rpmcmurdo

It's almost as if they have not heard of Second Life, or multi-player games.

Facebook will, like CompuServe, AOL, Yahoo, etc fade away. They won't necessarily implode, but what was a hot trend will turn into a commodity nobody cares about. Also, their role in the US elections and Jan 6th will haunt them.

<insert animated Geocities unicorn here>

27 year San Francisco resident here. The government here is dysfunctional because that's what people voted for. The fact that people pay so much to live here says that people are willing to put up with a lot in exchange for living in a diverse and beautiful city.

Just wait until the scooter companies and operators get nailed with an injury class action lawsuit. A good friend was seriously injured on a rental scooter, going 2-3 mph, catapulted onto her face, ended up with brain damage and multiple facial fractures requiring reconstructive surgery. A high school physics student could work out that tiny wheels combined with a high center of gravity is a bad combination.

The irony is that the people complaining about this are the same ones who are gleefully sharing their personal details and narrative on social media, and Facebook in particular. The only difference between mass surveillance in the US and China is that 99% of the US population happily opts in or doesn't care.

Capitalism is fine. WeWork is Trump scale criminal financial fraud. Adam Neumann should have gotten exactly zero dollars for leaving the company. The company is so broke it can't afford severance for regular workers, and this crook gets 1.7 billion dollars to go away?

SF has always been expensive. When I moved here, my grandfather who was an actuary for an insurance company (i.e. walking financial database) told me that back in the 1930s, they had to pay 2-3x salary for people based there due to the high cost of living. If you read old issues of the SF Chronicle, you'll find the same story repeated across generations.

The only time SF was every really cheap was during the 70s into the late 80s, which was due to a combination of white flight, the Loma Prieta earthquake, and the AIDS plague depopulating the city. Apart from that anomaly, it has been super pricey ever since the Gold Rush.

While shitting all over those "little people" with their annoying obligations like mortgages, children and aging parents and whatnot, who wake up one morning to find out they have a huge tax bill on money they never made while the "visionary founder" gets 1.7 billion dollars for power driving the company into the dirt.

WeWork is an office subletting business. That is _all_ it is.

I am from the east coast, and compared to where I grew up, the power grid is way more reliable. Where I grew up, the utilities were not undergrounded, and many neighborhoods were heavily forested. Whenever there was a big front of thunderstorms in summer or, worse, an ice storm in the winter, large swaths of the area would lose all of their utilities besides natural gas. Sometimes these outages would last several days.

It was inconvenient, but nobody wanted to pay for the cost of undergrounding utilities, so it was something you just dealt with. A few people bought generators, but most didn't. The only time the outages really caused hardship was during ice storms, but fortunately those were pretty rare.

I now live in CA. PG&E made the right call here. A couple days of no electricity is better than burning an entire town to the ground in a firestorm.

Pilot here...

This NYTimes article is a recommended read. The author discusses the role of pilots who lack good airmanship (pilot training outside the US relies much more on rote memorization versus learning to fly small planes and/or in the military).

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...

Boeing certainly messed up with the MCAS system design, but a perhaps bigger error was to over-estimate pilot skills and intuition. A good "stick and rudder" pilot would have cut out the automation promptly and likely recovered from the situation.

For example, one of the factors in the crashes was airspeed. The pilots left the throttle at takeoff power, and accelerated to such a high speed that it was not possible to counteract the nose down moment. Also, had they noted the airspeed, they would have immediately known that they were not at risk of stalling, and that they were dealing with an instrumentation/automation failure (in which case you cut out the automation and hand fly the plane).

This does not absolve Boeing. MCAS violated their "pilot first" design pattern. It should have simply activated the stick shaker and an audio alert (and redundant sensor inputs should have been in place to minimize false positives). That said, the way pilots are trained in countries where light aviation is not a thing is an issue to be dealt with.

I am curious what their hiring strategy was. I met someone who worked there a few weeks ago at a networking event. This was after most of the bad news had broken. Wow, was he drinking the Kool Aid. I felt like I was getting an Amway or Scientology pitch (the main thought going through my mind was "you should really be using this opportunity to look for a job"). It made me wonder if they systematically hired people who were easy marks, like the type of people cults would look for, and did they have a hiring protocol for screening them.

Good! I come from a family that is split between A) secular/atheist people and B) deeply religious people from the South. Group A has done well, all have happy families, and are overall good people. Group B are, to put it nicely, uneducated bigots who blame a lifetime of bad decisions on everyone besides themselves, oh, and they are also some of the most hateful people you will ever meet. The only people in group B who turned out okay were the ones who rejected religion or turned out gay (and newsflash, they were exiled by their so loving families).

Because the government can. Ask the Jews in Nazi Germany how "rights" worked for them. Prior to Hitler coming to power, Germany was the most advanced and liberalized society of its time.