1,841 karma · joined November 2, 2014
twitter.com/johnloeber
github.com/datamine
I'm an applied mathematician with wide-ranging interests.
From another blog post:
> I grew up in Europe (mostly Germany, Denmark, Switzerland). I had never even set foot outside the continent until I was 18, when I moved to the United States. I have lived here for 12 years now, with most of that in San Francisco.
Decades of studies rationalizing that "actually, people who drink two glasses of wine a day live longer" and their ilk, have only ever distracted from this simple truth, obviously so hard to contradict by first principles.
Technology is not the reason it's a winner-take-most market. It's helpful, but in the long term, many players will have comparable technology.
Utilization is the reason why it's a winner-take-most market. If you have the most popular app with the best drive liquidity, that's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. In turn, it means that your economics are better because your cars are going to be utilized at a higher % of the time. This in turn means that you can charge lower prices, and so forth. (A similar dynamic has been the case for Uber, for example.)
Unfortunately, sitting in a Waymo is experientially not at all the same as riding the BART or NYC subway.
1) With superior scale, the utilization of each Waymo approaches 100%. "Empty rides" going to a new pickup spot become more and more rare because they immediately get a ride close-by.
2) I think you underestimate the case for shared rides. Any Waymo with >= 2 passengers is reducing congestion, not adding. When you consider small bus-shuttles, e.g. 6 or 12 or 18 seats, it gets even more impactful.
3) The point with suburbs is that they become more accessible when the price point comes down. If you have a 45-minute commute to drive yourself, an Uber might cost you $60, which would be prohibitive. If a seat in a carpooled Waymo costs only $5 or $10, the incentives and customer behavior change significantly.
That's a design choice, and design choices that appeal to tradition are everywhere, even in software.
$57K, https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...
WeWork was executing a strange vision of how "creative" work should be done while ignoring the ordinary needs of office workers. Open-plan couches instead of soundproofed phone booths.
There are lots and lots of unscrupulous online supplement merchants who are breaking the law.
I think that might be directly contradicted by your first sentence. People do care. Design matters, and typeface selection is a big part of that.