Friends,
OMG! We are not in Kansas anymore. And neither is Kansas!
Just a few hours ago, the unthinkable happened — the citizens of the State of Kansas, one of our reddest and most Republican states, voted in an overwhelming landslide by nearly 20 points to keep abortion legal and available to all women! Let this be the word and the warning that goes out to all who seek to take any rights away from women:
YOU will not succeed, and you will be defeated in this fall’s election.
Voters in Kansas came out in droves on Tuesday to tell the Supreme Court where they could go. Their message from Kansas and the challenge to the rest of us is clear: We have 3 months to work as hard as we can to save our Democracy. We demand that Democrats sign a pledge to make Roe v Wade the law of the land — and to eliminate the filibuster. All Republicans who voted against certifying the legal results of the 2020 election must go to wherever traitors go.
Please give this 14-minute emergency podcast of mine a quick listen right now — and please share it with others! If you normally don’t listen to podcasts, please just this once click the play arrow - if only to lift your spirits during this dark time.
— Mike
** Comments on posts are limited to paid subscribers — but, not to worry, anyone can send me their opinions and thoughts by writing me at mike@michaelmoore.com. I read every one of them, though obviously I can’t respond to all. **

Listen now (14 min) | Friends, OMG! We are not in Kansas anymore. And neither is Kansas! Just a few hours ago, the unthinkable happened &#8212; the citizens of the State of Kansas, one of our reddest and most Republican states, voted in an overwhelming landslide by nearly 20 points to keep abortion legal and available to all women! Let this be the word and the warning that goes out to all who seek to take any rights away from women:

EMERGENCY PODCAST SYSTEM: Kansas Has Gone Over The Rainbow

When Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” yesterday he said that the $700 billion climate change, energy, and health care proposal he announced last week with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would not raise taxes. “We should not increase taxes, and we did not increase taxes,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
But a new study by the U.S. Congress’s nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation has found that not only would the legislation increase taxes, it would increase taxes by $11 billion more on Americans earning below $200,000 per year than on Americans earning between $500,000 and $1 million, in 2023.
And the legislation would increase taxes by $3 billion more on Americans earning below $200,000 per year than on Americans earning between $200,000 and $500,000 per year
As such, if Democrats pass the legislation, and President Joe Biden signs it into law, it would violate the promise President Joe Biden made not to increase taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 per year. Biden reaffirmed this promise during his State of the Union Address in March of this Year. “And under my plan, nobody earning less than $400,000 a year will pay an additional penny in new taxes. Nobody.
Democrats say that Schumer-Manchin isn’t really a tax increase because the higher taxes would be indirectly passed on to employees by corporations required to pay the new 15% minimum tax by reducing their after-tax wages. It’s a “bogus argument,” said Steve Rosenthal, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, of the tax increase. Rosenthal said that anybody pointing it out was engaging in “a gotcha kind of thing.”
But neither Rosenthal nor anybody else is questioning the assumptions made by the Joint Committee on Taxation, which calculated the tax increases. It is standard economic practice to assume that companies would pass along at least some of their tax increase to employees.
And the Joint Committee is a widely respected and nonpartisan committee that is staffed by Ph.D economists, accountants, and attorneys and has been in existence for nearly 100 years and is trusted by members of Congress from both parties. Moreover, its analyses is supported by a calculation by the National Association of Manufacturers, which calculates that the higher taxes would reduce reduce workers’ income income by $17 billion and GDP by $69 billion.
Economists have long observed that taxes on corporations are passed on to workers, customers, and shareholders. If the goal is to reduce income disparities then one must raise taxes more on people earning higher incomes than on people earning lower ones, and the Schumer-Manchin legislation does not do this.
Democrats argue that the legislation will save lower-income people money by reducing energy costs, but there are good reasons to doubt this.
Read more

Manchin-Schumer is projected to increase taxes $11 billion more on Americans earning below $200,000 than those earning over $400,000.

Senate Dem Proposal Would Hike Taxes On Lower Incomes

If at first you don’t succeed, hide the numbers.
Until Thursday, the Canadian province of British Columbia provided a clear breakdown of hospitalizations and deaths by vaccine status. Each week, the BC Centre for Disease Control offered an updated count of vaccinated, boosted, and unvaccinated people who had been hospitalized or died.
British Columbia presented the data in what it called “vax donut charts,” because the charts looked like donuts and were stratified by Covid vaccine status. (Crazy, I know.)
Here’s a vax donut chart from May, for example:
Unfortunately, in the last few months the vax donut charts have become less tasty than vaccine advocates had hoped.
The dark purple color represents people who have received at least three Covid vaccine doses, and the purple color those who have received two. As the charts make clear, vaccinated and boosted people account for the vast majority of all Covid hospitalizations and deaths in British Columbia.
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By way of comparison, just over half of all of British Columbia’s 5.3 million residents are boosted, while another 31 percent have received at least two doses. Yes, vaccinated and especially boosted people tend to be somewhat older than the unvaccinated.
Still, the fact that 75 to 80 percent of all deaths occur in boosted people highlight the sad reality that the shots do little if anything to stop severe cases and death from Omicron - the final defense of vaccine advocates.
And so British Columbia announced last week that the Vax Donut Chart would be no more. “As of July 28, the Outcomes by Vax and Vax Donut Charts have been retired,” a notice on the Centre for Disease Control Website said blandly.
Retired! Orwell would be proud.
Worse, the charts from earlier weeks also seem to have disappeared from the Wayback Machine - the Internet’s most crucial archive. Trying to find them on saved pages simply pulls up the July 28th notice.
Amazingly, a Canadian television network actually asked the Centre for Disease Control why it had pulled the charts. The agency’s response:
“As most of the population has now been vaccinated with at least two doses of vaccine and many more have been infected with COVID-19, the data became hard to interpret."
The data became hard to interpret.
And by “hard” they mean “easy.”

Add British Columbia to the governments trying to hide the reality that the mRNA jabbed make up the vast majority of Covid hospitalizations and deaths.

More disappearing Covid vaccine data

In the fall of 1990, the metal band Warrant was on the verge of releasing their new album “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” when Jani Lane, the band’s lead singer and primary songwriter, got a call. It was a record executive at Sony who told Lane that the album needed a power ballad (i.e. a sentimental love song) in order to increase its chance of commercial success. At the time, releasing a power ballad was an ...
The post Reject the Algorithm appeared first on Of Dollars And Data.

Reject the Algorithm

Dear readers,
This blog is officially back! I’m excited to restart my writing here, after a long hiatus. It took more than three years to write my book, The Cold Start Problem and all my energy went into that. But as of last December, it’s finally out in the world, and I want to thank all of you for making it a success. I’ll be sharing more about what I learned in my journey in writing and publishing the book in a future essay — and all my random life hacks for clearing out a few hours every week to put it together.
In the meantime, I have some big life (and work) updates:
1) LA Tech Week 2022
First, putting this up front, so the link doesn’t get lost — join me at LA Tech Week 2022 in mid-August! I’ll be co-hosting a number of events, along with my a16z colleague Katia Ameri. Just register on the site to see all the events. I’m involved in the organization of the conference (more on this in a second) and will be hosting a number of events related to gaming, the metaverse, consumer apps, etc. I’ll be tweeting the events I’ll be attending as the dates approach, and would love to see y’all there.
2) I’ve moved to LA (well, specifically, Venice Calfornia!)
Related is the the actual personal news: I’ve moved to LA after nearly 15 years in San Francisco. Big change for me. This is the result of a very random series of events where the COVID lockdown convinced me to spontaneously try #vanlife, where on a whim I purchased and lived out of a sprinter van for months at a time. This became my life in the back half of 2020, where I drove from California to Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, working full-time on the week days and exploring national parks on the weekends. Surprisingly, it worked well! Throughout, and particularly during the colder months, I used LA as my home base between longer trips.
Although I had visited many times before, I hadn’t actually tried to actually live there, so I started to try different neighborhoods, and began to Airbnb all throughout the city — Malibu, Silver Lake, WeHo, Santa Monica, and otherwise — before eventually deciding to settle down in one spot. Today, I call Venice, CA my home. It’s walkable, hip, artsy, and has pockets of amazing beauty. If you visit, make sure you check out Abbott Kinney Blvd, the Venice Canals, the walk streets, and Gjelina’s! And don’t worry, my SF friends and coworkers — I’ll be back to the Bay Area often, maybe every month or two. (I’m keeping my place there)
Since arriving in LA, I’ve been working with the startup/VC community to help boost the already vibrant tech ecosystem here. We’re committed to have a major presence here — a16z recently signed an office in Santa Monica (opening soon, it’s a whole building with multiple floors etc) and already has several dozen employees here, as part of our move to the cloud. I’ve set up numerous Whatsapp groups, including for the several hundred investors based here, and also maintain several rotating dinner series for games industry founders and executives.
3) A new role at a16z: GAMES FUND ONE
Earlier this year, we launched GAMES FUND ONE, a16z’s first investment fund focused on investing in the metaverse, AR/VR, games studios, social platforms for gamers, and so on. Check out the launch video!
I’ve been dabbling in the industry, backing a number of top startups spun out of Riot Games, Epic, and otherwise. But as part of this launch, I joined the fund full-time, where I’ll be focused on the convergence of consumer apps and games along with my colleagues Jon and James who will cover content and infrastructure, respectively. Of course, I maintain a number of my board seats and a broad portfolio for consumer startups that I’ll continue to support, but am excited to focus my new investments within Games.
I’ll be writing more about why I’m excited for games (and the “metaverse,” whatever that is!) to define the next generation of consumer tech.
More on that soon.
Finally, I just want to thank everyone who has been a subscriber to this blog (and newsletter) over the past few years. I started writing it in 2007 upon arriving to SF as a mid-20s noob aspiring founder, and over a decade later, it taught me that writing is one of my favorite activities. And I’ve met so many great people from doing it, too. I’m glad to be back!
best,
Andrew
(Btw, for LA history fans, check out this fun video from Lost LA on the history of Venice CA and why it shares a name with an Italian city. It has some great old photos and tidbits)

Dear readers, This blog is officially back! I&#8217;m excited to restart my writing here, after a long hiatus. It took more than three years to write my book, The Cold Start Problem and all my energy went into that. But as of last December, it&#8217;s finally out in the world, and I want to thank [&#8230;]

Personal updates: Moving to LA, a new role at a16z, and more!

(Third in a series)
Last month, I asked your for first-person stories of the way Covid and vaccine restrictions changed your lives. One subset was particularly striking - those from readers in Canada. Australia may have had stricter rules, but I’m not sure any democratic country did more to ostracize citizens who dared to question its Covid responses.
As these emails show, Canada’s response to Covid quickly tied into the country’s complicated feelings about the United States and Donald Trump. Canadians disliked Trump even before Covid. In a January 2020 survey, only 28 percent said they trusted him to do the right thing, a lower percentage than people in Japan, Britain, Australia, or even Italy.
So once Trump’s handling of Covid became a central controversy in the epidemic, support for strict countermeasures became the norm in Canada. And Canadians pride themselves on being nicer, fairer, and less partisan than Americans. As a Canadian immigration group proclaims, Canadians value equality, respect, safety, peace, nature - and we love our hockey! (Way to roll with the stereotype!)
But that admirable ethos comes with a dark side - an unwillingness to stand up to authority and a passive-aggressive shunning of those who do. This is the right thing to do, and who are you to say it isn’t?
(For glowing *vaccinated* hearts. They don’t mean myocarditis, right?)
Canada banned Covid unvaccinated people from air travel long after it was clear both that airplanes were not a major transmission vector for Covid and that vaccines did nothing to stop transmission. Hard not to see that policy as anything other than punitive, a way to hurt people who had chosen not to be jabbed. The response to the trucker protests this winter was similarly over-the-top.
And the viciousness didn’t stop with the government. As the stories below make clear, employers and families ostracized anyone who spoke out or wouldn’t follow the rules.
(PAYWALLED FOR 72 HOURS)
Read more

Anti-Trump feeling and the strong Canadian preference for social cohesion meant lockdown and vaccine skeptics north of the border faced off-the-charts pressure.

The price of fear (Part 3, Canadian edition)

On a recent July afternoon in The Bronx, 19-year-old Franklin Mesa went up to Nathaniel Rivers, 35, who had just parked his car, and allegedly stabbed him to death in front of his wife.
Mesa’s family members described him as schizophrenic. Police said he was arrested last year for punching somebody, twice, in the face. And a neighbor said that he was often the source of “hostile, aggressive” situations, including preventing a woman from getting on the bus.
And yet it appears that nobody did anything to see if Mesa was taking his psychiatric medicine, which his sister said he had been on since he was 15.
Rivers’ horrifying death rekindles the national debate over how to prevent violence by the seriously mentally ill. Between 2015 and 2018, 911 calls reporting emotionally disturbed people have jumped by nearly 25% in New York City, while the number of homeless people with serious mental illness rose by the same percent.
Consider the case of Martial Simon, a 61 year-old mentally ill homeless man, who early this year confessed to pushing 40 year-old Michelle Go onto the subway tracks, killing her instantly. Simon, who was defended by the Legal Aid Society in 2017, is now at a psychiatric facility where he will remain until he’s found mentally fit.
The fact is, he should never have been released.
Simon had already been under the supervision of New York’s correctional authority until last August for two cases of armed robbery in 2017. His sister wanted him permanently hospitalized. “I remember begging one of the hospitals, ‘Let him stay,’” she said, “because once he’s out, he didn’t want to take medication, and it was the medication that kept him going.”
A homeless advocate who saw Simon’s medical records reports that Simon even told a psychiatrist in 2017 that it was only a matter of time before he pushed a woman onto the subway tracks.
“People with mental illness who harm other people usually do it because of paranoid delusions in which they fear for their own lives,” Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke told me. “They become convinced, based on psychotic delusions, that they need to kill to protect. What looks on the outside like pure aggression is often a deeply disturbed attempt to protect.”
Most people know this. We have been talking about this problem for years. And yet it only gets worse and worse. In 2021, felony assaults in New York’s subway were almost 25% higher compared to 2019, despite a lower ridership because of the pandemic. The number of people pushed onto tracks rose from 9 in 2017 to 20 in 2019 to 30 in 2021.
Why is that?
By now you’ve heard the story. We once had psychiatric hospitals in America. The conditions grew so bad that we shut them down. But we never fully funded the community-based mental health centers designed to replace them.
As a result, roughly one-quarter of all homeless by the 1980s had been patients in mental hospitals and one-third showed signs of psychosis or affective disorders, according to a major review of multiple studies from cities across the United States. Today, approximately 121,000 mentally ill people are conservatively estimated to be living on America’s streets.
But that story is missing an important element: what, exactly, has been going on since the 1980s? Why, in the 40 years since, have we not funded the community-based mental health centers, or built new psychiatric hospitals?
Read more

Mental illness shouldn't be stigmatized, but leaving it untreated should be.

Progressives Let Homeless Get So Ill, They Kill

Anyone paying attention in August 2021 could see the rush to approve mRNA Covid boosters was politically driven and didn’t have much data behind it.
Now we have proof from the inside.
Emails released last week by the Food and Drug Administration show the agency’s vaccine regulators felt heavy pressure from the White House and senior FDA officials to approve boosters.
By itself, that fact is not a huge surprise. The two top vax regulators, Drs. Marion Gruber and Philip Krause, announced their resignations in late August 2021 and within weeks spoke out publicly against widespread booster shots.
No, the most frightening revelation in the emails isn’t the political machinations they reveal. It’s how they explode the myth of FDA omniscience, that the agency somehow had knowledge unavailable to the public to help it understand if boosters might work.
In reality, the emails show the opposite. (The FDA released them in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the conservative group Judicial Watch, which has done great work using FOIA to unearth government documents on Covid.)
As Gruber and other top FDA officials discussed what to do about boosters, they had almost no data on the safety or efficacy of a third shot. Their most useful estimates of vaccine efficacy came from Israeli studies using the same figures from the Israeli health care system that I had begun highlighting in July on Twitter.
As one physician in the FDA vaccine review office complained to Gruber on Friday, August 20, “And then there is the question of the data that will support these booster doses.”
Without good data, the regulators had no chance to make a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. They simply went with their instincts, like everyone else.
—
And their instincts were wrong.
The emails make clear the reason Gruber didn’t want to approve boosters for general use in August 2021 was not because she didn’t think they would work. Or that repeated mRNA dosing might raise long-term safety issues.
No, Gruber was sour on boosters because she thought the Covid vaccines worked so well they wouldn’t be necessary!
—
She and Krause, her deputy, would go on to write that widespread boosters should be delayed because poorer countries should have access to the miracle of mRNA before the United States and other wealthy nations grabbed third shots.
Think of the Africans! And the Indians! And all the other poors!
In the light of everything that’s happened since, this position looks worse than ironic. The poor countries that avoided the mRNA shots have largely put Covid behind them, while wealthy countries navigate their fifth or sixth or seventh waves.
(India: lots of people, no mRNA vaccines, no boosters, no second boosters, no super-special Omicron boosters, not so much Covid!)
Now the world’s wealthy countries cannot give away their miracle jabs, no matter how hard they try.
Yes, that’s right. African nations have resoundingly rejected offers of a free product that Western countries eagerly used on their own citizens. Has anything similar ever happened before? I can’t think of another example.
The mRNAs, groundbreaking in every way.

New Food and Drug Administration documents show the agency knew almost nothing about how well mRNA boosters might work when it okayed them. It was mainly using public Israeli data like everyone else.

The secret is there are no secrets

How best to punish spammers? I give this topic a lot of thought because I spend a lot of time sifting through the endless rubbish they send me. And that's when it dawned on me: the punishment should fit the crime - robbing me of my time - which means that I, in turn, need to rob them of their time. With the smallest possible overhead on my time, of course. So, earlier this year I created Password Purgatory with the singular goal of putting spammers through the hellscape that is attempting to satisfy really nasty password complexity criteria. And I mean really nasty criteria, like much worse than you've ever seen before. I opened-sourced it, took a bunch of PRs, built out the API to present increasingly inane password complexity criteria then left it at that. Until now because finally, it's live, working and devilishly beautiful 😈
This is the easy bit - I didn't have to do anything for this step! But let me put it into context and give you a real world sample:
Ugh. Nasty stuff, off to hell for them it is, and it all begins with filing the spam into a special folder called "Send Spammer to Password Purgatory":
That's the extent of work involved on a spam-by-spam basis, but let's peal back the covers and look at what happens next.
Microsoft Power Automate (previously "Microsoft Flow") is a really neat way of triggering a series of actions based on an event, and there's a whole lot of connectors built in to make life super easy. Easy on us as the devs, that is, less easy on the spammers because here's what happens as soon as I file an email in the aforementioned folder:
Using the built in connector to my Microsoft 365 email account, the presence of a new email in that folder triggers a brand new instance of a flow. Following, I've added the "HTTP" connector which enables me to make an outbound request:
All this request does is makes a POST to an API on Password Purgatory called "create-hell". It passes an API key because I don't want just anyone making these requests as it will create data that will persist at Cloudflare. Speaking of which, let's look at what happens over there.
Let's start with some history: Back in the not too distant past, Cloudflare wasn't a host and instead would just reverse proxy requests through to origin services and do cool stuff with them along the way. This made adding HTTPS to any website easy (and free), added heaps of really neat WAF functionality and empowered us to do cool things with caching. But this was all in-transit coolness whilst the app logic, data and vast bulk of the codebase sat at that origin site. Cloudflare Workers started to change that and suddenly we had code on the edge running in hundreds of nodes around the world, nice and close to our visitors. Did that start to make Cloudflare a "host"? Hmm... but the data itself was still on the origin service (transient caching aside). Fast forward to now and there are multiple options to store data on Cloudflare's edges including their (presently beta) R2 service, Durable Objects, the (forthcoming) D1 SQL database and of most importance to this blogpost, Workers KV. Does this make them a host if you can now build entire apps within their environment? Maybe so, but let's skip the titles for now and focus on the code.
All the code I'm going to refer to here is open source and available in the public Password Purgatory Logger Github repo. Very early on in the index.js file that does all the work, you'll see a function called "createHell" which is called when the flow step above runs. That code creates a GUID then stores it in KV after which I can easily view it in the Cloudflare dashboard:
There's no value yet, just a key and it's returned via a JSON response in a property called "kvKey". To read that back in the flow, I need a "Parse JSON" step with a schema I generated from a sample:
At this point I now have a unique ID in persistent storage and it's available in the flow, which means it's time to send the spammer an email.
Because it would be rude not to respond, I'd like to send the spammer back an email and invite them to my very special registration form. To do this, I've grabbed the "Reply to email" connector and fed the kvKey through to a hyperlink:
It's an HTML email with the key hidden within the hyperlink tag so it doesn't look overtly weird. Using this connector means that when the email sends, it looks precisely like I've lovingly crafted it myself:
With the entire flow now executed, we can view the history of each step and see how the data moves between them:
Now, we play the waiting game 😊
Wasting spammer time in and of itself is good. Causing them pain by having them attempt to pass increasingly obtuse password complexity criteria is better. But the best thing - the pièce de résistance - is to log that pain and share it publicly for our collective entertainment 🤣
So, by following the link the spammer ends up here (you're welcome to follow that link and have a play with it):
The kvKey is passed via the query string and the page invites the spammer to begin the process of becoming a partner. All they need to leave is an email address... and a password. That page then embeds 2 scripts from the Password Purgatory website, both of which you can find in the open source and public Github repository I created in the original blog post. Each attempt at creating an account sends off the password only to the original Password Purgatory API I created months ago, after which it responds with the next set of criteria. But each attempt also sends off both the criteria that was presented (none on the first go, then something increasingly bizarre on each subsequent go), the password they tried to use to satisfy the criteria and the kvKey so it can all be tied together. What that means is that the Cloudflare Workers KV entry created earlier gradually builds up as follows:
There are a couple of little conditions built into the code:
That's everything needed to lure the spammer in and record their pain, now for the really fun bit 😊
The very first time the spammer's password attempt is logged, the Cloudflare Worker sends me an email to let me know I have a new spammer hooked (this capability using MailChannels only launched this year):
It was so exciting getting this email yesterday, I swear it's the same sensation as literally getting a fish on your line! That link is one I can share to put the spammer's pain on display for the world to see. This is achieved with another Cloudflare Workers route that simply pulls out the logs for the given kvKey and formats it neatly in an HTML response:
Ah, satisfaction 😊 I listed the amount of time the spammer burned with a goal to further refining the complexity criteria in the future to attempt to keep them "hooked" for longer. Is the requirement for a US post code in the password a bit to geographically specific, for example? Time will tell and I wholeheartedly welcome PRs to that effect in the original Password Purgatory API repo.
Oh - and just to ensure traction and exposure are maximised, there's a neatly formatted Twitter card that includes the last criteria and password used, you know, the ones that finally broke the spammer's spirit and caused them to give up:
Spammer burned a total of 80 seconds in Password Purgatory 😈 #PasswordPurgatory https://t.co/VwSCHNZ2AW— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) August 3, 2022
Clearly, I've taken a great deal of pleasure in messing with spammers and I hope you do too. I've gotta be honest - I've never been so excited to go through my junk mail! But I also thoroughly enjoyed putting this together with Power Automate and Workers KV, I think it's super cool that you can pull an app together like this with a combination of browser-based config plus code and storage that runs directly in hundreds of globally distributed edge nodes around the world. I hope the spammers appreciate just how elegant this all is 🤣

Sending Spammers to Password Purgatory with Microsoft Power Automate and Cloudflare Workers KV

To investors,
There has been anticipation of Wall Street institutions joining the bitcoin and crypto industry for years. Fidelity started mining bitcoin back in 2014, which was followed in 2018 with the launch of their custody and trading platform. Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest became the first public fund to invest in bitcoin during the second half of 2015.
Since these two pioneers entered the industry, there has been speculation that their peers would quickly follow. While the peers did not follow quickly, we have seen a large increase in institutional investor adoption between 2018 - 2021. There were the first two public pension funds, from Fairfax County, Virginia, who invested in a dedicated crypto venture fund with the understanding that bitcoin would make up ~20% of the fund.
This was followed with the announcement from Paul Tudor Jones, and then Stanley Druckenmiller, that he was invested in bitcoin as part of an inflation hedge strategy. Things accelerated quickly once two of the best Wall Street investors in history publicly acknowledged their bitcoin allocations. The career risk had been removed for portfolio managers across hedge funds and various asset allocators. As long as the best in the business were in the trade, you couldn’t be fired for following their lead.
We saw bitcoin’s price rocket to a new all-time high and all seemed well in the world. But as the macro landscape changed, and the Fed began to implement tighter financial conditions, bitcoin suffered along with all other assets. While this was happening, there was one big question outstanding — why had the world’s largest asset manager not dove into the wild world of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies?
It appears we got more clarity this morning.
BlackRock announced a partnership with Coinbase to allow investors the ability “to manage their portfolios and conduct risk analysis on investment decisions.” The announcement states that this partnership will only pertain to bitcoin initially and the two companies will look for client demand to determine if it will expand to other crypto assets.
This partnership is a big deal, not because of what is happening, but rather because of what it signifies. The world’s largest asset manager is announcing a partnership with the largest publicly-traded crypto exchange after bitcoin has fallen approximately 70% from the all-time high of $69,000. Those who are bitcoin-native understand that the real value is captured during bear markets. It now appears that large institutions like BlackRock understand that as well.
If the institutions aren’t leaving during bear markets, then the market outlook for bitcoin over the medium to long-term is quite compelling. A BlackRock spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal that the Coinbase partnership was part of their long-term cryptocurrency strategy. That isn’t exactly something that would have been expected 2-3 years ago.
BlackRock wasn’t the only institution with news this morning either. Fairfax County Retirement Systems CIO Katherine Molnar announced that the pension plan has received approval to invest $70 million in a pair of yield farming strategies. When asked why the team was leaning into the crypto opportunity now, Molnar told the Financial Times:
“Some of the yields that you’re able to achieve in a yield farming strategy are really attractive because some of the people have stepped back from that space.”
This translates to the classic theory of being greedy when others are fearful. With that said, there is immense risk still associated with the bitcoin and crypto industry. There are few other assets that can rise and fall with the level of volatility that is commonplace in crypto. There have been previous problems with a lack of disclosures or lack of regulation. And, of course, there are plenty of unknown risks that are difficult to identify.
But that isn’t stopping the institutions from participating.
The sophisticated investors understand that the short-term price movements are likely noise. They are continuing to invest capital, build products, and strike moat-building partnerships. These large institutions have the balance sheets to weather the bear market in crypto or the recession in the macro economy. They aren’t worried about what happens today, tomorrow, or next week. This is the 10+ year strategy being laid right before our eyes.
It is rare to live through the birth, and subsequent scaling, of a new multi-trillion dollar asset class, but that appears to be what we are doing now. Timing is everything in investing and we seem to be quite fortunate.
Hope each of you has a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.
-Pomp
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Robinhood CEO Shuts Down FTX M&A Chatter, Says He Has Money to Do His Own Deals: The chief executive officer of Robinhood Markets, the brokerage whose stock has lost about three-quarters of its value since its debut last year, tried to shut down speculation Wednesday that his firm might become a takeover target of crypto giant FTX. FTX's billionaire founder Sam Bankman-Fried took a 7.6% stake in Robinhood in May. Bloomberg reported in June that FTX was exploring whether it could purchase the company, bolstering FTX's nascent efforts to offer stock trading to customers. Read more.
US Senate Bill Will Give CFTC Crypto Market Oversight – but Doesn't Say How Much: The latest U.S. legislative effort to steer most crypto oversight to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has bipartisan support but does little to answer the crypto industry's top question: What makes a token a security or a commodity? The legislation from the leaders of the Senate’s Agriculture Committee would require crypto firms involved in the trading of digital commodities – including bitcoin and ether – to register with the CFTC as their primary regulator, something industry leaders such as FTX co-founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried are cheering from the sidelines. Read more.
Ex-Coinbase Product Manager Pleads Not Guilty in Crypto Insider Trading Case: Former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi has pleaded not guilty to federal charges of insider trading, according to a Reuters report on Wednesday. Ishan Wahi is accused of sharing information about which crypto assets the exchange would be listing next with his brother Nikhil Wahi and Sameer Ramani prior to the actual listing. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission also brought charges against the three tied to the same insider trading allegations. Read more.
MicroStrategy Shares Surge as Michael Saylor Puts Full Focus on Bitcoin: MicroStrategy stock is up nearly 15% on Wednesday, helped by a modest rally in bitcoin and news late Tuesday that Michael Saylor is stepping down as CEO to become executive chairman. The software company's president, Phong Le, will become CEO. The management changes will allow for the company's enterprise business to have the full focus of the CEO, with Saylor devoting his energies to strategies for corporate bitcoin adoption. Read more.
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Listen now (4 min) | To investors, There has been anticipation of Wall Street institutions joining the bitcoin and crypto industry for years. Fidelity started mining bitcoin back in 2014, which was followed in 2018 with the launch of their custody and trading platform. Cathie Wood&#8217;s ARK Invest became the first public fund to invest in bitcoin during the second half of 2015.

Institutions Aren't Running From The Bear Market

Friends,
Last week Pope Francis visited Canada to apologize and seek forgiveness for the crimes committed by the Catholic Church against the indigenous peoples of Canada. He called that practice of Christianity “evil.”
On the first day of his visit, I received an email from one of Canada’s most well known and beloved Native Canadians, the folksinger Buffy Sainte Marie. In her message, she explained why an apology isn’t enough.
So in this episode of Rumble, I ask the Pope to grant indigenous people everywhere a Papal Decree that’s long overdue.
— Mike
Read more about The Doctrine of Discovery:
National Geographic article
DoctrineOfDiscovery.org
Click here to leave me a 60-second voice message on Anchor (I might play it on a future podcast episode.)
A full transcript of this episode will soon be available here.
Music from today’s episode:
“Aiya Surli Tikiatasanga (The Time I Arrive)” — Leo Osoak
“The Mission (Gabriel’s Oboe)” — Ennio Morricone
“Universal Soldier” — Buffy Sainte Marie
Podcast Underwriters:
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** Comments on posts are limited to paid subscribers — but, not to worry, anyone can send me their opinions and thoughts by writing me at mike@michaelmoore.com. I read every one of them, though obviously I can’t respond to all. **

Listen now (31 min) | Episode 250: Rumble with Michael Moore

Popes of Genocides Past and Present

Has Technological Progress Stalled?

As Volts listeners are no doubt aware, Senator Joe Manchin — Our Lord and Savior, blessed be His name — seems to have found his way to an agreement with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on a reconciliation bill. The 700 page Inflation Reduction Act would raise some taxes, reduce some drug prices, and subsidize some healthcare exchanges, but most notably, it would invest almost $370 billion into clean energy and climate change mitigation.
Make no mistake: if it passes, this bill will be a very big deal. Though it has shrunk from $550 billion to $370 billion, the original climate and energy package in the House-passed Build Back Better bill is still visible in the IRA, if you squint just right. Though the Clean Electricity Payment Program (RIP) is long gone, most of the clean energy tax credits have survived, amidst a sweeping variety of spending on everything from consumer heat-pump rebates to a green bank to money for carbon-capture and hydrogen research.
Everyone, including his fellow senators and top congressional staffers, was taken by surprise by Manchin’s pivot, so perilously late in the game. There is a bit of giddiness in the clean energy world, tempered by the hard-won awareness that nothing is certain until Joe Biden signs a piece of legislation. There are still many ways this can all go wrong.
While we wait for the final outcome, our fingernails digging into the arms of our chairs, we might as well discuss what's in the bill and what we should think about it. To do that, I've brought back two of the earliest and most popular guests on Volts: Jesse Jenkins, Princeton professor and energy modeler, and Leah Stokes, professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara.
I'm excited to talk to them about what's in the bill, what’s been taken out, what we should be worried about (and not), and what they think of the bill’s chance of passage.

A detailed conversation with energy experts Jesse Jenkins & Leah Stokes about what is in the climate/energy portion of the Inflation Reduction Act, what's been taken out, and the overall impact of the bill. Don't miss this one.&#160;

Volts podcast: what to make of the Democrats' last-minute climate bill

Where Should Affluent People Live?
it's not a simple question
Sympathy for the affluent amounts to sympathy for the devil, in our culture, but I don’t think you have to have such sympathy to recognize that the question posed above is trickier than some people think.
The LA Times recently published a story about Americans moving to Mexico City. Set free from having to live near their employer by the remote work acceleration that was driven by Covid-19, these “digital nomads” are changing the economics and character of the city in ways that offend natives. New chain businesses are replacing old small business favorites, properties are being snatched up to become permanent Airbnbs, and rents are driven higher and higher by wealthy Americans with cash to burn. They don’t speak the language, they don’t understand the culture, they don’t respect the customs. They just come and take and take without a thought for the people who were already there, or so says the article in the LA Times.
Predictably, a lot of the online chatter about the piece involves noting the irony, given that undocumented Mexican immigration into the United States has been a political football for as long as I’ve been alive. Equally predictably, a lot of this chatter has had a right-wing flair. But I don’t think recognizing the complexities here requires a conservative mindset. There’s definitely been a lot of kneejerk nativism involved in the response to the story, but the basic insight of such replies is not wrong: the gradual erosion of borders in an increasingly global world goes both ways. It’s inevitable. It’s theoretically possible for you to allow only immigration into your country and no emigration from your country to another, but the basic politics and process of such a scenario make it seem unlikely to me. And such a situation would in fact exacerbate the longstanding complaint of “brain drain,” where the United States gobbles up the smartest citizens of other countries, leading to slower development there. While uneducated undocumented workers drive a lot of the discussion around immigration, the way that our government hands out skilled worker visas means that legal immigration into the United States as well as emigration out of it is largely a behavior of the affluent, as least as compared to an immigrant’s former country.
Of course, this is also a domestic issue. The gentrification of cities like San Francisco and New York has caused a lot of fretting for decades. Now, with the work-from-home movement having been sped up by Covid-19, mid-sized American cities like Spokane, WA and Bozeman, MT have seen a huge influx of new arrivals, leading to spiraling rents and backlash from natives.
All in all, I really don’t know where progressive people think the affluent should live. I mean, let’s think about this.
Given the relationship between geography and money, people simply staying where they are geographically means our system is guilty of entrenched inequality and a lack of social mobility.
If you live in a neighborhood and you use the tools of zoning and regulation to preserve the current state of that neighborhood, you’re guilty of being a NIMBY.
If you move to a poorer and more diverse neighborhood, you’re guilty of gentrification and displacement.
If you leave an urban center altogether for less racially and socioeconomically diverse municipalities, you’re guilty of white flight, which has destroyed the tax base and thus devastated basic civic functions in cities like Detroit.
If you move to a poorer, majority non-white country, you're guilty of being a digital nomad and of “modern colonialism.”
If you work to allow immigration into your country but forbid emigration out of your country, you’re guilty of contributing to brain drain.
It really feels like there’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario here. It reminds me quite a bit of the current situation for white novelists: if they don’t include people of color in their novels, they’re guilty of a lack of diversity; if they do include people of color, they’re guilty of appropriation. The fundamental trouble with these issues is not really a matter of interpersonal empathy for the gentrifiers, literal or figurative. The trouble is that sooner or later you have to give people some basic direction in terms of what ethical behavior looks like, if you want people to behave ethically. And the neoliberals would of course tell us that however annoying wealthy American expats might be, their foreign dollars provoke a great deal of economic activity and spur development and growth. In this way too moving to a new country is like moving to a new neighborhood: as unfortunate as eventual displacement might be, in the short term new affluent neighbors bring more opportunity to the area and often demand better services from local government.
(It’s worth noting that some people argue that you can’t actually find clear cases of displacement outside of a few high-profile neighborhoods like Williamsburg.)
Here’s a common sentiment denying that there’s any irony to be found in Mexicans being annoyed at Americans moving to their country.
This might sound like a pat little answer, but it doesn’t really make any sense when you think about it. First, the idea that poor people can’t contribute to displacement simply isn’t correct. Poorer people moving into an area still need somewhere to live. If they take up the cheaper housing, then that reduces the available supply, leading to higher prices that are pushed up the ladder - those who are just a bit richer than the poorest now must look for more expensive housing, and on up the chain. A corollary to this is a dynamic related to gentrification that I rarely see discussed. Often, people complaining about it will say that the affluent should simply move to already-affluent neighborhoods. Setting aside the fact that many people accused of gentrification are human capital rich but money poor, this doesn’t actually solve any problems. If someone who would prefer to enjoy the cheaper rents of the largely Caribbean neighborhood Lefferts Gardens instead moves to richer and whiter Park Slope, they’re still soaking up some of the cheaper housing, and some people who are marginally holding on in that neighborhood will be priced out and have to go to more inexpensive neighborhoods like… Lefferts Gardens.
Now a rejoinder that I will definitely get to this post will be “who cares,” and I’m not particularly trying to provoke sympathy for the affluent here. And the most brutish answer to the titular question is wherever they want; the bad feelings of natives may be cataloged in the LA Times, and there may be some social resistance, but ultimately rich American money will enable the relatively wealthy to live where they choose. But I still think the question has merit, as it exposes the kind of holes that are all too common in progressive spaces these days. I think a really unfortunate consequence of the hand-waving “shit is fucked up and bullshit” school of leftist rhetoric that bloomed post-Occupy is that it results in an awful lot of complaints that aren’t tied to any particular positive vision of how better to live. We critique everything, but it's rare that this criticism is constructive and presents better options. And this is a very direct and simple and literal question: where do we want the upper-middle and upper classes to live?
In simple and explicit terms, I don’t think there’s a coherent left-leaning answer to that question, and we need to come up with one. The likely answer is to make it so that the difference between the haves and have-nots is much smaller so that the haves can’t utilize their greater economic power to drive displacement of the have-nots, but in the shorter term I think we need to work through what we want from the well-to-do when it comes to housing.

Where Should Affluent People Live?

I mostly cover insights about the software engineering industry for more experienced software engineers and engineering managers. This article is a break from these topics.
In the second half of 2021, we were in the middle of the most heated tech job market of all time. I wrote about why this market reached all-time highs in a 'perfect storm'. However, while there was huge demand for software engineers, one thing stood out.
Even in 2021, the market for less experienced software engineers was already chilly. For experienced engineers, job opportunities were plenty, and large compensation increases were common. However, the opposite was true especially for entry-level software engineers: demand for these folks did not increase, neither did their compensation. In October 2021, I already shared advice for this group.
A year later, the market has cooled down for experienced software engineers. Where does this leave engineers with less experience?
The market for these people is even worse than it was in 2021. There's far more competition - bootcamps and universities have not stopped in graduating new entrants to the market - however, companies are still more likely to hire for experienced engineers, and they are more likely be able to afford these people versus in 2021 when the market was on fire.
This article is advice I can offer to entry-level software engineers. To be clear, I am not selling hope. We are likely to be in the middle one of the most difficult year to break into software engineering in the past decade. This is especially true if you lack pedigree - e.g. you did not graduate from a well-known school, you have not done an internship at a well-known tech company or you do not have a strong network where people can refer you entry-level positions at the company they work at.
All of the below advice is what I tell people who ask me what they could do to maximise chances of getting their first - or second - jobs as software engineers.
Note that none of the below links are affiliate links or sponsored. I am not affiliated in any way with any of the resources I recommend save The Tech Resume Inside Out book that I wrote and is free for anyone without a job. See my ethics statement on the lack of advertisements, sponsorships or affiliate links.
Know that it will be very hard to get that first job this time. Bootcamps oversell how easy it is to get job in tech: because they need applicants to come, so they make money. Success stories from people getting jobs without experience both have survivor bias, and those are usually stories from years ago, when the job market was not so hostile to entry-level engineers.
The reality is that the job market is cooling off for experienced engineers as well. VC-funded companies and even some traditional companies are freezing hiring or laying off. Those hiring with a limited headcount are more likely to prioritize experienced engineers. In what has never happened before: Meta did not issue new grad return offers for its interns.
For new grads, the current tech climate can safely be compared to how challenging it likely was to get a first job in tech in 2008 - following the financial crisis - or in 2001 - after the Dotcom Bust.
Consider joining a support group if you are not part of one already. Try to find a place where there are other people in your shoes. This is where having education at a college or being part of the bootcamp is helpful, as you already have such a group.
Alternatively, look for new grad Discord channels or communities with low fees like Scrimba and other, similar ones. It's easier to figure out what works, and what doesn't, and get motivation as part of a group.
For free resources, look for Discord communities like CS Career Hub. Join r/cscareers on Reddit to learn about how others are starting out on their careers.
Aim wide when applying. Don't only apply to the best-known companies, or ones offering full-remote. Those companies will be getting hundreds, if not thousands of applications to entry-level roles.
In 2018, when I was a hiring manager at Uber, in Amsterdam, we opened internships for software engineering students. Within three days of advertising this position, we received 500 qualified applications - meaning people who checked the boxes on what we were asking for. We had four headcount to fill. This was in 2018, when the market was not nearly as challenging.
While I'm not saying to not apply to well-known places, know that without references, your chances of even hearing back will likely be slim.
Find smaller, lesser-known companies. These can be startups who are struggling to find any applicants, and businesses who will not spend the budget to advertise on job boards like LinkedIn, but you can find job adverts on job aggregators like Indeed.
Apply to less competitive companies, including 'unsexy' ones. Look for local, non-tech companies, and ones who are not offering full-remote positions. Not only do these positions get fewer applicants: if they are onsite or hybrid, they'll also hire more juniors. This is because they can onboard junior people better.
Apply to local companies, not just remote ones. Full-remote roles will get much more applications than local ones. Those full-remote roles are also far more likely to hire someone with past experience, as the hiring manager is more likely to see such a hire as a lower risk one.
Know that you'll have far better chances if applying locally, especially if it is for a position where being in the office - at least a few days a week - is a requirement. Many of the experienced people won't apply, neither will people outside the area.
When getting your first or your second job, you should consider the competition you might have, and try to apply to places that will have less of this.
Apply to consultancies/developer agencies as well. The software consultancy business model requires hiring and training junior developers. They also give exposure with different environments and technologies. Agencies are a great stepping stone into the industry, and one many people move onto higher paying opportunities a few years later.
Be aware that some agencies have poor working practices: if you land in one of these, try to move on, instead of being stuck for too long.
Know that almost no company will sponsor visas for entry-level positions. Some companies do sponsor visas: but they do these for key positions that they cannot hire for locally. New grad positions almost never fall into this category. There are a handful of exceptions - like some of Big Tech will offer visas for interns to return from strategic locations they want to hire for.
However, you can safely assume that any position which needs a visa for you to work at: you will not hear back if applying, if you are an early-career software engineer, or someone looking for your first job. You might as well save an application that will not go anywhere.
Tailor your resume to each position you apply to. If you don't have a job - yet - you request a copy of my book, The Tech Resume Inside Out for free. More than 1,000 people have done so: I approve all non-spam requests.
Build your experience while you are job hunting. Which person is more likely to be hired the next 12 months: one who spends 12 months applying nonstop, or the one who spends time applying, but also built a side project that anyone can try out, contributed to an open-source project, and did a contract gig on one of the popular freelancer marketplaces? It will be the latter.
Balance time between applying, and between making your profile stand out more.
Contribute to open source in non-trivial ways. Most people you compete with will have similar, non-production-grade projects on their resume. Those who contribute to popular open source libraries used by thousands of people and companies in production really stand out. Look for projects like Awesome First PR opportunities and explore open-source projects you use.
This route will be hard: much harder than just applying to jobs all day. This is why you stand out from other applicants if you persevere, and start contributing.
Read and apply How to Be a Kickass New Software Engineer from bootcamp grad turned senior engineer Raymond Gan. Also read the featured articles in Raymond Gan's LinkedIn profile which are all first-hand advice pieces on what does, and what does not work for bootcamp grads, in Raymond's experience.
Consider taking on short projects for little payment or for free. If you are unable to land a fulltime job, it might be because you lack experience of shipping something in the real world.
One way to get this experience by doing shorter term projects, where you might be losing money on your time spent, but you ship something in production.
You could build a website or a mobile app for a friend or someone you know who needs something like this but cannot afford to pay market rate. You could build your own such app as well. You can also connect with strangers for projects: but this latter is the one I'd suggest the least, as there's a slippery slope between having your skills exploited, versus getting references on real-world work, even if you are not paid market rates.
When I started out, I did several freelance projects while I was at university where I charged below market rates. Those projects served as good references later, and helped me stand out from candidates who only had classroom projects and the usual CRUD app to showcase.
Not all new grads will get job offers. How will you stand out? The new grads software engineer market is vey much an employers market: meaning there are fewer open positions than people applying to those positions. This means not all new grads will succeed in securing a job.
Knowing this: you need to stand out. What are ways that you will do this, knowing your competition?
Standing out can be done in several ways:
The above ones are some of many ways to stand out. Putting in the effort to stand out might not get results immediately. However, without standing out from a crowd of applicants, you are far less likely to see success with your applications.
If you only have one offer: take it. You'll read advice about how to negotiate compensation between different offers, and how hot the market is in tech. Ignore this: as most of this applies to people with much experience behind their back.
I've personally had a pretty good career, eventually making it to places like Skype and Uber: but, when starting out, I just took the first job that I was able to get in Hungary - as my first job. For my second job, when moving to the UK, getting a first offer at a company I was not excited to work at - long commute, not interesting domain - luckily, resulted in other companies calling me back and I got two more offers. Without this, I would have absolutely taken that one job offer I had.
It's more important that you get started over getting a perfect start. You can course adjust as you go.
It took me about 8 years to work my way up to work at Uber. I freelanced during university shipping a variety of projects. My first fulltime job was a consultany in Hungary, then a consultancy in the UK, and only then did I get my first "bigger name" of JP Morgan on my resume. From there on, it was much easier to have better-known companies to notice me and about five years into my career I got a call from Skype, which was the first widely-known tech company I worked at.
Getting started in the industry, and taking that first opportunity with the local Hungarian company was far more important for my career, than taking a perfect start. And I'm still grateful for all that I learned during two years at the company called Sense/Net you've probably never heard of.
If you're a bootcamp grad: know that some of the "learn to code in X months" bootcamps don't do a good enough job in giving you the skills needed to get a software engineering job. Consider programs like Launch School that take much longer than a bootcamp, is not a bootcamp-like approach, but their graduates get offers even in this heated market.
For hiring managers and engineering managers reading this article: be aware of the current market dynamics. While as a new grad software engineer it is very hard to find that first job, as a hiring manager, it's never been easier to hire very motivated and talented new grads.
If you have headcount to fill, consider opening up at least a few new grad positions, once you have the seniority ratio in-place to support these people.
You'll save budget by hiring these people, bring enthusiasm, and you could change the career trajectories for every such hire you make.
If you hire new grads, see my advice on growing a junior-heavy team and on onboarding engineers to your team.
Getting your foot in the industry is very hard. Much of the online resources of 'how I got 5 offers in 2 weeks' are all about survival bias and won't reflect the reality of most people, or how challenging it is to get started.
As a ray of hope: once you'll make it in, it will only get easier with every passing year.
Good luck, and it is an especially challenging time to get started in the industry.
After you land that first position, you might find advice to myself when starting out as a software developer relevant.

We could well be seeing one of the most difficult times to break into software engineering. Here is my advice to maximise chances of getting that first software engineering job.

Advice for Less Experienced Software Engineers in the Current Tech Market

Suppose you are an oil-rich country. You drill the oil and get very rich, for now. But someday you will run out of oil, or the world will switch to green sustainable energy, and then you will stop being very rich. Seems bad.
There are two main classes of solution to this problem. Norway’s solution is to invest the oil money into a sovereign wealth fund; after they run out of oil, they can stay rich off investment income. Dubai’s solution is to use the oil money to build a really impressive city, then hope that rich people (tourists, emigres, and multinational companies seeking regional hubs) will relocate there, and then they can tax those rich people.
The Norwegian solution has a lot to recommend it. It’s a lot more certain: getting steady returns on capital is a solved problem in a way that development economics isn’t. And it scales better: there are a pretty limited number of rich people willing to move to new desert cities, and multinational companies only need one regional hub per region. Still, for a certain type of oil sheikh, building the world’s biggest everything has a certain unquantifiable charm.
Bloomberg View has a new article on the progress of Neom (h/t Marginal Revolution), Saudi Arabia’s answer to Dubai. I hesitate to include Neom in this newsletter. It’s not really a charter city, but very much a project of the Saudi government. It is in no sense utopian or libertarian; in fact, it advertises itself as a new level of surveillance in an already-totalitarian state. Most of all, it doesn’t. make. sense. This is an insane, utterly impossible project that the Saudi government is somehow barrelling full-speed-ahead on.
Take the Line:
You really want to watch this video. I had read a few other articles on Neom, thought I understood what level of craziness we were talking about here - but no, this is much, much crazier. I didn’t understand the full scale until they gave their proposed dimensions: a structure 500 meters tall, 200 meters wide, and (wait for it) 170 km long.
500 meters is about the height of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the US. 170 km is about the east-west length of the Republic of Ireland. So the Saudis are going to build something . . . as tall as the World Trade Center . . . and . . . as long as . . . Ireland? That’s their plan? Yes, says the video, that is their plan.
Is this just some crazy attempt to build hype, like when Elon Musk says the next Tesla definitely will have full-self-driving ability? I don’t think so. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is obsessed with Neom and very vain; I don’t think he would deliberately promise impossible things knowing that he will be embarrassed later when they don’t work out (and he says it will be done by 2030, so we’ll know the results relatively soon). Also, the government has earmarked $500 billion to $1 trillion for the project - around the GDP of Sweden - which sounds kind of like being serious. Also, they’ve already started on important Saudi construction preliminaries, like murdering the people who previously lived in the area. Also, they’ve already set up on-site camps for the construction workers (source):
So what is going on? After describing Neom project leader Nadhmi Al-Nasr…
Former employees say one of the chief sources of aggravation is Al-Nasr, whom they describe as having a volcanic temper. Several recall him openly berating subordinates, sometimes issuing threats unlike anything they’d experienced in their careers. In one particularly tense moment, after two e-sports companies canceled partnerships with Neom, citing human-rights concerns, Al-Nasr said he’d pull out a gun and start shooting if he wasn’t told who was to blame, according to two witnesses to the exchange. Al-Nasr disputes these accounts. “Not anyone can stand the pressure of the demands of the day, and there are people who leave because it’s more demanding than anything they have done before,” he says.
…the Bloomberg article offers some tantalizing clues:
Among the misdeeds most likely to anger Al-Nasr, the former employees say, was failing to spend enough money. Three of them described Al-Nasr keeping a diagram showing which department heads were disbursing less than their budgets allowed, which the ex-staff half-seriously referred to as a “wall of shame.”
Maybe if you demand grander and grander plans, and have a reputation for killing anyone who opposes you, then eventually you get a really grand plan and nobody has the guts to tell you that it’s impossible.
But the problem isn’t just that Neom is too big. Everything about it is doomed. There are reasons most cities aren’t designed as 200 meter wide, 170 km long lines; this maximizes the distance between any two points! The Saudis say they will solve this with a high-speed train, but all public transit is inherently limited in speed by the need to stop at a bunch of stations along the way. The video says that you’ll be able to go from one end of Neom to the other in 20 minutes, which suggests a 500 km/hour or 300 mile/hour train line. There are some maglevs which are almost that fast, but this only works if everyone is going nonstop from the exact westernmost point in Neom to the exact easternmost point. If you want people to only have to walk a kilometer or so to their destination, you’ll need 85 stops along the way. You can do slightly better than this with a combination of express and local trains, but you’re never going to compensate for the fact that laying your city out in a line is shooting yourself in the foot.
I think maybe this is what happens to your brain when you read too many YIMBY blogs. “The only things people want out of cities are super high density and a ban on cars, right?” Dude, you are Saudi Arabia. The only two things in your country are open space and fuel. Log off Twitter, touch grass, etc.
But The Line is only the beginning. They will also have a Giant Floating Octagon Of Clean Industry:
…the world’s largest ski and watersports resort, and yes we are still in Saudi Arabia, they’ll make an artificial lake and use artificial snow:
…and whatever this is supposed to be:
Fine! Let’s just have random stuff! Canal-pools along every street so you can swim to work! A beach made of crushed marble which will shine like silver! Whatever!
If this were some billionaire’s passion project, I’d be fine with it. It would be fun to watch exactly how it failed; it would probably leave some cool ruins. Maybe after the hype died down they could try for something smaller, and it would still be pretty impressive. At least it would beat yet another megayacht.
But in fact, this is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, squandering public money. Not just renewable tax receipts, but the country’s accumulated oil windfall, just as the world tries to transition to renewable energy and the country risks never getting any oil windfall ever again. This is the money that should be going to the Saudi people having a future, and instead Mohammed bin Salman is spending it on playing some kind of demented desert version of SimCity, using a strategy that ten minutes playing actual SimCity could tell him was a bad idea.
Neom represents all the worst parts of model cities. Dictators robbing the public purse to build cool monuments that make them feel special. Total lack of interest in workers, previous inhabitants, future inhabitants, or anyone except the very rich. “Sustainability”, “density”, and “liveability” as buzzwords to throw at foreign media, with no broader story for how any of this will improve the lives of real people or the cause of human freedom.
I find model cities interesting and promising only insofar as I think some of them aren’t like Neom.
Haven’t heard much out of the crypto people recently, wonder what they’re up to:
They seem to have gotten…an Indian tribe? That wasn’t on my bingo card for 2022.
The Catawba Digital Economic Zone is the brainchild of Joseph McKinney (founder of the pro-charter-cities Startup Societies Foundation) and the Catawba Nation of Native Americans (a federally recognized tribe with a reservation in South Carolina). Indian tribes have regulatory independence from state governments, which some tribes have famously used to allow casinos in their territory. The Catawba are going one step further: they claim to have favorable cryptocurrency regulations which make it easier to register and operate your crypto company in Catawba territory than in the rest of the US.
You can find their exact laws here, although they are long and in legalese. CoinDesk has an explainer of the crypto benefits, which seem to focus on digital asset regulations which “integrate digital assets under existing law”, including rights around disputes and loans. They also expect upcoming laws on DAOs, stablecoin, and banking.
“Native American tribes” and “cryptocurrency” were not previously two concepts I associated closely with each other. But the Catawba were already a standout for their political savvy and economic ambitions, and they seem intimately involved here; the Zone is being run by “the business branch of the Catawba Indian Nation”, the commissioners are mostly Catawba citizens and tribal elders, and there are some nice touches like financial incentives for businesses that employ Catawba citizens.
I like crypto as an insurance policy against oppressive governments, but I am not very bullish about it as an industry right now. Still, I am excited about the idea of Indian reservation charter cities - either in cooperation with outsiders like McKinney, or - who knows? - as grassroots designs from the tribes themselves like. Reservation charter cities wouldn’t be the biggest deal. Tribes have substantial independence from state and local governments, but not much independence from the national government, and a lot of the dysfunction that needs escaping is at the federal level. Still, there are probably some niche opportunities; see eg Squamish tribe building skyscrapers on their land in Vancouver despite NIMBY opposition for one example of where this sort of idea could go.
Malé is the capital of the Maldives, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean. It looks like this:
One noticeable feature of Malé is its lack of lebensraum. Maldives is a pretty well-off country with a strong tourist industry, and lots more people would like to be nearby. What to do?
You can already guess the proposed solution of Maldives Floating City. They want a 20,000 person seastead docked ten minutes away from the 130,000 person island-capital. The Floating City will serve both tourists and local Maldivians (some of whom are getting nervous about rising sea levels, and would probably appreciate a development guaranteed to stay above water).
According to the organization’s press release, the Dutch corporate sponsor has obtained full permission to build the seastead, some test construction has already started, and full construction will begin in January. They hope to finish by 2027.
Here are the inevitable pretty pictures:
If you like tropical paradises and are incredibly optimistic, you can buy a house in the Floating City here, prices seem to be $150-250K.
This is not the long-awaited dream of the libertarian seastead; the whole city will be firmly anchored in Maldives, both physically and legally. But if it works, it’s a proof of concept that libertarians may be able to build on later.
1: Prospera now hosts the drone delivery service Aerialoop, which will eventually transport cargo from their Roatan Island hub to various outposts on the mainland; you can find more information here. Their long-term plans include eventually following this up with passenger drones. And here’s some more information on the growing drone industry in Latin America.
2: Related: Prospera intern and resident George Kerpestein is writing a Substack about his experiences there. And here is the Prospera newsletter.
3: Thanks to commenters last month for pointing out that Chinese cult Falun Gong has its own compound/city in upstate New York. You can read more about it here:
4: Sealand is an independent nation (according to Sealand) based out of an old WWII sea fort in international waters. It is not for sale, but the Bull Sandfort is, for only £50,000. Alas, this one is firmly within British territorial waters. But it does look pretty defensible…anyway, see the listing here.
In 2030, there are at least 50,000 people in whatever the Neom project has evolved into by then: 75%
Saudi Arabia builds a structure at least 100m x 100m x 1000m before 2040 or the Singularity, whichever comes first: <1%
In 2030, the Trojena Ski Resort exists, an ordinary (rich) person can book a room and go skiing there, and it is at least close to as impressive as the pictures (my subjective judgment; doesn’t have to be exactly the same design): 5%
In 2030, Maldives Floating City is home to at least 2,000 people: 20%

Model City Monday 8/1/22

This issue is the second part and final article in a series about oncall. Part 1 – published last week – covers healthy oncall practices. In this issue, we dive into:
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Looking across the industry, there are several different philosophies.
1. “Being oncall is your one and only job.” Some companies hire dedicated tech people whose only job is to be oncall, handle alerts, and improve the oncall infrastructure. This role is called ‘DevOps Engineer’ at some companies, SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) at others, and may also be called ‘Operations Engineer.’
The role is constructed so expectations are clear and shifts are staggered, so the workload is reasonable.
These roles are typical at more traditional companies, many of which are transitioning from an Ops model, (see Part 1 of this series for detail on what an Ops model is,) to one with more continuous delivery. The role is also widespread in highly regulated industries. Companies which prioritize software engineers’ wellbeing might also opt for this model, or at least utilize dedicated people to be oncall to lighten the burden on the engineering organization.
2. “It’s not part of the job outside business hours.” Plenty of businesses don’t expect engineers to be oncall outside of business hours. These companies are typically:
3. “It’s not part of the job outside business hours, but we might still try to reach you during those times.”
A variation of the above two cases, when the company does not expect software engineers to be available. However, they do have someone oncall, and that person might try to reach out to software engineers during an outage. However, it's not expected that the engineer answers their phone.
This is a typical setup at small businesses and startups where incidents are too few and far between to warrant making oncall “official.” It’s more common at companies where the founders are hands-on, and can resolve most issues themselves, thereby bearing most of the oncall burden, rather than the engineers.
4. “It’s part of the job for all software engineers and we operate in regions which regulate how it needs to be compensated with pay and time off.”
There are plenty of countries that regulate oncall pay and time off, the list of which we covered in Part 1 already. Most companies operating in these regions structure their oncall compensation to adhere to local regulations.
I say “most” as two groups will technically violate regulations:
5. “It’s part of the job, but we acknowledge the disruption with pay and additional time off.”
Empathetic companies acknowledge going oncall is another burden that needs to be compensated, regardless if there is no local regulation mandating it. These companies offer pay, and might also offer the ability to choose time off, or a mix of compensation. Companies that typically use this approach:
6. “It’s voluntary for most people, and we encourage it with pay and time off.”
The final group are companies which do need people oncall, but manage to structure this so it is voluntary. They get enough volunteers by generously compensating for being oncall. Often, these places have dedicated people oncall along the lines of DevOps engineers or SREs.
What if there are not enough people to cover oncall? The company might reserve a mandate for anybody to go oncall until there are enough volunteers, but pay generously for their time. In most cases, the companies I talked to which implement oncalls this way manage to recruit enough volunteers.
For example, an engineer at The Guardian – the UK-based newspaper and website – shared that their oncall is voluntary and works well:
“Our oncall is paid at £750 per week. It’s a voluntary rota of 2 engineers each week. On top of the pay, you are encouraged to take rest after your shift. Oncall is popular and we don’t have issues filling the rotation.”
Voluntary oncall can work well if the effort it takes to staff oncall, is far lower than the number of engineers at the company.
7. “It’s part of the job for all software engineers and not paid additional.”
This approach is common at many companies. A few which stand out:
Some firms compensate with time off, instead of cash. This can range from inviting people to start late if they got paged the previous night, all the way to offering a specific number of days as paid vacation for each week worked of oncall. For companies which already offer unlimited time off, offering lieu days is no change to the existing policy, and so it won’t be seen as a supportive measure.
Although I list seven different philosophies: in reality, there are two main ways of thinking about oncall:
A: Oncall for software engineers is additional.
1. “Being oncall is your one and only job.”
2. “It’s not part of the job outside business hours.
3. “It’s not part of the job outside business hours, but we might still try to reach you during those times.”
4. “It’s part of the job for all software engineers and we operate in regions which regulate how it needs to be compensated with pay and time off.”
5. “It’s part of the job, but we recognize the disruption with pay and additional time off.”
6. “It’s voluntary for most people, and we encourage it with pay and time off.”
B: Oncall is part of the job:
7. “It’s part of the job for all software engineers and not paid additional.”
Being oncall means you need to be on standby and have your laptop with you at all times, so you can respond to pagers, and start resolving incidents within minutes. Most software engineers who are oncall tend to have this responsibility for a week at a time.
Being oncall can be quite disruptive in two major ways:
Several countries have strict regulations around oncall, with some going as far as mandating the right to a certain number of hours of uninterrupted rest per day or per week.
Incident management scaleup indcide t.io (disclaimer: I am an investor) ran an oncall survey where they collected 200 responses, and found that while 70% of respondents said each team was responsible for their oncall rota, about 40% were compensated for oncall. An interesting finding from their summary:
“Interestingly, this was more common in larger organizations (5,000+ people) than in small to mid-sized organizations that participated in the survey.
Where companies did provide compensation, most paid a fixed amount for time spent oncall (e.g., $X per hour, day or week). But the actual dollar amount paid ranged significantly, from $5 to $1,000 per week, with the average weekly rate at $540.”
For this series about oncall, I invited people to share whether their company pays for oncall, and if so, how much? Here is a collection of companies which do not pay for software engineers to be oncall – but still require it – and ones that do. Note that companies in the “Unpaid oncall” column need to follow local regulation for oncall compensation in countries which mandate this, as discussed in Part 1 of the series.
So which companies pay, and which ones do not?
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Big Tech generally does not pay for being oncall. Except for Google, and except for regions where paying for oncall is mandatory, they don’t compensate for this. Why is this?
A major reason is these companies pay top of the market: in the third and highest bracket in the trimodal compensation model. So even when not paying for oncall, they offer higher compensation than most other companies which pay lower, but compensate additionally for oncall.
And it’s reasonable to argue that they have a point. Between these two offers, which one sounds more appealing?
Many well-funded startups which pay closer to the top of the market also make oncall as part of expectations as well.
The only curious data point is how Google, on top of paying top of the market, also pays for oncall, and invests in healthy oncall practices on top of these, as we’ve covered in Part 1 of the series.
How much do companies pay which compensate for being oncall? The answer is, it varies a lot. This ranges from about $100 per week, all the way to around $1,250 per week – and even higher for some engineers at Google.
Compensation approaches are split between these three buckets, ordered by frequency:
Here is a summary of the policies various companies have, and how they compensate.
A few curious insights into the above rates:
At companies which don’t compensate for oncall, is there a different approach? As I talked with software engineers oncall at these companies, several shared that they do get various benefits, mostly related to time off. Here’s a summary of approaches:
During my research, I came across a few examples of poor oncall culture.
Twilio is a company about which I received an unusually high number of complaints to do with oncall. All contributors had a negative view of how the current approach to oncall works at the company.
Here is how a current software engineer detailed the oncall expectations at Twilio:
“Shift duration is also freely discussed within teams. Generally, it is 7 days, but inside teams with few members like 2 or 3, they can also do 3 days’ rotations. If you are a team of 4, you're almost in ‘oncall prison’ for 2 out of 4 weeks (secondary + primary week.)
Lately, there have been strong discussions internally within the R&D teams (mostly involved in oncall) because of this.
General rules –again, the team can slightly vary them:
1. Expected to engage within 10 minutes of an alert.
2. Expected to engage within 5/10 minutes on POC (point of contact – paged by other teams or people.)
3. No drugs or excessive alcohol while oncall.
4. Escalate early if you encounter problems.
5. You can travel, if you can ensure all the above.”
Several engineers working at the company told me oncall operational load is high, teams are understaffed, oncall is not paid, and someone even used the term “oncall prison,” as quoted above. A few additional quotes from software engineers and engineering managers at this company:
What is the reason for the high oncall lead? I talked with a few engineers who had two or more years of tenure. This is what they shared:
The good news at Twilio is that leadership seems to be aware of the unsustainable oncall setup, and is working on addressing this problem. Engineers I talked with shared how while burnout is hitting many of them, they do feel that leaders are trying to fix things and empower engineers. Someone I talked with shared how they feel the thing holding the company back is the mindset which many tenured engineers have; they assume things are fine just the way they are – including the high oncall load.
Amazon is another company where oncall stress is high and oncall is not compensated – unless regulated locally, like in Brazil or Spain. Within Prime Video in the UK, oncall compensation is historic: when Amazon acquired startup LoveFilm in 2011 – a startup which transformed into Prime Video – oncall compensation was part of all current and future contracts, and it has stayed that way ever since.
Oncall is one of the main negatives of working at Amazon, as I write in Inside Amazon’s Engineering Culture:
“The bad: Heavy oncall and operations load in many cases. Teams are expected to operate their systems well, and this is often done in a way that results in stressful oncalls. Operational issues need to be addressed immediately instead of letting them escalate.”
Different teams and organizations, of course, have varying oncall loads. People who work in the Alexa and Redshift organizations have shared stories of extreme oncall loads.
Engineering managers – called SDMs (Software Development Managers) – at Amazon have been known to step in and try to ease the oncall load by offering days off. As a current Amazon engineer shares:
“After rough oncalls in the Alexa Devices organization, several SDMs have been lenient with PTO to compensate (if up late, then come in late, if working the weekend, then take an extra day off, etc.) This was not an official policy and any change-ups in the manager (like a re-org which happened somewhat often) and any accumulated off-the-books PTO time would vanish.”
However, I have heard several stories of staff suffering extreme burnout due to Amazon’s relentless oncall load, and this burnout persisting with them to their next position. A software engineer I talked with shared how they burnt out so badly because of Amazon’s oncall culture, that they struggled during the first several months of their next job at a startup, as they were recovering mentally and physically from the oppressive operations load at Amazon.
Other examples. A few engineers have cautionary tales which I’m sharing as warnings:
Why are poor oncall practices painful? They can directly impact software engineer attrition and wellbeing. Simply put, poor oncall practices will lead to more engineers quitting, more people getting burnt out and fewer people recommending a company.
Twilio’s example can be a cautionary tale in my view. While the company has been a business success, it has seen large attrition struggles, and not getting a handle fast enough on healthy oncall means they might see things get worse in terms of attrition, before they get better.
Based on my in-depth, anecdotal research of the industry right now, it appears there are two main philosophies when it comes to rewarding oncall:
I can safely say I was living in an “oncall bubble” before researching this topic that has such a big impact on many people’s work and personal lives. Having mostly worked at companies where oncall is part of the job, is unpaid, and comes with high pressure, I assumed this is how it works everywhere.
However, this article and its underlying research reveals that oncall duties being taken as a given, is actually far from the case across the industry. Many companies – small and big, startups and traditional – do pay extra compensation for it. Some places don’t pay cash, but they do offer time off in return for being on oncall duty.
We’ve explored healthy oncall practices in part one of this series. I hope the data points on which companies pay and how much, help shape your oncall policy.
And don’t forget that engineers can shape oncall practices, not just managers; as software engineer Anna Baker at LaunchDarkly shares in Part 1:
“We had a former Intercom engineer take part in developing the new oncall process here, and they advocated for some of the practices they'd seen work well. Pretty incredible to have an engineer championing their former company's oncall. Although we ended up with a slightly different model, we definitely took note and I want to make sure to acknowledge that.”

Which companies pay for oncall, and how much? Philosophies across the industry for paying for standby duty and numbers from 80 companies.

Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers

Lately I don’t blog as often as I’d like, so in an effort to change that, I’ve waived my protocol about spicy takes. I used to reserve them for Twitter and my Patreon. Today, you’re getting one here.
Why: I get very little out of 95% of them. I much prefer online recordings, which can come vetted/recommended. Also I can bump them up to 1.5x or 2x speed, so that at least if the talk isn’t that good I waste less time on it.
I know, it’s harsh. I’m sorry.
You know what, I’m not sorry. I’m a brat, and I want better than that. More importantly, I think speakers can do better than that.
It’s not that the speakers are poor engineers. It’s not even that they’re necessarily poor speakers. I think two things are happening.
I’m a selfish little cuss. When I’m in the audience, I want the talk to be about me. Not the speaker.
But I’m also an empathetic little cuss. So when I’m speaking I try, first and foremost, to center the audience the way I’d like to be centered.
That’s not very helpful advice on its own, so…
I suspect some of this is gonna sound counterintuitive.
I’d like to start by addressing some of that platitudinous advice about how to deliver a talk. These are things I see a lot of speakers do, that I specifically do not do.
Why: I think people forget this part unless there’s a big name drop, and I also think legitimacy by proxy is gross. People can decide from my talk if I’m worth listening to.
One legit objection: “I am from an underrepresented group, and without my credentials no one listens to me.”
Maybe so. But:
Or any version of it, like “broader context for my talk” or “why my talk is important.” The people who are hearing the intro to my talk are already at my talk. I don’t have to convince anyone. If I wrote it right, the content will do the convincing.
In fact, more broadly, I think a lot of speakers could benefit from spending less time trying to convince people they’re worth listening to, and just write the talk as if it were dead f**king obvious that you’re worth listening to. Imagine you already have the rapt attention of the whole room, and think about what you would say in that situation, and write that. In many circumstances—tech conferences being one—I think that would produce much better talks.
They’re wildly inaccessible to people from different age ranges and cultures, so talks with a lot of these have a shorter shelf life and limited relevance.
These sorts of things also often get used as crutches for weak content. If I’m reaching for them, I look for the weakness I’m trying to cover up.
Mostly my audience is too far away to see my eyes live. How many audience members could I momentarily lock eyes with in a room of 400? Maybe 40? If I had time? The rest can’t see my face well enough to ‘lock eyes’ with me even if I could fake it. And on Zoom I have to operate Zoom, which unfortunately hijacks most opportunities to make choices about my gaze.
See, 99% of the time when developers show code in a talk, it’s WAY too small for people to read and WAY too much for them to absorb. On a projector in a 4-600 person room, you can make about 3 lines legible onscreen. Everybody does more than that.
Whatever I’m trying to say about code, I figure out how to represent it with 3 lines, or I figure out how to paraphrase it with a diagram. Or I don’t talk about it. More on this later.
Those are my “counterintuitive things I don’t do.”
I’ll present these things in the rough order that they show up in the talk, and as foils to the “dont’s” I shared above.
From the moment I’m given the stage, I’m trying to get past self-intros and other crap and onto The Hook (the start of the talk) as fast as I can.
The Hook has one job: surprise people. That’s it.
Why: Because I give talks to auditoriums full of nerds.
Reveal to nerds that they don’t know something, and you’re done having to worry about whether they’re leaving. You’ve nerd-sniped them. They’re not leaving.
Disclaimer: I have one huge advantage with this step.
My advantage: my schtick is to take slippery concepts and install handles on them for easier handling, transport, and transfer.
A lot of ’em are concepts that people handwave because everyone is “supposed” to get them, and no one quite does, and it’s unsafe to admit it.
So my schtick has a built-in hook. I can just go up there like “Today we’re talking about tech debt. Y’all think you know what that is, but you don’t and I’ll prove it.”
Bam, now everyone’s either like “Who does this b**ch think she is” or “WHOA, I had no idea!”
Here’s an example of that: I give a talk about tech debt, and I have a slide titled “What is Technical Debt?” And then it says “Tech Debt == Bad Code,” which is a 65% accurate distillation of what a lot of engineers would tell you if you asked that question.
And yet, that part of the slide is labeled “Two Misconceptions.” Wait, so that’s wrong? And apparently there’s also another thing that’s wrong?” Yep. I start the talk with what tech debt is not, and I point out flaws in two very commonly held assumptions. You can see it here (This link starts deliberately at 126 seconds into the video):
I don’t define “empowering engineers to make design decisions.” I tell a story about a launch pad tower that was 4x harder to maintain because the damn door was on the wrong side.
Human brains can struggle to apply a general idea to a specific situation, but they’re BRILLIANT at drawing connections between stories and seeing broader patterns.
So, by explaining with stories, I can get points across in less time and cover WAY more ground in one talk.
Here’s an example of that: same video as above, but this time deliberately timestamped much later, at 2060 seconds. This is where I tell that story about the launch pad design.
Sharing examples offers another advantage: it credentials me.
The stories I tell demonstrate that I have experience with this and I know what I’m talking about. I don’t need to be like “Listen to me because I work for <Brand Name>”.
Funny is great, but it’s hard to do well (I’d know: I did standup), and can be harmful when done poorly. I’d rather my talk be memorable for its utility than its humor: good or bad.
I find that the best way to offer tools is flowchart-style.
The body of my talk should be structured like a tree, rooted at a contrast with existing knowledge. People remember stuff best when they can relate (especially contrast) it to stuff they already know about. I take advantage of that.
This talk about leveling up exemplifies the strategy. First, I introduce the idea of leveling up actively, and I contrast it with the more common, more passive understanding of leveling up. Next, I introduce four branches: the four skills of leveling up actively that I will discuss in the talk. Each of those branches spins off into specific exercises and tactics.
It’s not that making eye contact is bad—it just has a low return on investment relative to other stage presence things I could focus on.
For example, you’ll notice in the above examples that I move around onstage (Leveling Up talk) and on camera (Tech Debt talk).
But the biggest and most underrated stage presence concern (especially in ‘informative talk’ circles) is timing of delivery.
Timing of delivery makes an enormous impact. It can make the difference between the concept sinking into people’s brains and sliding past to be lost to the ether.
This one is hard to develop. You do, I’m afraid, have to get comfortable standing on stage doing this (or whatever), in total silence, while you wait for your point to land. And then you also have to know when to be satisfied that it landed.
You can see some examples of me playing with timing here, 2546 seconds into a workshop that I co-facilitated with a student of mine (at the time—she is now a software engineer in good repute at Spotify). The content of this talk is unlikely to make sense unless you have watched the rest of the workshop, so I recommend focusing solely on the timing here:
I comport myself as if people are already listening to me.
I project “This is my stage. I’ll do what I want on it. You’ll watch and listen if you know what’s good for you.”
This workshop recording at 38 seconds in offers a good example of that. People still make fun of me for this when we’re out for beers at conferences:
This is, by the way, a noticeably gendered variety of stage presence. People largely reserve this for, and expect this of, masculine presences. I noticed that after I got better at doing this, a funny thing started to happen at my talks.
During Q&A, I get called “sir” pretty regularly.
In winged eyeliner and four inch heels.
(For the record: It’s okay. I don’t mind. It’s kinda fun.)
In this regard I am, again, privileged. My parents agreed on almost nothing, but they did both raise me like I’d have important things to say. And I talk a lot like my dad does. In a lot of ways I’m everything my dad wanted…in a hetero son. Oops 😂
This is the maximum amount of code I’ve ever put on a slide, and it’s in the midst of several minutes of explanation where we built this code up gradually. I’ve never introduced more than about three lines of code at once in a tech talk.
But even this right here is more code than I put on a slide for a tech talk anymore. Instead, I try to keep each kind of subject matter to the medium that best suits it. So for talks, I focus on topics that convey well in audio format. I do not think code does that.
First of all, speakers put way too much code on a slide and go past it way too fast. In a room of 400-600 people, most of them are too far away to even see it—and that’s if there’s no projector glare, which there’s always projector glare. Code just doesn’t communicate well in contexts where only the audio is accessible to the whole audience.
Is it possible to convey code without visual cues? Yes. But it requires special tools like high-speed screen readers, which have a learning curve that I can’t ask my audience to scale in one talk.
So about the most the audience is gonna get out of code in a talk is something like “that code is cool.”
And if they get that out of the code in your talk, you’ll get positive feedback. But they, the audience, does not get a useful takeaway. You, the speaker, get to leave feeling like a badass, and they, the audience, might even think you’re a badass, but the audience doesn’t get to leave with any newfound badassery at their own disposal. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s a failure. If my audience doesn’t leave with their own new skills, their imaginations full of schemes for unleashing their newfound badassery on their work, then I have not taught them anything important. I have failed. And that kind of failure is not badass.
When I want to teach or explain with code, I do it in a visual format with audio options: a blog post like this or a video like this. Or I create interactive exercises like this.
In a talk, I focus on stuff that folks can quote, or make into lists, or draw in tree diagrams. I focus talks on getting people to think about their old problems with a new perspective—usually a flexible framework outfitted, like I said, with handles 😉.
Here are some examples of slides like that from various talks:
So those are specifics of my preparation. They happen in different orders depending on the talk. Sometimes, my brain makes its own progress on one of these steps when I least expect it.
What new skills do I want my audience to have, and know how to use, when they leave this room?
I don’t worry about what they’re going to think of me or my talk.
I don’t even worry about what they’re coming to my talk to get: I instead trust myself to focus on skills that tech audiences sorely need, more than what they’re asking for.
But they—or maybe more precisely, their potential as change agents in tech—are my whole focus in building a talk. And that’s what works for me.
This blog post assumes you have some speaking experience and some understanding of conference etiquette. Here are some additional things I also want to say based on things I cannot believe I have actually seen speakers, sometimes compensated ones, do onstage at tech conferences.
Folks, I love you, but Jesus, have your basics in hand when you get onstage.
Critique, The Internet, and You—about critiquing things people make
The feedback series—about critiquing the things that somebody does
The listening series—the one I’d say most people think they need the least and actually need the most

How I do (and don’t) prepare a talk for a tech conference

The Best C# .NET Web Application Tech Stack: Deploying to Azure

Other people can always see your shadow. And other people showed me mine. My shadow is voracious, compartmentalized, judgmental, opportunistic, controlling, and afraid of rejection. Whereas my more legible self (more “lovable,” in my eyes) is idealistic, warm, wholehearted, loyal, explorative, appreciative and accepting.
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Other people can always see your shadow. And other people showed me mine. My shadow is voracious, compartmentalized, judgmental, opportunistic, controlling, and afraid of rejection. Whereas my more legible self (more &#8220;lovable,&#8221; in my eyes) is idealistic, warm, wholehearted, loyal, explorative, appreciative and accepting.

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