🇵🇹 Lisbon is pretty great:
- locals are insanely friendly and hospitable and keep wanting to show you around and invite you to go on trips or drinks or parties etc.
- weather is close to perfect, warm but not too hot
- lots of cafes, great food
- very walkable
- very affordable

- if you can speak a bit of Spanish you can get around speaking Portuñol, a mix of Spanish and Portuguese and they get it; also everyone speaks English otherwise anyway
- a lot of the remote working ppl who'd be in Asia if not for COVID borders closed, are now in Lisbon
- met multiple ppl who are setting up residency in Portugal, as it gives Americans a visa for EU and gives Europeans a tax residence elsewhere, interesting
- Lisbon from very quick glance feels a bit like Barcelona without the arrogance and pompousness, just humble and chill ppl
- the entire service industry here seems to be run by Brazilians, affordable labor and they speak the language
The amount of annoyances here are quite low:
- not much air pollution
- not lots of noise
- not too hot
- not too cold
- no rude ppl
- most of city is very safe
Oh one annoyance though:
- a lot of ppl smoke cigarettes here

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
“We don’t negotiate salaries” is a negotiation tactic.

Always. No, your company is not an exception.

A tactic I don’t appreciate at all because of how unfairly it penalizes low-leverage, junior employees, and those loyal enough not to question it, but that’s negotiation for you after all. Weaponized information asymmetry.

Listen to Aditya


And by the way, you should never be worried that an offer would be withdrawn if you politely negotiate.

I have seen this happen *extremely* rarely, mostly to women, and anyway is a giant red flag. It suggests you probably didn’t want to work there.

You wish there was no negotiating so it would all be more fair? I feel you, but it’s not happening.

Instead, negotiate hard, use your privilege, and then go and share numbers with your underrepresented and underpaid colleagues. […]