ryankupyn

For those who are paywalled out, the article refers to this paper done by a NYU professor and Uber's own economics team.

http://john-joseph-horton.com/papers/uber_price.pdf

That's true - I think employees would be generally inclined to organize with specific pay/work conditions in mind (though many tech workers are highly skilled enough that they could more easily achieve those goals by going to another company, rather then going through the long-term commitment with one company that a union contract implies).

But by compensating employees heavily with equity, companies have made it so that many Bay Area tech company workers would be giving up any hope of buying a house if they successfully organized in a way that diminished their employer's dominant market position (and the profits and high stock price that come with it).

There might also be another effect in play - as the labor market tightens, I think Uber is looking into ways of boosting the supply of rides from the drivers it already has.

This offer exploits loss aversion on the part of those drivers (once they take it up, they don't want to "lose" and have it not be worth it, so they might end up driving even if fares are low).

The thing that surprises me is that, after paying these engineers seven figures, they're still sticking them in open plan offices (as far as I can tell from the photos). Though I do know some people who can work effectively in that environment, it would be interesting to compare ever-so-slightly-cheaper engineers + a less-distracted work environment.

While the theft of trade secrets central to developing self-driving cars obviously seems important, and this case might have a significant impact on the future market for autonomous vehicles, it's not clear to me where these damages numbers are coming from.

Neither Waymo nor Uber have actually made much money from self-driving cars at this point - Uber has its small-scale pilot programs, and Waymo has R&D partnerships with companies like Avis and Lyft. But unless there are some major potential deals that Waymo missed out on because of Uber's mere presence and their quick development of self-driving technology, I can't imagine they'd be able to argue that they've been damaged at this point - this isn't like a patent case where companies are making money off their products.

It'd be interesting to see a more unusual argument from Waymo, though - something like "The trade secrets Uber stole allowed them to more easily recruit engineers, reducing the talent pool available to us and delaying the wide release of our own product."

Very cool! Kudos to you guys for putting this together!

I expect that this trend of deputizing companies to police speech on their platforms will evolve in tension with rising antitrust scrutiny of the tech giants, because the rise of utterly dominant companies (a trend that the EU seems intent on slowing) would make efforts to regulate speech easier.

Large companies like Google have a global presence, and assets that can be targeted within the jurisdiction of most major governments, while a fragmented - and more competitive - market would make it more likely that "holdouts" can rise beyond the reach of a given government. These platforms would provide a redoubt for regulated speech, because it would be much harder to compel them to pay fines (though of course a country can simply block them).

At the same time, these new regulations give a competitive advantage to the companies with the scale and resources to invest in automating the removal process, and increases the challenges for upstart platforms, which now need to develop the infrastructure to aggressively police content on their networks if they want to grow beyond a certain size.

I think that in the long run, this will evolve into a stable equilibrium where governments periodically levy large-but-not-devastating fines in the name of "antitrust" in order to show their dedication to "competitive markets" and "customer choice", while simultaneously working hand-in-glove with these companies to enforce what they consider to be acceptable standards of speech in online communities. In the long run, no major competitors will emerge, and both the established firms and the government will silently thank their lucky stars.

What I really want to see is security being integrated into the development process as a conscious tradeoff teams have to make.

When a new feature is proposed, it's rare to hear someone object on the grounds that it could potentially add new vulnerabilities, but in the long run an approach that recognizes and considers those risks would be beneficial.

At the same time, this is incredibly hard to do - managers celebrate employees who develop things that look cool and awesome, not employees who can mitigate risk and manage security effectively (hopefully this changes, but I can't imagine that many unaffected CEOs are calling up their sysadmins right now and congratulating them on their diligence in making sure all their machines are patched).

I think they're hoping for a "sweet spot" of legalization, where the product is legal to produce and sell, but regulations prevent outdoor farming (or mandate additional security in such a way that makes indoor farming an appealing alternative).

That's a great point, and I think that Instacart will have a much easier time developing those partnerships now that Amazon has implicitly validated grocery-delivery as a major market.

I think the real risk is that Amazon enters the market and quickly enters into a relentless price war that makes the ~20% premium compared to in-store prices that Instacart puts on every product untenable and sucks the entire market into an unprofitable quagmire from which other grocers will struggle to escape, because Amazon can afford to subsidize its grocery business for longer than its competitors can survive.

IMO, the Instacart bull scenario is that they manage to survive Amazon's arrival and gradually take on a larger share of the consumer grocery market, turning their grocery partners into urban warehouse/distribution center operators with vestigial storefronts attached.

The Instacart bear scenario is that the entire non-Amazon grocery market collapses in the same way bookstores did over the past 20 years, leaving behind only a few specialty stores that cover niches that Amazon finds unprofitable to enter, and that Instacart's potential partner base is too sparse and fragmented for them to survive.

I used to be all for the removal of highways, but now I worry that this trend will accentuate economic inequality and hurt poorer people who might want to move to the big wealthy cities where these highways are being removed.

50 years ago, when these roads were being built, they enabled wealthy workers to flee to the suburbs and commute into city centers for work, cutting through the poorer neighborhoods left behind.

Now the geographic patterns are reversing in some areas, and city centers are now far more vibrant (read: wealthy), while in places like Los Angeles, where I live, much of the new population growth is occurring on the periphery of the urban area, where lower income workers can afford to live while enduring long commutes into the city.

I live in an affluent neighborhood, and many of my neighbors want to make the city more walkable and "friendlier", by making roads smaller and de-emphasizing cars in favor of transit and human-scale development. In the long run, I think this is a good idea, and would dramatically improve my life in the city.

But at the same time, if policies make a city and its high quality jobs difficult to access for people who can't afford to live in the city itself, it's not necessarily a net positive, especially when the wealthiest cities are enthusiastically restricting supply.

Ultimately, I worry that we will look back at this period in urban policy as the time when city centers got far wealthier, low-income people were displaced, and the focus of wonks turned to creating cities that rich people like them would like to live in, without realizing that the same policies that makes a city enjoyable to live in also makes the engine of good jobs hard to access for people who aren't fortunate enough to already be living there.

This is really cool, but I'd love to know how durable a printed house is over the long term. Right now though, I think that there's a profitable niche for this sort of portable and low-labor-intensity construction in the defence and disaster-relief fields, where speed and cost are a higher priority than aesthetics.

I could easily see the US government (or rather, their contractors) using this technology when constructing bases overseas, especially in places in Afghanistan where workers don't just need to be paid, but fed, housed and transported at great expense.

Do you know if the tax applies to homes vacant for any reason, or just homes that could be on the market but aren't? Otherwise I could imagine a particularly unwelcome situation where a market downturn or other shock leads to landlords being unable to rent their units, then get hit by both the loss of rent and the 60% tax on top of that.

They could have made the world's first distributed remote file storage, parcelling out customer's files across 20 different servers. They just had to back up each file to multiple ftp sites and add new ones as their actual owners rooted them out. I'm sure availability would be fantastic, and the costs of running not-your-servers are pretty darn low.

Absolutely true in my experience. What employees want, even more than additional money, is a lower mental load dealing with the everyday necessities of life, which an employer is perfectly placed to provide, since employees spend 40+ hours a week in the office.

A more cynical benefit of sodas/snacks/exercise classes/laundry/dogwalking/social events provided by the company is that it makes leaving a lot less appealing. A competitor can easily offer a higher salary, but when departing means completely restructuring an employee's daily routine, it can be a powerful force keeping people in place.

Yeah, that's pretty much what's going to happen. My employer just acquired a rival that does exactly that, so now my entire division is gradually shifting to build on their work and automate more and more.

The biggest change internally is what kind of grad degrees people get. 10-15 years ago everyone went for an MBA when they wanted to move up, now more people are getting their Stats PhDs, then coming back and applying their knowledge to problems that would have been the domain of B-Schoolers just a few years ago.

I've always wondered how effective this would be in different industries. In some businesses, leadership exists to make very easily quantifiable (and perhaps therefore more automatable decisions) - answering questions like "Should we build a new factory?; What product lines should we develop?".

Where I work, in consulting, the senior leadership exists almost solely for the purpose of building relationships with customers and bringing in business - really hard for AI without a radical change in the sales model (but I can imagine a sort of Consulting-As-A-Service, given that we already bill by the hour).

I really suspect (and worry from an own-career perspective) that the first thing to be automated will be the number-crunchers surrounding senior management. I spend my time doing things like calculating the marginal effects of extra pay on employee productivity, which is hard largely because most companies have terrible data. Once companies start implementing systems that can effectively and automatically track complex metrics like this, around 80% of my role won't be needed any more, and instead of paying $250/hr for a guy to whack out some R code, companies can get the same service wrapped up in whatever future version of SAP they're using.

And each of those shares has split into 12 today, so I think he's probably doing alright for himself.

Poor time-handling also have big consequences as well. In Nevada, for example, overtime calculations use a rolling 24-hour period, and as a result many workers are incorrectly paid each year because their employer's system doesn't account for DST changes.

If you want to go deeper into this, BLS data has a fantastic metric for measuring the relative density of different occupations by metro area - the location quotient.

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41860.htm

As you can see, in the Bay Area, the two most common software-related occupations are ~2.9 times as common as the US as a whole (Software Developers - Systems Software, and Software Developers - Applications).

But they both lose out to Solar Photovoltaic Installers and Genetic Counsellors, which are 6(!) times as more common on the Bay Area than the rest of the US (from a much smaller base, though).

Edit: If you slice by San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, looking only at Systems developers, the quotient goes to around 9 - far ahead of runners up in Massachusetts and Huntsville, AL.

It'll be interesting to see if this leads to a debt crisis in the future, as Japan's population shrinks and the per-capita debt burden increases. It'd be very tricky to deal with as social spending for the elderly increases at the same time.

I expect that it's the long time horizon until Max-Hervé (or rather his estate) is actually paid off. Up until that point, barring any regulations which require the insurer to steadily accumulate reserves in response to the rising value of his policy, the insurer will keep operating - and profiting normally. It's entirely possible that this distant future cost isn't that much of an issue for most investors! And of course Aviva has 50 years to engage in legal wrangling as well. It would only take one amenable government in that period to turn the tables.

For Max-Hervé and his banks there is actually some rather significant risk. Their insurer could collapse due to some other cause, and policies might not be paid out. By keeping the policy and not settling, their taking out a position on Aviva's continued survival for 50 years.

If Spotify wanted to be really sneaky, some amount of downtime might be good for them financially.

The bulk of their revenue comes from customers who subscribe on a per-month basis, while they pay out royalties on a per-song-played basis. This outage is reducing the amount they have to pay, and if the outage-elasticity-of-demand is low enough they could (hypothetically) come out ahead!

The most concerning thing about this article is the implications if someone like Foos has access to the levers of modern technology. Imagine if, instead of owning a motel, he worked on Dropcam at Nest (I certainly hope they have the ability to monitor and audit their own personnel, for their own sake).

The article is really a brilliant example of how we should not view the organizations/institutions we interact with as impersonal abstractions, but should always consider the human beings - and human flaws/motives - behind them.

I agree. For a lot of small companies/side projects I'm not at all annoyed by overuse of bootstrap. I think that it's better to put your energy into making a great and unique product than making a great and unique page to sell your product.

This is interesting, but consider that income varies widely by location, and is generally higher in areas with a higher cost of living. Both restaurant servers and computer programmers make more in San Francisco than they would in Scranton.

It's only misleading in the sense that it would better to say "The poor are better off when we build more housing of any sort, even if they can't afford the units being built."

This is one of the most well-executed attempts to bring real-world art online I've ever seen.

I've always hoped that the internet could expand access to art, but I've always felt that the experience of viewing art and commentary through a computer really fails to capture the essence of experiencing it in real life. I hope that other institutions will learn from this and apply the lessons to their own cultural mission.