wils1245

I don’t think the fact that the big 5 are doing well means we’re not in a bubble. Tesla is far from alone in holding a lofty valuation without profits to justify it, and we’re in the middle of an irrational mania over cryptocurrencies.

They already control the internet. The end of ISP net neutrality isn't about displacing the incumbents, it's about charging the incumbents rent to help maintain their position. This, along with anything else that they can afford that startups can't, helps them massively.

This is an extremely ironic example. Google controls what content you see more than any ISP ever will, with or without net neutrality.

If anything, this FCC change will cement Google's dominance. They'll pay some rent to ISPs to maintain their priority lane, something an incumbent won't be able to do.

>Kayla Davis, who runs financial planning at ABM Industries, relied on Excel to pull data from a motley of disparate accounting systems

"Motley of disparate accounting systems" is your problem, not Excel. Heavy Excel use/misuse by end analysts is a symptom of poor data practices, not a cause. If Excel is being used to compile and distribute complicated/big/important reports, it's extremely likely they lack better and more coherent tools and data sources.

What sector are you in?

Do you take vacations? It's a wonder what it does for your state of mind.

Have you noticed how many brick and mortar stores ask for your email or phone number at the register during a purchase? They absolutely can tie offline purchases to online activity with that information (not to mention your credit card).

I remember the first time I actually got raw logs of where my ad agency’s impressions were ultimately going. It was just so blindingly obvious that it was all a waste.

I came to the same conclusion you did. You’d have to go several layers up into the client’s org to find anyone with incentive to do anything but tell the most optimistic story they could.

That old agency is still around, surprisingly. My best guess is that whoever is actually holding people accountable for the money spent just has a number in mind that sounds reasonable, and has no expectation of seeing evidence that it’s well spent.

Definitely agree with your point about it being odd to get in touch with perfect strangers, but it's a great tool for promoting acquaintances to friends. I recently had a small house party and organized a ski trip, and Facebook allowed me to very easily invite people I didn't very well. It can be a great low pressure, non-intrusive, but genuine way to try and bring people into something.

I think as others have mentioned, spam is a big problem, but the more fundamental problem with this idea is supply/demand. For a sufficiently large system, the number of people that are interested in talking to person X about topic Y isn't likely to be well matched with the number of people person X is interested in talking about topic Y with.

Dating sites, while not what you want, are very illustrative. On open messaging platforms like OkCupid, in which anyone can message anyone, women are barraged with messages from men that want to talk about sex. How do you filter them out? If you do manage to filter them out, how do you surface a reasonable number of good conversation matches?

The only solution I've seen in this thread is offering opt-out. But all that's doing is offering people a way to not use a product, it's not fixing the problem.

Even relatively well funded and mature dating sites solve this by either offering finicky filter options to users, or really blunt filters (women have to initiate the conversation).

If I owe you $500, and I give you $450, does that mean I paid back the loan?

The consequence of not living up to an expectation depends on what's riding on that expectation. For a company trying to live up to a valuation higher than companies producing orders of magnitude more vehicles, I think it matters.

Not sure about the systems you maintain, but mine page for false positives all the time. They're annoying, sometimes they wake me up, but in general they're not a big deal.

A false positive from a medical test is much more costly, both in money for a doctor (or doctor's staff member's) time, and anxiety for the patient.

That said, your brother's case makes some sense. It's targeted, and I imagine the action you want to take after getting an alert would be pretty well defined.

I don’t like the overall goals of the bill, but both the 401k change and the tuition reimbursement tax are even more objectionable, simply for being dishonest.

The 401k tax has precisely nothing to do with building a better tax code. It’s about capturing taxes on retirement savings now rather than later to make the bill look like it comes closer to paying for itself.

Similar to the tuition benefit tax. It’s a pure accounting trick. Sure, on paper there’s a ton of new revenue you’re now going to get, but no one is actually going to pay it. Grad students are broke! There’s not some untapped source of revenue there.

Sure, but McDonalds being successful doesn’t mean most people like McDonalds. Lots of people, sure, but lots don’t.

What difference does it make that traffic and parking are “external?” They are still always factors in many places.

A data point countering your assumptions - I sold my car because I don’t like driving. I want transit to be good so I can use it.

Speaks to a problem of means testing property taxes on anything other than the property value - how to define poor in a way that can’t be games by skillful accounting?

Hasn't advertising always been the primary drip of financial resources for podcasts? Aside from a bit more enthusiasm for Casper mattresses than is probably warranted, I don't think your concerns have come to pass.

The great thing that podcasts have going for them as a product is they're super cheap to make (relatively speaking). Podcasters willing to compromise the product by taking on more obtrusive advertising will get outcompeted by those who don't. It's ideally how media sites in general would work, but those are expensive enough to run that most sites resort to intrusive ads.

It is if the man supposedly cleaning things up is every bit as corrupt as those he’s having arrested.

Kind of hard to get outraged about. These people _are_ corrupt. So is the crown prince. The Game of Thrones reference is apt, none of these people are morally superior to the others.

On the list of Saudi outrages, this ranks pretty far down the list.

At some point though, what more can you do with characters? After a while the viewer knows everything about them and the setting they exist in. There's nothing more to flesh out.

I grew up watching the Simpsons every day. I stopped watching because I didn't like the new episodes, but also because there was nothing any of the characters could credibly do that would surprise me, or that I hadn't already seen them do.

>> people will continue to pay higher prices

Why are you sure if that? The opposite is true. At some point stockholders will get afraid and pull back. The question is how much, and who gets hurt the most.

I think the point of the parent comment isn’t that a high PE ratio is inherently bad, but that these stocks are more highly valued relative to revenue than stocks usually are.

My question is, when the crypto market corrects, will it spark a broader tech pullback? The big four will be fine, but lots of unprofitable tech companies will be vulnerable.

Why should we have any more faith in the miners? They have a self interest to divert the wealth stored in Bitcoin to themselves, which doesn’t align with my interests as a coin holder.

I don’t think that’s true. The violence that occurred on the day of the vote and the uncompromising attitude of the Spanish govenrment likely caused things to escalate more quickly than it would have otherwise.

To me, Mountain View is the most egregiously under built city in the bay. Huge corporate campus for Google and others, but the housing stock of a suburb.

What’s a reasonable commute? If you’re in any of those places and commuting to SF you’re likely looking at an hour to get to work.

Not sure what you mean. There’s a whole lot of investor money flowing into engineers’ pockets here in the bay.

Thr bay is a great place for young people to quickly grow their careers. The issue is that once you want to settle and raise children it’s impossible without an executive salary or some kind of inheritance.

Living with roommates is fun when you’re young, but nearly everyone tires of it eventually. You can also get a one or two bedroom with a partner and good salaries, but try adding a kid and that place is packed to the brim.

To counter your anecdote, I’m 30, and have been in the bay about 4 years. I believe I grew my career in the bay faster than I could have anywhere else, and am very happy to have come here.

I’m still single, so have no plans to leave, but _none_ of my friends my age looking to start families are expecting to stay here.

They not only don't have a moat, the incumbents are better positioned to execute their business model than Blue Apron is.

It's a good point. The reasoning behind the moves matter. There's a huge difference between switching jobs because a better opportunity is available, and switching jobs frequently for lateral moves.

It would probably be more accurate to say that it's a yellow flag, requiring a bit of explanation but not necessarily a bad thing. I find the pattern of switching every 6 months for (presumably) ~10 years to be pretty extreme and difficult to explain, though. Not to mention exhausting! How many job interviews must that have taken?