And yet the cheapest car can easily outrun any human who ever lived. Everything is unique if you look into it closely enough. I would say that’s not the same as special, though I admit this is just semantics.
19,834 karma · joined March 28, 2007
Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. Until skynet turns on us I’ll be happy to say I lived at the exact time it happened.
But I’ve also done the MLB all-star game, and subcontracted through a few major f&b firms and those started off as corporate as they come.
I don’t think I’ve yet been involved in one that became corporate after starting off small but I’ll let you know if I get there.
The thing about festivals is they have real economies of scale. For instance sponsors value getting in front of 25,000 people really highly, but they don’t value a 2,500 person festival at all. (I’m speaking general audience, in some niches a high quality small crowd is still worth money.) The portapotties get cheaper when you’re ordering however many come on one truck. The dumpster and tent companies don’t charge you any more for a 3 day rental than a one day. Etc.
So to make the business model grow you grow the festival. But soon you’re running a big security budget, so you look around for who in your area does security fit really big events. There are two firms. Ok you pick one.
Now the city wants to talk about your sanitation plan. Ok who does sanitation as a service here? OK there’s one company. Who can provide me a few 40 yd dumpsters and retrieve them on Sunday night? Ok there are like two willing to do that. Who rents large tents that has a fire permit in your city and can bring out a forklift because we’re on hard surface so we need 500lb cement anchors according to my city fire department. Ok there’s one vendor.
How do I feed 25k people? Well who does f&b for large events. Oh there are a few and they’re bidding on me. Guess I’ll go with the highest bidder among the few big national f&b firms. (My festivals are food festivals and I can handle f&b for 25,000 eaters no problem because I have run many large food truck festivals and I know who is good but most promoters cannot tell the good food operators from the bad and there are so many of both.)
So what happens is you’ve got all these pieces and you get to a level where just practical reasons as well as municipality rules make you choose between a handful of basically interchangeable vendors. And those vendors all do a good job and aren’t price gouging (they’ve got plenty of labor cost too) but they kinda all look the same.
I started planning street festivals a few years ago. It’s now a lucrative and growing business for me. The demand for events at all scales vastly outstrips supply, and I think growing social isolation is part of the reason.
The free riders might seem like a problem to someone who just wants there to be events, but it is a huge opportunity to us who throw them.
Me: they’re great but their tech sucks
You: their tech is good
Me: it can’t do basic stuff
You: ok you’re right but they’re great
I can tell you I’m a member of both, but I frequently let my Costco lapse but never Sam’s. Just because it isn’t killing the golden goose doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile to fix.
You can’t. You can only get delivery pricing. They don’t have the basic functionality every store has had for a decade.
Go to self check-out and grab a scanner for your heavy items, which they sell many of. You can’t, they don’t have them, you have to wait for the attendant to get to you with it. (They’re generally good at their job but it’s still annoying if you’re in a rush.)
Sam’s Club is as good as it gets tech-wise, in-store and out. They even have AI that allows the exit door receipt checker to skip checking people so you don’t get stuck in a line waiting for someone to verify you paid for everything.
Their website/app makes it impossible to just see what’s in store at what price. Go search for coca cola and I see the price to have it delivered (much higher than in store) and a link to instacart. No pickup options or even prices.
On Sams Club’s website I can see that in store price and order it for pickup.
Again, Costco could keep the things we all like and just have basic 2018 functionality, it isn’t hard.
There’s no reason they couldn’t do basically all of the good things mentioned in this article plus have a functional website, let me scan and pay with my phone in store, have a handheld scanner at each register, etc.
I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it averages out to being better or worse.
The aggressive ignorance (not my term, I’ve got a better one) is that multiple times this guy just didn’t even respond to the actual point. See his first response to me where he just restated the thing I was clearly replying to, rather than addressing my actual argument, which is that all those people would’ve ended up with the same amount of SpaceX shars at the same time, even if the rules had not changed. He just restated the argument I had already just rebutted, then he did the same thing in this branch.
It does not matter that SpaceX is in the index sooner. The future in six months or 12 months would look the same in either case.
Toyota’s P/E is under ten. They’ll make more money selling cars this quarter than TSLA will in ten years.
TSLA prices have never been within an order of magnitude of reasonable. They’ve been publicly traded for so long that some of the people legally driving them weren’t born when they IPOed. They’re not a startup and haven’t been in a while.
And to be clear, I’m not saying it’s a good thing. I just don’t think it matters so much.
I can go ask Gemini questions that require it to get information from several emails at once like “which x vendor had the lowest price”. Im assuming it can do the same with my texts or, if not yet, it will soon. I had zero such faith with Apple.
I will wait until the fall and see if this looks like the germ of something actually useful before deciding if I’m going to switch.
Siri seems to rarely get better and sometimes actually get worse.