Your comment is insightful, but left me no instructions as to whether I should be laughing or crying. So, I'll do both.
2,210 karma · joined January 2, 2010
I'm neutral on Yang's campaign, but I like the idea of a UBI because administering it will be much cheaper than running existing benefits. Means-testing has a real and very sizeable cost.
What will happen to all the guvment workers who will get laid off once existing benefits have been supplanted by the UBI? They will go home to merrily enjoy their new UBI checks.
If you're purely a consumer, I don't see how your equipment has anything to do with search at all. Searching using one system isn't more expensive than using another.
This is easier said than done, as the other search engines are still not as good as Google, even though Google's results have been getting worse. This may be a controversial opinion, but it's not what my comment is about. I'm going to make a more scandalous suggestion.
Don't use search engines at all.
The idea that a centralized one-size-fits-all search engine is necessary is preposterous. The Web makes available all kinds of information, and unifying it all under a single data model is difficult, and doesn't even make sense. (Does anyone remember the semantic web?) Unifying the world's information behind a single search facade is likewise a Very Difficult Task (TM), one that's likely to fall into the trap of big business, as search has done, because the required resources are so huge.
But what if it's solving the wrong problem? Information of a particular type tends to gravitate to local centers of storage, so to speak, which are specific to the type of information being stored. For example:
- Encyclopedic knowledge is in Wikipedia.
- You can find places by searching Foursquare, Yelp, Apple Maps, OSM, ...
- Q&A about programming (and lots of other topics) is on StackExchange.
- News aggregators have been beaten to death, and multiple are available.
- You can search Twitter using Twitter, and Facebook using Facebook.
I can go on, but the point is clear: every single Web-connected system offers a search function of its own, one that's likely specialized to the type of information stored in that system. It'll most certainly do a better job at searching that local store, and will do so more quickly and cheaply than a centralized, generic search engine. This also avoids the moral hazard of search centralization.
This leaves the little guy: the random small website or blog, where the majority of true gems are found. Google locates these by sheer brute force: they literally index the entire web. They've taken a relative eternity to do so, but it's a problem that could have been solved by something better than mere force.
Does anyone remember webrings? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring What if "the little guys" organized in webrings and directories? This doesn't seem like a technical problem, as a webring or directory is trivial to build. Could this be a UX problem that hasn't been solved to the satisfaction of a modern Web user? Is anyone or anything taking another stab at this?
In closing, I'll throw out one last vague notion: that of an openly federated search. How cool would that be? We don't need Google for that at all.
Now, I won’t write another rant on the subject of Eternal September, and how our field is increasingly populated by charlatans who can’t do simple things on their own. But yes: that’s exactly how I feel.
You, my friend, just made a trillion VC megadollars.
The "engagement" aspect of HN is in the quality of items that make it to the front page, and in the comments. It's not in the slow drip-drip-drip of near-real-time notification regarding the activities of specific users.
Could you point to some reading that would help one become educated on this past history?
Here in New York there’s a road in Brooklyn called “Ocean Parkway”, which has grown notorious for crashes small and large. In recent years it’s been studded with speed cameras, which collectively have reduced the speed on this wide 6-lane thoroughfare to something very close to the prescribed 25 mph. Speed cameras really do work.
You know what’s even funnier? Those who are unaware of the cameras, or don’t care about those robofines, tend to look like complete idiots when they speed and swerve around rows and rows of cars driving nicely and carefully at 25 mph.
My theory is that traveling in a vehicle that is “on rails” (train or tram or bus - they’re all alike in that their routes are predetermined) removes every bit of agency from the passenger, and leaves them completely disconnected from details of the route. Passengers engage in conversation or bring entertainment with them that further weakens the spatial link.
Those traveling in private cars have at least some opportunity left to influence their trajectory or destination. “Perhaps you should make a right turn here” or “let’s stop for ice cream at that place we like” are both things that get said along the way. There’s also the constant stream of teachable moments supplied by other drivers in the form of poor vehicle control.
I’m raising my daughter in Manhattan, the least car-friendly place in the US. Until we ditched transit and began driving everywhere, she had no idea where we were or in which direction we were heading. Nowadays she makes suggestions from the back seat regarding which road is best and which stops we must make on the way.
That, my friends, is anecdata; but so is every citylab article. The world can’t be described by a naive generalization that, ironically, even a child can see through.
I for one am still waiting with bated breath for the "eggplant parm" emoji.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell
Not true! I get charged at the end of my lease for any "wear & tear above normal". Fair allows the customer to pre-pay a monthly surcharge to avoid the lump sum W&T charge at the end. Transport is cheap: I can get the car towed across town for <$100, which is less than 40% of a single monthly payment.
> Since the majority of their customer base churns through the platform with low tenure and is not retained (short term Uber drivers)
How can you possibly know that? Here in NYC driving for Uber is not a short-term thing by any means. TLC licensing cost and the time it takes to obtain this license is sufficient overhead to lock Uber drivers in for a long time in the hope of perhaps one day breaking even. Fair also charges a relatively hefty (I paid ~$2k) lease start fee in order to discourage customers from churning too quickly.
> Your gut is very wrong on this one, sorry.
I encourage you to present information in support of your assertion.
I'm a Fair customer, and I like the service, but I don't think it's a steal. It's a fair deal (no pun intended), but by no means would I call it a ridiculous, out-of-this-world deal.
Surely some fellow New Yorkers will remember the good old days of the Uber-Lyft price war, when it was possible to travel from the low 90-s & York to the low 80-s & Columbus for $2 on an Uber Pool. Or how during the morning rush an Uber Pool would take one from the UWS to FiDi for about $5. Those were unimaginably good deals because they were heavily subsidized by the VC cash that was flowing so easily into rideshare companies and out the other end into riders' wallets. Those were the days!
Fair is nothing like that. I pay $266/month for a 2018 CPO Honda Accord that I received with 2k miles and most of its original warranty. I reckon this costs me about 15-20% more than a dealership lease of a brand new car. I consider this a fair (...) premium for the flexibility that a Fair lease affords me: I can end it at any time without undue shenanigans, whereas a traditional lease would require me to either transfer it or pay an early termination fee.
Why is this important? With Fair I don't feel as if some hapless VC is subsidizing my use of the vehicle. The whole thing feels like an actual business with assets and employees and some kind of plan, not a reckless gamble for market share that in itself is worth nothing to begin with. It all makes a certain kind of cold sense: when you browse Fair's app for a vehicle, the cars you see aren't actually on Fair's balance sheet until the lease has started. Since their prices aren't too good to be true, my gut tells me that, at the very least, they have a spreadsheet somewhere that spits out the price they should charge a customer after having quantified the risk of this customer ending the lease before its break-even date, thus saddling Fair with the car for which it now has to pay out of its own coffers.
SoftBank being SoftBank, it's possible that Fair is one of its better bets.
But my original comment was mainly addressing the NIMBYism in California. Look at SF: it's a low-rise city of sky-high demand and prices. Who's preventing new construction? The same local NIMBYs who enjoy rising property values due to severely restricted supply of land that can be built on.