kamarg

> Amazon should have won in very few of the markets it entered. Instead, its competitors just decided to lie down and die, with a couple of yelps on their way to their death.

Once AWS started really making money, there's not many companies that could realistically beat Amazon. How do you beat them when they can use tactics like what happened with diapers.com? How many companies can afford to run what is likely their main revenue source at a $100,000,000+ loss every three months just to keep Amazon out of a market that wouldn't even be a top 5 revenue stream for Amazon?

Plenty of companies are building boring new PHP sites on Magento and making money without being SPAs. At least here in the Midwest, I've noticed quite a few non-tech companies moving their SPA sites away from being SPAs because it was the wrong technology choice for what the site does.

If you build it yourself you could easily continue those contracts with way less work put in. There's many, many jobs out there that exist only because people don't think they can read the documentation and figure out how to run things themselves.

If the contracts start to dry up, offer it as an automated service. Look at how many people still pay to have someone install and configure things like Wordpress. There's literally thousands of free guides on the internet about how to do it yourself but people will gladly hand over their money to have someone that claims to be an expert do it instead.

It wouldn't stop all the layoffs but that isn't the goal. The goal would be to give employees a vote when decisions are made on how to deal with the economic fallout instead of being the passive victims of whatever decision is arrived upon by upper management and the board.

Instead of instantly laying off as many people as possible, the union could have brought other proposals to the table to try and help both the company and employees. Maybe you delay 401k matching until the end of the year instead of paying it every paycheck. Maybe cut employee salaries and hours instead. The union at least gives the employees the chance to voice ideas on how to help the company and themselves make it through instead of finding out that 400+ of your coworkers were let go over Zoom via a two minute prerecorded message.

> I wish the employees had a seat at the negotiating table for any of this

If the tech industry didn't seem to despise unionizing so much this could've been possible. Maybe that will change once the current disaster is behind us.

Anecdotally, the owner of one of the nearby pizza places mentioned that both profits and margins are up for her. Of course pizza places historically have a large amount of delivery already. I imagine the current crisis has driven more customers to them at the expense of places that are traditionally dine-in only.

My understanding of it is that we basically outsourced our inflation from the 2008 QE rounds to other countries. This seems to be a feature of being the reserve currency of the world. Presumably that would be the same thing that prevents hyperinflation this time around.

Many contracts that have illegal/unenforceable clauses have been run by lawyers...

| obviously you can't suspend the DL of a self-driving car or a car company

Why not? They have to have some kind of license to operate, right? Even if it's not labelled "driver's license". If their vehicles are going around running people over, revoke whatever license it is that they have until they get it fixed.

Maybe but most people also don't want to not be working involuntarily with no notice.

Is the retainer for a specific amount of time? I know my knowledge of systems I no longer work on fades pretty quickly once I no longer am actively working on it.

I wonder if the question is really, do the giant corporations that want to compete globally have as much ability to get laws passed in Germany as they do here in the US? If they do, you can bet that those protections and working conditions will start looking a lot more like what we see in the US even if it's only a benefit for a fraction of a percentage of people in Germany and a detriment for all the rest.

What about a fresh college grad vs a high school grad with four more years of problem solving, socialization, and maturity? They comparison you make isn't fair because you aren't giving the high school grad the benefit of added learning they would accumulate in the same time period the college grad was taking courses.

This looks amazing. Any thoughts on what it would take to turn it into a minimally usable PWA so that I could carry things I consider important with me even in offline mode?

Then it's 99.9999% safe to ignore. There is no reason that calling someone else would be a problem for anything that is legitimate.

Which is a shame. I really enjoyed my Nokia 920. It was a significantly better user experience than any Android phone I've owned. Just a shame that nobody wanted to develop apps for it.

The "office empires" make perfect sense at the size of FAANGs. When you need to hire that many people every year, many of them who have never worked in "the real world" before, how do you do the best to ensure they all have access to knowledge, resources, support, and oversight? Not everyone is good at self directed work from home. That doesn't mean they can't be an outstanding employee. Hiring is expensive and if you can avoid having major churn in employees you'll save quite a bit of money.

On top of that, being a major employer in a city gives your company sizable clout when it comes to lobbying the local government. Don't like the new tax plan? It will probably work out in your favor to let the city know that it would really hurt hiring and salaries at the biggest employer in the city. Heck if it hurts enough, you might even have to move to that nearby competitor city who is offering all those sweet tax breaks. You don't want to but it's the only responsible thing to do for all of your employees. It would be a shame to see a bunch of those employees leave the city and cause housing prices to drop for all the rest of the citizens. What's that? You're reconsidering that tax bill? I knew you'd make the right choice for your constituents.

It's not between sticking around or quitting. They could have gone out and found a new job. One that presumably pays more than unemployment and quite possibly given the current stage of the economic cycle, more than their current job.

Legally it's easy to walk away. Just stop showing. You'll probably get a few phone calls wanting to know where you are before they terminate you as an employee in a few days.

Realistically, in the US so much of your financial health is tied to your employer that the advice to "just walk away" is only safe if you're already financially secure and don't need a job. Aside from the steady paycheck you're likely to lose: medical insurance, dental insurance, tax free retirement savings, and the unvested portion of your stock/retirement savings at a minimum. If you're in a position that tends to pay a yearly or even quarterly bonus, you're walking away from that too.

You're also going to lose a number of smaller items that can be expensive. Does your employer pay for the tools you use to be productive? How much does a JetBrains subscription cost these days? Or an MSDN license? How about all those AWS instances you use for sharpening your skills? Time to start ponying up or doing without.

This doesn't even count the other perks and benefits that companies are throwing at employees for highly competitive positions. Enjoying that free gym membership? Not anymore. How about the free snacks and lunches? That's another expense you can add back in now that you don't have any income. Free coffee in the break room? Time to find out just how cheap you're willing to get with your daily dose of caffeine.

Now factor in that for many being unemployed for extended periods of time can lead to severe depression and a lack of self-worth.

Don't forget to also factor in that 22% of divorces in the US are because of "money issues" which can usually be translated to "lack of money".

Taking the above into account I would likely put up with some pretty awful employment practices while looking for a new job rather than just walking away.

Because you agreed to pay it at a date before that? Because you don't want to be the person that's known for making things harder on others than they should be? Because not everything is about eeking every single penny you can from every single transaction?

Unfortunately there's always new recruiters that are willing to press this point either because they believe it or they just want the commission and will say what it takes to place a candidate. This is not something that will be fixed just by having the "bad" recruiters slowly removed over time. It's a constant task to educate job seekers that such an event is very unlikely.

Looks like a great service. Sadly none of your current markets are near me and the closest city I could vote for is an eight hour drive away. I'll check back periodically and see if you've expanded to anywhere within driving range. Thanks for letting me know about the service!

There used to be a site for exactly this called custommade.com. Aside from a list of items that others have already made for you to browse, you could also put up a description of the project and let craftsmen contact you with questions or bids for the project.

I'm not entirely sure what happened but they ended up refocusing on strictly custom jewelry instead of custom whatever you want that someone else can make. It's really unfortunate because it was an excellent service with very talented makers and I haven't been able to find anything similar to replace it.

If you are homeless but able to contribute to the economy if you weren't homeless the programs are very good. If even after getting off the streets, you still require additional help, the support available to you is significantly less good.

Put another way, if it was likely you could get yourself out of the homeless situation there's plenty of support in place for you. If you require help, there's little that is in place.

So, whether the support is good depends almost entirely on what type of homeless you are. It can be good for some while being abysmal for others.

As someone from the Midwest I can assure you that we don't have a larger percentage of crappy coders than the coasts and tech hubs do. We spend just as much time fixing the code from your terrible developers as you do from ours.

It's really a lack of training provided by companies and that most 4 year degrees don't actually prepare people to write good maintainable code so new developers have to luck into finding a mentor that can teach them these things.

I bought the book the day it was released. It's an excellent resource for anyone wanting to learn D3. Of particular surprise was that I haven't found any errors/omissions that caused the code examples to not work properly so far.

That could be a representative sample of the area the trial was held in. Trial by jury of your peers means that some juries will be composed of mostly and sometimes even all "peers" with less formal education that most would think appropriate for the subject matter being discussed.

In this specific example it doesn't matter if it's Kmart or a one off mom and pop store. You can look at NYC to see how empty store fronts are given preference over renting to new non-giant brands. Landlords have figured out it's better to just let a storefront sit empty for years rather than rent to anyone that isn't an already giant/established brand.

Hundreds of dollars is really not very much for many paying players to spend on these types of games. That would typically be considered a "casual" player which is just barely above a free-to-play player in terms of importance to the developers.

Fake it till you make it obviously.