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crusader_complex posted:Re: culture war, if this is correct (I'm not an expert in any of these things, I just read the threads) then companies like Uber and ABnB particularly are taking VC money and lobbying to change public safety laws so they can turn their bad investments into possibly good ones. They pretend like they were just on their merry way to be profitable when suddenly they 'discover' regulations, when really the whole time any real profits came from shortcutting those regulations. And everyone is always supposed to believe they just didn't know, and it was just an honest mistake and not a cynical calculation made from the start. As someone who works in a small, young-ish (10 years or so) company in a totally different field: it is a mix of knowing the regulations and not caring, knowing the regulations and thinking they don't technically apply because they aren't really an X and being totally ignorant of the regulation because no one has physically stopped them yet, so it must be OK. I guess the proportions are 9/1/90.
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May 14, 2016 02:55
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nachos posted:
I don't know anything about SpoonRocket or what the company's stupid operating premise was, but isn't this basically the end stage of capitalism? Once most of the efficiency in a system is baked in, it becomes harder and harder to wring more profit out of it.
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May 17, 2016 19:29
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Shagman posted:So Theranos just invalidated 2 years of test results. The people of Theranos are probably a lot like the people I work for. First, you start out knowing you are a good person doing the right thing. Then, you assume that regulators enforcing the law directly against you is the way the system is supposed to work. If everyone self-enforced, why would regulations and regulators even exist? And you end up in hilarious situations like this one where your company has been caught fundamentally not understanding the science, business or regulatory framework of the field it operates in and you think "oh well, we'll get them next time" and never once consider that you are both incompetent and hurting people.
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May 19, 2016 16:09
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eschaton posted:And that poor Elizabeth Holmes, she won't have anything at all to fall back on. She has a trust fund? No wonder she thought this Theranos thing would work despite the statistical difficulties, the results just didn't matter.
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Jun 2, 2016 01:56
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eschaton posted:She comes from money. Why else do you think she gets to drop out of Stanford to start a company at 19? And where she got all of her advisors/investors/board members? I never really thought about it, stupid comes in all kinds of flavors but stupid with money appears to be downright dangerous to the health of the population. Now that I write that down it is obvious.
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Jun 2, 2016 02:11
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wateroverfire posted:Well, there are potentially thousands or even tens of thousands of home cooks who would like to make money by inviting people to eat in their homes, and who make the long margin on that business. So there's that to consider. You're just begging the question here. You assume that CA laws are overly burdensome to small time cooks without any evidence and then assume that they can be changed to make small time home cooks both safe and cheaper. Since you have provided no evidence for this and knowing your posting history you will resort to "common sense" my response to you is this: everything you have posted on this subject is incorrect and naively stupid to the point where you should stop. Please stop.
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Jun 7, 2016 19:41
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OwlFancier posted:Regulatr, crowdsource your safety inspections from our talented underemployed. We even provide the nice glossy certificates for them to hand out to you. Our inspectors are paid by the passed inspection so they have incentive to work with you to get you ready to work rather than against you like the city/state/your absent father.
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Jun 8, 2016 19:28
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silence_kit posted:Spazzle's not arguing against food safety laws. He's complaining about how this thread is knee-jerk pro-regulation no matter what the regulation is, and how people in this thread have made arguments which literally consisted of "startup company breaks law, therefore startup company is bad". However, much of the rest of D&D consists of complaining about how government practices, laws, and regulations are unfair, unjust, bigoted, sexist, racist, hyper-bigoted, giga-bigoted, whatever, and for that reason I say that this thread is kind of a bizarre D & D. In addition to what others have said, there is a world of difference between saying that X government law is bad for whatever reason and start-ups (or companies in general) can just do whatever they want without regard for the law. It is entirely consistent that the "rest of D&D consists of complaining about how government practices, laws, and regulations are unfair, unjust, bigoted, sexist, racist, hyper-bigoted, giga-bigoted, whatever," and have the same "people in this thread [make] arguments which literally consist of 'startup company breaks law, therefore startup company is bad'". You seem to think the entire subtext of D&D is whether we should live in a world of laws, rather than what the consequences of those laws are.
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Jun 9, 2016 06:21
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Jumpingmanjim posted:Make food safety regulations unnecessary by including a packet of antibiotics with every meal. Hello extra super gonorrhea!
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Jun 10, 2016 02:14
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WampaLord posted:I have content, ironically found on Gawker! Wow, spurious correlations are a business model now.
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Jun 10, 2016 20:06
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Tuxedo Gin posted:Spurious correlations are built into every single job application and rental application. No kidding, but at least currently you have an opportunity to sample a large space of those spurious correlations by applying at different companies and rental buildings. In this case, whatever dumb poo poo gets baked in becomes the coin of the realm instead of just the quirks of a few landlords. Tuxedo Gin posted:Logical progression of a broken and oppressive system. No argument here on that front.
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Jun 10, 2016 20:24
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Elizabeth Holmes is going to do a presentation on Theranos' technology at the annual conference of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. Does anyone know if this conference is recorded or live streamed or something? I want to watch this so bad. This isn't MBA bullshit hour, this is going to be a room full of experts on this subject and the only way she is going to escape direct and copious making GBS threads on her company's work (or lack thereof) is to say nothing of value at all.
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Jun 14, 2016 02:01
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eschaton posted:Most scientific conferences aren't live streamed or anything like that, though many are recorded these days since the technology is so cheap and ubiquitous. Most of the conferences I go to have a secret link for people who can't be physically present. I assume that link will make it in to the wild.
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Jun 14, 2016 14:04
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JamesKPolk posted:There's a rationality to it from a certain perspective... (or all capital in general is delusional). The one glut capital does not abide is a glut of capital itself.
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Jun 15, 2016 23:06
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Jumpingmanjim posted:I have no idea how this will play out, can they just make stuff up? Based on that abstract, she is going to give a "this is who we are" talk with some cherry picked data that highlights the best Theranos can do. There probably isn't going to be out right fabrications, but she'll carefully chose to show the parts that work while all the while speaking of the project as a whole. Such as, "we are working to detect 180 things in your blood, here are our results for Hep C (i.e. the one test that does appear to work), oh, and we are doing this thing with Zika, too." There isn't going to be anything interesting in her talk, it is a session to educate the medical community on her company and she wants to demonstrate that all of the bad words written about Theranos are much ado about nothing.
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Jun 17, 2016 15:32
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cheese posted:A friend's boomer parents are in this situation. ~1.5m Mountain View house they bought in the 80's for a fraction, but what are they gonna do if they sell? All 3 of their kids live in the Bay Area (SJ, Pleasanton and Daly City) and are either recently married or engaged, and they have lifelong friends nearby. They could sell and buy 40 arces and a McMansion in Missouri, but why? So they can start their lives over and be 1500 miles from their impending grandchildren? If the cohort that includes your friend's boomer parents hadn't spent the 80s, 90s and 00s NIMBYing the poo poo out of different types of housing, maybe they'd have some place in the area to move.
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Jun 18, 2016 17:49
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cheese posted:Yes, if they had been able to predict the future like some kind of wizard then I'm sure they and their friends would have had a different perspective. I'm not trying to white knight for white, middle class Boomers but hindsight is 20/20 and they are flawed, short sighted people just like they rest of us. I'm sure I and my Millenial cohort are going to have to explain to our grandkids in 40 years why we refused to look up from our cat videos as the scientists warned us about climate change. They didn't have to be able to predict the future, they merely had to not be assholes to everyone that wasn't a homeowner. Now that their lovely behavior is affecting them, they are the last people we should be worried about. All I'm saying is that this cohort is the maker of their choice between riches and seeing their grandchildren. e_angst posted:Yes, the best way to fix things is to harbor intense jealousy at anyone who has more than you, and to villainize them at every turn. Ignore their conditions and ignore what motivates them to do what they do, because they have money (or at least valuable assets) and therefor gently caress them! Considering that we are in this situation because we spent the last 30ish years listening almost exclusively to these people, yes, it is time their interests are put on the farthest back burner. MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jun 18, 2016 |
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Jun 18, 2016 18:35
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actionjackson posted:As someone who works in medical research this is especially amusing to me. Also any fuckery in relation to Warfarin is especially egregious. Whenever I hear about Theranos I think of this song. The total inability to understand the complexities of everything involved from the science to the regulatory environment magnified by hubris makes the whole enterprise look like a way for a rich person to demonstrate self-diagnosed superiority.
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Jul 6, 2016 19:56
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Arsenic Lupin posted:New York Times on Elizabeth Holmes being barred from running a lab: Good. The entire premise of that company was stupid and now that it has become clear that they couldn't be bothered to execute that stupid premise correctly, it is obvious it is dangerous and should be destroyed and people like Holmes maybe jailed.
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Jul 8, 2016 17:12
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Arsenic Lupin posted:While we're at it, another startup founded by teenagers goes boom. I like how the first complaint (in your quote at least) is from a venture capitalist bemoaning that the company actually paid people to do things. What a quaint notion.
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Jul 19, 2016 14:47
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Kobayashi posted:Yeah, I don't really buy this. Any mid-to-high end men's department store will measure another anatomically weird feature – the foot – using a Bannock device, in order to identify the proper length and width for shoes. And while they may not carry all the extreme sizes in stock, they'll probably have narrow, regular/medium, and wide sizes on site. Furthermore, the sales team is expected to know how sizes vary between manufacturers, and even between lasts from the same manufacturer. And if that's not enough, a man can work with cordwainer for a bespoke fit. Granted, this isn't as common as it was 50 years ago, but I highly doubt that our great-grandmothers lived in some golden age of well-fitting, custom bra craftsmanship. Alternatively, the world has catered to white man poo poo for the last x hundred years (or more) and women-specific anything is only now beginning to get attention similar to that which men have enjoyed. In other words, it was poo poo before industrialization, got worse with industrialization and is now, slightly, beginning to catch up to where men's shoes were a very long time ago. It did not have to be good absolutely for industrialization to make it worse relatively.
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Jul 23, 2016 04:30
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silence_kit posted:Huh? Visit any department store, and you'll find that the majority of the store is catered towards women. The point wasn't about the volume of items, but rather the attention shown to the genders as thoughtful consumers. Moreover, perhaps you can see how pointing out the state of modern department stores reinforces my point rather than countering it?
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Jul 23, 2016 05:51
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MiddleOne posted:Same as in Stockholm last year then. Did it work?
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Aug 16, 2016 15:44
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Whatever the state of self-driving technology, the legal poo poo is going to take decades to work out. That, alone, will delay adoption of self-driving anything for 10-20 years. Companies right now are happy to have a few cars playing around on streets and whatever because the total risk is pretty small. I don't think Uber is going to jump at the chance to be responsible for thousands of cars driving around.
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Aug 19, 2016 16:31
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Subjunctive posted:Aw, Uber got beaten to the punch: http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/25/nutonomy-singapore-self-driving-car-service/ Edited for clarity: Karl Iagnemma posted:NuTonomy’s first-in-the-world public [endangerment] is a direct reflection of the level of [hubris and avarice] that we have achieved. Baby Babbeh posted:I basically knew libertarians were full of poo poo when I found out a lot of them believe that monopolies can't exist without government intervention. That's just completely, demonstratively the opposite of what has actually happened in most industries throughout history. The degree of willful refusal to engage with inconvenient facts it must take to sustain a belief like that boggles my mind. Austrian Economist (i.e. mega Asperger libertarian) Joseph Schumpeter was upset to find that the economy of the United States came to be dominated by large corporations instead of his preferred legion of small time entrepreneurs and thought the development would lead to the demise of capitalism. I guess he'd never heard of economies of scale? MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 19:56
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This isn't aimed at you specifically, but isn't market 'efficiency' great?
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Sep 1, 2016 15:29
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Nessus posted:How did people rip off aristocrats in ancient times? That would seem to be the real growth sector. Then again, that's probably what's going on here. Become the next Rasputin?
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Sep 16, 2016 13:03
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fits my needs posted:drat, all these startups are pretty much con men and hucksters. What else are you going to do? Work for a living like a chump?
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Sep 27, 2016 19:18
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Stop, stop, he's already dead.
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Sep 28, 2016 22:37
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nowhinezone posted:
This is mean.
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Sep 29, 2016 00:52
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nowhinezone posted:The FDA, CMS, and possibly the SEC are the mean ones in this situation. By mean, I'm talking about living in the real world, not the unicorn fantasy bubble. Why you gotta tell it how it is?
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Sep 29, 2016 19:13
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nowhinezone posted:I work in a related field to Theranos and it amazes me how many times people ignore the fact that point of care (POC) testing already exists for a variety of tests. Most famously being the finger stick sample to check blood sugar. Using a similar amount of blood there are small, portable devices that can analyze blood gases, troponin, electrolytes, red blood cell count, blood thinning numbers, and long term diabetes numbers (A1c). Refining this technology to make it more accurate/smaller/require smaller amounts of blood/cheaper would be a very smart thing to do. Especially if you found a sustainable way to make these technologies work in low resource areas (not having to reorder strips, cartridges, etc). Theranos chat is usually better than what the thread is currently talking about. As a non-biologist/doctor, what always bothered me about the supposed technology was the sampling. If you are going to run a test for the presence of a virus with a drop of blood instead of a vial, the test has to be at least 1000x more powerful (assuming a drop is 1/1000th of a vial) to get the same testing power. And, if you are going to run 200 tests on that drop of blood, your virus test has to be 200000x as powerful because you are using less of the blood still. I never heard a single word from anyone on how that was supposed to happen and its weird that a fundamental sampling issue wouldn't even be menationed, because it has little to do with the actual technology.
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Sep 30, 2016 00:34
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nowhinezone posted:Eh it's a bit more complicated than that. Depends on how you're identifying the virus. If you doing PCR amplification of genetic material then, theoretically you only need a small sample assuming the virus is present in a more than negligible quantity in the sample. For example, there are PCR based tests that allow you to test for several respiratory viruses at once based on one nasal swab. Why a nasal swab and not blood? Well most respiratory viruses concentrate in your secretions which is how they like to be transmitted. We can do the same thing for stool pathogens. The example of virus detection was a bit of an ignorant foil on my part because I don't know enough about the specifics of testing. Maybe it is because I write funding proposals all the time, but the discussion of the current limits of sampling and testing power and acknowledgement of what you'd have to change, statistically, to maintain testing power with the current testing methodology is low hanging fruit to build confidence in investors, regulatory agencies and the public. You don't have to discuss your technology at all to do it, just act like you've got a loving clue what is going on. Instead we got the constant veil of secrecy, a cult of personality surrounding Elizabeth Holmes and a bunch of pablum about freeing yourself from doctors and the medical establishment. quote:
You'll get no argument from me on the ethics front, I was never happy with Theranos' business model on the ethics score for precisely the reasons you outline here. I also didn't think what was obvious (to me) methodological snake oil would get as far as it did.
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Sep 30, 2016 02:50
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La Brea Carpet posted:Oh I understand completely that creating a neutral profile absent of obvious gender or ethnicity can sometimes allow a person to get in the front door somewhere that they otherwise couldn't. I'm not saying that's a wrong thing to do. But everyone knows vaginas need regular input of money to operate, so you can't trust women with money. Edit: That now sounds way more MRA than intended. Still works though. MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Sep 30, 2016 |
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Sep 30, 2016 19:35
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WrenP-Complete posted:I was so impressed that no one took my (admittedly obvious) bait. Are we not mocking stupid tech articles here anymore?
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Sep 30, 2016 20:15
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WrenP-Complete posted:I would love to; my code is broken and I'm procrastinating. My code is not yet written and I am also (trying not to) procrastinate. Yeah, the screenshot is what I meant, but now I think you posting it works either way.
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Sep 30, 2016 20:43
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WrenP-Complete posted:I don't understand. Could you please clarify? Your understanding of my post's intent is correct. But even knowing that, responding with your screen shot works in my understanding of how this thread functions, whereas previously I thought it didn't.
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Sep 30, 2016 20:54
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WrenP-Complete posted:Quick straw poll: Does anyone here know someone who has used this kind of service? Yeah. The couple I know that tried it was into it for getting new recipe ideas (they are the cooking show types). Then she got a mega cancer diagnosis and couldn't go out and shop and he didn't want to leave her alone long enough to do serious grocery shopping, so they started using Blue Apron when friends and family weren't around to help out. Now that she is more-or-less recovered, they don't use it nearly as much but I think they eat out much more.
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Oct 2, 2016 20:06
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BarbarianElephant posted:As for the sucky treatment of warehouse employees, isn't this typical of warehouse and factory work? It really sucks to work in those places. For some business owners, this is the way to run your company: quote:“In the few instances when OSHA has visited our Richmond facility, as they do with thousands of other workplaces each year,” Blue Apron wrote in a statement, “they identified routine improvements for us to make, all of which were welcomed and promptly addressed.” The head of my company has told me that I shouldn't stress so much about whether the things the company does are "technically fraud" because we are regularly audited and that means the government will catch the problems and let us know. They quite literally think that it is ok to make totally foreseeable "mistakes" because they have no interest in hiring people who have dealt with the problems they have and think that inspection/audit/whatever fines are not punishment for bad behavior, but helpful correction of (deliberately ignorant) "innocent" mistakes. I mean, I'm just trying to make a living here as best I can, what is the harm?
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Oct 2, 2016 20:54
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Arsenic Lupin posted:e: Another point that's being missed here is that as soon as you allow home businesses to break food-and-safety laws formally, then larger businesses will start masquerading as small home businesses to avoid regulations. This is exactly what is happening with AirBnB and apartment buildings. It isn't legal, in San Francisco, to take rental housing off the market, without jumping through many hoops. There are many businesses doing just that thanks to AirBnB -- it's not official, therefore it's not taxed, therefore it's not regulated. To add to this: what about the people who are obeying the law when they start their businesses? I'm sure there are smaller kitchens around the country who wanted to start commercial production and, instead of complaining about how hard food safety regulations are, either dug into the regs or hired a knowledgeable consultant and complied with the laws. Just because regulations exit does not mean they are overly burdensome or unnecessary or tools to keep the little guy down. Well, they always seem to be to the ubermensch that start computer-toucher apps for them.
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Oct 5, 2016 02:32
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