Anyway, in order to change something ( implicitly for the better.. one hopes ), one should be able to know the current approach. Based on the articicle itself ("It has also stumbled from farming inexperience."), that is not the case.
Personally, I think it's laziness - too lazy to plan it out better, to learn what you are dealing with, to find outcomes that benefit someone other than yourself.
But there is something to be said for disruption, and understanding it won't be perfect immediately but can be improved beyond the current situation.
It's sort of like overthrowing a dictatorship and replacing it with democracy - the first few years are tough, but the future goes far beyond any dictatorship (it's called, in some places, a J curve).
But that doesn't excuse the laziness in any way, or that often these people do it for only their own benefit.
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A lesson I had to learn when I was first in charge: when deciding a course of action, ask myself, 'would I accept that from a subordinate?' If you report to no one, it's hard to hold yourself to the same or, if you are doing it right, higher standards. That is the corruption of power.
If you really want to see a person's character, give them power.
Uber isn’t what it is because they broke the law, but because the vast public approve of their actions.
My sense is this is in decline
Predicability - You wouldn't know how much the fare would be when getting into a taxi. In addition, driving indirect routes to charge more and claiming the ride cost more than the normal fare were common scams. Uber/Lyft tells you the price before you order the ride.
Ease of payment - taxis had card machines pre Uber but the machines were frequently "broken" unless the rider spent time arguing that they had no other way to pay. Then, in a miraculous turn of events, the machine recovered.
Accountability - If a taxi driver stole from you, you had essentially no chance of finding them again, especially as a tourist. Uber/Lyft stores this information and surfaces aggregate reviews.
Yeah? So do I. I really wish we still had them everywhere, but thanks to Uber, you can pretty much only get a cab in Manhattan.
I take a cab over an Uber any time its practicable, it's almost always cheaper. For the same price as an Uber, my cab driver gets a really nice tip.
I suggest watching this with subtitles, while it is a comedic skit taken to the extreme you can see how taxi drivers were viewed before ride sharing apps disrupted the taxi industry.
Just vertical farming is a bit too expensive still, but with animals it's already vertical.
... how often does that happen? Usually it's just illegal cabs or e-waste littering as a service.
Is there examples of the alternative?
* 3d Printing
* Cloud Computing
* The iPhone
* Google Translate
* Google Maps
* CRISPR
* Netflix
* SpaceX
* Electric Vehicles
* OpenAI
* Drones
You may not include Uber in that list, but I would. I vividly remember taxis before Uber.
You are free to pick apart the companies and their origins to decide if they are enough of an outsider for you.
3d printing, iphone, google, crispr, netflix have little to nothing to do with them.
Honestly why is CRISPR in this list, that is from scientists and labs not tech billionaires and busniess.
Cloud computing has been impacted a lot by Zuck and invented/reinvented by Bezos yes (not that Bezos was in the list I replied to).
Google Maps and Translate were both bought and innovation happened outside the space we're talking about.
Spacex and Electric Vehicles. Musk got onboard after the fact and used money and influence to push the existing path forward. The telling part is once that path is done things derail quickly when Musk is the one coming up with ideas (cybertruck, booring company etc..)
If this was my money I'd rather take the higher odds for any improvement and have deep understanding of the state of the art at the table. But it's not, so I'm delighted Larry is spending his money on something that truly could help everyone with their most basic needs rather than spending it on more sailing boats, hobby rockets or similar.
This has yet to really prove itself to be the case.
The context of these comments often imply that at no point before SV existed did anyone invest large amounts of money in something that failed to work.
The reason why economic growth is rare (most economic growth that occurs globally is due to the impact of technology invented outside the country, 95% of countries globally have zero organic growth) is because it is extremely disruptive and means that someone with nothing other than money, who may not have been approved by society can invent something.
The point about disrupt vs reform above is correct...it just ignores the fact that reform has never been successful (despite it being repeatedly tried by politicians) because economic growth is so damaging to vested interests (there are multiple books about this topic, Innovator's Dilemma is one...I worked as an equity analyst, the number of examples of a company actually turning it around when faced with technological change are very few, the number of examples of a company bailing-in taxpayers due to political connections when faced with technological change is too large to count, this is particularly case outside the US because so much technological change comes from the US so calls to "protect" domestic industry are frequent and economically crippling).
This seems like more a characteristic of "winner take all (or most)" capitalism rather than a characteristic of innovation.
A new technology potentially creates a new market opportunity and you have everyone bum-rush it as quickly as possible with as much money as possible in the hopes of being the new monopolist.
At any rate, this Ellison play wasn't about an innovation. It was about muscling into a mature market he didn't understand (an "eating-the-world play" to use SV lingo).
Fire,the wheel, farming, animal husbandry, spinning; all probably not the result of an investment bubble.
In more recent times: Antibiotics, vaccination ( against smallpox).
There are plenty of cases where humanity advance in a higher leap without giant capital concentrations.
Do you not look at the rest of the world and think: if this is so easy then why is technical innovation limited to a handful of countries? It makes no sense. How can you look at the economic history and think this? It makes no sense.
We are fixing this."
I didn't have that impression of him. Many people will say he has high standards, and can seem intense or maybe grumpy on occasion, but AFAIK, many of the countless people he's helped will also say that he has a heart of gold. (I personally knew two undergrads who said they'd gone through rough spots, and he above-and-beyond helped them.)
Also, at times it seemed that Andy knows everyone. My own small experience with this... Years after I'd graduated, a non-tech friend mentioned they'd love to work at this super-cool tech company, but friend did qualitative research, not code. So I email Andy (who I might never have even spoken 1-on-1 with), out of the blue: long shot, but does he happen to know how someone would approach that company, when they probably don't know why they might want this skill they've never heard of. He replied back: sure, the head of engineering there had been his student, and here's how to reach him, with a referral from Andy.
(I want to call him Prof. van Dam, out of respect, but reportedly he finds that "stuffy and undemocratic": https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-an... )
Andy van Dam cleared his throat and looked right at Steve. "Well, its really impressive, Steve, and of course we'll want to join your program. But it's not exactly what we've been waiting for."
Steve looked a little angry. "What are you waiting for? You're going to have to wait a long time to find something better than the Mac!"
"Well, 128K isn't nearly enough memory to do what we want, not even close, and the screen is just too small. We're waiting for a 3M machine, and most of the other colleges are, too."
"A what?"
"A 3M machine. There was a recently published paper that coined the term. You know, a workstation with at least a megabyte of memory, a million pixel display, and a megaflop of computational horsepower. We believe that's what we need for an effective educational workstation."
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT:
Jobs met Paul Berg, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at a luncheon in Silicon Valley held to honor President of France François Mitterrand.[4]: 72 [6] Berg was frustrated by the time and expense of researching recombinant DNA via wet laboratories, and suggested that Jobs should use his influence to create a "3M computer" that is designed for higher education.
Move fast and break things seems to only work in software where "broken" means roll back to the previous state. But we have a ridiculous amount of wealth tied up with billionaire fools who think that this is the most efficient way to make progress. At this point, SV takeover of capital is actively detrimental to progress that benefits the average person and economy.
Often real disruption occurs from people you wouldn't expect
Starlink was possible due to the expertise within SpaceX, and the ability to subsidize the hoisting of the satellites into orbit.
Put it this way the ISP in my country on the other side of the world has now been disrupted and now Starlink enables farmers in remote deserts can access high speed internet, due to a new Space exploration company subsidizing the cost of satellites based on its technology to hoist satellites into orbit to provide such internet.
It is a culmination of things going right and the right industry movement that creates disruption.
And taxis were already a very regulated industry, that isn't actually that old. Not only was there on-going change, side-stepping regulations was one of the biggest advantages. It's not the same as claiming to be able leapfrog many hundreds of years of development on greenhouse farming.
Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries. No-one thought this was possible, I assume there was someone somewhere who said that all the innovation was done, no leapfrogging, etc. (unsurprisingly, the only positive quote in the article is from an academic who works in the area and is aware the model has been proven). Indeed, you do actually see this today where people argue that it is pointless to try to produce food anymore, just ship it on polluting cargo ships...that will save the environment.
And, to be clear, the main issue with this is that it is politically disruptive. NL are tearing this industry apart. They have a gusher of cash, and are trying to shut it down. The article isn't about a man spending $500m on technological innovation...if he succeeded with this model, was making billions like NL, there would still be an article attempting to shut it down (and, if NL is anything to go by, succeeding).
Economic growth and innovation are very unpopular. Never forget this.
The Dutch built their agriculture industry on the back of the environment - they have massive problems keeping nitrogen runoff under control enough to pass EU-wide legal limits, and the question on how to transform the ag economy has crashed two governments by now. Continuing as-is is blatant cheating against other EU countries that do keep their nitrogen emissions under control, but any kind of reform will threaten people with very deep pockets.
This cultish "EU is the world" mentality is tiresome.
It was unprofitable until literally this quarter, and the majority of that profit was, I believe, earned from food delivery services.
Now that it's established... it isn't generally cheaper than taxis, it just has a slightly better app, though in many places that's not true anymore.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, you know how the taxi groups lobbied against public transportation, for example to airports? AWESOME, now there aren't just a bunch of local SMBs doing that, now there is an international mega corp doing that too.
They drove their competition out by offering rides far below the cost to provide them.
Now they're more expensive than what they replaced, and with far worse service.
Take pre-booking a car for an early flight for example. Taxi companies would ensure they had someone on shift ahead of time and refuse the booking if they couldn't accommodate you. Uber will accept your booking but leave you to hope that, around the time of your booking, someone decides to open the app and accept it.
It doesnt sound like it's obvious to the driver that it's a pre-booking either. So you'll often see drivers show up 15-20 minutes early, irate that you're not ready to leave.
The worst thing about Uber is that their price distortion seriously damaged their competition, who could not afford to burn tens billions of dollars on the service the business is meant to be making money from.
You try this with something like agriculture, which has increasingly become efficient and arguably made vast improvements over the last hundred years, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Remember than Larry Ellison is in it completely for himself and is willing to do anything I increase his bottom line. You cannot entrust something as important as agriculture to the likes of Ellison. In short: don’t trust Larry Ellison.
SV needs people who are young and dumb enough to go up against established players that older smarter people who are entrenched in the system know better than to go up against the giants to disrupt things.
Hell, the Traitorous Eight, once they managed to lock up enough capital are the ones who founded Silicon Valley, went up against the incumbent Shockley Semiconductor, founding Fairchild and Intel. They were the leading experts in their field at the time though, so maybe that's a bit different, but plenty of people, knowing too much about the whole situation have decided it's not worth it to try. Innovation doesn't come at the hands of those who don't try.
Computer science experts could have never built facebook or twitter.
> In his early twenties (1871), the Irish potato famine was fresh in memory, and new blight resistant American varieties were needed. Burbank developed an improved and blight resistant variety of the Russet potato, known as the Burbank or Idaho potato, still used widely today.
During the course of his work, over 800 unique and improved fruits, vegetables, spineless cactus, flowers and other plants were developed for commercial and home use.
Just as a general concept, no idea how it could apply to this case.
I also am no fan of the way these douchebag ignoramuses go about things and this is no attempt to excuse them or lionize them. Ellison is not a net positive for humanity.