megaman8

> However any VW dealer who convinces a customer to buy an ICE car has also sold themselves good odds of a future revenue stream maintaining that car.

I don't know about you, but I never ever ever get my car serviced at a dealership unless it's either under warranty or a factory recall (free).

Hold on to it and don't tell anyone you have the money: not even relatives, just your wife.

Be very careful when you spend it. There are 2 types of spending in life: Assets and liabilities, learn about this. You want to minimize your liabilities and maximize your assets.

It's great that they teach the idea that Diabetes (type 2) is preventable and even treatable with responsible eating habits. Too many people believe it's just something your doctor is supposed to treat with a pill.

Food companies often push the idea that all you need to do is exercise more. Whilst exercise might be a great thing: it alone can't fix the problem. You still need to learn how to eat.

But still, most of those things are one time costs: product development, failed products, fixing defects, certification. once you have completed those things, you can keep selling the successful product for decades right? especially now that the pace of innovation is slowing down. I mean just look at the clothing industry: a t-shirt today is the same as it was 10 or 50 years ago, right?

I would imagine things are super high tech and new, would need some iteration in their first 5 to 10 years, but after that, I don't know.

the costs that scale with each good sold is: Support, cost of returns, Sales, marketing, etc.

that's exactly why I cancelled my print subscriptions to both car and driver and road and track. I can't stand those. Whoever is creating those, really needs to be fired.

yes, but the links we always see here on hackernews are for their normal wsj site.

seems like a decent deal. i'm having trouble understanding the 200$ credit: it seems to good to be true. the way i understand it: If i have an existing phone and sign up for FI then I get a 200$ credit, which means, if my monthly bill is say 45$ (20$+15$+10/gb) then i won't have to pay for the first 4.5 months?? wow, seems to good to be true.

i think the catch is: most phones aren't supported so you have to buy a relatively new phone to be elligble for it, right?

there's a reason print media is going out of business.

to this day, I still can't pay for wall street journal article with a micropayment. and no, i'm not going to pay them 100$s of dollars for a 6 month subscription to read a single article.

i don't know why this is being downvoted. the core idea is a good one. Start moving people away from expensive areas and have them populate areas like the rust belt where housing is much cheaper. Detroit is pretty cost effective as others have mentioned.

don't forget about property taxes and HOAs. sometimes the property taxes can be higher than the value of the house. just watch out.

I think, what these employees don't realize is: Even when a company places values over profits, it is still in an attempt to maximize profits over the long term. By placing values above profits, it increases it's goodwill with customers thus increasing it's moat and it's retention, as well as it's employee retention. This strategy made sense in the early days.

Not anymore.

As Google's position becomes increasingly strengthend (with all the market share it can capture in search already realized ~ and it slightly decreasing anyway due to it's slightly tarnished brand), it doesn't need to maintain this illusion of values over profits anymore.

Seems it's much easier to get some legislation passed than actually fix your business model. Everytime I come across an interesting news article and want to make a 10c donation, there's never an easy micropayment way to do it. Furthermore places like the wall street journal block their content and ask you to pay hundreds of dollars. I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars just so I can speed-read a single article for 60 seconds.

Come on, media industry, get with the times and understand your target customer.

I dont have much sympathy for companies that turn down highly qualified intelligent workers by the truckload. There are so many people with MBAs who, for years struggle to get any kind of job at all.

I mean sure, paying more can help alot, but first of all, just fix your Hiring process. The hiring process at these some of the companies I've heard about are absolutely abysmal. I've heard first hand: They get great candidates who pass the phone screen and all the in person interviews: then at the last minute change their mind about hiring.

I've seen this at software companies when I was on the hiring side of the equation. HR told us we had an extra slot open. We don't wanna waste the slot so decide to hire somone. we wasted months turning down excellent candidates because engineers don't know how to interview a candidate because there's never time to train someone when teams are changing every year. Then we finally find a perfect one that everyone likes, and the manager above us decides to cancel the position and use the slot to hire a college buddy of his for a completely different role.

My theory is, a lot of these so called job openings are for jobs that aren't really needed. And the stake holders don't realize that the jobs aren't needed until the final hiring decision sign off is needed.

1/2 for bureacrazy? that sounds like a lot for just overhead

SF just passed 300 million/year measure that's supposed to help the homeless and that's in addition to the 240 million/year of funding that's already there. Both of those combined exceeds the budgets of most cities. First I would say, let's figure out how to use that money so that it's actually working. 540 million/year is enough to give the 7000 homeless in SF 77,000$ per year. Let's put that to good use and make sure it doesn't end up in administrative waste before throwing more $ at it.

Then start new cities in open areas and create incentives (just in the beginning) for business to move jobs there. There's so much open space surrounding the bay area. In the east bay, From our clogged 6 lane highways, i can see nothing but green and yellow for miles as far as the eye can see.

That's just in the beginning. Not every regulation saves lives - some are just on the books to protect rent seeking entities and lobbyists, and some are just there because they've always been there.

To live in, In SF. your choices are a 1.5 million dollar condo or a 50$ dollar tent. Seriously people, we need to allow for more choices than that. I'm sure builders and entrepreneurs would line up around the block to build solutions that are cheaper and more cost effective, but you first have to make it legal (get rid of the mountains of regulations and zoning headaches that make this problem so insurmountable), without that, will never make any progress on this problem.

Why do you think the internet took off as quickly as it did? or the facebook app store in 2008, etc. It's because there were no regulations (or almost none). This allowed thinks to take off very quickly.

Let's designate a section of several cities, say a 1 square mile section as regulation free, with an absolute minimum of zoning requirements, and almost 0 regulations. Then let the market have at it, see what gets built. Sure, maybe you don't like what happens in version 1. But, if we never iterate on this problem, we'll never make progress on it and in a 100 years we'll still be talking about this same self imposed problem which is completely solvable.

That only works if you are single, and live in 200 sq ft studio (which by the way will run you 24K per year after tax dollars). Then you can save and get ahead.

If you have a family of four you will almost ALWAYS be significantly worse off in palo alto. Even if you rent, The average 4 bedroom in palo alto is about 7k per month if your lucky which comes out to 84k which is about 130k in pretax dollars. Day care for 2 kids is about 60k per year. You'll need at least 225K just to scrape by, with no eating out, no vacations, etc..

I know i'm in a minority opinion here, but to be honest I think it would be totally fair for an employer to pay everyone the same regardless of location in the US (as long as their not forcing you to move to a more expensive city - if they force you to be in a more expensive city, then they need to pay up), if it's a remote company. I know it may sound harsh to some. But, think of it this way, it will encourage more companies to become remote, thus opening more doors for people and allowing more people to work remotely. After all, a low salary in a low cost of living city is usually better than a high salary in palo alto, considering the enormous delta in living costs and taxes.

i completely agree. we could use a lot fewer people on this planet.

So, it sounds like that wasn't a "good job".

The tricky part is defining what a "good job" is. which will be different for different people. i define it as: good work life balance, decent salary, good location, good stability.

Rule #1 for career advice: Never, ever leave a good job unless your financially ready to retire.

But that's not advertisement. Those are ideas and agendas. And I don't see how a company can use those to make more money, seems like a stretch.

that's true of every business: they need to make money.

> Do you really think that 550 billions of dollars are spent each year on something that doesn’t work?

Look at all the top advertisers on the internet, in almost every case it's all big brand advertisers that can't prove results, like Nike for instance. I know someone at Nike who held a marketing position there: she said, basically they just throw the money out there and hope that it works. There's very little validation that any of it works. And, I've heard on an NPR show how a lot of big brand advertisers are just continuing to do what they've always done because they've been doing it so long.

Now, the economist of course would say that companies who squander money on advertisements would loose market share. That's the way it should work. But our capitalist markets aren't nearly as efficient as people commonly believe.

On a personal note: I can tell you 99.99% or more of the advertisements don't work on me at all. How do i know this? I keep close account of everything I spend money on. I once did an audit on everything I've spend money on in the last 3 years and found that almost everything I spent money on is not due to ads (with the exception of SEO ~ I do occasionally find products through search engines but this usually isn't considered a direct advertisement expense). It's not that I'm against ads. If an Ad promised a product I actually wanted (say a home at an affordable price, or a faster way to get to work), I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The problem is, everything that's being advertised is more stuff I don't want.

at a certain point, you have to accept that there's nothing left to be done: at some point all the low hanging fruit has been picked clean.

If they really want to expand their revenue and move into areas it's going to be very risky. So, why not milk the cow for all it's worth.

it's simply too expensive to be selling to the masses. Apple knows where and who the money is, and it's not with the masses.

besides, Apple actually has plenty of low end offerings on sale alredy: the iphone 6 and iphone 5. the refurbished versions of their older phones the 4,5 and 6. Right? are those selling out?

Great concept! I really hope this catches on.

i suggested someone once try it and they mistake it for a "disease".