jakelarkin

the technicalities I was referring to is that the federal anti-trust laws have been interpreted (contorted) to disregard regional monopolies. If Verizon, ATT & Comcast each own 30% of the national market, non-overlapping regions, even if customers in those regions have zero choice of broadband provider, the ISPs are not technically a monopoly in terms of regulations that can be applied.

Another problem is that anti-trust law does not really regard for speed/quality/cost of service for internet. If your home is served for internet by Comcast at 50 Mbps or ATT DSL at 1Mbps or expensive high-latency satellite at 3 Mbps, well that's not a monopoly even though Comcast is really your only choice for what is socially considered a normal internet speed.

only if walmart and ISPs are a monopoly, which by very technical legal arguments, they're not.

having to pay off ISPs to the tune of millions for network access to e-commerce customers, prevents Amazon from ever getting started selling books in the 90s

fake/dangerous products are the bigger issue with Amazon. I have seen prenatal fish oil supplements that are supposed to retail for $50, on Amazon fulfillment for $40 and on Alibaba for $18. Who's to say 3rd party merchants aren't reselling the fake Alibaba ones on Amazon for tidy profits? Odds are the fake ones are just repackaged low quality supplements, chock full of mercury.

With the breakneck pace of scams can anyone really trust Amazon fulfilled Merchants for items with very specific safety tolerances? (medication/supplements, hepa air filters, electrical components, just to name a few things) I have just started ordering more things direct from manufacturers web-stores rather than deal with the stress.

I still wonder why Google sold Boston Dynamics, and no other transportation or defense manufacturer scooped them up. The technology certainly looks amazing. Are the commercialization prospects really that bad?

much like the leadership of Eric Schmidt or Steve Jobs of the recent era, William Hewlett and David Packard did a lot to set the culture and ethos of the Bay Area tech scene in their time - in the 60s through the 80s. Since HP ended up being one of the larger companies of that period, many engineers and managers were influenced by early experience there.

hmm apparently the Southern Cross has 3.6Tbps of capacity which I could see being a constraint on throughput if that's the bulk of bandwidth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cross_Cable

so Kaiser Permanente, basically

its more or less well known that Dan Scavino, Trump's social media dir, posts to Trump's twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/10...

PM and PMM at big companies are effectively middle-management. Business manager hiring leans toward the trajectory you describe because 1) its the largest, traditional low-volatility career path for top performers out of good schools 2) it ensures the candidate has passed through a number of relatively rigorous admission filters on pedigree, culture, diligence and performance, and 3) at successful large companies the senior managers/execs are mostly MBA grads and they themselves are biased to hiring younger versions of themselves as reports.

zombie unicorns for years

counterpoint: buses have greater reach and are potentially cheaper to add and operate than BART trains on the margin. If the primary transbay tube goes down in a quake we'll benefit from the diversification.

unless they complete the Caltrain DTX this is just a $3billion bus station. SF supes keep punting because it doesn't buy them local votes. DTX has been consistently surveyed as the most desired transit infrastructure by commuters and the business community for decades. Politicians of course would rather steal the funds for ineffectual projects that pander to some narrow progressive pet-causes.

The $1.6 billion Central Subway should have been funneled into DTX. But of course Rose Pak delivered the votes, so thats why that's getting built and DTX is not.

how Kaspersky was ever thought to be "okay" in the US enterprise/government market has always been perplexing to me. Antivirus, something which literally inspects all of your files and network activity, made in the country that's a hotbed of blackhat activity and home one of the most aggressive cyber-espionage militaries outside the US. yea okay great, sign me up.

the average corporation does not care about security as long as someone else is paying the price. moreover they actively drag on security best-practices if they increase costs or introduce any friction whatsoever into consumer purchases. one of the reasons why we don't have CHIP+PIN in the US

you can't rotate biometry if its compromised

Sadly it seems IBM is mostly a sales & marketing operation for high-markup low-quality IT labor. MBA management of tech as a cost center has reached its next milestone. Of course, in the long-run, a company can't succeed by gutting its core competency.

been running this math recently:

quality child care or private school is +$2k/month/child

+2bdrm housing $4k

food/transport/other $2k

for couple with one kid you're at $8k/month post-tax or $150k/year pre-tax to break even.

Was thinking about this the other day: in big companies SWE individual contributors are the new line workers. Large enterprise ends up trying to manage them with business metrics goals without much visibility into the process issues that hamper overall quality or the production efficiency. Has anybody thought to apply the Toyota Production System in Engineering management?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System

the internet + globalization mega-trend unleashed in the 1990s has caused deflationary pressure on wages of any blue-collar labor that has the property of being easily transferable to the developing world. The effect lingers for decades are capital assets are slowly shifted around the world.

there's no Cushing, Oklahoma for water. most water delivery dams, pipelines, plants are owned by govt entities and are vertically integrated to serve a particular locale. Theres not often ways to switch delivery and commercialize it.

the closest analog is the Colorado river basin but the various state's government agencies sort that out themselves without the need for intermediary market markers.

rather have underpriced water be available to people for gardening, washing cars, swimming pools than it be given away for free in corrupt government contracts to a mega-corporation so they can grow rice in the California desert or bottle ground water and sell it at inflated prices.

"The CEO has been under fire for taking the unprecedented step of transferring the patent of one of Allergan’s blockbuster drugs, the eye medication Restasis, to a sovereign Native American tribe as part of a bid to maintain monopoly control of the drug and its revenue."

"The Restasis patent was approved 15 years ago and was set to expire in 2014, but the Allergan deal is part of an attempt to renew the patent and extend the company’s control of the drug through 2024."

no shit people are fed up

naive take is he grossly overestimates AI capabilities ... tech today (1) cannot broadly drive a car (2) is not a near existential threat to humanity

thought leaders are inflecting to the Trough of Disillusionment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

also probably playing a role ... toyota hybrid patents starting to expire

the issue is its impossible for the state to afford to provide a jury trial to everyone that is currently eligible. A trial has >5 paid professionals involved, plus the jurors, there just isn't enough time or money to process the case load.

the courts/prosecutors, out of necessity, have set up a shadow system of pressuring most defendants into plea bargains based on the relative strength of their case, which would be fine except the rules around this are weak and its ripe for abuse by the lazy or career/politically motivated.

At some point we'll need to admit this and draw up a better system for minor felonies.

If 23andMe is eventually acquired/reaped, what is the worst thing the new owner can do with the data?

to ensure long-term stewardship of the data, a company that holds genetic info should be a non-profit owned by the DNA providers, along the lines of a mutual insurance company.

that and encouraging people to spend $160 on bt earphones

Mostly it comes down to investor preference.

For companies experiencing a high rate of growth and good long term ROI, many investors would prefer the company reinvest the net revenue instead of paying dividends.

Some investors prefer capital gains due to tax treatment (long term gains vs income tax). Many companies oblige this with stock buybacks.

All of these provide a form of risk insurance and professional administration to prevent large transactions from going very badly on the edge.