guyzero

They're not selling lidar units, this is lead generation for the M&A team.

American high schools have to be out around 3 PM to allow for enough time for sports teams to practice. Other schools end up synchronizing to this schedule. A non-trivial reason is that high school teachers with young children need to have them synced with their own work schedules and teachers have some level of control over how school days are scheduled.

Anyway, like everything in the US, blame the obsession with high school athletics.

Not broadcast per se but cable company set top boxes monitor your viewing habits and correlate them with your account which has a bunch of demographic data.

"surveillance-for-profit business models to be forbidden"

Are you going to ban TV networks and credit card companies next? Grocery store loyalty programs? Practically every company these days collects about their users and customers.

" a good thing somehow suddenly became "a scam"."

Does Griddy push real-time cost information to consumers to enable them to react to situations like this? "Scam" might be harsh, but their model clearly failed.

From the article: "Consumers who aren’t exposed to price risk have no fundamental incentives to conserve energy in times of need."

But, at the same time, consumers that have no visibility into their current electricity prices are unable to alter their behaviour. Until there's extremely high-resolution, real-time price transparency, this system is destined to fail.

Also consumers have base loads just like generators have base loads: you might defer doing laundry, but no one is going to unplug their refrigerator during a electricity price surge. Again, this simplistic spot pricing scheme is destined to fail if it doesn't meet consumer's need to have predictable baseline consumption rates.

I weakly agree with the author here that demand-based pricing is in everyone's interest, but that said, last week in Taxas was a systemic failure of immense proportions and everyone involved in planning Texas' electricity grid should be ashamed.

Arguably this is a sign of an Israeli tendency to complain about things and arrogance. Maybe they were right, maybe they weren't.

At the risk of being not politically correct myself, I think there are significant cultural gaps between the west coast American standard and people from Israel (Bardin is Isralei).

With the caveat that this is my experience only, Israelis are more blunt, direct and often openly critical vs Americans, especially Californians. They're often right and all the ones I've worked with have been very smart, but the way a message is communicated is sometimes more important than the message itself.

I think that in this global age people think that the notion of intercultural communication issues has gone away, but IMO it still exists.

People complain about Google but Taboola is a hundred times more toxic with their garbage ads cluttering up the bottom half of so many media sites' pages. Being shown the same ad for shoes a hundred times the day after I bought them is nothing next to shock-image ads into content farms.

I meant the article comments as you discovered.

a) the comments on this are unhinged b) why can't the ships go to Oakland or Seattle? There's probably a reason, but it seems like an obvious alternative.

It's not that.

WideVine and PlayReady and FairPlay don't exist because tech companies want them, they exist because movie studios want them - or to be more precise, they demand them.

Chrome plays non-DRM video just fine. No studio in the USA will make their films available on a non-DRM encumbered service.

You may not like hate speech laws, but they're explicitly coded in to plenty of legal systems, like Canada.

https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/Resear...

Shunning is a perfectly valid means of social expression.

That said, this article: https://betakit.com/narwhal-list-2020-tracks-a-year-of-massi...

seems to think Canada is on track to produce a lot of unicorns in the next few years. Seems like pretty good work for a country 1/10th the size of the US.

Yes and yes.

IMO the conclusion isn't that the scene "doesn't work" but that it's not producing a lot of "moon shots" and tends to focus on "roof shots". There is nothing inherently wrong with this strategy and it produces solid gains over time, but it's a lot harder going to accidentally create a billion dollar company. That said, Solect got acquired for 1.5B back 20 years ago, Shopify exists, it's not like there are zero Canadian unicorns, they just get produced a lot more slowly.

I think the comparison of a house vs other investments is a bad comparison - you need to live somewhere. You need to compare buying a house to renting a house or apartment or whatever. People do view houses as investments, sure, but I think that's fundamentally misleading. Compare the basic cash flow of the different options available. Figure out how much you're willing to pay for being close to work, close to friends, having more or less space, being in a walkable neighbourhood or whatever else matters. As much as I enjoy the illusory dollar value gains of home ownership, ultimately I had to work within the confines of my budget.

Also I think this line of thought is also misleading: "For most people, their home investment represents a large part of their net worth."

That's true but it's because of inflated house prices and reflects the fact that Americans don't save that much. Again, just treat a house as a liability and not an asset and suddenly this is meaningless and we can get back to managing cash flows and thinking about increasing savings. (Although as a side note, being very aggressive savers isn't necessarily great for a country as a whole, Germany is very conflicted about it's very high savings rates - for example, https://www.dw.com/en/why-cant-germans-stop-saving-money/a-4...)

eh, I'm not sure this really spells the end of anything - Bay Area growth has been extremely high for years, decades even. And yes, California has a huge problem with building homes & infrastructure, but even so, it's been growing at around 8.5% for a while. At the same time people have been leaving all along and it's inevitable that changes like this will happen. I honestly think that Oracle doesn't even benefit from being in the SF area anymore anyway, they sell maintenance contracts to fortune 500 companies, you can do that from anywhere. And no one is being forced to relocate, so anyone with school-age kids or an employed spouse is likely to stay anyway.

13 years ago ads was roughly $14B annual revenue for Google. Was it a "hose" back then?

A $36B revenue business makes Google's non-ad business roughly the 94th largest company in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...

Non-ad revenues are a $36B business (annualized based on Q3 revenue).

What's the threshold for something being a "hose"? A $36B business is a pretty big business!

To quote the OP, "There is no second hose."

My statement is that yes, there is a second hose.

I've never said they're not primarily an ad company.

A decade ago when the OP was an intern it was 100%! Non-ad revenue source have grown by infinity percent!

I made a very specific claim and I'm not sure what everyone's problem is. Google has found other sources of revenue and is actively trying to grow those sources. There are other hoses. I have never claimed it's not an ad company or that ads have somehow gone away. Because that would be dumb and factually wrong.

Come on, anyone can read GOOG financial statements.

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20201030_alphabet_10Q.pd...

Q3 2019, ads were 84% of revenue Q3 2020, ads were 81% of revenue

It's not a massive change, but it's changing and ads are at the lowest percentage of overall revenue they've ever been.

Google's revenue is more diversified today than it's ever been. This is a facile take.

The article says there were over a thousand applicants but not how many were approved to get the money. Anyway, with an average income of just over $27K per year in Tulsa, a handful of tech people relocating there probably makes a bigger difference to them than it does to California.

I love this luddism-light. Blogs are not necessarily well indexed or well optimized for search engines. Newsgroups are a mess and people abandoned them for many good reasons. Private blogs? I guess those would be fine if actually had any friends.

I will suffer through the "interface dictatorship" to reap the benefits of a huge audience and active moderation, both of which ensure that questions get answered quickly and correctly.

I find it odd that he heads with the least defensible of all these examples: You've probably noticed things no longer work as well as they once did. For example, the store's online inventory says something is in stock and when you get to the store, it's not on the shelf. A small issue, but telling nonetheless.

This has never worked! And widespread online inventory systems date back, what, 10 years? This is a weird place to begin an essay about how good the good old days were.

Sure, but on the other hand, the empirical proof of what labour unions have accomplished.

Flying seems impossible too, but yet planes take off every day.