One difference between federal-level prediction markets and state-level gambling is that most states had limited gambling to 21+, so most state governments wanted more nuanced options than outright bans
Yes, I'm certainly aware of the other partitions. That's why I said all the public cloud regions outside China.
Yeah, "govcloud" is technically available to the public, although there are other partitions reserved for government use that are not, and the naming is a big hairy mess. Many service teams don't have any US-citizens-in-the-USA working for them, and they cannot in any way adequately support these regions.
My on-call experience improved significantly when I moved from the US to Canada, and I got taken off the (extremely thin!) list of engineers eligible to ssh into RDS instances in Govcloud. There were so few USA-citizen-in-USA engineers that I had been getting tickets for services and instances in Govcloud about which I had only the very thinnest knowledge… and then I was limited in my ability to consult with others who were actually experts. The customers in Govcloud paid a premium to be there, I got paged for a bunch of tickets which I was ill-prepared to handle, and it was generally a bad experience for everyone.
Working with the airgapped secret/top-secret partitions was even worse. You would get paged incessantly and then someone who was cleared for access but knew almost nothing about the service in question would have to go to a SCIF in the DC area, and you would exchange screenshots and text instructions with a turnaround time of hours or days.
It's been my username for 20 years and I'm not changing it to be more corpo-propriate now. I think it makes more sense if you know that my name is Conrad.
It's pretty easy to find out who I am in the real world too. For one thing I'm a private pilot and for 10 years I had an airplane personally registered to me, making my name and address a matter of (open) public record.
> I'm not changing it to be more corpo-propriate now.
Look, I'm not wanting to be rude here, and this is obviously all hypothetical since you're likely not actively pitching to investors, but if you were, being stubborn in this way would be a deal breaker for me as an investor.
I see all the reasons you have for keeping it, and they're reasonable, but the mere idea that that's a hill you're willing to die on is a red flag. I'd see this as one of many potential points of friction. Where else will you choose to not make compromises?
Maybe it's not rational on my part, but you're trying to convince irrational entities to part with their money.
You could look at it this way: if someone offered $17M to change it, would you?
I kind of am actively pitching to investors at this point.
I wouldn't say the username is a hill to die on. I can't hide that this is the online identity I used while working on this project. Trying to hide it would just feel sketchier, no?
And yeah, for 17 mil I'm willing to talk about most anything, but I still see a conversation with investors like going on a date. The red flags can go both ways...
I don't blame you for not wanting to change your name.
But fundraising is a game to be played, and part of playing the game is building credibility with VCs. It may be that a quirky name helps with that, but probably not.
From the classic baseball movie Bull Durham, where the old veteran is explaining to the newbie how to be successful:
"Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You'll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you'll be classy. If you win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press'll think you're colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it means you are a slob."
If you already have a track record, then you can have a quirky name or personality. Until then, you've got to play the game.
I agree completely. However, this mentality is why honest people like you get pushed to the sidelines, and manufactured, perfect imaged, 1000+ referenced in LinkedIn types are more successful in getting VC funding. If this is seriously your goal, you are going to have to play the game. Remember, even when perfectly playing the game in your position you will likely fail. If this is what you want to do, do you want to be taken out of the running for something like a username?
I'm mystified by this argument, that the best way for me to play the game is how others are playing it. Investors don't all make the same bet, nor do they want to, so I'm going to do what only I can do.
Sure some people will rule me out for superficial reasons, but I also get some benefit in screening out people who want to kick the tires but aren't interested in building a real relationship, just like companies do when they screen job candidates.
'Median total farm household income has exceeded the median U.S. household income in every year since 1998'
'In 2024, median farm operator household income exceeded median U.S. household income by 22.7 percent'
'In 2024, the median U.S. farm household had $1.6 million in wealth'
'In 2024, fewer than 3 percent of all farm households had wealth levels that were lower than the estimated U.S. median household level and over 97 percent had wealth levels higher than the U.S. median'
and nutrition, pollution, infectious diseases, etc
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