vegannet

Uber Eats isn’t really in the business of delivering food, it’s in the business of discounting the cost of food delivery. If your favourite local restaurant raised investment to be able to reduce their prices to below cost they would have a queue of people at the door... but would they be thriving? The moment Uber Eats can’t afford to continue to subsidise the cost of their food delivery model they won’t be “thriving” any more and local players will fill the vacuum.

I am not a doctor but fwiw I was told by an NHS doctor that the most recent scientific understanding of vitamin D is that the recommended dose (based on old science) is far too low and 5000 per day is a good amount for someone in the UK (due to the amount of sunlight we get on average here).

Search is hard to get right and the cost of Algolia is negligible vs. doing it yourself. As a programmer, every line of code you write is a line of code you own: the less code you own in production, the better off you are. Algolia has saved us hundreds of hours which translates to tens of thousands of dollars.

If your code is bad in a monolith, it’ll be bad with Microservices. If you can’t build a good monolith, you can’t build a good Microservices architecture — because it introduces even more complexity and requires even more consideration.

Discipline is fundamental to good software engineering: you can’t force it with Microservices.

That’s often a concern amongst publishers around implementing the ability to pay to opt out of advertisements however I think in this case the relative low cost of YouTube advertisements is because of the high cost of getting them right.

An advert is the creative and context — i.e: a photo on an influencers Instagram story is a different advert to the same photo on a billboard.

Yes but it’s very contagious, asymptomatic while contagious _and_ many people who aren’t at risk of death do come into contact with those who are. There are tens of millions of people in the UK who are vulnerable to severe consequences if they catch the disease.

I think the key to understanding the scope for abuse is to understand the opportunity. There will always be abusive behaviour and tools are required to tackle it _but_ the majority of abusive behaviour on the internet comes from a desire for attention, and one-to-one abuse is much less common. Abusive people are typically looking for a platform to broadcast.

I think that the methods outlined on the website will help but I think the concept is inherently anti-abuse.

Context: I worked in community management for many years, dealing with some of the worst of abusive online behaviour.

I’ve always been a little confused about their cult following given their unfriendly terms — arbitrary domain cancellation based on adult material for example — which are fair terms to have if that’s their ethics but it seems at odds with the typical pro freedom expectations many people in technology hold.

Setters and getters aren’t really object oriented. An object has behaviour, ensuring the inner workings of that object are protected is a good thing _even if_ the inner workings are only ever inner workings. There’s lots of valid and meaningful uses of this functionality.

The reason WeWork is great is because investors are subsidising our memberships, just like Uber is cheap because investors are shovelling in cash. WeWork has the potential for profitability if you take away the ridiculousness but the ridiculousness _is_ WeWork: co-working spaces have existed for years, companies like IWG (Regus) offer the same as WeWork and they're profitable... because they don't have a full time bar staff, a live DJ and a skateboard ramp in their lobby. Yes, the new flagship WeWork in London has a skateboard ramp and live DJ in the lobby. When WeWork fails (and their spaces are scooped up by the mature players in the market) the ridiculousness will disappear and we'll be left the same space that has been available all along.

I like WeWork, WeWork has value, but ping-pong and baristas don't make for 10x valuations.

Yes and no. They use a guest registration system (on an iPad) that takes a photograph to send to the person who invited you on arrival so that your host knows who to look for in the shared space. You can simply choose not to stand in front of the camera (there’s a countdown) — it’s not mandatory, and certainly nobody would take issue with you opting out. I was a WeWork member for years and, as far as I know, the photos are only used in the emails to hosts.

Also it’s worth noting that the same systems are used by lots of companies, especially tech companies: they go as far as taking photos to print on temporary badges. Photos of guests is certainly not unique to WeWork, most startup offices I’ve visited do it.

You can make the same point repeatedly if you like but, as I've explained, the costs you're referring to are a very small part of the total cost and certainly do not come close to offsetting the gains made by cutting out livestock from the equation.

The cost of transporting a hundred thousand burgers is dwarfed by the cost of creating a hundred thousand burgers. The primary costs associated with meat are in the production, not the transport: compared to, say, Beyond Meat, a single beef burger is 15x more ecologically expensive _before_ transport -- which is the same, and inconsequential in comparison.

Marginally? Beef, for example, takes many times the amount of energy and water to produce equivalent calories to vegan foods. Based on any measure, beef is significantly more expensive than vegan food sources, “marginally” is far from an accurate comparison.

I think it very much depends on the work you’re doing. My co-workers depend on debuggers which are a crutch that allow them to _feel_ like they have control over our spaghetti code — “it’s fine, I can step through!” — but the code I produce (without a debugger but through TDD) is much more resilient. There’s certainly engineering problems that benefit from a debugger but I think for most modern work they’re not essential — and often a crutch.

The majority of plastic waste in “civilised” countries is shipped elsewhere: out of sight out of mind. There’s a strong likelihood that your plastic waste is ending up somewhere you do not expect it to end up.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-recycling-is-in-chaos...

I hate very little in life but I can confidently say I hate “DRYing out code” because it’s _always_ used by developers who believe the repetitiveness of code dictate its quality. I have never seen a good commit for “DRYing out code” — in fact, that concept is usually a big red flag.

I’m quite attracted to writing “good” code — in that I think about theory and principles a lot — and “DRY” is not part of my vocabulary. I very much agree with your point that over-engineering is a problem but DRY is not related to that.

You’re looking at 1/10th of the earnings you’d generate from AirBnB with the same amount of work. You have to manage bookings, grant access (working around your own availability), handle insurance and clean up. Would you deal with all of that for less than £10/day once or twice a week? The pitch makes sense for larger spaces that can accommodate teams — like the examples on the site — but for individuals there’s no value.

There is such a startup in London (and elsewhere maybe) but the problem is the costs are greater than the cost of a true co-working space. WeWork in London has hot desks from about £10/day (monthly) and £20/day (pay as you go). A homeowner isn’t going to let someone use their home all day to make a few £.

https://www.vrumi.com/

I’m talking about the specific promises made by Tether. The question is not about whether or not fractional reserve banking exists, the question is how can Tether engage in fractional reserve banking (or any profit making activity) without being fraudulent when they explicitly claimed to hold 100% of their USD in cash reserves at all times?

“[...] each tetherUSD in circulation represents one US dollar held in our reserves (i.e. a one­to­one ratio) which means the system is fully reserved when the sum of all tethers in existence (at any point in time) is exactly equal to the balance of USD held in our reserve.”

I’m not clear how that applies to Tether:

“[...] each tetherUSD in circulation represents one US dollar held in our reserves (i.e. a one­to­one ratio) which means the system is fully reserved when the sum of all tethers in existence (at any point in time) is exactly equal to the balance of USD held in our reserve.”

Where does the 5% come from?

If Tether worked as it was advertised there would be no profit opportunity. The purported reason Tether exists is to help the crypto markets deal with the liquidity problems because of how difficult Fiat banking is, essentially Tethers value proposition was “we (by some miracle) have reliable banking, we can buy and sell 1 Tether for 1 USD at any time regardless of other crypto currencies value”. In reality Tether is a shit-show because it doesn’t provide reliable banking (even before considering the fact that it isn’t even solvent) and that’s why the value of Tether offers any arbitrage opportunities.

If we were in a fantasy land where Tether wasn’t fraudulent then the price variance of Tether on exchanges would be so minuscule that there would be no arbitrage opportunity for anyone to take advantage of. Your hypothetical profit opportunity only exists because Tether is (ultimately) fraudulent.

Remember that Tether was pitched as a 1:1 USD backed cryptocurrency that could be exchanged 1:1 at any time (in both directions). The mess that it is now (only liquid on exchanges at a variable rate) is not what Tether was marketed as.

Tether (as promised) is the equivalent of you accepting $100 USD from your friend and giving them $100 of Monopoly money and promising them that at any time they can trade their monopoly dollars for your real dollars... and you won’t ever use the USD for anything, it’ll be locked away untouchable by you. How do you profit from that? You can’t lend it, you can’t invest it, you can’t use it as collateral, it has to be unencumbered at all times and you have to incur the costs of managing it.

Read the original whitepaper and try and identify a profit opportunity. This is all before considering that Tether is a fundamentally flawed concept: if Tether could operate a reliable banking relationship, so could others, and Tether would be pointless.

I have a permanent desk in a WeWork and although there is reasonably high turnover (I’d guess the average desk tenancy is about 4 months although at least a dozen in my space have been there for 18 months or more) I have made a few friends who are still around and there’s quite a few friendships in the office amongst unconnected people. I think it’s definitely more challenging than a co-worker relationship because there’s less common ground and less forced communication but it’s definitely possible to have genuine friendships. I’ve been at the same desk since 2017 so I can’t compare my experience across multiple co-working spaces but I had a friend in my office who moved to a different WeWork and he said that the culture varies significantly building to building, so it could be that you’d find success in building friendships in a different building.

Sure, it’s unjust that innocent people lose everything, but... every single day innocent people lose everything because of the legal system.

“Innocent until proven guilty” may be the best we have for a legal standard but it is far from perfect and applying it anywhere outside of the legal system is a mistake regardless of how you feel about innocent people losing their careers through the court of public opinion.

Outside of the legal system “innocent until proven guilty” is a very common cause of the revictimisation of victims.

Innocent until proven guilty is a legal standard, it is unreasonable and impractical to expect individuals to abide by it in their day to day life. Every day you are constantly making assessments on people based on the information you have, whether that’s in the context of a crime or otherwise. The justice system (in America especially) is not “fair” and does not treat guilt as the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” might lead you to believe — in many circumstances innocent defendants plead guilty.

Some people like to cling to the idea of innocent until proven guilty because it’s a nice sentiment that makes things easy — “I don’t have to make a decision about this person, I can just agree with the court outcome” — but it’s meaningless outside of the legal process. Many people do not have a clear understanding of what it takes to prove guilt in court (and also do not understand what can derail a conviction) and would be surprised to learn how difficult it can be in some situations where there is (to the layman) clear evidence.

Does this mean the next step is developers start building out brandless hotels that are a collection of individual investor owned rooms that are serviced and let through Airbnb. There’s already “invest in a hotel room” schemes (that are mostly fraudulent/garbage) so maybe this is an inevitability.

I’ve heard that a 5 month old child can be vaccinated (it’s just not standard practice) so in a situation where there are serious concerns about infection you are not without options.

We are arguing different points. I’m saying _if_ an organisation _is_ insecure enough for social engineering to work then a vacation auto-responder is not going to represent any meaningful increase in risk.

Any organisation where “hey I forgot my password, can you reset it?” from an unknown email address is an attack that has chance of success is an organisation where there’s dozens of major problems long before you get to auto-responders identifying who is away from the office.