fluxic

-pizza keeps well in a car (fries/buns get soggy)

-pizza is still good when it's merely warm (whereas pasta/chicken aren't)

-pizza doesn't come in individual servings (you don't order $2.50 slices. pizza delivery has effective $10+ order minimums)

-margins on pizza are huge (it's literally just a cheese sandwich. the cost of a large domino's pizza is <$2.50 iirc; margins on fancier food are not as high)

A great in-depth look at the shaky unit economics of the food delivery business model:

The Food Delivery Death Star https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death-star-85f9...

Lullabies for little criminals is an INCREDIBLE book.

So cool!!! What a slayer

Even if you're a New Yorker-calibre writer, you won't be able to write anything of "quality" in less than an hour.

Now imagine if you're not a New Yorker-calibre writer!

(I'm a pretty snobby reader and still like the occasional techie-founder post. You don't have to be a copywriting wizard to write something substantive, but it isn't enough to just commit text to the page. You can tell when someone has thought deeply and laboured over a piece of writing. The idea that you can write something worthy of other people's time in one hour is cut-and-dry clickbait.)

Take it from a very expensive copywriter: you cannot write a quality blog post in 1 hour.

Consider the content of this post:

1. research

2. draft

3. edit

...revolutionary. Maybe there's a reason why Baremetrics writers aren't in the New Yorker ;)

I know this concerns parcel delivery, and not food delivery, but for anyone interested, this was a great read on why the unit economy of (non-people) delivery is super rough:

>https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death-star-85f9...

just an excuse to beta test their new army of mailmen who give better CPA-tracking to their ads team.

Don't diss King Cake Baby

You should watch Gattaca.

Don't blame me!

—PBR loyalist

I didn't say we should abandon capitalism, I just think characterizing it as altruistic is extremely naïve. Capitalism might naturally tend towards the greater good better than other social systems, but it has no built-in guideposts that prevent destructive behaviour (see above).

Moreover, with the amount of ecological damage (mass, irreversible extinctions, global warming), indigenous genocide, slavery, etc. I'm not sure if being anti-capitalist is as "insane" as you put it. Global capitalism has given us advances in medicine, culture, reduced warfare, material wealth—but these advances haven't come without significant costs. Depending on what you value, capitalism could end up being a net-negative system.

I know plenty of people getting very, very rich doing very, very (legal) unethical things. Many of them are users of this site.

>Capitalism is altruistic. It functions when people do good, valuable things for each other and establish trust that payment will be provided for that value. It has nothing to do with your status as poor.

Like selling addictive opioids, scam affiliate marketing subscriptions, atmosphere-ruining fossil fuels, attention-destroying social media sites (often targeted at children!), society-destroying social media bots, arcane financial products whose only purpose is to shield immense wealth from taxes or regulation, etc. etc.

Yeah, capitalism sure is great, ain't it.

>It is not the tyranny of the 1% that creates their wealth, it is their sacrifice.

http://digg.com/2017/wyatt-ingraham-koch-shirts

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

― Ronald Wright

>Punish the rich for wasting resources on buying super cars and yachts and mansions, don't punish them for innovating and working hard.

Harder than 82% of the other population? Lol.

Just chiming in to say Valencia is LOVELY!!!! Such a fantastic, cheap, beautiful, beachy place to be.

This comment is pretty disingenuous. It's one thing to create a compelling piece of art; it's another thing entirely to create a platform with no real intention beyond sucking in eyeballs for advertisers.

I too love my Casper © mattress, by far the world's best-ever mattress, made from ethical mattress materials and guaranteed to provide you with a sumptuous sleep, night after night!

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Library card!

Historically, this is exactly what happened. I'm just saying—it's a morally repugnant thing to happen, and it shouldn't be any less morally repugnant whether it's an entitled capitalist techie kicking my grandfather out of his house, a swindling clan leader, or some imperialist with an (albeit smalller) axe to grind.

Coercion is coercion.

Well many of the people displacing residents don't "own" the land either. They can just afford crazier rents. The distinction between whether someone is renting or owning has little bearing on where someone considers "home".

See: entitlements people feel about going back to "homelands" in the Middle East, or to Europe after the war. These are not people that owned land, and yet we still feel morally responsible to help them return to their original homelands.

People have roots, man. If somebody would have tried to kick my Grand-x father off his homestead in Scotland, he'd have shoed them away with the blunt end of an axe. And yet when it's capitalism rather than war that displaces people from their homesteads, it's lower-class stubbornness to blame?

Why should money entitle people to live in certain places, rather than history? You can argue both sides.

Montreal?

Update 1:

>Travis Kalanick just sent out a company-wide email. It essentially says after Uber said it was naming a COO, Jones decided to leave.

[0] https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/843586902817099777

Update 2: Ex-president Jones makes statement

>"I joined Uber because of its Mission [sic], and the challenge to build global capabilities that would help the company mature and thrive long-term.

"It is now clear, however, that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business.

"There are thousands of amazing people at the company, and I truly wish everyone well."

[1] https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/843620240961368065

[stupid comment, deleted]

>Using the Microsoft Corporation as his benchmark, Mr. Luttwak says that the new high-tech titans produce much capital but relatively few new jobs. The rich get richer, but those driven out of work by the computer revolution are forced to take lower-paying service jobs. The unskilled they displace turn rationally to criminal activity like drug dealing.

Prescient.

Facebook is a $400B corporation, one of the world's most valuable, and it employs, what, 15k people? Before, your bigcorps like Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil employed hundreds of thousands.

We no longer need labourers for factory work, to fight wars, to flip burgers or drive trucks. People say that automation will only create more jobs and freedom, but I have a hard time believing that. Automation is the ultimate triumph of capital over labour. The rich don't need Middle America any more, because most Middle Americans don't have any worthwhile skills. Americans in "flyover country" are increasingly unemployed, filing for disability, and dying of opioid overdoses. And people wonder why Trump got elected.

I'm parroting the points made in this delightful talk here, by a YC alum no less: https://www.facebook.com/antonio.f.garcia.martinez/posts/101...

30-40% of people read to the end of the articles

Call me a pessimist, but as a content creator this piece came off as extremely out of touch. Yes: NYT is booming in subscriptions, and Patreon has carved out a nice little niche for supporting podcasters and YouTubers. But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years.

Before, if you were a writer, you could write for the neighbourhood paper or magazine and carve out a decent living (see: Hemingway, DFW, etc.) Now, unless you're a staff writer for the NYT or maybe 10 other 1%er sites, there's no way to make a living off subscription sites. They have killed local markets that have supported writers. Book sales are down. Newspaper sales are down. Literary magazine sales are non-existent. Anecdatum: I wrote a series of Medium posts this month with a Patreon link at the bottom: 70k hits, $0 donations. It's hard for me to imagine reaching 70k people with my writing in 1910 and still being a pauper.

Two things: this isn't necessarily all doom and gloom. There are probably more artists living than at any point in history. And the internet helps us reach more people than ever before.

However, bragging that the world's most popular newspaper is adding subscriptions and that another couple of creators are making $10,000 on Patreon does not a Renaissance make. Patreon's PR team is trying to spin something that—at least for writers—isn't happening. The needle is not moving.