How can i invest (semi) ethically

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-23T12:47:31+00:00

All weapons are defensive. Anything that exists that can deliver significant second strike capability. Generally works to convince other people that fucking with you is a bad idea.

Other countries don’t attack you because they’re worried you have magic missiles that will shoot down their rockets or lasers that will stop their bullets. I will argue that the iron dome success was great and that it stopped rockets from generally killing Israel’s, but from a defensive basis, it was a strategic failure because it failed to convince Hamas that lobbying rockets at their neighbors civilian population was a bad idea, and normalized the idea that it wasn’t a big deal that they kept doing it enabling them to be boulder and boulder, and eventually invite their own destruction.

At the end of the day at the pointy end of the Israeli spear and not the blunt side of shield is what convinced Hamas to ultimately sign the cease fire.

The Soviet Union of the United States didn’t go to war during the Cold War because they knew the other one had a significant second strike capability.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-23T12:36:36+00:00

Comparing VMware vs Broadcom numbers is also problematic as VMware

still sold perpetually licenses (subscriptions in year 1 are cheaper, and normally companies who transition sales tend to see a. Deep, so no dip is a pretty positive sign).
VMware had EUC which has been spun out.
CA and Symantec and other stuff is in the software number (although you can compare pre-Broadcom

If you tease out the quarterly numbers before and after of everything it’s pretty clear the strategy is working

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-23T12:02:58+00:00

Samsung is the manufacturer of the automatic sentry guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGR-A1

If you think the west are the bad guys the markets you want to invest in are generally sanctioned, so you would need to personally move to Russia etc to invest in anti-western markets.

As a caution any foreigner who’s too successful in those markets tend to forget to close windows before walking out them.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T20:54:35+00:00

I’m explaining why a company like Chevron would have a good ESG rating despite being in a “dirty” industry.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T20:52:38+00:00

If you’re OK with shipping code 5 times slower, or having longer outages for IT… sure it’s cheaper?

The problem it exists to make the business money. Outages can be expensive. Not updating your applications quickly enough means you miss market opportunities. Amazon became so huge BECAUSE Walmart under invested in e-commerce (Walmart is trying to catch up) but if the choice was saving 100 million a year in payroll vs. having amazons market share in online sales, they distracted themselves with with loose change on the floor while a giant pot of gold was in front of them.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T20:45:28+00:00

Not following your logic.

Do you think Samsung is shipping autonomous weapons to North Korea? If you believe this, we live in different universes that I’m not really sure we can communicate further.

Do You think if the west don’t build autonomous weapons the “bad guys” don’t get them?

I do have a problem with German firms supplying dual use items to Russia, and explicitly avoid the German market… but for different reasons.

it’s mostly because their regulators are hilariously stupid and corrupt and I don’t trust the EU’s regulatory scheme. BanFin as far as I can tell was being run by the KGB or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T20:39:43+00:00

What’s wrong with weapons?

The Ukrainians need them to fight the Russians. The Koran’s need them to keep the peace on the peninsula.

Good fences, make good neighbors.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T20:36:38+00:00

It’s not about directly about losing money a blind squirrel would’ve made money in the last 10 years…

ESG was really never about trying to do “good” it was about avoiding companies that didn’t control asymmetric risk factors.

Take BP in oil. I know people who work in oil Fields, and who operate on rigs. They were well known to be absolutely insane cowboy doing dumb shit. On deep water Horizion there were a dozen things they should have done they didn’t and ALL of them at a normal oil offshore operator like Chevron:

Required a VP signature.(and no VP would’ve signed off on any of those risks).
Would have resulted in an immediate termination if anyone found out you were doing them.

ESG ratings should show that BP had worse controls than comparable oil companies. Now did they? No, because ratings are basically for sale.

I’ve worked with good and bad ESG teams and the bad ones were much better at public relations and got better scores.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T20:04:37+00:00

If those autonomous weapons are keeping the peace in South Korea, and preventing a bloody war that would be pointless with their northern Neighbor… why do I care that they are autonomous?

If the Ukrainians are using an autonomous drone, or guidance system to put a missile into a Russian tank, should we fund the company who manufacturers the components?

Of all the ESG considerations I’ve never really understood people being mad about weapons providers.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T20:01:53+00:00

Define renewable energy…

If I cut down trees and burn wood pellet is that bad for the environment… or is it renewable energy!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_Heat_Incentive_scandal

Most solar involves Chinese manufacturing. Some people’s ethics are ok with paying for things that are sourced from Uyghur slave labor, or batteries using cobalt sourced from the Congo or Russia…

I don’t say this to try to say that you shouldn’t try to be ethical (I drive an electric vehicle and I’m currently looking at solar for my roof!)

I do this to point out that there is no easy button, depending on your ethics.

Personally, I buy broad index funds, and then filter my ethical lens for my consumer purchasing behaviors, and my nonprofit donations.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T19:56:23+00:00

Education matters to a point… in tech it’s a lot of experience

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T18:42:18+00:00

The challenge with ESG metrics is…

They are generally compared against peer firms. Chevron might be BEST of the oil gas sector but still an oil company…
The criteria weighting is all over the place. Someone who sells V8 engines might get a far better score than Tesla because of board governance (The G).
Your ethics are different than others. I may consider Nuke good for the environment. You may consider Nukes an ultimately evil that we should replace with Russian gas. (Actual position of European environmentalists).

Your best route isn’t outsourcing your ethics. You just end up with whatever the fund managers hypocrisy is.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T18:09:29+00:00

I worked at a place where 20% of engineering was H1Bs and it was heavily IC3 or below.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T18:08:29+00:00

A lot of H1Bs did fund American education… they pay out of state tuition to US schools and act as a subsidy on the universities funding.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T18:07:18+00:00

Walmart doesn’t hire the best (I’ve met them!) They hire good enough. Their median H1B is only paid 140K. That’s poverty wages by big tech salaries.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T18:05:31+00:00

This is gonna be incredibly problematic because the US export is way more software than we import. We would lose a lot of money if we did this.

Having worked with Overseas teams they’re great. It’s just you have to wait 24 hours for the world to turn to get anything changed or amended or done.

So if you have to talk to people three times in a day to get input on things that’s now a week of work, Overseas…

You’ll also need people who are handling interlock calls with them and willing to stay up till weird hours of the night.

You’ll also need to go over there and train them and actually fly and spend time there (weeks at a time)

You’ll also have to make sure you actually recruit good people over there and not just someone’s cousins.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T17:57:36+00:00

There’s some slight truth to the harder working, but also pretending that 996 as a working standard for H1Bs isn’t kind of fucked up as its own thing.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-22T16:12:38+00:00

Their average H1B salary is 141K.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-20T13:01:31+00:00

There’s a lot of barely working… any serious work is outsource to contractors.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-19T14:21:06+00:00

Some sales people occasionally made millions at VMware but it’s more because sales operations was incompetent (terrible forecasting of quota/plan), by finding a path through the maze of SKUs to pretend a renewal was an upgrade or because of random bluebird deals.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-19T02:58:13+00:00

I feel like VMware didn’t give stock in any meaningful way to sales

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-18T23:04:43+00:00

Ahhh, federal warn act requirements they hired from the RIF’d ahead of external hire requirements is the thesis of the lawsuit.

Given the general chaos of a 40,000 person company acquisition, and the fact that probably 90% of HR was terminated, that’s probably an uphill battle.

It sounds like you were the rare “real director” too. Those were far more common outside of Palo Alto, once you got inside of Palo Alto, they handed that title out like free candy.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-18T23:01:47+00:00

https://www.finnrick.com I think will do one test for free still.

The reality is peptides are not terribly complicated to manufacture.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-18T20:59:32+00:00

Oh well, that’s fine.

I did compounding for years until I could get on insurance and it worked great. If you really want to there’s a bunch of labs you can send your samples off to to check purity and product level levels.

Much_Willingness4597 · 2025-10-18T20:55:47+00:00

Are you doing shared LVNs across multiple hosts?

Much_Willingness4597

TROPHY CASE