This was a worry for me when leaving my full time job in 2022 to work on open source. Our OSS project was able to pay rent, but was concerned about healthcare costs for my partner and me (NY state has extended COBRA coverage, but it's extremely expensive). My co-founder lives in Australia, which has free basic health care, so he was up for leaving his job before I was.
Taking the risk was one of the best decisions I've made, but if I had a chronic health condition/higher healthcare costs, probably would not have been comfortable.
He's a retired pro basketball player. He's since made early investments in companies like Hugging Face[1], Coinbase, and Robinhood.[2] If you earn millions in your 20s, didn't spend it, and have a killer work ethic, you can flip careers to professional investor.
He's an hall of fame basketball player who has made a shit-ton of money, drafted after one year of collge with a team of bankers investing his money, he's definitely not "hustling two jobs" simultaneously. The semi-remarkable thing is he hasn't blown his wealth on gambling or pet sharks.
If it were that easy, the norm wouldn't be blowing the wealth on gambling or pet sharks lol.
If he has successfully assembled a team of bankers that has been as successful as his portfolio suggests, while allowing him to be completely hands off, the man clearly has talents beyond the basketball court.
Later on it looks like he classifies him as a "vanity angel" rather than a "strategic angel." It sounds like it can be useful to have someone with name recognition as an investor when you're talking to people who aren't very familiar with the space.
if you are trying to convince people to invest on name recognition vs. knowledge of your space, or ability to move the company forward it doesn't seem like a great guide for getting angels: "be lucky and get someone famous with lots of money".
This is great long term for having cars that follow traffic laws since human drivers in NYC are awful (kill/injure pedestrians, bikers, and other street users all the time).
Not so great for getting cars out of NYC and pedestrianizing more of the city/moving towards more “low traffic neighborhoods” as I imagine Waymo and other similar companies are going to fight against these efforts.
Edit: Lots of people talking about human drivers taking advantage of self-driving cars being more cautious/timid. Good news is that once you have enough self-driving cars on the road, it probably slows down/calms other traffic (see related research on speed governors).
I'm not sure why you think waymo would fight against that. People getting rid of their own cars for daily use will increase how often a service like waymo is used for occasional usage. In the long run it would be a win for waymo. Not many people are taking taxis on a daily basis in New York for normal driving, they buy a car if they need to do that because even with the parking bill they will still come out ahead. And once they have their own car they feel like they need to get some use out of it.
> not sure why you think waymo would fight against that
If you were to pedestrianize 10% of Manhattan (or for example all of Broadway, which is being considered), then that’s less area for Waymo to operate and make money. To be clear, this is likely more of a long term issue.
It had a lot of on street parking, at least mid town did, when I lived there in 2000 (which admittedly was 25 years ago). It was good enough that my gf at the time was driving from a Columbia dorm to IBM hawthorn.
Waymo would not fight against "people getting rid of their cars", many people in NY who use the incredible public transit system would like to see more car-free streets, which they absolutely would fight against.
Do you mean that in the sense of "anyone getting killed is unacceptable" or the sense of "we need complete separation between cars and pedestrians/bikers, somehow"?
The rule of thumb for almost completely eliminating pedestrian fatalities is complete separation or a 20mph speed limit. A 20mph speed limit is far more feasible for the 5 boroughs than most other American cities.
I think there's a third more charitable reading: that current injury and fatality rates are still too high, even if they compare favorably to the rest of the US's rates. It's unrealistic to have no traffic injuries ever; this doesn't imply that NYC can't do better.
I mean if we required a license to own a bike in NYC we could see a significant reduction in injuries/deaths, same for pedestrians. Cars are already heavily regulated and likely aren't the underlying issue.
There are many ways to interpret data, but one often comes to the conclusion that pedestrians and bikers are the root cause of most accidents.
Cars are only “heavily regulated” in the sense that you pass a test once when you are a teenager and then never have to pass a test again, just pay a nominal fee to renew your license.
I am curious what data you are looking at that gives you the impression pedestrians and bikers are the root cause of most accidents. As a frequent pedestrian / biker here, I see a car doing something unhinged about every mile I walk. On Wednesday I almost got hit by a car flying the wrong way down a one-way street and then running a red.
> the fact that any pedestrians/bikers are killed/injured by cars in NYC is unacceptable.
Then the next step is regulating bikes and pedestrians. I think most studies which are willing to assign blame to bikes find they’re usually at fault or visibility is an issue, both of which come down to the bike. To approach no deaths, we need licenses, lights, increased safety protection, and training. If we’re fine with NYC just being one of the safest cities for bikers and pedestrians, then maybe we don’t have to worry about that
It’s a step in the right direction, but they still pollute (heavy electric vehicles have a lot more tire dust) and take up a lot space (could close roads and build housing or just have more space for the millions of city residents that don’t have/use cars).
> heavy electric vehicles have a lot more tire dust
It would be interesting to know the fleet-level statistics for this. Driven by humans, EV might wear tires faster because of fast starts and the extra weight during stops. It's possible that the Waymo Driver accelerates and decelerates more smoothly, resulting in less tire wear than a human-driven ICE vehicle.
You know what kills or harms people in NYC are the motorized bikes driving the wrong way and putting people in the hospital, with no charges against the operator because they are usually an illegal alien. Not sure Waymo is going to fix that.
Seems possible that on/off-ramps are leveled up in the next few years as Stripe and other large financial institutions all try to launch and dominate stablecoins.
In 2018, Patreon almost got kicked off of Stripe because Mastercard objected to NSFW content (probably because of PACs and/or “moralizing busybodies”). Patreon booted most of the NSFW creators and OnlyFans scooped them up. OnlyFans is now significantly bigger than Patreon.
To be clear, Stripe is one of multiple payment processors OnlyFans uses. I don't know what the other ones are but they do have a processor that is more favorable for NSFW content, and all related payments go through that/those processors. Safer payments go through Stripe, at least last I checked.
Payment processors successfully got OnlyFans to ban sexually explicit content in 2021. The policy was just reversed before it ever went into effect - presumably the announcement generated some compelling data on how much less money everyone would make if the policy went through. (I don't know if this is also related to their transition away from Stripe for the NSFW-est content.)
There used to be something like this at the Boston Museum of Science, where you created a fish (don’t remember if you drew it freehand and/or selected from different fish parts) and released it into the tank with other fish and predators.
The Federal Highway Administration tried to revoke its approval for the program (some federal roads in the congestion relief zone). Still being litigated last I checked.
Taking the risk was one of the best decisions I've made, but if I had a chronic health condition/higher healthcare costs, probably would not have been comfortable.