I have friends in the Abingdon area and the primary objection, from what they've told me, is that locals objected to a reservoir that would mainly be used to supply London. Little Englanders at their worst.
Yeah but don’t forget all the eminent domain shit that happened in the 70s and destroyed neighbourhoods left and right. The power structure set up to make sure that doesn’t happen again are now impeding important progress.
I invested in Small Robots Co (https://smallrobotco.com/) who were doing something similar. They had a good product, good brand, raised some funding, and were starting to get traction, with robots in trials on a number of farms, but at the end of the day they ran out of funding before they reached default-alive.
It's a tough space - convincing farmers to give it a go and running trials takes time and the UK isn't a very startup-friendly environment - investors are too often looking for a quick return.
This is such an important area - it's only going to become more critical to be able to grow more food whilst using less fertiliser and weed killer - so I wish you the very best of luck!
Coincidentally, we're based fairly close to where they operated. We are in touch with some of the people that used to be involved with SRC, and have been able to learn from some of their experiences. There is agreement that the UK can be difficult for this kind of startup, but also about the importance of the product area.
Completely agree. An infinite canvas sounds great until you need to find anything, then you end up with having to create a structure to it, and you rapidly end up grouping stuff into "pages" - Miro's "frames".
4 year old Lenovo laptop here, 16GB RAM and SSD. Bootup from cold is around 5-seconds, everything is pretty snappy even with lots of browser tabs open and VSCode running. Never had the start menu lag other people have reported. Definitely faster than it was when Windows 10 was installed.
Have you checked for viruses? Last time I saw a machine that slow booting up, even with a spinning disk, it was riddled with viruses.
It checks your website for the kind of things that get missed when you go from dev to production or can go wrong later - expired domains and SSL certs, broken links, robot options blocking search engine crawlers, etc. Adding more checks all the time and always keen to hear suggestions.
Every proposal I have seen kicks in after $100m. That's a level of wealth where even paying a 5% tax is likely to result in an annual net increase in wealth, as when you have that amount of money to invest achieving 5%+ returns is not unusual. The net result is that wealth would still increase, just at a slower rate.
Additionally, even amongst the general population, let alone startup founders, the number of people with wealth in excess of $100m is tiny. Numbers are hard to come by but I've seen estimates of 5,000 people in the US. What this means is that people arguing against a wealth tax are happy to disadvantage 330m people to protect the wealth of a low number of thousands.
>What this means is that people arguing against a wealth tax are happy to disadvantage 330m people to protect the wealth of a low number of thousands.
By not giving 1% of your wealth to Africa you're disadvantaging a billion people to protect the wealth of one. It's not a disadvantage to someone that they're not getting a part of somebody else's wealth; we're not born with some divine right to other people's money.
The ability to have 100 million dollars is entirely due to the enforcement of laws that we all agree on. I think we should re-frame the wealth tax as guillotine insurance.
Enforcing those laws doesn't take a lot of money: see countries like Singapore (or America 100 years ago). In the US most tax money goes into welfare, and warfare (and I think it's hard to argue that America's current military expenditure is the minimum necessary to protect its citizens' property).
The talk of guillotines is completely out of place by the way: the French revolution was not a bunch of peasants guillotining the rich out of envy; they were guillotining the royal family, for taxing them too much!
>The talk of guillotines is completely out of place by the way: the French revolution was not a bunch of peasants guillotining the rich out of envy; they were guillotining the royal family, for taxing them too much!
That is rather reductionist. At the time, the landed gentry, nobility and the church were the rich people in France. The middle class guillotined the rich because they were the ones paying all the taxes while the actual wealthy were not paying any taxes at all. I'm sure you can see the overlap with the present day sentiment.
The real reason America has such high military expenditure is more about ensuring the hegemony of the U.S. dollar by backing Saudi interests in the Middle East (and thereby ensuring that the dollar is the main currency denominating oil transactions, which ensures its global reserve status). Which gives the U.S. an upper hand on the world stage because of its currency being the reserve.
I know it's cliche, but these arguments always seem to boil down to the - Americans don't view themselves as poor, merely temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Though, I would make that 'billionaires' in today's world.
It's not free because I want it to be sustainable, but also because it does more than just capture form data and send you an email. You might not need more than that, but if you do then it's probably even more important that it's a sustainable business.
Exponent, a weekly podcast covering a topic from Stratechery, Ben Thompson and James Allworth on business and technology strategy.
Friday Night Comedy from the BBC. If you like satirical comedy and an English sense of humour then The News Quiz and The Now Show are the best there is.
The Art of Product , Build Your SaaS and Out of Beta are great if following along as people build bootstrapped start-ups is your thing.
Startups for the Rest of Us is the OG bootstrapped start-up podcast.
Planet Money and The Indicator, both from PBS, cover business, economics and society and make it interesting.
Flash Forward, by Rose Eveleth, a trip to a possible future then a walk through how we get there.
