I'll disagree because the primary issues with gun control in the US are:
[1] Guns are a core part of culture for much of America, very deeply so outside coastal cities. Most of the left wing in the US lives in coastal cities and either grew up there or immigrated very recently and does not leave, so this is an alien concept to them, but even in very blue cities like D.C. you would be shocked how many liberal democrats have armories. It is literally amendment #2!
[2] They are already widely distributed and it would be a logistical impossibility to actually enforce gun control.
This is directly analogous to NPM where:
[1] The package registry working the way it does and people quickly installing packages without thinking much is deeply part of JS culture. It doesn't help that JS caters very heavily to as wide of a market as possible, of which the majority is going to be entry level/junior to associate engineers for whomst script kiddying or letting AI install whatever is essentially a way of life. As evidence, this type of thing is not really a problem with derivatives like Bun, especially in mature organizations where it's easy to enforce a minimum 72 hour wait time between publish and installation of a package.
[2] Packages are already widely distributed and part of dependency stacks (e.g. the infamous leftpad) where it is a logistical impossibility to change how things work.
I also view startups and companies like Vercel as essentially the NRA here, Next.js has taken over huge swathes of the ecosystem and highly encourages dependency-maxxing.
Another direct analogy: proponents of gun control say they are unnecessary for self defense (esp. because law enforcement is good now), too heavy duty to begin with, and fundamentally dangerous.
Similarly I would criticize dependency-maxxing as unnecessary for capability (esp. because AI is good now), too heavy duty to begin with, and fundamentally dangerous.
The whole reason this joke works is because of exactly your belief that somehow you're different and the solution which works for everybody else can't work for you. Charlie is always going to try to kick the ball and Lucy is always going to pull it away and Charlie will never learn from this experience no matter how often it is repeated.
When a company is acquired, sometimes the company's products get a new lease on life, and sometimes the company's products are killed, or allowed to die.
Some of these acquired products aren't dead or even in maintenance mode though, they're still running. So it doesn't really make sense to include them in a graveyard, among the other very much alive projects like Streamlit and LangFuse, or missing dead projects like Sora.
This is just slop. I wouldn't give this too much attention.
The company is not forced to sell immediately to whoever offers it money, they can sell themselves off for parts.
I heavily doubt PE firms are interested here as there is no potential for growth or a multiple. Spirit's assets are mainly their fleet, there are like 4 maybe 5 people who could buy, of these 2-3 are facing similar financial crises.
In the US I think nobody except United can afford to make a move, more likely some Asian airlines will move; many have grown and have route demand they can't service due to lack of aircraft. If you fly to Asia often you'll note that much of the time Asian airlines have to operate an aircraft from a US airline.
I hear this a lot but their fleet is valued upwards of a billion, they own most of their fleet it was just financed with debt (it's not like a house where the bank has equity in the asset, the lender has debt with spirit and levers on that debt that control what it converts to on default but Spirit legally owns the planes). The slots are <100M total
This isn't really a scam because no money moves and this is non-binding. Here are a list of glaring issues I see here:
1) Pledges being non-binding means there is no proof of funds. This means they can't actually make an offer, presumably they will have to email everyone who pledged to put in cash and hope it resembles a solid offer.
2) How much is Spirit worth? Their market cap was ~50M a few days before they shut down. Where are we getting 1.75B$ from?
3) Since these are non-binding pledges I'm inclined to believe most of these numbers are bots / fake. Especially as accredited investors skew older and make up less than 1/5th of the population!
4) 666 is a very specific significant number for the average pledge size to consistently stay at. I've watched the number of patrons go up by thousands and yet the average pledge size stay the exact same. The total pledged is certainly fake as a result, although see [3] pretty sure these are all fake numbers.
5) You get nothing in return for your pledge and definitely nothing in return for your money. They go to great lengths to add disclaimers that everything is proposed and subject to change at their discretion.
6) Just like the entire site is AI slop, the disclaimers are too, not worded correctly like regular financial disclaimers, in many places not required and in other places not good enough.
7) They pretend to care a lot about disclaimers and legal verbiage yet there is no mention of the entity or who is working on this bid so missing the most basic mark when it comes to financial disclosure!
8) It says "Spirit didn't fail because people stopped flying. It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt and extracted every dollar it could." This is just a lie, no matter how Wall Street trades your stock it doesn't affect your treasury. Spirit failed because of horrible financial mismanagement and both an inability to maintain solvency under operating costs (which rose even further recently due to jet fuel shortages) as well as an inability to secure a line of credit. Technically you could also blame their corporate strategy although this was pretty good with the Jet Blue merger, so blame here also lies directly with Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz (unlikely duo!) for championing blocking the merger. You can find this from a simple Google search or asking your AI of choice.
9) While we're on the subject of financial mismanagement, whoever wrote this clearly has not much idea of how the finances for something like this would work. _It's not just AI generated — it's AI slop._
10) Whoever made this has no idea whether the assets are actually still there nor do we. Spirit may already be under binding agreements for asset sales.
11) Whoever wrote this also does not understand how companies run. First of all they think they are doing something revolutionary with equity, when almost every company has ESOPs/EIPs. Profit-sharing relative to ownership is also literally how shares work and Spirit already regularly paid these out prior to beginning their financial crisis. Every publicly traded company has open books and openly reports their financials each quarter.
12) "One member, one vote — your voice is equal regardless of pledge size." What incentive would anyone have for pledging more? Also, voice in what? Vote in what?
13) "No golden parachutes — executive pay capped at a fair ratio to median worker pay." First of all, this is not what a golden parachute is. Secondly, either the fair ratio will be ridiculous to allow properly compensating execs, or they will be underpaying by a large margin and find it difficult to get any proper execs in place. Then they can speedrun the last few years of mismanagement at Spirit.
14) "The cooperative model has worked: REI, Ocean Spray, Land O'Lakes, the Packers — all people-owned." These organizations all have well thought out models. This is not the same as AI slop.
15) "Private equity is already circling the wreckage." First of all, Spirit is freely undergoing an asset sale. Their operations etc. are shut down. Not only is this not appetizing to PE, but in general PE firms stay very far away from airlines which are famously low margin difficult to operate businesses with limited potential for growth once established. PE normally focuses on airports and airport services, neither of which Spirit has (their airport assets are limited to slots at LGA which are useless to anyone except airlines). The much more obvious buyer is other airlines looking to expand control and consolidate aircrafts.
16) It is common for a company facing insolvency to shut down, do an asset sale of expensive assets, and then come online in a much smaller form with remaining assets, funding itself with the sold off assets. I don't see why Spirit would not do the same thing, in which case even if a cooperative bid is put together it would be much weaker than disjoint buyers (e.g. Frontier and JetBlue separately buying some aircrafts).
17) Lastly whoever wrote this has absolutely no plan to deal with the high operating costs and failing industry here, which is really much more important than ownership incentive structures. No amount of kumbayah we're all in this together is going to drive jet fuel prices down or change the economics of commercial aviation.
This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower.
In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.
Palantir builds these systems for the US government which is (hopefully) something you can hold accountable / can reasonably trust.
Meta builds these systems for itself to make digital cocaine and sell personal data to profit off everyone (including and moreso primarily the elderly and children). You can't hold them accountable, actually pretty much nobody can hold Zuckerberg accountable.
When Palantir helps USG spy on the planet the primary purpose is defeat enemies + protect assets. When Meta builds these systems the primary purpose is digital cocaine.
> When Palantir helps USG spy on the planet the primary purpose is defeat enemies + protect assets.
I think it takes about the same amount of suspended disbelief to say that, as it takes a Facebook employee to believe the primary purpose of targeted ads is to connect customers and businesses.
Does Palantir collect data or just analyze aggregated purchased data? I'm not familiar with the data collecting SDKs available as I don't whore out myself/my sites like that, so maybe there is a pipe directly from them????
Either way, I'd definitely hold those directly responsible for collecting and selling of the data way worse than those that just make use of a product. It's like the war on drugs where those making say they will make as long as there are people wanting to buy
> Does Palantir collect data or just analyze aggregated purchased data?
Neither. Palantir makes data management software, they've never been in the business of collecting or analysing data themselves at all. There's generally a fundamental misunderstanding online of what Palantir actually does.
Any time you see an article or comment saying something along the lines of "Palantir is stealing your data", consider if it makes sense when you replace Palantir with MySQL, if it doesn't then it's generally safe to assume that article is garbage.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to have grievances with Palantir, but they're completely drowned out by nonsense.
Neither. Palantir makes data management software, they've never been in the business of collecting or analysing data themselves at all. There's generally a fundamental misunderstanding online of what Palantir actually does.
This is rather naive. Palantir makes politics by creating and funding a SuperPAC to discredit a former employee who happens to support the RAISE act.
Leading the Future, a super PAC whose funders include the founders of companies like Palantir and OpenAI, is spending millions of dollars this election cycle, and a considerable amount of that money is going toward attack ads against Alex Bores – even though Bores himself used to work for Palantir.
Those are legitimate grievances as mentioned, what they are not is Palantir themselves collecting massive amounts of data, which is often what they're portrayed as doing and what the GP asked about.
Some background: DC has one of the most prolific automated traffic camera systems in the world and violations bring in $250M+ annually. The only US city with higher ticket revenue is NYC at $300M+, but the NYC metro has more than 3x the population and traffic of DC.
This is actually how you start a city though, you build a suburb and wait for it to grow into a city. This takes a really really long time so it's better to build near existing cities.
We don't observe this phenomenon occurring often in the modern day only because cities sprawl rapidly and so the evolution of the suburb becomes a borough of the existing city rather than a brand new city. Otherwise Brooklyn, Jersey City, Weehawken, etc. would all be considered new cities instead of being referred to as the NYC metro.
Affordable housing = housing that regular people can afford
The only silly thing here is that "low income housing" got rebranded as "affordable housing" and absolutely everything else got rebranded as "luxury homes" for political reasons.
"Market-rate housing" is even sillier given that it is literally the opposite of what "affordable housing" policies dictate
I'm not going to debate what the definitions should be, I'll just say I don't think it is productive to join an existing conversation using terms with different definitions than everyone else uses. Defining all housing as inherently "affordable" makes the term meaningless and even if you disagree with the motivations behind the desire for "affordable housing", at least the term has meaning in the way it's typically used.
You are quite literally debating what the definition should be, because this is _not_ the existing definition of affordable housing, it is legally what OP is saying. "Affordable housing" is just when the household spends <= 30% of gross income on housing related costs. This is the definition used by the HUD and the same definition applied in policymaking.
What >you< are referring to and what it is conflated with by progressive policymakers is "low income housing" which imposes an AMI based restriction on the resident's income. This in turn means that 30% of their income is much lower and restricts the sticker price of the home.
In recent years, most 'affordable housing' policy has been advanced by progressives, who use that term for marketing purposes, whereas the actual policy primarily relates to 'low income housing' or even 'very low income housing.' This does not mean 'affordable housing' = 'low income housing', it just means the term 'affordable housing' is used in the title and the actual measures advanced are related to AMI and 'low income housing.'
There is no "progressive" definition, income level is not at all part of the definition. Per the universal legal definition of 'affordable housing,' if a home costs $1B but is occupied by Elon Musk, it would still be affordable because it is less than 30% of his gross income.
When you are dealing with income levels it is universally called 'low income housing,' and the HUD definition is already scaled to local income levels, the 'A' in AMI stands for 'Area.'
You are conflating marketing ('we need more affordable housing!') with policy ('low income housing')
It is productive to decline to use propaganda terms. If, every time someone says they support affirmative action they are asked if they support having higher standards for Asian applicants to medical school than for white applicants that’s good because forcing people to defend their support of racist policies reduces support for them. By the same token pointing out that affordable housing doesn’t mean housing people can afford, it means politician allocated housing paid for by the general taxpayer, reduces support. Reducing support for bad things is good.
Its also helpful to know that there is a specific (US) program called "affordable housing" that subsidizes rents for low income people. The economic effect of that program is to increase rents (but not home prices). This especially hits the working poor who make just a bit too much to have subsidized rents.
This is not a program, it is a term used by the HUD and very explicitly does not relate to income levels. That is the point I keep making, when the modern (<5y) left keeps touting “affordable housing” they are misusing the term simply because they don’t want to say “low income housing” even though everybody acknowledges they are actually referring to “low income housing.”
It is very important to distinguish the two because “affordable housing” is a marketing term that could reasonably convince someone that the policy is meant to help 80% of people including themselves, when in actuality it is low income housing which is restricted to <20% of the area population and even fewer voters.
[1] Guns are a core part of culture for much of America, very deeply so outside coastal cities. Most of the left wing in the US lives in coastal cities and either grew up there or immigrated very recently and does not leave, so this is an alien concept to them, but even in very blue cities like D.C. you would be shocked how many liberal democrats have armories. It is literally amendment #2!
[2] They are already widely distributed and it would be a logistical impossibility to actually enforce gun control.
This is directly analogous to NPM where:
[1] The package registry working the way it does and people quickly installing packages without thinking much is deeply part of JS culture. It doesn't help that JS caters very heavily to as wide of a market as possible, of which the majority is going to be entry level/junior to associate engineers for whomst script kiddying or letting AI install whatever is essentially a way of life. As evidence, this type of thing is not really a problem with derivatives like Bun, especially in mature organizations where it's easy to enforce a minimum 72 hour wait time between publish and installation of a package.
[2] Packages are already widely distributed and part of dependency stacks (e.g. the infamous leftpad) where it is a logistical impossibility to change how things work.
I also view startups and companies like Vercel as essentially the NRA here, Next.js has taken over huge swathes of the ecosystem and highly encourages dependency-maxxing.
Another direct analogy: proponents of gun control say they are unnecessary for self defense (esp. because law enforcement is good now), too heavy duty to begin with, and fundamentally dangerous.
Similarly I would criticize dependency-maxxing as unnecessary for capability (esp. because AI is good now), too heavy duty to begin with, and fundamentally dangerous.
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