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Arsenic Lupin posted:This. No sick leave, no protection against layoffs, no liability bonds, no workman's comp, wage determined entirely by the whims of the employer, and of course no unions. It's a lot cheaper to run a company if you define all (most) of the employees as independent contractors, as well as requiring them to provide their own tools. Aren't most taxi drivers independent contractors?
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Feb 9, 2016 22:37
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Mrit posted:Uber loses money/breaks even on most of its fares. They do this because they have the cash to burn, it makes them look good, and it sucks drivers in. I think that people will be willing to pay more for an Uber should they have to raise their prices because it really is more convenient and a better experience than calling a cab. You've really got to be ideologically committed to Uber being the Great Evil to deny that it is a better experience for the customer.
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Feb 11, 2016 03:49
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Absurd Alhazred posted:This is a pro click, worth reading in its entirety. His other articles are pretty great too.
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Feb 13, 2016 07:17
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sbaldrick posted:Phones are still in the early days of their lifecycle really. I'd guess in about 5 years you'll be able to build your own fairly easily and cheaply. Right now phones are still in the 486, first gen. Pentium chipset era. I don't know about this. Standardizing the components so that anyone can just read an instruction manual and plug in a bunch of wires and circuit boards together would probably mean that there'd be more overhead/waste in the design and the cell phone would have to be bigger, use more electricity, etc. Smartphones still don't really have great battery life, and I'd be shocked if people would be willing to compromise (battery life x performance x 1/size) for customization. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Feb 16, 2016 |
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Feb 16, 2016 05:55
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:1. Yelp heavily implied that the low wage position was basically a "trial period" after which she would earn at least a living wage in another position Do you have a source for this? Dr. Fishopolis posted:3. $1250 is still way, way, way under the market price for living anywhere in SF, and most people with roommates pay close to that if not more. She didn't live in SF, she lived in the East Bay and commuted to work by rail. She is being really misleading by claiming that $1250 is like the bare minimum rent you have to pay to survive near where she lived. In actuality, she made a bad financial decision by renting an entire place to herself in the highest cost area of the country on a minimum wage salary. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Feb 21, 2016 |
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Feb 21, 2016 21:11
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DrNutt posted:Companies have no responsibility to provide a living wage. I'm sorry, it looks like you aren't living in a micro apartment with seven other roommates, oh, and it says here you have a fridge and a TV? Looks like the only factor in your situation was your poor financial decision making, friend! You don't have to live like that in the East Bay to pay less than $1250 in rent. You do have to at least get a roommate though.
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Feb 21, 2016 21:19
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Trevor Hale posted:The problem with her article is that is has led to this response article https://medium.com/@StefWilliams25/an-open-letter-to-millenials-like-talia-52e9597943aa#.eohlsskv5 Yeah it's a huge problem. You don't have to hold up the tweet-writer as the poster child for the cause though. Probably it would be better to make a story about a native family pushed out of SF and not about a clueless transplant who didn't realize that it is normal to get a roommate or two to make ends meet while living in an expensive area on minimum wage.
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Feb 22, 2016 00:29
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FilthyImp posted:MS developing a Smartphone OS would have been terrible terrible. They just wouldn't have the UI know-how that crazy Old Man Jobs had. And their hardware would have been shiiiiiiiiit. I don't buy that. Probably writing cell phone operating systems is easier than writing Windows. Smartphone OS programmers were/are in a great situation where they didn't have to worry about backwards compatibility and maintaining compatibility with many different hardware configurations. Also, mobile operating systems have way less features and functionality than the old desktop OSes too.
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Feb 26, 2016 03:45
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Adventure Pigeon posted:I like that they think government regulation is the major thing stifling science when it's usually just lack of resources (the majority of which come from the government to begin with). The dude played Bioshock one too many times and has just enough sense not to try to build his city underwater. I don't know if lack of resources is really what stifles applied scientific research. There's already a lot of junk science and research that is out there (a tonne of academic publications are never cited and only serve as bullet points on a resume) and it could be argued that funding applied science research more heavily would only attract more low value "me-too" research. That argument shouldn't be to hard for people in this thread to accept--we are in the thread where people constantly bitch about how the over-investment in startup companies leads to me-too companies which don't add any value.
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Mar 31, 2016 20:31
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Emacs Headroom posted:Not every piece of science has value, but some does. That means there's a return on investment for scientific research. I'm saying that a lot of the research even at the very top tier is pretty bad and goes nowhere. Do we really need more of it? I'm not complaining about negative results--I'm complaining about like, if you had to explain the point and hopes of the project honestly, and not using advertising grant proposal spin, you'd have to conclude that it is a high risk, low reward project, or the project only sounds like a good idea if you don't have an understanding of the technical requirements that you need to beat the current technology (this stuff gets funded all the time!). I'm mostly talking about applied science and engineering projects. blowfish posted:The funding agency people get buried under a mountain of funding applications, and even after tossing out the stupid proposals for idiots that mountain of funding applications is still too large. The funding agency people now need to whittle down the mountain further, and start applying criteria like "what they're trying to do sounds like it might work" and "that prof has a history of producing results" and "I am only one person and can't realistically understand every single field of science and I have finite time so I can't actually evaluate anyone's results", so everything in a field too different from the overworked grant agency guy's gets tossed, everything that's too ambitious gets tossed, and everything from people who haven't produced results according to overly simplistic metrics like H-index, number of paper and which journal they went into, etc. gets tossed. If at this point the pile of remaining applications is still too large, everything from people who haven't previously gotten big grants from you or another well-known funder gets tossed. If the pile is still too large, really silly criteria get applied. Right now, there are funding agencies rejecting grant applications for a punctuation mistake or for using a slightly wrong font size. This doesn't mean much to me. Mostly what you are saying here is that getting research funding is competitive. I say that it should be, because a lot of the stuff which even makes the cut isn't that great. And I'm not saying that the research isn't great because it had a negative result--I'm saying that the research isn't great because the idea is high risk low reward, or the idea is predicated on a misunderstanding of current technology. The other thing that you are saying here is that it is hard to gauge what is a good research proposal and what is a bad research proposal, especially if you are not an expert. This is a good point. I guess because of this, if you can't find a way to better evaluate proposals, you are obligated to fund a tonne of bad research too to randomly stumble upon the good ideas. This, in my opinion, is the strongest argument for increasing research funding. You can basically always use this argument though, no matter the funding level. Also, you can always use it in support of increasing funding for tech startup companies, no matter what the funding climate is. blowfish posted:As a result, everyone applies everywhere to do research closely related to that year's strategic statements of the relevant funding agencies that they can pretend will have ~impact~ (by being applied/easy to commercialise, looking cool so it goes into clickbait articles, whatever) but isn't actually too hard, and aims to publish any barely-interesting finding in as high-ranking a journal as possible, i.e. a bunch of low value me-too research. Because nobody knows which grants will get funded, everyone writes a PhD student or postdoc position into every grant application who will be expected to janitor their experiments and computer with next to no help, instead of employing permanent mid-level research staff + permanent assistants who have a loving clue how to fix the equipment when the new guy breaks it on their first day. I agree that academic research should be done more by professionals rather than graduate students. Having graduate students do the work is pretty inefficient. You have to spend a lot of time training the student, and then after a little while, the student leaves, often to work in a field totally unrelated to what he or she was trained in, and you have to start the training process over again. Maybe there should be fewer Ph.D. students. Many Ph.D. students go on to jobs which do not really require a Ph.D. It is a pretty big waste. The types of industries which actually need Ph.D. level experts in a particular field can fund academic research themselves if they want to pay for the training of Ph.D. level experts to enter their industry. They'll know better than the government what skills could be economically useful. I agree with what you are saying regarding dumb funding incentives to some extent. However, alternately, you could explain the me-too research as, it is extremely difficult to come up with a totally original research idea which, when the proposal is carefully analyzed, has no major show-stopping flaws and could be promising. Since doing that is extremely tough, many professors, unable to generate their own ideas, instead put all of their effort into working on current fads in the research community or they put all of their effort into studying the same types of problems that they have been studying for the past 30 years with not much interesting coming out of it. blowfish posted:If you look at Germany, which is more and more becoming the centre of European academia (except for nuclear engineering), you have some aspects of this. Profs have a reasonable amount of base level funding in addition to their salary (used to be more, but still better than most other countries), where a chair of a random scientific field can expect to spend mid-five figures per year before grants even at a mid tier university nobody has ever heard of, and can thus employ an assistant and/or keep the lab running. In addition, the most successful institutes (Max Planck institutes etc.) tend to run on the principle of hiring directors capable of sensibly spending a several-million-euro budget however they want, with even the groups hired by the director often getting a yearly pile of cash to burn with a note saying "do something interesting", and produce a shitload of top-tier research. Note that the other half of the problem isn't solved in Germany, and due to high barriers to entry to the top tier academia actually sucks hard for early career scientists (see below). I have talked with someone who got a Ph.D. in applied science in Germany and went on to do a post-doc in America, and he said some things that kind of contradict what you say here. One of the things he said was that he was shocked at how American professors can over-promise results, applications, etc. in their proposals, continually under-deliver and still get funding. He said something to the effect that the research proposals in Germany were much more conservative and to underdeliver would basically get you blacklisted from future funding. He was in engineering/applied physics. Maybe it is different in biology. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 15:08
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Nocturtle posted:A bunch of newly jobless physics PhDs combined with the tech bubble bursting could really hit bay area salaries. The physics world can't be that big to matter for that. Nocturtle posted:Although there might not be that much demand for former academics with mediocre programming skills and a tenuous grasp of statistics. Haha, if you listen to physicists describe their capabilities, you'll learn that actually, they are the best programmers, better than professional computer programmers, and also the best statisticians, better than people who actually study statistics. Although you should give them credit, they've got to be somewhat good at statistics because you kind of have to be to be able detect the extremely weak and esoteric effects that they spend their entire careers chasing after.
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Apr 2, 2016 20:07
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Emacs Headroom posted:blah_blah doesn't spend all day in YOSPOS, but my impression is that he does know what he's doing. lol, President Obama doesn't spend all day in Debate & Discussion, but my impression is that he knows what he's doing
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Apr 4, 2016 02:27
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Ha, I wonder if my predictions in this thread will turn out to be wrong. I claimed earlier in this thread that increasing government spending for science projects may not necessarily be a good idea. Watch as in the next 8 years, President Trump will pass legislation increasing DoD funding, and a marginal graduate student science project which wouldn't have gotten funded in a more conservative funding climate becomes the next steam engine/radio/internet.
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Apr 5, 2016 13:12
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Regarding video game programmers not being paid as well as other programmers: why is this so shocking? A lot of people go into computer science because they love video games, and are willing to do anything to get into the industry. It's like nerd show business.
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Apr 24, 2016 04:24
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Panfilo posted:So what's going to happen in the long run? Are we in for another huge recession when people get tired of throwing fistfuls of money at wacky monkeycheese ideas? I don't know the numbers, but I'd be shocked if startups were a big enough portion of the economy to strongly affect the entire economy. I'm going to make the same argument below that posters in Debate & Discussion commonly make in defense of scientific research into old, tired, very unlikely to ever economically matter physics research: if venture capital/esoteric physics research is so small when compared to the rest of the economy, why obsess over how it isn't the most economically efficient activity? It's like playing the lottery but with much more uncertain odds--maybe you can hit the jackpot and win big! Venture capital isn't even taxpayer money, so it doesn't necessarily have to be your money that they are gambling with. Obviously there is a lot of stupid stuff and dumb ideas in startups to make fun of, but I think a lot of the hostility in the thread towards them is just culture warfare. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 21:03 on May 13, 2016 |
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May 13, 2016 20:53
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quote:When it comes to startups it isn't easy to say which is the most "economically efficient" activity.
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May 13, 2016 22:56
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Dude, I think Spazzle's post is pretty reasonable. Spazzle is just explaining why this thread's knee-jerk ideology is naïve. IMO, this thread is pretty weird--it is kind of like bizarro D&D. In this thread, government laws are just, by virtue of being government laws. However, every other thread in this forum mostly consists of complaining about the government's laws and policies. Also, in this thread, profit is good, and when a company is unprofitable it is bad. This is to be contrasted with the rest of D&D where profit is bad and profitable companies are literally evil. Finally, in this thread, it is commonly thought that over-investment in start-up companies has produced a lot of me-too companies which add no value. However, if you were to say the same thing about scientific research, government funding for the arts, etc, in other threads, you'd be shunned, and posters would swear up and down that that effect would be impossible and that there is all of this great scientific research and art which is being stifled by lack of investment and that more investment always means more output. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Jun 9, 2016 |
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Jun 9, 2016 05:15
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Bushiz posted:The government laws are just because the government has repeatedly proven a pressing public need to have things like food safety laws. Contrarily, there's no pressing public need to have hate crime laws protecting police officers. This is not a hypocritical view in any way and trying to frame it as such is straight-up delusional. 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 bizarro D & D. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Jun 9, 2016 |
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Jun 9, 2016 05:41
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OwlFancier posted:This thread is overwhelmingly pro regulation because startups are overwhelmingly prone to ignoring loving important regulations. I sincerely believe that some posters in this thread would defend to the death even the most stupid, pointless, and wasteful government regulation if it gave them an opportunity to rag on a startup company. This thread has moved beyond "make fun of stupid and bad ideas and other dumb stuff in startup companies" and "chastise startup companies for producing/having sociologically dangerous ideas/effects". It is currently the "make lazy kneejerk criticisms of startup companies" thread.
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Jun 9, 2016 20:53
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sbaldrick posted:Remember at the start of the thread when someone said the North Carolina was a great place for people to live because the cities are progressively. I think the often-stated idea that you have to live in NY/SF/LA to be able to have a 'peaceful Republican-free existence' is totally stupid. A lot of other major metropolitan areas in the US are great places for progressive-minded people to live and many don't cost an arm and a leg to live there. Sure, if you live in the other cities, you might not be able to participate in the cultural avant-garde, but could you really claim yourself as a member of the avant-garde if you post on this website? silence_kit fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Jun 21, 2016 |
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Jun 21, 2016 03:44
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Coolness Averted posted:a cool and reasonable response to gay/trans/brown people saying "I'd rather not be in a state that actively denies me civil rights/is cool with me getting murdered" Yes, it is a reasonable response. You are incredibly delusional and probably form your warped view of the world from spending too much time in the many "complain about Republicans" D&D threads if you think that the entire US outside of the Castro or whatever is one giant Klan rally. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Jun 21, 2016 |
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Jun 21, 2016 05:00
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Here's another headline: Laws In Red States Actually Permit Gay Murder, According to Prolific Forums Poster
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Jun 21, 2016 12:29
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The following argument has been iterated many times in this thread, but techies are just scapegoats and really are undeserving targets for clueless liberals' frustration towards the cost of living in SF and the rest of the Bay Area. D & D posters and other progressives constantly complain about how millennials are not doing well economically and how they should have better opportunities, while in the same breath chastise young techies for making too much money. The policies enacted by the landed gentry in SF and the rest of the Bay Area to limit the housing supply are the real reason why it is so expensive to live there. In an ideal world, the landowners would pay for the homeless shelters through their property taxes.
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Jul 2, 2016 01:02
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ShadowHawk posted:No you see the problem is companies that pay their workers too much and not at all the landed gentry extracting the highest rents in the nation Again, this thread is bizarro D&D: in the rest of this forum, the party line is that millennials have been dealt a bad hand, deserve to have more economic opportunities, etc. etc., however in this thread, young techie millennials are literal villains for making too much money and for spending huge fractions of their salaries on rental housing in one of the most desirable areas in the US. Also, in this thread, the start-up companies that they work for are bad because they aren't profitable. This is to be contrasted with the party line in all of the other threads in this forum. If you were to read the rest of D&D, you'd learn that profit is bad and profitable companies are evil. Everything is upside down in this thread. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jul 3, 2016 |
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Jul 3, 2016 01:57
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archangelwar posted:Yes these giant tech companies will pick up and move their headquarters over a minuscule tax as that is literally the only reason they are located in that area and nothing else. I hear they are already scoping out Tupelo, MS as the next destination due to the sweet 20 year tax deals the state has been cutting. They could just move their headquarters out of SF and to one of the many other cities in the Bay Area. Most tech companies in the Bay Area aren't headquartered in SF anyway. I have been told that Berkeley, CA, despite being a pretty nice place to live and the home of a pretty prestigious university with a good engineering school, isn't really home to a lot of technology companies because its taxes on businesses are much higher than nearby cities. A lot of small companies started by Berkeley professors do set up shop there since it is convenient, but later move elsewhere in the Bay Area to avoid paying the Berkeley taxes if their company makes it and actually starts making money. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Jul 3, 2016 |
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Jul 3, 2016 04:58
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ocrumsprug posted:Sounds like it is accomplishing exactly what it is intended to accomplish. What, the Berkeley tax? Probably. Berkeley is a pretty NIMBY place. If you are referring to the proposed SF tax, pushing tech companies out of SF proper and into a nearby municipality won't help lower rents in SF. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Jul 3, 2016 |
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Jul 3, 2016 05:21
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Halloween Jack posted:Straight razor shaving is for exactly the kind of shaving nerd who would say, in all seriousness, "A classic wet shave takes you on an aesthetic journey back to the root of your male essence." People who are so boring, they can talk about shaving for hours. Because they're obsessed with some fedora-wearing idea of masculinity, but philately is too exciting for them. I think most of the benefit to wet shaving is in the soap and brush i.e. not the part which saves you money and not in the razor. You really get a closer shave with less irritation with the newer multi-blade razors, and you don't have to obsess over technique like with the old-fashioned safety razor.
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Jul 20, 2016 16:36
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Halloween Jack posted:I'll concede the possibility that the high-quality multi-blade razors shave closer and with no more irritation, as well as being easier. That's if you throw them away after using them once. But practically speaking, they're loving expensive, so people are reusing blunted blades with bits of hair and dead skin trapped in them. Ones where they can't actually see or control the edge of the blade like you can with a safety razor. No way, the cartridges don't go bad nearly as quickly as the double-edged razor blades. The cartridges are still good and are superior to even a fresh razor blade for many uses. The razor blades go bad really quickly--the Feathers I used to use would become noticeably blunt after one use and start irritating my skin. It is probably still more economical to use the old fashioned razor blades though. litany of gulps posted:I've never found that mastering technique requires much of an obsession with a safety razor. I strongly disagree--I've used both (I used an old fashioned safety razor for a couple of years since I had read on the internet that it was so great--I've since switched back to normal safety razors) and strongly prefer the cartridges. Shaving even using an old cartridge is easier, less irritating, and faster than the old fashioned safety razor. The brush and soap are better than the gels or creams IMO. I think a lot of people who sing the praises of shaving like we are still in the 1950's wrongly attribute the effect of the soap and brush to the safety razor.
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Jul 21, 2016 03:08
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MickeyFinn posted: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. Huh? Visit any department store, and you'll find that the majority of the store is catered towards women.
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Jul 23, 2016 05:36
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Paradoxish posted:This seems pretty logical since taxis are a thing. Most people have always had alternatives to driving drunk, they just choose not to use them. The result is surprising to me. Usually when you make something cheaper and more convenient (Uber is cheaper and more convenient than taxis) its use becomes more widespread. This argument gets used all of the time (maybe even by the same posters in this thread) in gun threads in D&D. The argument goes, even though there are many ways to commit suicide/commit violent crime, guns make it easier to do and so they increase suicide and violent crime rates. Again, this thread is bizarro D&D. An argument or principle which posters apply in other threads doesn't work here and the opposite is commonly accepted.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:16
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ocrumsprug posted:Used car dealership that is quick to disregard laws they think are silly. Lol, I made a prediction earlier in this thread and at the time I thought it was a little hyperbolic, but it looks like it actually came true: silence_kit posted:I sincerely believe that some posters in this thread would defend to the death even the most stupid, pointless, and wasteful government regulation if it gave them an opportunity to rag on a startup company.
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Aug 2, 2016 06:41
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I would think that a new company offering a non-slimy alternative to used car dealers would be applauded, but we are in topsy-turvy land where we obsess over properly complying with blue laws. Incredible.
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Aug 2, 2016 16:31
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Whatever happened to CarMax? What about CarMax? If this post is just a passive-aggressive way of saying that CarMax is a similar business, I say, so what? The more alternatives to used car dealers, the better.
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Aug 2, 2016 17:09
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:This might not be the best tangent for the unicorns thread, but what are people like car salesmen supposed to do when technology literally obsoletes their job or makes their gravy train into something that's a lot harder to eke a living out of? No, it is a good tangent for the thread. If CarMax, Beepi, etc., were to totally get rid of used car dealers, and create overall lower costs of ownership for cars (I'm not saying that this is what they are doing--if you use their services you probably can't get the prices you could get by haggling with car dealers), then arguably that would be a net benefit to society. Unlike taxi-cab rides and hotel rooms, basically almost everybody in the US, including poor people, needs a car and spends a lot of money on cars, and would benefit from lower costs of car ownership. It's like how food now is cheaper than it has ever been. Sure the process of industrializing farming has eliminated many jobs, but everybody, including poor people, eats and people now don't have to pay as much for food, which I would say is a net social good.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:24
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:Why do you think most professors refuse to deal with funding their research through the private sector? Often it is because the research is totally irrelevant and not interesting to anybody in the private sector. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Sep 11, 2016 |
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Sep 11, 2016 04:18
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Discendo Vox posted:It turns out that information doesn't want to be free- in fact there is a cost if we want to be able to know or keep its value. People want information to be free, and they also don't want to see or experience the costs involved Are you an idiot? Do you think that the academic publishing companies charge exorbitant fees because it is expensive to host .pdfs on a website and have volunteers do all of the work? There's no way in hell that academic publishing companies are operating anywhere close to at cost. Discendo Vox posted:Also, even interested and generous private sector funding sources tend to suck as people who can indirectly control research. There are a lot of nightmare stories about not only corporate bias in research, but also just having to coordinate and maintain funding from people who don't know the field involved, or how research works generally. In many areas of applied science, academia actually lags behind what industry is doing. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Sep 11, 2016 |
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Sep 11, 2016 04:47
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duz posted:Except medallion cabs are street hails, the very thing Uber isn't? The point is that taxi companies aren't really that much better for the drivers than Uber is. Ignatius J. Reilly, I mean, Discendo Vox just made a claim earlier in the thread that the way taxi cab companies are structured is ethical, which is just lol
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Sep 14, 2016 02:25
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Almost entirely from AWS. I don't think that Amazon is really losing money on each sale. Jeff Bezos, being a megalo-maniac, takes the profits and reinvests it into the business so that the business can offer even more products and services. If Amazon were to stop trying out new things, they'd probably be a pretty profitable company. That's very different from selling everything at a loss and hoping that their competition goes away so they can raise price and be profitable. Amazon's prices actually aren't really that great for a lot of their products, but they are incredibly convenient and have great customer service.
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Sep 15, 2016 00:35
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peter banana posted:3. Milk is sucked out of a cows boob by a machine that will also take any pus that comes out of the sores on her teats with it. 
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Oct 21, 2016 16:58
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MiddleOne posted:There simply is not that high a demand for better wireless alternatives outside of mobiles. I think you've got this backwards. It's not that there is no demand for greater wireless communication capacity, it's just that there isn't that much inexpensive wireless communication capacity so people use wired communication instead. You are right though--basic physics kind of dictates that wired communication will never go completely extinct. Fibers can carry incredible amounts of data over long distances and I think it's unlikely that wireless technology will be able to replace fiber as the back-bone of our communication network. Wireless may become good enough and cheap enough to connect from hubs to homes though. Arsenic Lupin posted:It also has to do with successful legal tactics to delay Google's access to utility poles and the like. There is a technological problem --which Google may well have solved-- and there's a social/political problem, which they demonstrably have not. That, also, is typical of Google: solving the technology alone. I don't know if Google really created that much technology in that area. I think they discovered that it is way harder to be a company which actually sells real-world and not virtual products and services. The planning and supply chain management for companies which sell real things is like a million times harder than being an internet company which started at around the time the internet really took off. IMO, companies like Amazon and Tesla are way more impressive than Google for this reason. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Oct 28, 2016 |
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Oct 28, 2016 03:37
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