a5seo

I’m totally going to drop this link next time I see a passive aggressive link dropped in a comment! /s

> organic marketing etc but then you are just trading time for dollars.

But the alternative, trading dollars for dollars, is essentially just arbitrage, which tends to disappear from competition. Organic marketing is the only sustainable source of alpha I’ve found in affiliate marketing.

I agree. In Austin, Montessori preschools tend to be more rigid and doctrinaire. I don’t know if this is true everywhere, but they also tend to have disproportionately high representation of immigrant families. My impression, based on 8 years of interactions at two different Montessori schools, is immigrant parents seem more deferential toward the teachers and administrators. And more interested in measurable academic outcomes. So the schools respond by keeping the kids on a more linear path with engaging the various “works” (Montessorispeak for projects or learning kits). That said, I think it’s still a great system.

I grew up attending a public elementary school in Sacramento that implemented Open Education. It had many similarities to Montessori— kids received a weekly “contract” with their personalized learning plan and assignments due. If you wanted to do all your math work on Monday, reading on Tuesday, and spend Wednesday through Friday on science, you could (within reason since some things required group lessons). It was an amazing system and I feel extremely fortunate to have experienced it.

That said, now I kind of wonder how much the California open-minded, seeker mentality was responsible for this.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/03/27/520953343/open-sc...

You don’t get rich by writing checks. Except pg.

Reading this account made me think of a paper I read in grad school about the Mann Gulch fire and how quickly one’s ability to make sense of the situation unravels.

https://www.cs.unibo.it/~ruffino/Letture%20TDPC/K.%20Weick%2...

That’s a deep burn.

If you have any capital saved, maybe it’s time to go on QuietLight or another site and buy a small SaaS company with an SBA loan and work for yourself.

Wait, doesn’t Austin have a billboard ban? There are some billboards but they’re grandfathered in and cannot be rebuilt if they fall over.

https://www.kut.org/austin/2022-04-21/advertising-companies-...

Texas only adds more clean generation because it’s way less capital intensive than building a natural gas or coal plant. Those plants require $500M+ minimum and the returns just aren’t that great. My wife is an energy attorney in Texas and handles power purchase and interconnection deals like these all day long.

Solar and wind deals require far less capital, go up faster, and aren’t subject to the supply risk of natural gas or coal.

Texas also has a lot of clean energy thanks to sun and terrain. The Edwards plateau creates some of the best wind generation opportunities in the US.

Texas also attracts energy heavy industries because it has relatively cheap power. Which we’ve learned partly results from not paying anyone to have excess capacity… which is all fun and games until you have winter storm Yuri roll in and your only option is to “shed load” which btw kills some people.

Another aspect of Texas is that we have demand response contracts whereby certain users get paid simply for the ability to “take” power when required. This is very attractive to bitcoin miners. Prices here go negative from time to time which is pretty wild.

All of this attracts a lot of energy-intensive industries to Texas.

I’m so glad I’m not alone in noticing this “provider” bs. Peel back the creepy Orwellian doublespeak and all you find is cynical ploy to save money by creating a false equivalence of doctors’ work with non-doctors. The health care industry is just the latest home of the money-grubbing vampire squid of finance. Sickens me.

Really great job. Whether it’s legal for customers to share this info or not is really a gray area.

If the data is only shared in an aggregate fashion, I doubt they can do much without a subpoena. And then what? Sue the website? Sorry, no. Section 230.

John Doe suits against anonymous customers?

Nothing requires PriceLevel to retain the PII of users… they can capture the data, validate, and flush the PII. “Sorry, we have no information about the contributor of this data.”

My sense is this will be the primary innovation of this service— how to get this info and keep it useful to end users without very much ability to vet it. Worth the effort.

You should read Imposters in the Temple by Martin Anderson for a full critique of academia’s pedagogical failures.

The power of stories like this never fails to humble me. There are countless (less dramatic) incidents like this in every life. Your experience brings them back into focus.

Can’t speak for OP but I moved to Exploratory.io. And the beauty of it is, it’s a GUI for R so you can export your transformation steps to R if needed.

Maybe if your time interval is super short and you have hundreds of years of data? Otherwise, I’m not sure what they’re on about.

They cost $50-70 each on Amazon or ULine. Awesome for stackable storage. With some plywood and casters, you can easily stack 6-8 tall in the garage and move them around with ease. Highly recommend.

I bought Webvan stock on their IPO day. Lost around $5k. (I was 22).

Amazing service. Terrible business model: boil the ocean, premature scale, hire the head of Andersen Consulting as CEO. Every bad, nonsensical decision.

And yet, the core was valid: a lot of people want their groceries delivered. When I went to business school a couple years later, the CMO of H-E-B spoke to my class (later, President) and I asked when they’d offer delivery. His response: “we believe people enjoy the experience of walking the aisles.” Well, Scott, whose parking lot is now 50% curbside pickup? Who spent 9 digits to acquire Favor? You’re welcome, you rich bastard.

It’s a good thing the grocery business had enough margin for error for these people to come around to learn the correct lessons from Webvan.

This 2008 article in Wired does a good job of explaining how aggregation, in theory, enables bundled mortgages to create a 1+1=3 situation:

https://www.wired.com/2009/02/wp-quant/

Except the model was flawed and carried much higher tail risks. Risks that the ratings agencies failed to catch when they gave them AAA ratings in the debt market.

AviatoError? F-ing Erlich.

I founded a startup. We raised $2.5M, not all at once. We banked at SVB. It sucked. Subpar online tools. $200/mo “analysis fee,” never once had a “relationship” with anyone. Maybe we were never big enough to be relevant. That’s fair.

My advice: use a retail bank until you have a few million in revenue, then shop around. Make the SVB’s of the world earn your business. SVB in particular was so incredibly entitled.

I’m glad they failed more spectacularly than my little startup.

As a solo developer, I guess I’m going to start tracking how fast I type and the size of my code commits each day, and that, my dear IRS friend, is the only part of my day I spent “developing software.”

The reality is that even if you hire a “software developer,” they aren’t going to spend 100% on it. So now you have a situation where the IRS is supposed to audit how? Watch how much support you did? How much training and coaching other developers? How much email/scheduling/admin bs? Was that meeting about software development or customer research? The fools who write these laws are just ridiculously out of touch.

Reading this was hard because having failed a few years ago, after 7 years and $3m raised for a B2B content marketing startup, it all rings so true.

We hired a VP of Sales (who was previously VP of Sales at a public company) when we had $20k MRR (avg deal size was $3k/mo), non of the four founders /wanted/ to lead sales, we hired a $5k/mo PR firm… we blew so much money trying buy our way out of figuring out repeatable GTM motions. Realistically, as founders, we were not up to the task.

Just make a service that easily ports (or reverse proxies) content from Medium and Substack into a static site hosted on Netlify for free with a custom domain.

Users can continue authoring on those platforms but can begin promoting their own-domain version and gradually move their users off.

I used Rackspace back in 2001-2002. Made the switch after hosting my JSP web app on servlets.net and experiencing an extended outage with no support. The difference in support was nothing short of miraculous.

I’m inclined to think Apollo failed to understand the investments necessary to make such a business work, and figured they could squeeze costs out of the business without losing value. Funny how these finance types always seem to find themselves suffering from “Black Swan” events every few years.

I’m glad you didn’t have any problems getting reservations. That wasn’t my experience. Fwiw, I mainly fly fish. I need to be in by 8am so I can hike to a high lake and get 3-4 hrs of fishing before the storm clouds roll in. It’s a different use case because it’s not helpful to me to be there crazy early, unlike climbers and through hikers who, sure, can start as early as they want. I kind of do need timed entry to work. And it just doesn’t. But good for you and your good fortune. I guess I should just be luckier or drop fly fishing. Sucks to be me, amiright?

The issue is that the site falls over under load. Or seems to, hence my point about getting their analytics data via a FOIA request. They probably need to use Cloudflare’s queue. But what incentive do they have? They’re selling out every reservation and getting every $2 fee they can. It doesn’t matter if the user experience is unpredictable and capricious.

No, it’s illegal to resell a reservation. I posted a joke scalper ad on Craigslist (forgot to take it down) for a national park reservation (this was right after they were introduced and I was salty about it) and they got a grand jury subpoena for my account info and investigated me for reselling government property. They didn’t charge me once they realized I didn’t do anything more than post and ad (and in protest at that), but scalping permits is highly illegal.

It’s a nightmare for booking timed entry reservations. Rocky Mountain National Park opens reservations on the 1st of each summer month for the upcoming month and the site is just slammed. You click a reservation time, spin spin spin, then error.

It’s honestly infuriating when you really need to get 2 or 3 days of reservations before 8am for long hikes so you know, you don’t get killed by lightning, and the website just screws you over.

I’d love to FOIA their analytics data and find out how many times users get errored out after selecting a time slot.

The head of Colorado’s energy agency literally almost died this summer because he couldn’t get an early enough reservation. This stuff actually is life and death.

Built a niche ratings and reviews site that grew to 10M visitors a year before I sold it.

I’m mainly proud of the fact that we kept strict separation between revenue ops and content moderation despite a lot of pressure from billion dollar companies to delete reviews they didn’t like. We left lots of money on the table, but fuck those companies.

15 years on, reviews are woven into most websites in the industry and they’re all pretty biased and controlled by the companies we resisted before selling.

Hah, I thought that, too. I Googled for this person and didn’t find anything. Funny how something just didn’t seem right in that testimonial.

“If I had a million dollars We wouldn't have to eat Kraft dinner But we would eat Kraft dinner Of course we would we'd just eat more”