- ~$50M all-in to build which sounds egregious but is small for a government project

- mostly good outcomes

- ~4y to pilot which also sounds egregious for a single moderate-complexity web app but again is practically lightspeed for a government project

People blame it getting shuttered on Trump but this is both a misread and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the government operates. The entire federal government is deliberately paced and primarily driven by a combination of politicals, regulation, budget, Congressional policymaking, and program staffing. The hammer on this was always going to fall,

[1] Congress has maintained a "buy over build" policy since literally the Cold War. Ironically the first policy here (1965) was to buy computers from ADP instead of custom-building them. The most impactful "buy commercial" policy (1996) was also IT focused. This was literally codified in several parts of the FAR, and if we're going to be blaming admins, the Trump admin has actually weakened the FAR with the RFO and would be on the other side of this issue.

[2] This policy is also the foundation upon which IT contractors like Palantir are built, if you've ever wondered "wtf do they do" they are a commercial contractor that builds custom software for government. So agencies get their custom stuff, Congress is happy they bought commercial, and the only loser is the taxpayer who overpaid a factor of 3-5x. To their credit, Palantir is a huge improvement on the status quo, because they charge by use cases and outcomes, whereas traditional SI's operate on a staffing model and a combination of high wrap rates and perverse incentives with billable hours creates horrible outcomes and ballooning costs. Anyways, there are a lot of commercial vendors that this work "could have" gone to and didn't. It would also have been really easy for them to shop this out because this was shaped really well for GSA MAS or STARS III.

[3] When you build things internally with e.g. 18F, one agency is typically the "customer" and pays the other agency (afaik 18F program is nested under the White House). So this really sucks when they walk away; 18F earned a reputation for building things through pilot, blogging about it, puffing their cheeks in the media, sending a bill to the agency, and then running off to the next shiny thing as engineers tend to do. As an agency you save a bit of money initially but now you are left with something nobody knows how to maintain, you have to hire contractors to do it, which by nature has to be a staffing contract, and then the wrap rate alone wrecks you. This happens all the time with commercial vendors, usually when they are outsized or don't get renewed, but obviously upsetting when it happens internally.

[4] The author of this piece was part of the team and so as you'd expect this piece is exceptionally biased. The reality is that the IRS self-assessed the maintenance as low and everybody who reports on this treats this as fact when it was not a GAO estimate, which is what carries any actual weight, it was internal IRS estimates and a single independent that mainly assessed call center volume not the actual system. Not only does their reputation precede them here, but their own spend on buildout (~$30M on contractors to help) contradicts the low maintenance narrative. We may never see a GAO estimate here, but the contract would almost certainly go out to TrussWorks, all government contracting data is public and you can look up for yourself how much TrussWorks typically charges the IRS whether directly or thru ATI's vehicles as subawards.

Project 20x looks pretty cool, we're in a similar space and there's probably a ~2y horizon to fix things before the bureaucracy falls to consultocracy. FWIW if you or anyone else building in gov need funding to get stuff off the ground there are plenty of DC-based VCs that are phenomenal, mission oriented and take big swings like this all the time.

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So the economic incentive is literally their entire business model lol

Basically of all visas O-1 is virtually guaranteed to have highly positive economic value

20k O-1 visas were issued last FY which was mostly under the Trump admin, up from 19.5k the previous FY under the Biden admin

Currently barely affording a condo in Jersey City (not Manhattan). Don't really understand why the prices are this high, none of these homes are selling, the ones that sell are vacant EB-1 investments of which there surely cannot be that many, and there's no way an upper-middle class family could afford this.

More ludicrously taxes keep going up, property tax is super high making it impossible for buying to ever be better than renting.

Everyone in tech keeps talking about how AI might usher in a permanent underclass but it's already here. It's not "you will own nothing and be happy" for most people I think it's already "you own nothing and aren't happy." It's very confusing what is happening with the real estate market but what is obvious is that local politicians and housing regulations have invented feudalism from first principles.

I genuinely do not understand the controversy here, imagine somebody said this about bread.

1) It is the 12th century. Local lords own all the wheat farms and bakeries. Bread is incredibly expensive, nobody can buy bread, people are simply buttering the bread and licking off the butter, and still having to pay a portion of their wages to help maintain the bakeries.

2) ~1000 years pass. Everyone looks back at that time as the worst economic reality in human history, the foundation of most political systems is the ability for anyone to own bread and operate bakeries, people can buy bread.

3) One day you go to the bakery to buy some bread and it's now $120 a loaf. You say WTF this is so expensive, nobody can buy bread anymore, but there are so many loaves on the shelf. You're informed all of these loavess are spoken for by the people in the parking lot who are apparently gambling on the value of bread.

4) Nobody is saying you can't gamble on the value of bread. Instead, everyone agrees it would cost less if we would simply make more bread. But the people in the parking lot, who are already rich and supposedly champion a totally free bakery, say we can't make more bread as that might drop the value of bread and reduce their portfolio value, which would be worse than starvation, so we must limit the bakery. This is obviously ridiculous.

5) Then somebody walks into the bakery and says, I am a champion of the working class, I am one of you, I too cannot afford bread, make me your leader! So you think amazing, let's put them in charge, they will make more bread.

6) Unfortunately, no, for a variety of reasons that sound like they were made up on the spot, they further reduce the supply of bread, stop people from building more bakeries, and install a series of their supporters to 'review' the grain quality of bread at great expense. Also, a very small group of people will get a loaf of bread for free.

7) The price of soars further, everyone agrees that all of this is making it even less affordable. However it becomes culturally unacceptable to reverse any of these policies.

8) You have obviously been betrayed by the current leader. One of the current leader's supporters decides they want to be leader. The other supporters, who again are responsible for this crisis, back this person and say this is the next leader. They say you cannot question them, you must put them in charge or you're to blame for the bread prices. They run constant smear campaigns against anybody who disagrees, branding them all the same as the people in the parking lot, and scare people on the brink of starvation. So fine, you put them in charge, but demanding they change things.

9) They say yes we have a great solution. The people in the parking lot who are gambling on the prices of bread will now let you borrow a slice from them. You cannot eat it but you may butter it and lick the butter. If the butter seeps into the bread, as tends to happen with butter, you will be charged for the cost of drying out the slice later.

10) It is the 21st century. Local lords own all the wheat farms and bakeries. Bread is incredibly expensive, nobody can buy bread, people are simply buttering the bread and licking off the butter, and still having to pay a portion of their wages to help maintain the bakeries.

Genuinely incredible

And the only companies safe from this are the large corporations that shook hands with Anthropic? Because Fable doesn't seem to have actual safeguards, more like 'if you talk about this you will be talking to Opus.' It doesn't guard against offensive use, it prevents all use (offensive AND defensive).

Rationalists are inventing oligopolies from first principles, absolutely incredible things happening in SF

("list-unsubscribe" OR "unsubscribe" OR "list-id")

[1] Guns are a core part of culture for much of America, very deeply so outside coastal cities. Most of the left wing in the US lives in coastal cities and either grew up there or immigrated very recently and does not leave, so this is an alien concept to them, but even in very blue cities like D.C. you would be shocked how many liberal democrats have armories. It is literally amendment #2!

[2] They are already widely distributed and it would be a logistical impossibility to actually enforce gun control.

This is directly analogous to NPM where:

[1] The package registry working the way it does and people quickly installing packages without thinking much is deeply part of JS culture. It doesn't help that JS caters very heavily to as wide of a market as possible, of which the majority is going to be entry level/junior to associate engineers for whomst script kiddying or letting AI install whatever is essentially a way of life. As evidence, this type of thing is not really a problem with derivatives like Bun, especially in mature organizations where it's easy to enforce a minimum 72 hour wait time between publish and installation of a package.

[2] Packages are already widely distributed and part of dependency stacks (e.g. the infamous leftpad) where it is a logistical impossibility to change how things work.

I also view startups and companies like Vercel as essentially the NRA here, Next.js has taken over huge swathes of the ecosystem and highly encourages dependency-maxxing.

Another direct analogy: proponents of gun control say they are unnecessary for self defense (esp. because law enforcement is good now), too heavy duty to begin with, and fundamentally dangerous.

Similarly I would criticize dependency-maxxing as unnecessary for capability (esp. because AI is good now), too heavy duty to begin with, and fundamentally dangerous.

I heavily doubt PE firms are interested here as there is no potential for growth or a multiple. Spirit's assets are mainly their fleet, there are like 4 maybe 5 people who could buy, of these 2-3 are facing similar financial crises.

In the US I think nobody except United can afford to make a move, more likely some Asian airlines will move; many have grown and have route demand they can't service due to lack of aircraft. If you fly to Asia often you'll note that much of the time Asian airlines have to operate an aircraft from a US airline.

1) Pledges being non-binding means there is no proof of funds. This means they can't actually make an offer, presumably they will have to email everyone who pledged to put in cash and hope it resembles a solid offer.

2) How much is Spirit worth? Their market cap was ~50M a few days before they shut down. Where are we getting 1.75B$ from?

3) Since these are non-binding pledges I'm inclined to believe most of these numbers are bots / fake. Especially as accredited investors skew older and make up less than 1/5th of the population!

4) 666 is a very specific significant number for the average pledge size to consistently stay at. I've watched the number of patrons go up by thousands and yet the average pledge size stay the exact same. The total pledged is certainly fake as a result, although see [3] pretty sure these are all fake numbers.

5) You get nothing in return for your pledge and definitely nothing in return for your money. They go to great lengths to add disclaimers that everything is proposed and subject to change at their discretion.

6) Just like the entire site is AI slop, the disclaimers are too, not worded correctly like regular financial disclaimers, in many places not required and in other places not good enough.

7) They pretend to care a lot about disclaimers and legal verbiage yet there is no mention of the entity or who is working on this bid so missing the most basic mark when it comes to financial disclosure!

8) It says "Spirit didn't fail because people stopped flying. It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt and extracted every dollar it could." This is just a lie, no matter how Wall Street trades your stock it doesn't affect your treasury. Spirit failed because of horrible financial mismanagement and both an inability to maintain solvency under operating costs (which rose even further recently due to jet fuel shortages) as well as an inability to secure a line of credit. Technically you could also blame their corporate strategy although this was pretty good with the Jet Blue merger, so blame here also lies directly with Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz (unlikely duo!) for championing blocking the merger. You can find this from a simple Google search or asking your AI of choice.

9) While we're on the subject of financial mismanagement, whoever wrote this clearly has not much idea of how the finances for something like this would work. _It's not just AI generated — it's AI slop._

10) Whoever made this has no idea whether the assets are actually still there nor do we. Spirit may already be under binding agreements for asset sales.

11) Whoever wrote this also does not understand how companies run. First of all they think they are doing something revolutionary with equity, when almost every company has ESOPs/EIPs. Profit-sharing relative to ownership is also literally how shares work and Spirit already regularly paid these out prior to beginning their financial crisis. Every publicly traded company has open books and openly reports their financials each quarter.

12) "One member, one vote — your voice is equal regardless of pledge size." What incentive would anyone have for pledging more? Also, voice in what? Vote in what?

13) "No golden parachutes — executive pay capped at a fair ratio to median worker pay." First of all, this is not what a golden parachute is. Secondly, either the fair ratio will be ridiculous to allow properly compensating execs, or they will be underpaying by a large margin and find it difficult to get any proper execs in place. Then they can speedrun the last few years of mismanagement at Spirit.

14) "The cooperative model has worked: REI, Ocean Spray, Land O'Lakes, the Packers — all people-owned." These organizations all have well thought out models. This is not the same as AI slop.

15) "Private equity is already circling the wreckage." First of all, Spirit is freely undergoing an asset sale. Their operations etc. are shut down. Not only is this not appetizing to PE, but in general PE firms stay very far away from airlines which are famously low margin difficult to operate businesses with limited potential for growth once established. PE normally focuses on airports and airport services, neither of which Spirit has (their airport assets are limited to slots at LGA which are useless to anyone except airlines). The much more obvious buyer is other airlines looking to expand control and consolidate aircrafts.

16) It is common for a company facing insolvency to shut down, do an asset sale of expensive assets, and then come online in a much smaller form with remaining assets, funding itself with the sold off assets. I don't see why Spirit would not do the same thing, in which case even if a cooperative bid is put together it would be much weaker than disjoint buyers (e.g. Frontier and JetBlue separately buying some aircrafts).

17) Lastly whoever wrote this has absolutely no plan to deal with the high operating costs and failing industry here, which is really much more important than ownership incentive structures. No amount of kumbayah we're all in this together is going to drive jet fuel prices down or change the economics of commercial aviation.

This is actually an amazing sweetheart deal for Cursor. Many times with these high profile acquisitions, most stock is tied to LPA's and employment at the company, and also earnout provisions. The company then finds a way to parachute them out early, which both voids the earnout and their employment, thus they never vest most of the units and the few units they do vest get bought out at 409A valuations which are typically much, much lower.

In the case of Cursor this is an amazing boon as SpaceX listed at an almost 100x multiple which is absolutely staggering. Had SpaceX stayed private they could have 409a'd Cursor and got it for effectively ~100M$ cash.

Palantir builds these systems for the US government which is (hopefully) something you can hold accountable / can reasonably trust.

Meta builds these systems for itself to make digital cocaine and sell personal data to profit off everyone (including and moreso primarily the elderly and children). You can't hold them accountable, actually pretty much nobody can hold Zuckerberg accountable.

When Palantir helps USG spy on the planet the primary purpose is defeat enemies + protect assets. When Meta builds these systems the primary purpose is digital cocaine.