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Also the thing that got glossed over was that the original article criticizing the iPad program specifically pointed out that they blew ~$750 a piece on a shitload of iPads when they could have bought cheaper tablets for young kids and chromebooks for the older kids and it would have been much better and cheaper. They did iPads because it made for better headlines or maybe allegedly straight corruption. That's the problem. Flashy solutions get picked over "boring" regular fixes. My area has the non-tech version where the school boards keep wanting to build cool looking lobbies and facades instead of just focusing on internal improvements with their school bonds. Parakeet vs. Phone fucked around with this message at 08:16 on May 22, 2019 |
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May 22, 2019 08:12
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And once again, the entire start of this discussion was about a special grant that was specifically for people inventing tech that could replace teachers to "fix" schools, and an article about a 1 billion dollar boondoggle to dump iPads and software on schools that could have used the money for a million other little things. We're not talking about pawning the existing computer lab for a week of lunches. We're talking about where money should be going.
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May 23, 2019 01:04
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Also a little extra sucky because they could just make it a good side job for students instead of finding ways to ring every loving dollar out of it. My college had a student-run almost co-op that did grubhub stuff for the campus with local places. It was a decent way for students with bikes to pick up a little cash and they used it as a way for business and econ majors to get experience running a business on the orders and admin side. But hey, gently caress it, outsource it.
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May 27, 2019 00:26
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:I thought YT actively scrubbed porn, or at least they did a long time ago This stuff is more nefarious. Basically pedophiles get videos that seem normal to most people and group them together. Like the article says, videos of kids in swimsuits at the pool or a family thing or kids doing gymnastics. They only started to stand out to people who pay attention to YouTube stuff because some of them had hundreds of thousands of views. There was also a trend of them getting kids to do "challenges" that were really just fetishes. This seems particularly bad, because like the article gives a little link to, all of this poo poo was happening a few months ago and apparently YouTube still hasn't done anything to fix it. They have a system to auto-disable comments to limit grooming and perverts putting timecodes of "suggestive" frames into the comments, but that's it. It's still perfectly happy to let the little amoral algorithm build pedophile playlists.
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Jun 4, 2019 09:39
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I also think an increasingly small part of their plan was that they could just keep costs low by just firing all the drivers and replacing their fleet with driverless cars or let people rent out their driverless cars, and well, we're seeing how that's working out.
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Jun 10, 2019 00:07
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Also I don't know that there's much to critically examine right now, unless you've got something to post? People are just discussing self-driving as a concept, so of course it's going to be a little loose. When the tunnel news broke it actually did get critically discussed with talk about ventilation, hammering down exactly how stupid it was and someone did a write-up of a neat historical attempt to design smaller tunnels without sacrificing safety.
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Jun 14, 2019 07:42
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It's why I don't beat myself up over not buying a few sub $30 bitcoins for fun when I was bored the first summer and wanted to try arbitraging them. They either would have been lost in Mt. Gox or sold at $100.
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Jun 18, 2019 07:39
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And funny timing because CBS just ran a big story about a military contractor getting tons of bonus pay for quick job completion by showing them separate books with artificially quick job completion times that they submitted. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-military-maintenance/ Honestly, as a dude who's living at the moment is tied to selling on eBay and Amazon, it seems like a solution looking for a problem. Big players seem to already incorporate the most important benefits of "smart contracts." I just had what I'm 99% certain is a bogus chargeback on an eBay sale through PayPal. PayPal's system can automatically pull up the tracking number I submitted and confirm that it was sent to an authorized address for that account and successfully delivered within the zip code. So it just auto-completes my side of the case and hands me back the money. Even if they lose with the bank/processor, I'm covered because it's one of the very few benefits that my fees pay for. They'll present the same case to the bank and we'll see what happens. Amazon has a similar thing for lost or "lost" packages. If you buy the shipping label through them, they auto-pull the tracking and sometimes handle the case automatically based on the data. As far as bitcoin goes, the best example might be Silk Road. They had an escrow system to protect buyers, except the dealers held all of the power, so any dealer with any history whatsoever just insisted that the buyer immediately release the money before they'd ship. And since there was no real third party to stop this behavior, it became the norm. It led to that hilarious scam where some dealer declared a fire sale because he was getting out of the business. About 2 weeks later people realized that he just didn't ship anything and pocketed all of the bitcoins. One hell of a way to cash out and retire. I'm sure there are edge cases where a smart contract would work, but I'm struggling to think of many where it wouldn't just be a neat curiosity.
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Jun 19, 2019 01:00
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Also, it doesn't seem like much of an upgrade from 9 years ago when I could pull up my local Philly cheesesteak place's website, click around on a menu, place an order and go pick it up or get it delivered. It all feels like the smallest incremental changes. I don't think they bothered to put it online, but a month or so ago I saw a beautiful time-filler piece on NBC's evening news about a remarkable new restaurant. You see, they hardly served anyone indoors. Instead they just sold through various apps and people could either get their food delivered or come pick it up. They marveled at this technological revolution and new style of restaurant as I screamed on the inside.
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Jul 3, 2019 03:42
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Yeah, don't forget the part that global GDP is estimated to be $80 trillion. Uber is trying to say that it will control 15% of the global economy with a straight face, and the investors are just nodding along. Jesus.
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Aug 9, 2019 07:30
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Missing Donut posted:You’re conflating two things. The metric in general is used to industry potential; a $1trillion industry has more potential than a $100million one for hopefully obvious reasons. I guess it's just still funny to me because that type of thinking would even get you laughed out of Shark Tank, but apparently Wall Street is fine with it. "All we have to do is enter two new markets, one of which has several established players and also loving Amazon moving in on it, and penetrate dozens of new country's markets and we'll totally be able to grow into a profit."
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Aug 10, 2019 00:48
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At first, I assumed that he was talking about using an fMRI as a lie detector, but it turns out it's even dumber than that. It knocked loose a memory that the loving B-team at Mythbusters showed that you could fool the fMRI in an episode even after carrying water for Polygraph tests. I'm sure any future tech would have the same problem.
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Sep 1, 2019 11:51
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There's a whole show on CNBC about this called CashPad too, although it's not just tiny houses. Sometimes it's a shipping container.
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Sep 5, 2019 04:41
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Arsenic Lupin posted:This happens surprisingly often. All it takes is persuading the government that "economic development" and there you go. Or get the village council to declare the homes a "blight" like what happened in Wisconsin for the totally real deal for the Foxconn plant. Although apparently they weren't quite morally bankrupt enough to actually condemn the houses, just imply it when negotiating.
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Sep 6, 2019 00:45
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So, this was getting some attention on the Amazon seller forums. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/09/11/amazon-antitrust-probe-ftc-marketplace/2283767001/ Sorry for a USA Today article but the Bloomberg one's behind a paywall. The FTC is doing proper interviews with merchants to track Amazon's anti-competitive behavior. I have absolutely no faith in them carrying through on this, but it's interesting at least. This is a kind of a side Amazon issue that doesn't get as much focus. They do seem to be afraid of this line of attack. They surprised a lot of sellers by basically surrendering to a lot of the demands for greater transparency from the EU complaints (although we'll see how serious they are about carrying through on them). For people who don't know, while Amazon has calmed down on this front greatly, they used small sellers to test out products on the platform. They looked at all the sales data and were able to cherrypick exactly which products to sell. After the smaller seller took all of the risk with launching and properly advertising a new product, they'd swoop in and crush them on price and shipping power. It's probably at least hundreds of millions of dollars of product research that they got for free by offering a marketplace. And it directly hurt the businesses that are supposed to be their competition and keep things fair, in theory. For awhile, there were a lot of sketchy stories too. A popular seller with a niche item would suddenly get a letter from Amazon insisting that there was an authenticity complaint and that they needed invoices to verify the product. While Amazon technically allows you to redact pricing information, you have to do it with a marker on the physical paper and scan it. Digitally marking it out is usually an immediate denial, without a clear explanation of how to redact information. It can scare new sellers into giving up their pricing. And you can't redact contact information, obviously. Then, what do you know, but the wholesaler or manufacturer would get a call from an Amazon agent giving them a hard sell on why they should sign an exclusive deal with Amazon. At deeply cut margins, because hey, you'll make it up in volume. No hard proof, but a lot of seller talked about this happening years ago. Just another way that Amazon manages to be sketchy.
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Sep 13, 2019 00:24
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In some dream world the marketplace would be regulated to hell and back as a marketplace. No black boxes. No guessing games. No house advantage. Just clear rules about who gets the preferred spot on a listing and what metrics matter. In fairness, some of this may be coming thanks to pressure from the European Commission. Then completely independent company Amazon Retail would sell through the market as just another corporate account and it would have to follow all the same rules without preferential treatment. Funny enough, this would probably mean that Amazon Warehouse (their liquidation wing) would be immediately shut down since they have horrible feedback. Amazon's non-liquidation wing doesn't have visible feedback currently. This alone could have a big effect on their size, since Amazon Retail has such a huge advantage on what it pretends is just a marketplace. Chasing the dream would have Amazon Retail getting on Amazon Fulfillment for working its employees to death and causing receiving, picking and packing to suffer, now that they'd more clearly feel the impact. I mean, also I'd like a million dollars, a unicorn, we live in capitalist hellworld, yada yada. Probably almost as easy to just nationalize it than to implement the system of regulation needed to "fix" it.
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Sep 14, 2019 02:20
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Amazon's big problem is that they threw open the gates to Chinese sellers with no ability to do quality control, so there's a huge problem with duplicate, fake and junk listings. It's a nightmare to just browse on Amazon anymore. There's also been a problem with Chinese sellers just "hijacking" existing listings for items that have a lot of good reviews and running their reputation into the ground through counterfeit sales. Amazon doesn't seem to care. There's a separate issue with standard tech love of bots. There was a huge thing not too long ago about random products being tagged as pesticides and requiring that the seller provide proof of toxic chemicals training to sell a children's book. The latest thing is a series of price controls that Amazon is forcing. Their bots partially hide listings that they view as gouging...on paper. In the last few months they've really extended it in practice. Right now, for certain items they'll hide the listing if you're a dollar over what they think the price should be. For example, a dude who distributes a brand of vitamins was hidden on his own listing because he couldn't match Walmart's price of $7. Even though their price was for in-store pickup and he was shipping it for $10 total. Amazon's currently pushing sellers to just eat losses to make the marketplace look good. Also, for example, in toys Amazon loves to drastically undercut all of the sellers that don't have massive economies of scale, make their pennies on volume and then usually quickly run out of stock. Once they were out of stock the smaller stores could make money at their margin. But for certain items Amazon is now saying, "gently caress you, sell at the price that makes sense for our massive warehouse network or we just won't ever advertise you and buyers will have to know how to click on the 'show more offers' button to see you." Just a point for Amazon sucking on all levels.
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Sep 17, 2019 03:12
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I'm reminded of the interview with the Silicon Valley people talking about how hard it was to make jokes when reality frequently beat them to the punch.
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Sep 18, 2019 22:37
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Yeah, it was roller skates. They ruined his dramatic exit by making him too unsteady to swipe his keycard. There are a few writeups in business magazines, but I think the New Yorker is the most detailed one: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley It goes into detail about their research meetings.
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Sep 19, 2019 01:56
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It'll be interesting. Unless they gain a lot of skill when they scale up, it'll be a nightmare. They seem to have a ton of problems with their contractors already (mostly from working them too hard) and they don't seem to be putting structures in place to actually make mass delivery work. Supposedly there's a lot of package theft and delivery issues, along with crazy stuff that shouldn't be happening at the smaller level that they're operating at. I saw a random post on the forum with pictures after an Amazon driver did about $6K of damage to a customer's garage door. Amazon footed the repair bill, at least.
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Sep 20, 2019 03:16
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Honestly, I'd even say that the idea of putting out licensed, background checked drivers for quick gig work during rushes isn't a terrible idea (obviously it's not "good" for society, but it fills a gap at the moment). Ages ago a goon in this thread mentioned jumping on to drive during college football season and earning a few hundred hauling people to and from the game. The big issues came when they just wanted to be a full-on taxi monopoly.
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Oct 2, 2019 09:26
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We can also only blame geography for so much when a lot of our problems come from white flight and general racism. Like, it was natural for richer people to move to the edges of the city as commuting became possible to get away from pollution/city problems but building happy, little all white mini-cities a half hour or hour away is all on America. Same with people fighting apartment buildings tooth and nail.
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Oct 3, 2019 03:20
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It's infuriating that they just regurgitate that stuff. I'm technically a "small businessman/entrepreneur" and let me tell you that only getting 4 or 5 hours of lovely sleep a night because you have to add on extra hours breaks your loving soul and pretty much forces a breakdown and proper couple days off after a few weeks. And you're a surly rear end in a top hat or a zombie in your downtime. You can only burn the candle at both ends for so long, even with short naps and caffeine filling gaps. So either they're lying or on meth, and pushing the idea that you just have to work harder and longer. It's annoying and reminds me of an old Cracked article that dug in on boutique stores. Specifically that if you poked at a lot of little shops, like the little fashion or decor stores that are randomly around small towns, they'll turn out to be some rich guy's wife, kid or relative doing it as a hobby. They barely make enough to cover rent and maybe take home a little, but certainly not enough to live off of. And yet, everyone who sees it thinks that small business is alive and well, anyone (especially those lazy poors) can do it, American Dream! 
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Oct 19, 2019 00:17
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I don't think that the WeWork board could do anything even if they had wanted to. I think the CEO had over 50% control up until recently. One of the first of SoftBank's punishments was gaining enough control to get him below 50%. There was a tweet pointing out that that was effectively just instituting a real board of directors, since a board of directors that can't remove the CEO is just corporate welfare paying for a dozen or so guys to have nice lunches.
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Oct 22, 2019 02:58
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PayPal bailing out would have signaled that this was a horrible idea to any normal person. It's going to be a legal nightmare. There's a reason so many of the bitcoin "businesses" were just virtual offices in foreign countries.
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Oct 22, 2019 22:44
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Wasn't that a big line Lowtax's lecture about the early dot com boom? It was an era when you went to a venture capitalist to get money to buy new fancy chairs, so that you could impress a second venture capitalist and get more money and pay off the first.
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Oct 27, 2019 07:10
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The wildest part is that this has been a problem for years. A long time ago a goon trader went deep into how much of the TF2 virtual hat marketplace was run by scammers, fraud and honest to god Russian mafia. A highlight was one of the biggest traders legitimately "breaking bad" and his former friends realizing that that was why he started learning Russian out of nowhere.
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Oct 31, 2019 22:56
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dex_sda posted:Link this please, I'm intrigued Sadly, I partly mentioned it because I hoped someone else might have a good article or link from their memory. I'm pretty sure that they were posts by Captain Invictus in the old Giant Bomb thread in Rapidly Going Deaf, because he was sharing stories with the Giant Bomb podcast. And that is not enough to pull it out of search, apparently. This reveal about manipulation in the earbuds was part of what kicked it off. https://www.polygon.com/2012/11/15/3648530/team-fortress-2-player-discovers-apparent-russian-trading-scheme-at Following this guy's investigation https://forums.steamrep.com/threads/today-i-discovered-that-there-are-tons-of-keys-with-doubtful-origin-injecting-into-the-market.14096/ There was a surprising amount of criminal work in the market, from what I can recall. There was regular credit card fraud, where people would buy keys and virtual items on a dummy account with stolen cards, trade the items to what was obviously an unrelated genuine account and let the dummy account eat the ban when the chargebacks rolled in. On a similar level, people would pretend that their accounts were stolen, or actually steal an account, trade away all the stuff through a few dummy accounts to "wash" the items, and then Valve would duplicate the items back onto the original account when they complained that it was stolen. This was so common that the crazy high value items that made headlines were deflated by at least half their value. The heart of the issue was that Valve understood at the time that they couldn't chase down and delete duplicate items, since that would eventually involve hurting the occasional legitimate buyer. That's why there so many annoying restrictions and holds on trading and selling items now. There was the money laundering, described above. It was a decent enough way to move and wash money in smaller quantities without raising heat. You buy the items and either sell them off-site for real money, or sell them for steam cash to buy steam keys to sell for clean cash where you need it. There was a side business of scammers preying on kids who didn't understand how much people would pay for hats. In TF2, at the time at least, your inventory was public by default. There were sites that could therefore track when rare hats dropped and send out alerts to traders. Within a few minutes, the poor player would get hounded by friend requests and messages offering them little gifts or trades way below market value or people trying to sell the account. There was a group of "white hat" traders who had started monitoring the same sites to quickly shoot off messages telling the person to not take any trade offers and valuing the hat. The breaking bad story, if I'm remembering it right, was about some popular and well known trader, who was one of the top 5 for managing deals in the biggest forum for trading. I think the estimate were that he was moving high 5 figures or low 6 figures of virtual items, with a focus on the really rare, high value stuff. Rumors started to come out that he was knowingly working with credit card fraudsters and item duplicators, but he played it off as simply being willing to work with Russian players who others denied reflexively. That was where the trader learning Russian came in, I think. Then one day, he does a burn it all down post where he basically tries to do a villain's speech bragging about how he was tired of trying to hide it and that he might as well just admit it. He burned his old accounts and announced that he was just going to cross over and make big money moving items for the fraud rings and launderers. Thinking about it, there are probably a lot of similarities with some of things I've read and heard about the baseball trading card market during the boom. Which is fun to read about if you have time. There were stories of trading card company executives rolling into conventions and selling dealers solid packs of rare cards that officially weren't supposed to exist, since it meant that they were outright lying about rarity. All the decent level traders knew, but nobody blew the whistle because it was good for business. The TF2 market had this weird underbelly of scammers, duplicators and launderers, but it all helped items and money move and trying to stay honest was a lot of work and borderline impossible unless you were really committed or just working in a small circle of people who were already vetted. And all over virtual hats (and guns and knives). Interesting to see that it's still going on though.
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Nov 2, 2019 03:14
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So, going off of some aging Econ knowledge, the Wall Street trading game I played as a kid and refreshing myself on Investopedia... A call is a contract you can buy, that gives you the option to buy something between now and a later date. You pay me $1 today for the right to buy a hamburger for $5 next week. If burgers go up to $7, you're happy and can make me get one for you for $5. If they stay below $5.99 I'm happy, since I got "free" money for taking on risk. The Robinhood glitch guys were selling calls, meaning they were taking in cash and selling that promise. A put is basically the opposite. If you buy a put you have the right to make the person who sold it buy from you for a price. You pay me $1 for the right to make me buy a hamburger for $5 next week. If burgers go down below $4, you make money because you can buy a cheap one and sell it to me. The distinction in this case is important, because it shows that the guy speaking maybe didn't really even get the glitch. Since there's a huge difference between puts and calls. AMD guy used $2,000 to buy 100 shares for a total of $3,800. They let him do a 2x margin, which is gross but not bad business. They loaned him $1,800 against the stock itself. If it falls below half of the value, then he has to sell all the stock immediately to cover the loan and he ends up with nothing. Once he owned the shares, he sold calls with a $2 strike price. If I'm following him right, if AMD went above $40 a share he had to let the other person buy them for $38. The thing is that these are covered calls. Since he's holding the shares, this heavily limits his risk. If the price hit $40 and they triggered, he'd just hand the shares over at the discounted price. So, normally this is an alright plan. It's basically a bet on the stock price to stay stable. Usually it'd be used to limit risk as part of a larger strategy. If I'm still following, the problem is that the dumb system let him sell the calls, because they were covered, but instead just gave him the money back as if he had no obligations and didn't track any of it. It acted like he just had more money free and clear in his account and proceeded to let him buy more shares. And so on and so forth. So with $2,000 real dollars he now owns ~1,300 shares of AMD with a borrowed ~$48,000. Their value fell to $36 a share already so assuming that they didn't reverse it all, he's already in the hole. Also he doesn't even "own" the shares because they're covering calls. If he's forced to sell the shares to cover the loan from Robinhood, then he magically picked up a shitload of liability. Since if the shares go above $40, he still owes those people the shares. It's a loving mess if the stock price moves at all. This is why it's a horrible idea to apparently let people "buy" the right to trade on margin for $5. Or gently caress around with options when they don't realize what they're really doing. There's a reason that stuff at least used to be really regulated. Parakeet vs. Phone fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Nov 7, 2019 |
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Nov 7, 2019 02:35
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The one thing that gets me about the people cheerfully taking advantage of the glitch is that, as a few articles pointed out, it's not like you magically wouldn't owe the money just because Robinhood hosed up and let you do something stupid. You'd almost certainly get a judgement against you, if they asked. Supposedly that one guy who took advantage of a previous version of this glitch (because this has apparently happened before) just quietly had his account closed and they never contacted him about the $50,000 loss, so maybe they'd just eat it over the bad press or possible regulation. You could also declare bankruptcy and leave them holding the bag, but that's hardly one weird trick to get rich. And as the articles covered, doing something this bad faith could maybe even wind up as criminal fraud. Still hilarious that Robinhood is this loving broken.
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Nov 7, 2019 03:27
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Cicero posted:Automation is steadily improving and long term that does threaten jobs, but it'll happen gradually, not overnight. It's also people latching onto the more drastic examples rather than the picky reality. People as a whole aren't being replaced. Technology is just forcing less people to do more work, with some getting shuffled out of the workforce. It's much more striking to write articles about "Wendy's/McDonald's Is Getting Rid of Cashiers" when the reality of "Wendy's is offer a self-serve kiosk that a lot of people won't bother to use for a lot of minor bullshit reasons, but it will somewhat reduce the load on checkout allowing them to probably cut a cashier" isn't quite as interesting or attention grabbing. An AI circling the item to pick out of a box for an Amazon warehouse worker, thereby forcing them to work a second faster on each pick all day, isn't a good headline.
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Nov 8, 2019 03:25
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Yeah, that's a good article and captures my general question of why the gently caress they did it. Like, throwing several thousand dollars on the line for the lulz is a weird thing. I also noticed that r/WallStreetBets has a banner that turns the Wall Street Kid into The Joker when you mouse over it, which captures the atmosphere of that place better than any words ever could. A slightly funnier point from the subreddit thread on it noted that Robinhood's margin policy isn't as forgiving as they assumed. You can pay $5 a month to trade on margin, but it's only good for up to $1,000. Any margin above that is charged 5% yearly interested assessed daily and billed monthly. Some idiot who's in for a million in long term puts on Apple and Tesla would owe $60,000 in interest if they actually let him use the glitch as he hoped. Still crazy, if the AMAs are true, that Robinhood is still relying on generic emails and not assigning some type of crisis manager to the cases. I guess it is possible that they could gently caress up handling this so bad that the buyer isn't liable.
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Nov 8, 2019 06:21
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It feels like you could slot this in for pretty much any Silicon Valley place at the moment. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1192946583832158208
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Nov 9, 2019 04:29
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Also, the point is that no one could tell them why that was the case. They just keep shrugging and saying it was the algorithm. I've applied for plenty of credit cards where they were more than happy to point out and justify why I didn't qualify for an increase. The best that Apple could offer was that maybe her credit score was lower due to chance or fraud, and it wasn't that. I know it's probably just some bureaucratic bullshit, but it seemed funny that even people above level one customer support couldn't do more than repeat "trust the algorithm." So now I guess they get to deal with a regulator's call and a shitload of internal meetings.
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Nov 10, 2019 02:36
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BabyFur Denny posted:isn't Uber basically an accidentally socialist company? Since they are still losing billions every quarter, they are redistributing money from venture capitalists and stockholders to their employees and drivers. Every time you book an uber ride, an investor loses money. This got posted earlier in the thread, and despite the lovely title, it's a good breakdown. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/say-goodbye-millennial-urban-lifestyle/599839/ We've had a few years where a lot of people in cities and bigger suburbs were able to have some middle class (maybe upper middle class/lower upper class) luxuries subsidized. Chauffeurs, personal assistants, handymen, shoppers, etc. All cheap and generally available quickly. And places like Uber somewhat poorly filled in a few gaps in places where mass transit and taxis legitimately sucked. On the bright side, some are MoviePass style chances to legally steal from VC. But a lot are built from a mix of VC money and grinding workers to paste. Plus there's something to be said that it's propping up part of the middle class with what's basically inefficient socialism, but wrapping it up such that a depressing number of people think it's all just business genius and we can't possibly tax these people more. That's how you get the weird billionaire/Silicon Valley/tech worship. And the worst part is that it will eventually crash to the ground, one way or another, but we don't know how it will shake out. There are way too many people who are furious at states trying to rein this bullshit in. So if Uber goes under from labor regulation be ready for that to take root. There's a company that I write for that had several bootlickers in the forums freaking out over California's new independent contractor law, despite the site not announcing any changes and despite the fact that the writing company probably falls under the exceptions anyway (since we really are freelancers for the most part). Parakeet vs. Phone fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Nov 18, 2019 |
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Nov 18, 2019 01:13
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GreyjoyBastard posted:otc antibiotics, specifically, are Not Ideal They may as well as be otc given how trivial it is to get them. I know the answer is major medical reform both for patients and doctors before we breed super bugs, but until that happens it'd be nice if I didn't have to shell out $35 for a doctor to go "yes your obvious symptoms of a sinus infection are probably a sinus infection." It also would have meant that my sister wouldn't have had to buy fish antibiotics for abscesses when she got fired and lost her insurance.
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Nov 22, 2019 00:22
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Wow. I'm pretty sure that the Truckla that robot Youtuber Simone Giertz made by hacking at a Tesla with an angle grinder looks better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R35gWBtLCYg Parakeet vs. Phone fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Nov 22, 2019 |
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Nov 22, 2019 06:24
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I'm legitimately a little mad, but not surprised, that Zume's real supposed business was "cloud kitchens." You know, this totally new thing where a single kitchen makes hot food and distributes it to small locations that don't have a kitchen. What's a commissary? On top of re-inventing the bus, it sounds like they found a way to serve pizza that's worse than any of the chains. And I hate the article acting like it was some genius move to just give up on competing with Pizza Hut and instead sell them boxes. Because, sure, gently caress it, Zume's also a restaurant supply company now with a very limited customer base.
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Nov 26, 2019 09:03
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It probably was just something shiny to dangle in front of VC. Their real business was supposedly the cloud kitchens/commissaries, which also seemed like a strange worst of both worlds experience. Restaurants that aren't popular/successful enough to sustain a kitchen location or real food truck can produce food in one central location that's probably just far enough to suck for delivery for everyone. The best scenario is that they don't try to do service and become WeWork but for commercial kitchens, which would be neat honestly, but makes very little business sense. Certain foods can work well on a commissary distribution model, but it's limited and usually doesn't involve hot foods. Also some of their ideas weren't terrible, but don't fit. They wanted to help run food trucks for restaurants. Which, okay, that's not a terrible idea. But it's more of a consulting service that you'd add to a place that sold/leased food trucks than real business. Most restaurants aren't going to pay you indefinitely to run a food truck for them, because either they need to learn how to do it or the operator should just cut them out because how many restaurants are really unique to be worth the hassle of cutting someone else in for some recipes. And their pizza model in general seems terrible, because even my backwoods region can apparently support a wood fired pizza truck that's generously now added my area onto its festival circuit. If their market is people who want Dignorios but don't want to bake it or drive to the Little Ceasar's or door dash literally anything else, then good luck.
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Nov 27, 2019 02:54
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 14:29 |
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Yeah, thinking about it, Zume reads like a classic "great idea" that breaks down once you start trying to math out who would actually want it. It'd be great to expand delivery ranges and times, but the problems of opening a good kitchen makes it only practical for more generic stuff. And if it's not specialty, then who really cares about which specific place makes an average burrito/pizza/Chinese food. Spazzle posted:The number of ads I get on Facebook for unique premade uncooked food delivery services is really insane. Who the gently caress is funding this garbage? It's a weird thing where, ecological costs aside, it's not a bad idea. Shipping costs get crazy better with scale and there's a huge demand for it. Whoever wins out in the end is going to have one hell of a monopoly and it can probably roll over into being profitable once they don't have to constantly knife fight 10 other companies, but so many are going to die or get bought out before then. It's just the usual case of VCs gambling with hundreds of millions of dollars. There's also the chance that grocery stores will wind up eating their lunch. I know Kroger's lets you just pick up a prepped, frozen meal at the store and I've heard of other chains getting in on it.
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Nov 27, 2019 05:56
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