I suspect this includes outsourcing a whole series of functions from support functions such as finance, accounting, tax and legal, to even what would be considered core functions such as UX, coding etc.
Taken to an extreme, the startup could remain a handful of people while benefiting from a much larger team which is not included in the headcount.
If you cut out the bloat, planning meetings, etc., you can stand up an MVP pretty quickly while doing the coding yourself.
I think most of the tricks are CSS frameworks, re-using parts of old projects, no-code MVP, outsourcing non-tech things.
Many of the successful indie founders seem to be non-technical business people who give 0 cares about coding something the right way, so they just smash stuff together without a care to get it out the door.
You should be outsourcing as many of those as possible anyway, even if you aren’t going for the bootstrap play. There’s no strategic reason to have a finance, HR or legal team unless you have 100s of employees. That’s not to say you ignore those things, but there are so many quality SaaS services that do those at a tiny fraction of the cost of an FTE it only makes sense to use them.
Or the company is started in a country where those things don't require several full time positions. Where I live I can run a company as a software engineer (No formal education in finance, legal etc) without any problems. Things which aren't solved automatically by accounting software is usually available to read up on online.
I wonder why they started with lettuce. I get the nutrients and minerals part, but the calorific value is low. Potatoes also grow well using hydroponics and would seem to be a better base choice for longer orbits.
If you are going to build a pilot plant to test things out, it makes sense to make it small, light and not very energy intensive then use v2 and v3 to scale up. Since potatoes contain a lot of energy, they also take a lot of energy to grow. Lettuce is a good crop to start with precisely because it is not very energy dense.
If you've ever eaten freeze dried, canned and dried foods for extended periods of time, you'll know the joy of something crisp and fresh. Leafy greens are spot on what you'd want. Before refrigeration, greenhouses and global shipping, our ancestors were the same way. It's why something like Polk salad (one of the first greens in Spring) or storing chicory roots for their mid-winter chicon (a single crisp leaf that sprouts from a single root) were so enjoyed. Fresh and green used to be celebrated, before it became too normal to worry about.
I’m curious to know where you learned about polk salad and that specific name for it. I’ve seen the use of “polk” to refer to “poke” before (the song Polk Salad Annie immediately comes to mind), but I always heard it called “poke” salad, which makes sense given the plant name is pokeweed. That said, hearing it called “poke” could also just be due to the regional accent/dialect of where I’m from.
FWIW, it it seems like it is supposed to be called "poke sallet" (that apparently being a word for a "cooked salad"), so misspelling both words is probably funnier than just one.
Unless this is actually used with some recycling on a long term basis, it's a net loss by weight. Just ship up some cooking oil. So I suspect it's entirely for the practicality and scientific value for now.
Lettuce, especially a hardy cultivar, is delicate but fast growing and parasite resistant. And not picky about the growth media usually. Potatoes are slow and I suspect they might start to rot on the space station before they got to full size. Hydroponic potatoes is possible but tricky. But I'm only making a guess from having grown these plants here on Earth.
In regard to calories I've heard good things said about oats and switchgrass. Not many people's favourite staples but they grow like weeds under wide climatic conditions with minimal water.
It appears that the answer is "yes", especially if supplemented by a piece of fruit to replace minerals and nutrients. And even tea and coffee are fine provided that your body is relatively used to dealing with caffeine.
Why consuming water from caffeine-containing drinks is different from consuming pure water? I've heard many times that drinking tea doesn't count into these daily water-consumption goals, but no one mentions why.
> Why consuming water from caffeine-containing drinks is different from consuming pure water
From the article:
> Some people worry caffeinated drinks dehydrate us, but this is only true when we drink large doses of caffeine and not enough water.
> Caffeinated drinks do make the body produce more urine, but they also contain water, which will usually more than compensate for the fluid caffeine makes you lose, says Maughan. In fact, he says, tea and coffee are a good way to hydrate because we're likely to drink more of something we enjoy.
> "Coffee contributes to daily fluid requirements, and in regular coffee-drinkers, the kidneys adapt to retain fluid from coffee," she says. "There's no reason moderate amounts of coffee or tea would dehydrate those who are used to having regular caffeine."
Caffeine is a diuretic (meaning that it causes you to produce more urine). It doesn't help your hydration levels if you drink something, and then immediately urinate it back out.
That said, if you're past risk of dehydration, it probably doesn't make that much difference.
It would be interesting to know which people benefit from the phenomena he mentions in the video - luck, conferred status, survivor bias - with those who experience imposter syndrome, and how the two outcomes come about.
Which circumstances lead to people believing that they are solely responsible for, and deserve their success, and which cause people to to feel the opposite. Not sure what the literature says on this.
> "We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives."
The 90s were a pretty fortunate decade. The threat of nuclear war had passed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the economy was chugging along fine, and terrorism hadn't yet taken centre stage. Certainly that's the way I remember it - maybe through rose-tinted glasses (?)
But nevertheless, maybe a quiet life without crises isn't such a bad thing?
the direction of the 90s was pointing at was, cosmopolitanism, techno-utopianism, radical secularism. I can't help to think that the decades that followed were a big regression from that with human tribes forming around the most ancient, base anxieties of the species. Unfortunately this decline was not captured in the the arts which became significantly less significant
Definitely rose tinted glasses. I don't know where you live but it depends on that. For example they were the years of slaughters in former Yugoslavia, terrorist attacks in Israel, various wars in Africa
things in africa and israel are not better today. The yugoslav wars were kind of to-be-expected since yugoslavia split at that time and they largely ended in the 90s. There 's more war today than in the 90s
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
The >500k bump from the Rwandan genocide is not in their battle related graph. If you scroll further down, you see it in “Other forms of large-scale violence”. Taking the up to date death toll of Syria you could say that the situation is as bad as in the ‘90.
I remember only two international crises -- the Gulf War and Serbia. when protecting the Earth against asteroid impacts started receiving what felt like more than its fair share of news coverage, even as a teenager I knew that the world must be in a great place. With the Internet taking off, I thought it would be the dawn of a golden age. Of course, that came to an abrupt halt on 2001/9/11.
The internet was also very useful and functional. though I’ll admit it got better in the 2000’s with Google Maps etc. Still I managed to navigate unknown cities with MapQuest printouts haha
But we aren't the middle children of history. I'd argue that we are amongst the first few generations where humans have become too powerful for their own good. That era started with the nuclear bomb when we first had the ability to destroy ourselves. Thankfully very small groups of people have ever had to take responsibility for that and they've mostly managed to do okay so far. However now with mass industrialization and the spectre of climate change we've reached a point where every single human is responsible for our collective future. We have to fight our evolutionary and historical instincts to preserve the planet for ourselves and all other life. So there is a crisis upon us, it may be different in nature to the ones before but its certainly no less challenging. For a far better argued view on this I would recommend "The precipice" by Toby Or
Taken to an extreme, the startup could remain a handful of people while benefiting from a much larger team which is not included in the headcount.