I have severe doubts he needs physical security...no billionaire is dumb enough to use Mafia tactics to go after a well known whistleblower. RiCICO exists for this reason, go after the big boss if he directs others to commit such crimes. Financial security on the other hand...I wouldn't put it past them to do whatever they could to make sure he can't find another job or penalize any tech company that hires him somehow, of course for other ostensible reasons. I understand the also mentioned whistleblower Frances Haugen was able to do so because she became independently wealthy as an early crypto investor and doesn't need to work again.

Really depends on the rules on those warrants, and depending on jurisdiction. The Slashdot-famous example would be the FISA Court, who in the Snowden leaks theoretically authorized most of the surveillance; reporting since then has shown the FISA court acts as "rubber stamp" and routinely authorizes warrants with scant evidence. That court's proceedings are secret so it's unlikely during the tenure of any judge anyone will seek accountability. Relevant to Flock, a country judge in Texas might be more likely to grant warrants based on flimsy, or even falsified evidence than a judge in New York City. Perhaps some judge will grant a "blanket authorization" of some kind, let's say to find anyone from Idaho who may have driven by a marijuana dispensary in Oregon. So there needs to be a lot of regulation on what warrants and authorization they'd accept.

Flock is a private company looking to make money, and law enforcement is a major customer. So their willingness to regulate what warrants they'd accept is probably not there, anything they can point to that says "it was authorized by a judge" is good enough for them. They're allowing a free-for-all right now.

This is how it should be done, highly regulated, logged, tracked, verified...require court orders for everything. But that would interfere with sales! So they do the minimum necessary thing to stop the most flagrant abuses like cops stalking their tinder matches, and say oh look we care about civil liberties and we're self regulating. Then they grow and wind back those protections so they can grow more. We've seen this before with Zuckerberg, who went from free-speech advocate to advocating fact checking to allowing and seemingly encouraging AI slop and conspiracy theories. There needs to be multistate and federal regulation, enforced by a competent body with powers to do much more than fine companies, on any company that has surveillance dragnets deployed beyond a small area.

While your framing of the situation is realistic and grim, I can offer a sliver of hope: there is historical parallel. The "spoils system" worked similarly in the late 1800s with civil service positions being given out to friends and allies of the new administration. James Garfield started ending it, and he was shot by a deranged office-seeker who was frozen out by the end of the spoils system. An unlikely hero emerged in Chester A Arthur, previously a creature of corrupt party machine politics who everyone believed would continue the spoils system after the death of the incorruptible Garfield. Instead he brought about the unequivocal end of the spoils system and signed laws to make it a crime to fire civil servants for political reasons. I daresay, we could use a man like Chester A Arthur again.

I mean, he's nearly 60 years old, and been CTO of Azure for over a decade. Azure actually became a serious cloud provider (AWS had been outpacing for a while) in short order, and the Azure tools for Windows management are far better than the on-premise NT-era active directory solutions, lest anyone need to spend time in ADSI Edit again.

There are few people pushing 60 who made useful software in the 90s still "doing stuff," at least at the level of impact like he had in that era. It's like lamenting an Army General who won commendations for bravery in the Gulf War isn't manning the artillery or leading tank charges anymore. Even Linus Torvalds no longer writes code, he's effectively a manager.

Mark Russinovich is a GOAT and as an old grey beard you have probably used his software, like sysinternals and psexec. Before he joined Microsoft when they bought his company, every decent Windows NT etc admin in the 90s and 2000s used his third party software. There are few people on earth with such in depth knowledge of the Windows operating system or who have made such useful software for IT. I've been a Linux/posix guy most of my career, but I respect him and when I had to use or administer windows I used his software extensively.

Dude can you read? The total value is plus cash on hand. That said selling at 2.5x ARR is a fire sale.

I put a whole paycheck of about 4k after taxes in ethereum during 2016 and put it on a Trezor hardware wallet where it stayed until last year. I didn't buy more because of the chorus of voices on here and elsewhere talking about how dumb it was. It was the best investment I ever made. That single paycheck now looks like three years' salary (if I was still working). What originally was enough to buy a beat up old Honda can now buy a Ferrari.

That makes a lot of sense. Get peoples interest by posting a crappy CAM bootleg (not even telesync for good audio) and make them want to pay to see it in 70mm IMAX or whatever the highest end option at a theater near them is.

Ordinarily I'd cringe at Comcast, one of the most hated companies in America, owning anything...but it's currently owned by Musk. So that would be an improvement. Especially if Musk took a nice financial hit.

Every movie that comes out has multiple torrents and various other sites you can download it from. This has been going on since the 90s since CeNTRoPY used to hookup the telesync SVCDs sometimes before the movie was released. One could download it from XDCC bots on IRC or if you were connected on a topsite or relay site some courier used FXP to directly transfer it to from another FTP site. Not much has changed except it's on torrents, darkweb, or other bootleg sites. Is the point it was posted on X?

I've yet to meet someone that preferred Microsoft Teams over Slack. People use it because it's bundled, but it can have poor UX and be a hairball to config and manage.

That's pretty amazing even back then you could start so low, my understanding is only low-end fixers and entry-level condos sold for that much in 2002.

I would argue if you ran the calculations on your rental houses versus investing in the S&P500, the S&P500 would surely win by a significant margin.

Today though, or even since 2011, this strategy could not have replicated the same results. For most Americans, the ship has long sailed on leveraged real estate investments being such a great source of wealth accumulation. Gen X was the last generation able to enjoy this, for us Millennials and even worse for Gen X, it hasn't worked out.

While you did buy at a historically great time and great location, the numbers still don't work out in favor of buying a house with a mortgage. For myself, I was in high school in 2001/2002; the next best opportunity was 2008 when I was a fresh college grad, so no such market timing possibility has even existed for my generation.

That said, even with massive bay area home value appreciation (400-500% since 2001); it still doesn't beat investing the money. I understand for some a forced leveraged investment like a home might be the only way they have the financial discipline to achieve these results. But, if you did have Boglehead type discipline, the results are staggeringly in favor of not buying.

If you bought a $500k house with $100k down in 2002, you'd have a $2mm house today..with significant attrition on those gains based on property taxes and mortgage interest and maintenance paid in the interim. If you straight invested that $100k in 2002 in a low cost S&P500 index fund, and didn't add any more money since, you'd have about $1mm today. However, if you rented at $2,000 a month back then and invested the delta between the mortgage and the rent over time in the S&P500, you'd have about $3.16mm today.

Ultimately this comes down to financial discipline and behavior.

However, these results in Bay Area real estate could not be replicated in the current generation (at least since 2011 or so). If you invested the $100k in 2011 in the S&P500, you'd have $776k today. Even with the $500k house optimistically doubling, you'd have less equity than the S&P500 investment.

Straight buy when mortgage interest rates skyrocketed. Shark exploding offer (expired in 24 hours, all cash, no contingencies). Nice house, not a fixer, desirable Bay Area location.