907 karma · joined January 2, 2020
I once walked into a mall (pre-pandemic) in the middle of a weekday and all the retail stores were open...but empty. It seemed like a massive waste of resources just to keep the stores open when customers were all at work.
I recently did a rewatch of older Simpsons episodes lately and aside from the 90s references a lot of the economic conditions seems incredibly outdated. Much like watching Friends or even more "recent" shows like How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) where the characters undergo their lives in a big expensive city but not work constantly.
It's hard to suspend belief on those shows given the shenanigans they do. How on earth did they live in that apartment (Friends/HIMYM), or live in such a large single family home on one income? The shows end up having to address their own disbelief with rent control (Friends) or the Frank Grimes episode (The Simpsons).
Since I joined we’ve been SaaSifying the business model, and we’re going about it with an API first design. The ERP, running legacy code written in Clarion (I would be very surprised if anyone here has heard of it!), would expose its procedures and functions via a .NET layer, which would open up our ERP via an API.
With this approach, we’ve been able to 1) divide up responsibilities extremely clearly within our small team, 2) establish new integrations with relevant places we’ve never been able to before such as Shopify and 3) move existing features that the ERP has to a subscription model such as shipping rates, EDI document transfers, and automatic invoicing.
Needless to say I am very much for API and modular design. It’s better from a team organization perspective, since the responsibilities (and automated testing) is clear. From a non-technical perspective, our sales & support reps can see and understand when features are missing or where the bottlenecks are once we draw out how the API system is architected.
> "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
It’s funny, a friend of mine who’s been jumping around tech companies and recently joined a (non-Apple) FAANG had told me that I was taking the Apple secrecy way too seriously.
It’s kind of a unspoken rule at Apple that you just don’t talk about what you worked on while you’re there, and I just normalized that kind of behavior at future ventures for better or for worse. Every former employee I’ve spoken to agreed. HR had (and I’m sure they still do) meetings almost annually showing that leaking has serious implications, from factory checkpoints (even though we’re in SWE) to prevent parts from being leaked to post-mortems on how various HW and SW leaks that end up on MacRumors.
-Boyle Heights was a predominately Latino community in east LA, which had the East LA interchange built right through it (I-10/I-5).
-Communities along what is currently I-105 were opposed to the construction since the 1970s for the typical NIMBY reasons, and these communities were predominately Black.
And the reverse:
-CA-2 was supposed to route from Silver Lake to Santa Monica via Beverly Hills, but community opposition prevented the freeway from being built and is why there's large parts of LA (mid-city/Melrose) that are far away from a freeway.
-I-710 was intended to connect Long Beach to Pasadena, but the city of South Pasadena protested heavily in preventing the freeway from being built and closing the gap. This litigation occurred up until the late-2010s when the CA State Assembly and Governor Newsom ended the 710 project once and for all.
Mickey is still huge as the peer comment states. Mickey shaped beignets, Mickey hats, Mickey costumes, etc. Just that everything else grew up to have as much, if not more, brand equity than Mickey.
I'm also surprised something like this hasn't come out of Japan already, but then again Japan doesn't have as large of a gender imbalance as China does due to the One Child Policy.
On an unrelated note, this also reminds me of the Futurama episode where people start downloading celebrity personalities into robots, and a sex education video scared teens into saying that "robo-sexual" relationships were shunned and did not advance the human race.
My hometown (and where I work now) is in an LA suburb and it and two adjacent cities recently implemented their “master plan”, and what they ended up doing was making arterial roads with heavy auto traffic traveling at 45-50mph into Class III bike paths. How do you expect a cyclist to “share the road” with cars going 3-4x their speed, or encourage novice cyclists? I think they just added sharrows to the busiest roads in the city and called it a day.
The planners were clearly not cyclists, or more realistically with one of the cities I sent a complaint to, had their hands tied and couldn’t devise any other way to get cyclists safely from one side of the city to another due to the car-heavy infrastructure the city already had. “Bicycle boulevards” like I saw while living in Berkeley and Cupertino where there were literally roadblocks, bollards, and speed bumps installed would be laughed out here.
One city planner told me that city council just didn’t see it as a priority, and that the councilmen just thought cycling was a “recreational activity” and didn’t see it as a serious commuter activity even though the planner himself was a bike commuter. Meanwhile car traffic is getting progressively worse and traffic lights still aren’t timed properly.
A mix of Mayor Garcetti’s (the city of LA) messaging mixed with the state and county orders, alongside two conflicting health department orders (Pasadena + LA County) have made navigating guidance totally confusing. There’s even infighting within the LA County Board of Supervisors, and talk of some cities to create their own health departments.
>14. The new State framework is rife with inexplicable inconsistencies of logic.
Not just that, you should read Garcetti’s stay at home orders last week, ordering people to stay home with 12 pages of exceptions.
>15. Beyond the basic human needs for air, water, food, shelter, and safety, it has, to date, been impossible for me to define what is “essential” to the 800,000 people who live here.
At this point, it seems like it’s up to the business owner to decide if they’re essential. Anecdotally I’ve heard of every small business owner here in LA call themselves essential simply because they “support essential infrastructure”.
Having all those tools integrated with the rest of another suite like Microsoft 365 would be enticing to corporate users. It would definitely starve out competition, but isn't new in Microsoft playbook.
I wouldn't be surprised if at some point third party Reddit clients end up getting neutered much like Twitter apps have become. Given that the mobile site is turning more inaccessible without registering for an account, it certainly seems that way.
I just checked and New Coke was available as part of a Stranger Things campaign, only in limited cities though.
I fear that there's a large subset of the population who won't follow safe practices unless you scare them with text like "don't visit your friends/family".
An attack on the US Banking system is a matter of when, not if.
I realized this during stay-at-home orders back in March. When I stopped bike commuting I started walking for 1-2 hours a day on days I didn’t go on runs, and realized I was burning a significant amount of calories according to my Apple Watch.
It might be an urban legend now, but I've heard of a soon-to-be-married couple purchasing a wedding ring in Portland, OR, and making several trips from SF to Portland. They took photos of the ring at typical Portland attractions (Mt. Hood, Multnomah Falls, food carts), and did that for several months. Doing that, after adding up all the flight/hotel tickets, was still cheaper than buying the ring straight up in California.
In California it's gotten so ridiculous that almost every city has its own sales tax [0]. This leads to some mild arbitrage where if I live on the border of LA County, I can go over to any city in Orange/Ventura/San Bernardino County and immediately save 3% off the purchase price.
To expect every taxpayer to keep track of where they've purchased items and pay a use tax so that taxes are going to the right places should not be on the burden of the tax payer. I'm a happy taxpayer and willingly will do so to fund our civic services and public goods, but not when the sale never occurred in the area where I purchased the item. People will find and exploit loopholes the minute they are revealed.
California (and some other states) have already gotten around this by requiring new cars registered to pay a tax adjustment if it was previously registered from another state. I don't think the state government just has the time or resources to do that for all purchases.
With the sales tax in Los Angeles at 10.25%, I’ve ended up queuing up large purchases together, buying a round trip ticket to Portland ($200-300) and hitting up the Apple Store, Target, Best Buy there. And get a free trip to Portland!
I’ve read the Christiana Mall in Delaware is especially popular for people living along the I-95 corridor for this very purpose.