Today in Billund, Denmark, the LEGO House has announced the next set in their exclusive limited series, available for purchase only at the LEGO store on-site. LEGO House 40505 LEGO Building Systems is 1,211 pieces celebrating the LEGO system of play with representations of its three pillars: Duplo, System, and Technic. And while we could go on with our usual statistical analysis of the new set, as we have done for past sets in this series, The Brothers Brick was provided a copy of the set for review and an opportunity to talk with one of the set’s designers: LEGO House Master Builder Stuart Harris. So instead, we’ll get to talk more about this set announcement as we build it below. And for those headed to the LEGO House in search of this set, it’ll be available in their exclusive LEGO store only starting March 1st for a price of 699 DKK (around $100 USD | $140 CAD | £80 GBP | €94 EUR) and a limit of 3 per household.
The front of the box is emblazoned with the graphics of the LEGO House and a picture of the final model. In the right upper corner, a gold box denotes the limited nature of this set, as well as its order in the series. While the age range identifies the set being for those 10 or older, the subject matter of the set is definitely geared toward those wizened in the history of The LEGO Group. The copy that was sent for review was autographed by the designers LEGO House Master Builder Stuart Harris and LEGO Set Designer Markus Rollbühler. Frequent TBB readers are likely already familiar with Markus’s unofficial creations featured on the site.
The back of the box shows all five of the LEGO House sets. Stuart and Markus have worked together on four of these kits, developing a strong working relationship that has turned out some terrific models. There’s also a blurb talking about the inspiration for this set and the three historical LEGO sets featured in the build. Oh, and there’s also a shot of the back of LEGO Building Systems here. But we’ll talk much more about that when we get to building it later on.
Within the box, we find 16 numbered bags of clear plastic, two unnumbered bags, and the instruction manual. We’ll take a look at the bags as we build the set, but for now we should focus on that booklet. There are several pages dedicated to LEGO House and it’s mission, the history of the LEGO System in Play, the sets that serve as inspiration for this build, and those lesser-known building systems that aren’t represented here like Primo, Bionicle, and Modulex.
The build begins with construction of the central section, dedicated to LEGO System bricks. Bages 1-3 are cracked open and combine with some additional pieces from the unnumbered ones. These quickly come together to form a base for the first micro model. Tiles with a few exposed studs are employed to allow the mini-model to separate from the stand, and exposed Technic axles portend connections to the neighboring sections.
The dark gray background with gold highlights not only offers a great contrast to the bright colors of the micro models, but it also has ties back to the LEGO House. So much of what this set represents comes back to the History Collection, the section of the House that acts as a LEGO museum. More than the other sets in this series, 40505 LEGO Building Systems is using the examples from the history of the toy to depict the larger concept of interconnectivity, the system that first allowed the plastic bricks to “grow up” with a child from Duplo up to Technic. Stuart talked about walking through this section of the House every day to and from his office. And who wouldn’t be inspired with so much history at their fingertips. Below is a shot from inside the History Collection (from the LEGO House’s website) for comparison with the model’s backdrop.
Getting back to the build, bags 4 and 5 combine together to make the base of our first mini-model. This collection of tiles, plates, and jumpers starts laying the plans for the rest of this System representation.
With bags 6 and 7, the Town Plan finally takes form. This lovely layout represents the first spark of a building system from within The LEGO Group back in the late ’50s. Acting as a subtheme, Town Plan offered individual buildings that could be added to a larger map, along with trees and vehicles to create a singular “mega-toy” from all these smaller models. It was the start of what would become a long history of interconnectivity between sets. This representation is well-thought-out and instantly recognizable. As a huge fan of microscale, I adore all the intricate representations via a minimal brick count. And of course, a Town Plan layout holds a place of honor at the LEGO House’s History Collection.
Bags 8 and 9 form up the Duplo section to the left of System. The biggest question here is why we have a recreation of a Duplo brick from System pieces instead of the part itself. During our interview, Stuart was kind enough to inform me of product safety standards that must be honored, which leads to a wedge between Duplo the other systems, at least as far as their appearance in sets is concerned. Still, the parts will always work with one another, with a 4x4x2 square of LEGO bricks equaling one Duplo 2×2 block, as shown in the backdrop on this section.
When it came time to pick the iconic set to represent Duplo, the LEGO House once again delivered with its giant kid-sized Duplo train. While the one we build from bags 10 and 11 looks far more like 1046 Train Set than the LEGO House version, it nonetheless remains an icon of the system. This is quite a deceptively-intricate portion of the build, going to great lengths to get the right number of wheels on the locomotive with the proper spacing, a functional tipper-car, and a track that appropriately fits the wheels while still showcasing those standard Duplo rail bends. For as few parts as it uses, it’s quite the train, and it all connects to the base on a single jumper element as shown below.
Finally, we come to the Technic section off to the right of the model. Bags 12 and 13 bring the base to life, this time with a blue color scheme.
With bag 14, the Technic representation in this historic tour of LEGO system development. Harkening back to 1977, 853 Car Chassis is the fundamental representation of any Technic car. Even recent models still boil down to the fundamentals displayed here, though the parts and complexity have changed significantly. This was the logic in selecting the Car Chassis for the third section on this model. There’s no actual connection here holding the car in place. Instead, it rests between two 1×1 round bricks at an angle. They do a great job of adding X/Z stability, just no flipping the model over!
Now, as much as I adored making those 3 mini-models, its with these last 2 bags of parts that the fun really begins! Those who have read my coverage of microscale creations before know that I absolutely love at particular medium. Cobbling together a nanoscale facsimile in LEGO is one of the great challenges of this hobby, in my opinion. So when I found out the back of this model houses 19 nanoscale sets from the history of LEGO, my heart skipped a beat. Let’s crack open bags 15 and 16 and get to work, shall we?
Moving across the model’s back from left to right, we have representations of the iconic LEGO wooden duck pull toy, an early house, the wooden fire truck, and one of the vehicles from Town Plan. The next section brings a nanoscale train, the first LEGO castle, the first Duplo set, the first Technic forklift, and a Classic Space ship. The third section of shelves has a Duplo train, Black Seas Barracuda, a Duplo farm, the Technic space shuttle, and LEGO Mindstorms. And finally, moving into more modern sets, we have Bionicle, the Temple of Airjitzu from Ninjago, the LEGO Ideas treehouse, a Technic crane, and a Friends house.
The designs on these nano-models are phenomenal! Working without illegal connections, Markus has given us a tour of LEGO history, with some specific highlights that are quite meaningful to me (looking at you, Bionicle and canister). You probably also noticed the empty space at the end, but we’ll talk more about that later.
These last bags also have two printed 1×8 tiles, with the model name and “LEGO House” on them. These pats go on the front, and are a standard addition to all models in the LEGO House series. I’ve included a shot of the printed pieces on their own, along with the other printed 1×1 tile used as a crosswalk in Town Plan.
With everything together, this display piece is ready for the shelf. As the sections have come together, they’re “connected” by a loose axle in a Technic pin hole. While this technique can tend to create gaps if trying to abut the system representations in a straight line, I would much rather have the loose connection to prevent the abrupt jerk that sometimes happens when trying to remove an axle from an axle hole. It’s important to note that the modularity of this set is just begging for more sections honoring the other LEGO systems. After talking with Stuart, I see a Bionicle representation being added to my copy in the near future. But the real question is, who will dare to take on Galidor?
“But Kyle,” you say, “How can you complete the model after you finish building it?” As the model was first presented, and reinforced by Stuart during our interview, that blank spot on the back of the model is for you, the builder, to fill in. Dip into your collection, spin up a nanoscale set from your personal LEGO history, and add it to the collection. Talking with Stuart, he’s got a Fabuland build to work on for his mini-museum. I’ve decided to add a rendition of one of my most memorable sets from my childhood: 6959 Lunar Launch Site. The Christmas I found that set under the tree has remained one of my most vivid childhood memories, and the Spyrius LEGO Space faction continues to be my favorite theme. I’ll be honest, the importance of this set didn’t fully hit me until I placed my mini-LLS among the other nano builds.
It’s hard to provide real recommendations on a set that’s only available from one LEGO store in the world. If any of us LEGO fans are lucky enough to make it to Billund, Denmark and take in all the experiences at the “Home of the Brick,” of course we’re going to take advantage of all the limited edition sets that are there. If you’re not walking out with all 5, you may never get another chance to collect them. Independent of any recommendation I provide, opportunity will be the driving factor. And as far as recommending a trip to LEGO House, I’m afraid I can’t comment on that, as I’ve never been.
But I can comment on the quality and ingenuity of the set I just built, which are both outstanding! There is no better homage to the history of The LEGO Group available in a box. It’s a symphony of LEGO’s basic colors, coming together in familiar forms to tell the story of how we all got here, both the company and its fans. And while other sets in this series may represent specific points in time (the company’s entry into toys, theme parks and model making, engineering advancement, and iconic pieces), 40505 LEGO Building Systems wants to take you on a journey through it all. For that reason, Stuart and Markus can chalk this up as a big success! So while I know you’re buying all 5 of these LEGO House exclusives when you visit Billund, maybe put this one in the cart first.
With 1,211 bricks, and available exclusively at the LEGO store at the LEGO House in Billund, Denmark, LEGO House 40505 LEGO Building Systems is hits the shelves starting March 1st and retails for 699 DKK (about $100 USD | $140 CAD | £80 GBP | €94 EUR)
The post LEGO House 40505 LEGO Building Systems – A historical triple threat of bricks appeared first on The Brothers Brick.
Uber lies about everything, especially money. Oh, and labour. Especially labour. And geometry. Especially geometry! But especially especially money. They constantly lie about money.
Uber are virtuosos of mendacity, but in Toronto, the company has attained a heretofore unseen hat-trick: they told a single lie that is dramatically, materially untruthful about money, labour and geometry! It's an achievement for the ages.
Here's how they did it.
For several decades, Toronto has been clobbered by the misrule of a series of far-right, clownish mayors. This was the result of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris's great gerrymander of 1998, when the city of Toronto was amalgamated with its car-dependent suburbs. This set the tone for the next quarter-century, as these outlying regions – utterly dependent on Toronto for core economic activity and massive subsidies to pay the unsustainable utility and infrastructure bills for sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes – proceeded to gut the city they relied on.
These "conservative" mayors – the philanderer, the crackhead, the sexual predator – turned the city into a corporate playground, swapping public housing and rent controls for out-of-control real-estate speculation and trading out some of the world's best transit for total car-dependency. As part of that decay, the city rolled out the red carpet for Uber, allowing the company to put as many unlicensed taxis as they wanted on the city's streets.
Now, it's hard to overstate the dire traffic situation in Toronto. Years of neglect and underinvestment in both the roads and the transit system have left both in a state of near collapse and it's not uncommon for multiple, consecutive main arteries to shut down without notice for weeks, months, or, in a few cases, years. The proliferation of Ubers on the road – driven by desperate people trying to survive the city's cost-of-living catastrophe – has only exacerbated this problem.
Uber, of course, would dispute this. The company insists – despite all common sense and peer-reviewed research – that adding more cars to the streets alleviates traffic. This is easily disproved: there just isn't any way to swap buses, streetcars, and subways for cars. The road space needed for all those single-occupancy cars pushes everything further apart, which means we need more cars, which means more roads, which means more distance between things, and so on.
It is an undeniable fact that geometry hates cars. But geometry loathes Uber. Because Ubers have all the problems of single-occupancy vehicles, and then they have the separate problem that they just end up circling idly around the city's streets, waiting for a rider. The more Ubers there are on the road, the longer each car ends up waiting for a passenger:
Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After years of bumbling-to-sinister municipal rule, Toronto finally reclaimed its political power and voted in a new mayor, Olivia Chow, a progressive of long tenure and great standing (I used to ring doorbells for her when she was campaigning for her city council seat). Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reclaim the city's prerogative to limit the number of Ubers on the road, ending the period of Uber's "self-regulation."
Uber, naturally, lost its shit. The company claims to be more than a (geometrically impossible) provider of convenient transportation for Torontonians, but also a provider of good jobs for working people. And to prove it, the company has promised to pay its drivers "120% of minimum wage." As I write for Ricochet, that's a whopper, even by Uber's standards:
Here's the thing: Uber is only proposing to pay 120% of the minimum wage while drivers have a passenger in the vehicle. And with the number of vehicles Uber wants on the road, most drivers will be earning nothing most of the time. Factor in that unpaid time, as well as expenses for vehicles, and the average Toronto Uber driver stands to make $2.50 per hour (Canadian):
https://ridefair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Legislated-Poverty.pdf
Now, Uber's told a lot of lies over the years. Right from the start, the company implicitly lied about what it cost to provide an Uber. For its first 12 years, Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar it brought in, lighting tens of billions in investment capital provided by the Saudi royals on fire in an effort to bankrupt rival transportation firms and disinvestment in municipal transit.
Uber then lied to retail investors about the business-case for buying its stock so that the House of Saud and other early investors could unload their stock. Uber claimed that they were on the verge of producing a self-driving car that would allow them to get rid of drivers, zero out their wage bill, and finally turn a profit. The company spent $2.5b on this, making it the most expensive Big Store in the history of cons:
After years, Uber produced a "self-driving car" that could travel one half of one American mile before experiencing a potentially lethal collision. Uber quietly paid another company $400m to take this disaster off its hands:
https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/10/why-is-uber-selling-its-autonomous-vehicle-division
The self-driving car lie was tied up in another lie – that somehow, automation could triumph over geometry. Robocabs, we were told, would travel in formations so tight that they would finally end the Red Queen's Race of more cars – more roads – more distance – more cars. That lie wormed its way into the company's IPO prospectus, which promised retail investors that profitability lay in replacing every journey – by car, cab, bike, bus, tram or train – with an Uber ride:
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1RN2SK/
The company has been bleeding out money ever since – though you wouldn't know it by looking at its investor disclosures. Every quarter, Uber trumpets that it has finally become profitable, and every quarter, Hubert Horan dissects its balance sheets to find the accounting trick the company thought of this time. There was one quarter where Uber declared profitability by marking up the value of stock it held in Uber-like companies in other countries.
How did it get this stock? Well, Uber tried to run a business in those countries and it was such a total disaster that they had to flee the country, selling their business to a failing domestic competitor in exchange for stock in its collapsing business. Naturally, there's no market for this stock, which, in Uber-land, means you can assign any value you want to it. So that one quarter, Uber just asserted that the stock had shot up in value and voila, profit!
But all of those lies are as nothing to the whopper that Uber is trying to sell to Torontonians by blanketing the city in ads: the lie that by paying drivers $2.50/hour to fill the streets with more single-occupancy cars, they will turn a profit, reduce the city's traffic, and provide good jobs. Uber says it can vanquish geometry, economics and working poverty with the awesome power of narrative.
In other words, it's taking Toronto for a bunch of suckers.
(Image: Rob Sinclair, CC BY 2.0<)
Majority of workers at Mercedes plant in Alabama sign UAW authorization cards https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/foreign/2024/02/27/mercedes-benz-uaw-organizing-autoworkers-alabama/72750019007/
Amazon Just Got Banned From the EU Parliament https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-european-parliament-ban/
#15yrsago Bruce Sterling on Web 2.0 https://www.wired.com/2009/03/what-bruce-ster/
#10yrsago German beekeeping laws are weird: an excerpt from “The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance” https://memex.craphound.com/2014/03/01/german-beekeeping-laws-are-weird-an-excerpt-from-the-emergency-sasquatch-ordinance/
#5yrsago Striking West Virginia teachers won swift and decisive victory; Oakland next? https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/28/rapid-victory-west-virginia-teacher-strike-shows-what-happens-when-progressives
#5yrsago Satanic Panic 2.0: The Momo Challenge hoax https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/momo-challenge-hoax/583825/
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Latest podcast: The Majority of Censorship is Self-Censorship https://craphound.com/news/2024/02/25/the-majority-of-censorship-is-self-censorship/
Upcoming appearances:
Tucson Festival of Books, Mar 9/10
https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/?id=676
Enshittification: How the Internet Went Bad and How to Get it Back (virtual), Mar 26
https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3781006
Wondercon Anaheim, Mar 29-31
https://www.comic-con.org/wc/
The Bezzle at Anderson's Books (Chicago), Apr 17
https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/cory-doctorow-1
Torino Biennale Tecnologia (Apr 19-21)
https://www.turismotorino.org/en/experiences/events/biennale-tecnologia
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (Winnipeg), May 2
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337?aff=oddtdtcreator
Tartu Prima Vista Literary Festival (May 5-11)
https://tartu2024.ee/en/kirjandusfestival/
Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9
https://media-ecology.org/convention
American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/
Recent appearances:
The enshittification of music (Music Ally)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh20fD3XXbg
Aaron Swartz (EpistemiCast)
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5t9QVHSQBjIXKUiN2EvEmK
Latest books:
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Upcoming books:
Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
I have been saving this post for this day because it is a special day, the anniversary of my experiencing the Silicon Valley dream; the IPO! Been there, done that, and literally got the T-shirt. What else can I say? Well, a lot of things it seems.
30 years ago today Global Village went public and was availble for trading on the NASDAQ exchange under the GVIL ticker.
Everybody who worked at Global Village on that day got one of those T-shirts. Mine has been sitting in a frame for more than 20 years now. It used to be on the wall in my office at work, back when I was important enough to warrant an office, and it has sat in my home office since then.
Stock options and going public are the things that Silicon Valley dreams are made of… though being bought out by Google used to come pretty close on that front. There are legendary tales of invididuals who got in early, worked hard with the promise of their stock options being worth something some day, and who were able to retire when the magic moment hit. (And equally legendary tales of people who gave up their shares only to later find that they have abandoned riches.)
There is a long standing story of old hands at Microsoft with stickers on their badge reading “FYIFV,” which stood for “fuck you, I’m fully vested” meaning that they could take the money and run any time they pleased.
I know people who have hung around Apple for ages who are worth millions due to stock options they were given over the years, especially options handed out at very low valuations during the bad days between Scully and the return of Steve Jobs.
My story is perhaps less dramatic. It is certainlty less lucrative.
When I started in tech support at Global Village in 1992 I made $28K annually, was given 2,500 options valued at 25 cents each, that being the estimated value of shares when I was hired, and the choice of a better computer if I opted to sit in an interior cube versus a window cube.
And you only need to look out the window if your computer is slow, right?
As with most people, my stock options vested over time. For some reason they decided to set the vesting period for five years, so after working there a year 500 shares would be available for me to purchase at the initial valuation. I would then accrue more shares on a monthly basis until I hit five years, at which point I would be fully vested.
Most places considered four years enough, but somebody at GV got five years in the head. Later, when I moved on to Big Island I complained to Rick that I was going to have to leave behind more than 500 shares of stock because I wouldn’t be fully vested until mid-1997. The stock still had value then. By 1997 it has lost much of it.
As I worked my way out of support and upstairs into engineering, the company was harnessing its success and building towards going public. One of the things that happened was the VCs started putting people in place to run the company, people who would follow their instructions for preparing the company for an IPO.
Our CEOI was one of the marketing executives from Apple who were on the PowerBook project, and the CFO… I forget where he was from, though I recall he later left in disgrace due to some ethical lapse.
But that wouldn’t make him alone in the board room I guess.
We needed two things to go public back then. The first was that we had to have two successful product lines. We already had the Macintosh modem market sewn up pretty well. But modems were all viewed as a single product line. That was where the OneWorld network fax, modem, remote access server line came in.
It didn’t have to be super successful, it just had to prove that we had two product lines.
Then we had to show a continuous pattern of growth. This meant that every quarter had to exceed the past quarter for revenue. That mean cutting off some quarters early when we had made enough revenue in order to carry it forward into the next.
This was, of course, unethical and probably unlawful. But our CEO told us they were doing it at a company meeting, so it isn’t like they were hiding it.
And, of course, we had to be profitable. But that was no problem. The Mac modem market was lucrative, the PowerBook segment especially.
This all changed not too far down the line. The rules changed when the VCs decided they wanted to cash out on Netscape about a year and a half later. Netscape didn’t need to make money or have a long term plan, they went public on hype and a pomise that there must be SOMETHING of value in the company because we were all using the Netscape Natigator browser… you were supposed to pay for it, but almost nobody did… and a company that had something on damn near everybody’s computer had to be wise and powerful.
It set the pattern for the dotcom boom, the idea that you just had to have a lot of users, that butts in seats, as it was called, was more important that making a profit or having a business plan that made any sense.
I happened to live at an apartment at Whisman and Middlefield Road, at one end of the series of buildings that would soon have the Netscape name on them. They, somewhat ironically, even had the old Cisco Systems building on Middlefield, a company that was the target model for many startups in the 90s.
As sure as Marc Andreesen provided the spark that made Netscape possible, he also provided most of the very dumb ideas that kept it from being anything beyond a brief flash in the pan. If Steve Case, head of AOL, hadn’t been a sucker, hadn’t believed the hype, he might have saved himself the effort of dismantling the failure that was Netscape rather than buying it in 1998. Instead he bailed out Andreesen and made him even richer. Case was smart enough to only buy Netscape with AOL stock, and he managed to turn around and sell AOL to Time Warner in 2000, so he wasn’t a complete chump.
Anyway, if you see me dismissing Marc Andreesen as somebody who was simply in the right place at the right time, I submit as evidence pretty much everything he has done since the Netscape IPO… and doubly so that he and his current firm are all in on crypto, though they clearly want to be the scammer in that equation, the rent seeking landlord, the house that wins no matter what happens.
But I digress.
So the day came, February 24, 1994, and Global Village went public. GVIL was listed on NASDAQ. I think the CEO got to ring the opening bell on Wall Street that day. We were all going to be rich!
Right? RIGHT?
Well, no. Or maybe. I certainly was not.
The stock opened up at $8 a share. If I had been able to exercise and sell ALL my shares on that date, it would have been worth $20,000. That wasn’t going to buy me a house, much less let me retire, even in 1994. But it could have been a down payment on a nice condo.
Except, of couse, I couldn’t sell all of my shares on that day. I had only hit about a year and a half of vesting, so I only had some shares available. 791 I think.
But still, if I could sell those, it would still net me more than $6K after fees and such.
I could not, however, sell ANY shares because when a company does an IPO employee shares are generally locked out from being sold for a period of time in order to let the VCs and other favored investors cash out in the initial frenzy. We had to wait six months.
And in six months, after the big cash out, the stock was down to $5 a share. That was even less interesting than $8 a share. But our time was not done yet.
The inetrnet was becoming a thing. While I disdained Netscape just a few paragraphs back, a company with no plan and no proven track record that went public on hype alone, the hype was not reserved for Netscape alone.
The market itself was rising. We were past the post Cold War recession, the peace dividend was a thing, Bill Clinton was president, and the internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular were suddenly the most interesting thing for Wall Street. We all wanted to get online, to the point that I wrote about the great dial tone drought a while back. Netscape was a symptom, not a cause of the hype, and any company that was involved with getting online was suddenly viewed with a great fondness beyond anything Lord British ever felt. (If anybody gets that call back reference I will be amazed.)
Among the beneficiaries was GVIL, which was pulled out of its $5 doldrums and began to rise with the internet tide. It passed $8, then $12, then $16 a share. Maybe we would be rich!
The price peaked just past $21 a share at one point. I remember this vividly as I had my shares with a broker and the day it hit that I put in a sell order. I could have sold at market, which would have just gotten me the money. That was in early 96 I think, which would have given me nearly 2,000 shares to play with. That many shares at $20… well, again, I wasn’t going to be rich, but that was a down payment on a real house or maybe a new car paid for in cash, with money set aside for the taxes on the sale.
But I did not put in the sell order at market price. I put it in at $22 a share to eke out just a little bit more cash. And it never got there. I then chased the price down the drain for the next two years. I would set a sell order at a price… because it wasn’t in constant decline, it would bounce back up a bit, before settling down to a lower plateau than before… hoping to catch an uptick, only to have the price drop, never to return.
It fell through $18, $12, $10, $8, $5 and was mucking about around $4 a share, at which point I was hardly paying attention. The modem market had collapsed… modems were becoming a commodity and Apple was at its nadir, that period when it was bouncing around between $12 and $18 a share, when Michael Dell was quipping about the company just giving them investors their money back and calling it a day… and Global Village sold off its modem business and its name.
By that point Big Island was in its own spiral and I was a Cypress Research and had an offer from a company called Edify, that would change my path into enterprise software.
The company became One World, and its stock ticker changed to OWLD. Lots of grandious promises were made and hamfisted attempts to create a pump and dump scam out of the stock were rife in the Yahoo finance forum for the stock.
I sold most of my stock before it turned to OWLD at somewhere around $3 a share. I went from a new BMW to a new PC in value. And I didn’t even sell all of it. Before the pre-IPO I had exercised my first vesting of shares. I have a stock certificate for 500 shares of Global Village in a drawer with my name on them.
Exercising shares before the IPO was a dumb thing to do, and I blame my youthful ignorance and enthusiasm for this lapse. When you buy shares like that, before the IPO, they become directly registered shares. You may have heard reference to directly registered shares as part of the dumbassery around the GameStop stock bubble, where the amateur investors, the “apes,” built up a whole fantasy around direct restistered shares. (If you haven’t heard about that, Folding Ideas has an excellent video about the whole thing. Worth watching, or at least listening to.)
The reality is that such shares are just a pain in the ass to sell because you have to do transactions through physical mail, with all the delay that incurs, to do anything with them. By the time I wanted to do something with them, the stock was already sinking.
Meanwhile, the company stayed in steady decline. OWLD would fall below $1 a share, with delisting threatened, before the company folded up shop in 1999.
It could have been worse. The story was one of the early hires held onto their 25,000 shares until the place went out of business. They believed in the company, and emotional investment in something like a tech company is never a good idea.
But I did learn my lesson. When I took my vested Edify options… a merger caused them all to vest early, which changed the ticker to SONE, a company we’ll get to later… and sold them because my wife and I wanted to buy a house. I set a sell order at market value and cashed them all out at $130 a share. The stock closed over $131, and touched close to $134 before the bell that day, at what was the absolute peak of the dotcom boom. It was literally the bubble just before it burst. I was a bit disappointed that I had sold below the days high and wondered if I had called in too early, if the next day would see the market climb even higher.
It did not. The next day the stock fell to $128. And it fell a bit more the day after that, and more every day for many days to come. I had the good fortune and amazing luck to have sold at just a couple of bucks below its ultimate peak price point. We bought the house and, as it turns out, buying real estate in Silicon Valley in 2000 had a better return than most investments.
Nobody has ever offered me stock options again. It stopped being as much of a thing after the dotcom bubble. Taxes and accounting laws were tightened up and the executives decided that only they deserved stock options for all of their hard work.
I closed my brokerage accounts and have not since invested directly in any stock, avoiding anything like the stock purchase plans that some companies have offered now and then, where twice a year they buy stock for you with money they have held back from your paycheck at the market price less a discount for being in the program… usually 15%.
And at every buy date the stock in question would spike up, much more than the 15% discount, and then fall back the next day, ensuring that the whole thing was a screw job for those who bought in on it.
I have money in a 401k for retirement, in an index fund. But investing in stock as an individual retail customer with an eye towards increasing your money… that is just gambling. And, as with any form of gambling, the house wins and the individuals lose. The index fund is only allowed to “win” because somebody on Wall Street earns their bonus based on that. You’re allowed to win a bit while they win big… though somehow they win big even when you lose.
I’d like to say it wasn’t always like that. But then I think about the 1920s and the great depression that the market caused while people like Joe Kennedy got rich. Even in the calm periods, where the market seemed focused on dividends and stability, the house always won in the end.
The story so far:
I’m feeling a little retrospective and nostalgic today, so if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to acknowledge a couple of personal milestones.
1. Today marks 19 years of me doing <a href="http://kottke.org" rel="nofollow">kottke.org</a> as a full-time job. What. The. Actual. F? I kinda can’t believe it. Before this, the longest I’d ever stayed at a job was about two years…and the average was closer to 9-12 months. Aside from dropping out of grad school to bet my life on the World Wide Web, choosing to turn this website into my job is the best decision I’ve ever made.
Some of you may not know this, but when I went full-time, I ran a three-week “pledge drive” to fund my activities on the site. In 2005, this was an almost unheard-of thing to do — people did not send money to strangers over the internet for their personal websites. But it worked: that initial boost sustained me that first year and allowed me to build this career sharing the best of the internet with you. Those brave folks got a pretty good return on their risky investment, I’d say.
Several years ago, I circled back to the idea of a reader-funded site and since then, the membership program has completely transformed the site and my engagement with the work I do here. Incredibly, some of the folks who supported me back in 2005 are still supporting me today — a huge thank you to them and to everyone else who has supported the site along the way.
2. This is a less-obvious milestone with diffuse edges but one that came to mind this morning as I looked back at some photos from a couple of years ago. When I announced I was taking a sabbatical in May 2022, I wrote about my fiddle leaf fig and the metaphorical connection I seem to have with it:
I’d brought this glorious living thing into my house only to kill it! Not cool. With the stress of the separation, my new living situation, and not seeing my kids every day, I felt a little like I was dying too.
One day, I decided I was not going to let my fiddle leaf fig tree die…and if I could do that, I wasn’t going to fall apart either. It’s a little corny, but my mantra became “if my tree is ok, I am ok”. I learned how to water & feed it and figured out the best place to put it for the right amount of light. It stopped shedding leaves.
I went on to explain that my tree was not doing that well…and its condition was telling me that I needed a break. Well, what a difference the last two years have made. On the left is a photo I took two years ago today of my fig and on the right is from this morning:
Oh, there are a couple of janky leaves in today’s photo (the product of some inattentive watering earlier this winter as I failed to adjust to the winter dryness), but the plant is happy in a bigger pot and there are several new leaves just from the past two weeks (as the amount of daylight increases). There are also two other fiddles in the house that are descended from cuttings I took from this one — they’re also thriving and both have new leaves coming in right now.
I still have not written a whole lot about what I did (or didn’t do) during the seven months I was off, but after more than a year back, it seems pretty clear that the sabbatical did what I wanted it to. I feel like I’m thriving as much as my tree is. In recent months, I’ve launched a couple of new features (including the comments, which I’ve been really pleased with) and added another voice to the site. There’s a new thing launching soon (*fingers crossed*) and I have plans for more new features, including improvements to the comments.
More importantly, the site feels vital and fun in a way that it hasn’t for quite awhile. It’s not all sunshine and lollipops (nothing is — I’m looking at you, tax season), but I’m having a blast, am engaged with the work, and am feeling pretty fulfilled lately. So another huge thanks to everyone for hanging in there while I sorted my shit out — I appreciate you.