salesguy222

That is like saying "most of our customers use the drive thru, so we will COMPLETELY CLOSE our restaurant to foot traffic".

A hybrid approach is best, especially when this article is literally text and some photos.

Potential side-effects directly caused by this are also similarly trending

underemployment, opioid addiction, crime, suicide, widening wealth gap all come to mind

Nah, no sarcasm intended. There will still be brick and mortar stores in the future, but it will not be the main method of shopping- online will be.

This is especially the case for food. It is not getting cheaper to run a brick and mortar operation with many moving parts. That is why Amazon is winning :)

Only art galeries with high margin unique sales and low overhead costs will be surviving 10 years from now

In 10 years, Whole Foods will not have retail locations, and its distribution network will have shifted to 100% online orders ;)

and, i should add, kroger and supervalu and etc will be struggling dinosaurs like sears

Checkmate, brick and mortar!! Amazon is eating the world.

Hahahha! Also roughly the price of just 2 Flying Raptors, which have the distinct honor of being nearly unfliable by even the most skilled pilots.

When the Fed stops dispersing cheap money to banks, who disperse it to publicly traded companies...

and when the "regulators" and "prosecutors" and "judges" aren't vacation pals with the Fortune 500 CEOs...

then maybe we will have some kind of a true free market, and not just an illusion of one run by the American Corporate Mafia :)

All businesses in America are fighting a zero sum game. Values and ethics are chucked out the window once you grow past Mojang's size. Out goes the employee ownership and work-life balance, in comes the desparation to grow into a monopoly. Wall St is a knife fight in my opinion. There will always be a competitor more desperate than you to win, and the market will reward them for it.

Yup! I am mostly in agreement. What is scary, I'd say, is that we do have many regulations and legal checks and prosecutors and laws and so on and so forth here...

... they just aren't enforced at all on the big dogs who are doing all the crazy shit.

You have to be as wreckless as Enron to even get a taste of post-hoc legal smackdown, and even then, the damage is still done.

I would love to, but that doesn't negate my statement that not all corporations are logical and efficient actors in the market place. As a result, too many humans on this earth will have to jump through the stupid and wasteful hoops set up by the CEO of a company that receives cheap money (indirectly) from the Fed.

So the next time you are working unpaid overtime and planning the CEO's first class flights to a "client meeting" that is really just a Wall St funded vacation for him...

I love how the society we currently live in places so much confidence in the statement that "corporations = efficient, rational market actors"...

and yet here we are, slaves to whims of a few thousand people globally who control 35 trillion dollars in assets.

This virtually guarantees that if you want to make a liveable income, you either need to work for or sell to a truly psychotic group of individuals who control an arbitrarly large portion of wealth thanks to a host of monetary and legal policies.

Oh my god this is such a true statement!!!

Unless you want to be curled up on a couch for 5 days and sleepless with your muscles and forehead visibly spasming every 15 seconds, DON'T take any benzos, and DON'T quit them cold turkey.

I had the misfortune of experiencing this first hand, but others have had it much worse, going into seizures and dying after trying to quit benzos for years.

There are definitely other treatment options. Don't mess with benzos unless you absolutely cannot bear an acute situation!!!

Good luck to everyone who is truly suffering out there! You can make it through !! :)

Fortunately yes!! Of course it is not millions of dollars a year, but it is enough to replace a desk job income and seems stable.

Here's to hoping!!

Growing yes, and profitable yes! I may not have a million or billion dollar market, but I've totally replaced my desk job income with this :)

I don't see the niche drying up anytime soon, so I appreciate this advice. I feel like I am on the right track!

No, thank you so much for this advice! It was helpful and much needed.

I may not be building a million or billion dollar market, but I figure that if money is the same, I'm glad to be working by my own rules rather than someone else's!

quality control is hard at scale.

i don't understand why it's so hard for people to order from a local shop with an owner they trust?

sometimes you reap what you sow

If I'm making a tech product (not SaaS) as a solo founder, no employees, no funding, not in the Bay Area, but making a product that people love, would I be considered a success?

I personally love the Startup School lectures and they have been a great help to me.

NSA analysts can only be called "experts in analyzing intelligence" if TSA agents can also be called "experts in analyzing terrorist threats".

Because the bar for hiring is pretty much the same lol

He is in fact extremely lean, and his fingers have massive growths of connective tissue from all the years of thrashing up rocks dangling by his fingertips ^.^

The only solution to all of this is libre/gratis hardware, software, hard work, and delayed gratifcation ^.^

There is still a price collected. The question is- "is this price worth the value delivered?"

In the case of roads, the answer is usually yes. The value they add is clear (at least until flying everywhereis the new economic norm).

People are willing to pay local taxes, tolls, insurance, licensing fees, gas taxes. A good portion of this money goes to road building and upkeep. Some of it is syphoned off and goes to other things.

If the proportion falls out of balance, and in parts of this country it does, then it no longer becomes "worth it", because of corruption and misuse.

If you've ever drive i95 from the Bronx to Stamford CT, you'll notice the portion in NY is in absolute disrepair, but the CT portion is very nicely paved. And yet, both states are flush with money. So what gives?? Mismanagement of public funds is the cause.

Similarly, if college (a 4 year holding tank after high school) is so much better than secondary education, vocational education, and self-teaching through books and youtube, then we can continue investing in it.

But since it isn't clear that college is better than these cheaper alternatives, it's just a way for public money to be siphoned from your wallet to someone else's.

It most definitely isn't free, unless you avoid the variety of taxes in our society. In which case, I applaud you for living a non-traditional and very self-sufficient life :)

It would be a net good if the people who went to college were changed in such a way that they stopped destroying value and started creating value.

That is to say, if college (more often than not) turned criminals into saints, and turned a welfare recipient into Erdos, then it would be an excellent investment for society.

But there's no evidence it does this, and it doesn't even do a better job than high school. You can learn more on youtube than you do in college.

So until then, it's a marketing racket that transfers state money into a few private hands- and the gov't goes around collecting for decades.

Unlimited ink? How do I ask for a shipment- through a form or a human? What happens when I request to much ink or pens? Do you conveniently forget to place my order?

How hard is it to cancel? What does the price tiering look like? When you are acquired, will I still receive my shipments?

All of these are arguments for why the "subscription market" is absolutely bogus

Nothing is free in life except sunlight.

Colleges employ people and build buildings and have ongoing costs. Taxpayer money would need to be used to pay for this, and that money must have continued value, otherwise no amount of money would actually get the job done (see Venezuela)

Not everyone learns valuable skills at college. You have to watch out for conflating "learning valuable skills" with "occupying space on a college campus."

While I can agree with you that entering waypoints is not quite analogous to software engineering, I think we are arguing over semantics.

Especially in 1999 and especially with legacy systems, the word "programming" means "providing computers with coded instructions for the automatic performance of a task".

This is similar to how a television network would "program" a list of shows to occur in order automatically.

I suppose my overriding point here is that there are credentialed people with smart sounding degrees whose maximum extent of interacting with computers is typing in instructions.

And therefore, we should be extremely wary when we use credentialing as the litmus test for "should they enter bomb coordinates that will be flying over civilian heads"

Wow, that's brutal. I wonder if those American lives are considered collateral damage too to those pushing for war

Do you think a typographer can enter coordinates into a system from the late 80s?

The pilots themselves can't even enter the coordinates. These planes were programmed by the CIA.

Sweet, let me dig up all the usual tropes I can think of so we can all figure out if this is good or bad.

Pro-tariff:

- "USA can do what it wants!!!!11"

- "China = bad quality! sad!"

- "Support American jobs!"

- "Mercantalism is how we thrive!"

Anti-tariff:

- Mercantalism kills everyone

- Consumers suffer, corporate cronies prosper

- People will find ways around the tariff

- US made does not always mean better quality

As a foil to your claim that people don't die from bad code:

In 1999, when the US was engaging in a bombing campaign in Serbia against "military targets" that were staffed by civilians, the US bombed the Chinese Embassy, killing several and injuring dozens of civilians.

The US later "apologizied" by saying "sorry, we programmed the coordinates improperly."

Now, I'm not sure if that means some CIA intern college kid task monkey supplied the wrong coordinates to the bomb programmer, or if the bomb programmer typed the (correct) coordinates improperly.

But, software absolutely does kill people when wielded by lazy, incompetent, and often, diploma-holding programmers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the...

Very few of us would survive nuclear war but we should at least spend an hour or two thinking about how to try

I'm not sure of the percentages, but I would say many scientists feel pressure to publish "new groundbreaking results that fit a lofty hypothesis"

This situation is a little different because their hypothesis actually wasn't lofty, but their results were.

But it is decently undeniable in my eyes that scientists are facing pressure from the MBAs to set goals first and then brute force the results to match the goals.