1,720 karma · joined July 25, 2014
1. First, I haven't heard many people argue that they think Musk's end state isn't viable. That is, Musk has already proven you can build a great electric car, the question is just whether he can solve the production issues and scale up (especially battery production) fast enough before he runs out of money. But if he does get there before he runs out of money, people agree he will have huge moats around his business with his technology, brand desirability and the gigafactory. Contrast this with Uber, where a lot of people think that in the end state (when VC money stops subsidizing every ride) that it will essentially be a commodity business with very poor economic fundamentals.
2. Uber has had story after story of fundamental problems with their corporate culture, while everything I've read about Tesla appears to be almost the exact opposite.
It kind of reminds me of the state of Linux in the mid-late 90s, where you'd have "install fests" with a roomful of 25 people and it took a whole day to get Linux installed on your machine (and your sound still didn't work, that took another afternoon).
So certainly higher usage for marijuana, but definitely not "many orders of magnitude"
The "fun facts" he listed re: the board members were just that - interesting tidbits (that I was personally intrigued to find out) but yes, not relevant to other aspects of the case.
The fact that "Carmack was enthralled with VR" is very much relevant to the story of why Carmack decided to spend so much effort (apparently using some Zenimax's resources according to the post) to work on technology that at the time wasn't immediately relevant to what Zenimax was doing.
I think this is a dubious statement. The bifurcation of American society, with increasing concentration of wealth in cities, and increasingly desolate rural areas, has only accelerated in recent years.
The fact is that most in demand knowledge workers want to live in central urban areas. You say you can have commute "only 20 mins longer than your average Long Island commuter" - does that mean your door-to-door time is over an hour each way? No thank you, I'd much rather live in a small apartment with a 15 minute walkable commute.
The main issue, as others have pointed out, is that the network effects and barriers to entry with Uber are quite low, so even if they beat Lyft they won't be able to jack up prices well above cost. In Austin, Uber and Lyft left after city voters passed driver fingerprinting requirements, and a flood of new companies entered the market. These new apps and companies had problems at first, but I currently use RideAustin (a non-profit, mind you) frequently, and despite being slightly more expensive than Uber is currently, the experience is pretty much indistinguishable.
I generally prefer an existing portfolio of code (e.g. github repos) to see the kind of code someone produces, but if you aren't able to show some fairly extensive examples of your work, homework is usually a bunch better assessment of your skills than what can be accomplished in a ~45 min interview.
The reason I ask is that that kind of behavior, where you click on the node and it highlights the paths to that node but grays out everything else, is super useful for complicated architecture diagrams where you want to put a ton of stuff in one diagram, but still be able to see where edges go when you have a big spider web of connections. I've been looking for diagramming software that would create these clickable kinds of diagrams for my company, but haven't found anything that exactly fits the bill (Most tools I've found generate static diagrams, and some mind mapping software I've seen doesn't totally fit the bill, either).
Seems like it would be pissing in the ocean (or I guess that analogy in reverse?), but when I saw the newsreels of the helicopters dropping bags of rocks into the spillway hole, that also seemed like it would take a couple thousand of those drops to make a difference.
Don't mean to minimize the work involved, just trying to decipher the marketing speak.
It does seem like Netflix's playbook would be more difficult to copy for music, but still an interesting prospect to consider.
A lot of migrations would be pretty trivial if you could have even a couple hours of downtime, but in an expectation of 24/7 availability that is no longer acceptable in most situations.
This is just flat out, 100% wrong. Mainly because "innocence" and "guilt" aren't even concepts that apply in civil cases.
All of your responses still seem to assume that businesses somehow have the same level of responsibilities and restrictions of a government, and that is just not true.
Does anybody really say that? I live in Austin, where we did essentially ban Uber and Lyft, and even then I didn't hear anybody who was for the tougher regulations on ridesharing argue that taxis don't suck.
For example, you speak of "presumption of innocence" and "burden of proof" as "core concepts of our justice system". These are only core concepts of our criminal justice system; our civil justice system has very different rules for burden of proof, for example.
Some countries have much, much higher percentage of fraudulent transactions than other countries, and it's perfectly reasonable for Western Union to use country of origin as a factor in raising the fraud red flag. Western Union doesn't have the power to arrest anybody, and they have no reason to "presume innocence" for any one of their customers. If anything, when it comes to monetary transfers, I think it's safer to "presume guilt", that is assume all transactions have reason to be fraudulent, and then only let transactions through if you have strong reason to believe they are not fraudulent.
While it's an upheaval to be sure, the vast majority of these laid-off employees have in-demand skills in a growing industry. Who I really feel for is people who get laid off in shrinking industries, where it's basically a game of musical chairs and there are fewer seats each round.