Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often spending hundreds of thousands to book over a dozen hotel rooms to use as makeshift conference rooms. The hotels often don't even allow people to sleep in the rooms, only to use them strictly as conference rooms.

All the real action happens in those hotel rooms, at private events, private receptions, etc.

Some people advocate keeping the team inside and telling them it's raining. But how far does that go? Are you keeping them in an underground bunker? Or is it a room with a window? A skyscraper with floor to ceiling windows surrounding them?

I'm of the mind that if it's possible, the team needs to be outside in the shit rain while protected by the shit umbrella. But they need to FEEL the weather, not just see it or vaguely know of it, but still protected enough to be able to get to where they need to go.

Of course, what if the shit storm is overwhelming and coming in sideways, or if it's flooding shit, so that even with protection, everyone is stuck in a quagmire? Well, obviously, don't actually let them go outside, but 1) the company has much bigger, likely existential problems it needs to deal with, and 2) the team REALLY needs to know.

Needless to say, this all applies more to decently high functioning organizations, but not to completely dysfunctional ones. When it's a nuclear winter outside, everyone is bought into the idea of staying in the bunker and just keeping calm and carrying on regardless of how bad it is outside. There's nowhere to go, you're there just to survive.

The depth, the quality, the passion of the guides, are an order of magnitude better than the generic tours they offer.

The regular ones are often lead by young inexperienced hires, mostly reading from a script, and you go through extremely curated exhibits.

On the VIP tour, we had a 30 year veteran who was on first name basis with the last few directors. We did things that made you think “I can’t believe we’re allowed to do/touch/see that” over and over again.

Better to be central to where the majority of companies and candidates are, where your ex-colleagues, parents of your children’s friends, and casual acquaintances (proverbial bowling league) all are part of a broader and accessible network for future job prospects.

It also keeps you culturally (professionally) more similar to your next job’s culture.

They have expertise in crafting and creating compelling arguments, in selling ideas. They have expertise in maintaining an industry-wide view and synthesizing general trends across the industry (or across industries). They have expertise in parachuting in as third-party and the politics that are associated with that.

These are VALUABLE skills. Imagine if everyone in your organization was an expert in crafting narratives, in putting forth concise arguments, in maintaining the larger context beyond their own area of practice.

The problem with strategy consultants is that they are not hired to be objectively valuable to an organization, an industry, society, etc. They are mercenaries who apply their skills to be valuable to specific people. And because they know how to be more compelling, even if they are not actually correct, it becomes deeply problematic over time, or at scale.

For individuals, the costs and benefits are easier to grasp, though the net benefit is likely higher than for companies. This makes it harder for companies to make a case as to why it's worth it, especially since the longer term costs and benefits for companies is incredibly difficult to prove in the short run, and without concrete evidence, it's very hard to convince people to give up the more tangible benefits they are seeing as individuals.

Then there's overall societal impact as well. Things like the economic impact on neighborhoods surrounding business districts, residential districts as people shift where they spend their time. Things like changes in civil engineering needs as commute and travel patterns change. But even more broadly, the impact of spouses spending more time together, parents spending more time at home with their children, home duties being more evenly taken care of across parents, etc.

In my mind, the level of complexity and decision making issues is akin to something like outsourcing manufacturing from the United States. There were short term and long term impacts on individuals, on companies, on industries, and on society as a whole that were known, that were debated. But how much import we placed on each, how much each factor was weighed in the moment, versus the broader impacts we are finally realizing and grappling with now, decades later, is just an absolute mess.

I've done the road trip - a slow meandering journey spanning tens of thousands of miles across the United States and Canada across many months. It's wonderful, but it's also fully engaged while being very hard on the body to drive so much. The engagement is obviously the point, but it's a particular way of travel.

I've also done the Zephyr in both directions, lakeshore limited, etc. on sleeper trains. It's very relaxing, but you also don't get to actually interact much with what is going on outside. But that's not such a bad thing at times. Sometimes it's exactly what you're looking for.

Put another way, 4 people moderately interested in the property will probably yield a higher price than 2 people that are very interested in the property.

This is especially true in luxury real estate, where buyers go in looking to substantially change the property. They expect to bring in their own architects and designers. The staging is just a canvas.

You just believe the costs, either in money or in privacy concerns, are not worth it. Which is reasonable.

But to describe it as impossible does not seem accurate.

Baffling to some HN readers perhaps, but Yahoo is still one of the biggest online destinations. It has a DAU count an order of magnitude larger than say Reddit, and it monetizes those users far more effectively.

Then there’s all the aggregate costs associated with switching. Maintenance of an EV requires different skills and different tooling. Establishing new or amending existing maintenance contracts, training new mechanics or retraining old ones, rewriting guidelines, purchasing new tools and equipment, etc. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars of costs per region.

And you’re going to do that across far-flung areas of the US, many which have a current EV install base near or at zero?

They have to work to transition this across tens of thousands of locations, while not jeopardizing the delivery of hundreds of millions of pieces of mail a day. And you’re going to suggest that they NOT take a slow phased approach? To transition one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the world?

Please. Consider for a moment you may be wrong. That things are not as simple as you think. That when every single person is trying to explain why, you shouldn’t automatically attempt to find ways to dismiss or invalidate what they have to say.

Potential deal with client Foo will be for $X, to be signed on Y day, with Z% chance of closing.

On an individual level, it may be more precise than it is accurate, but it’s a fairly standard and important part of sales operations. And yes, the estimate dates are often just ways to express orders of magnitude (put next Friday as estimate dates not because it’ll definitely close next Friday, but bc it’ll probably take about 2 weeks). The % chance of closing are typically pre determined by what stage of the deal you’re in.

However, when applied across dozens, hundreds, thousands of potential deals, it allows the organization to understand their sales pipeline and sales velocity fairly accurately.

Of course the numbers are gamed a bit. And some sales people are much worse at estimating than others, or less consistent about keeping the numbers up to date. But the benefit of these practices are massive.

DoorDash started their business doing exactly this in Palo Alto, and likely wouldn’t have been able to raise the funds or grow at the pace they did without this strategy.

On one hand, you could say good, these sorts of businesses are exploitative. But I’m not sure that the industry is a net negative as a whole, and this law could shut the door on a more sustainable model.

For example, there are much less people dying by automobile accidents (a leading cause of death for young people). In 2020, they could be replaced by very different types of death (COVID, Suicide, etc.)

That said, it certainly COULD be relatively similar people. You’d likely see relatively similar individuals dying of pneumonia as dying from COVID.

The ideal solution to being more efficient is also usually not by cutting budgets.

Fixing policy issues especially doesn’t come from changing budgets.