What would be the point? grocery stores are dying already. Buy buttons are cool but surely it won't take 20-30 years for grocery stores to go away?
Between Instacart (which in it's "final form" is basically amazon for groceries) and Amazon (don't forget the Echo, which was basically built for the same usecase) grocery stores don't really have long left. Certainly less than 10-15 years?
I think the key difference is that Sony and Android both approached the watch as a smaller phone. You can play angry birds on it, and you can play music, and shop online and do everything that a phone can. In that sense they haven't built a new device, they built a miniature phone with a wristband.
So whatever Apple is building, it's definitely not an "also-ran" because the category doesn't exist yet. Whatever wins this category will look and feel markedly different from a smartphone, just like how the first real smartphones looked and felt different from their predecessor "smart"phones like the razr and blackberry.
Whether Apple can bring a viable product to the market remains to be seen.
Yeah I love Uber but the one thing that's really annoyed me the past couple of years is whenever it goes above 2x surge every UberX driver immediately "forgets" how to navigate the city. Even a couple of blocks out of the way means a couple of bucks extra on your fare at surge pricing levels. Uber definitely has this data, I would love to see them release it given their commitment to data transparency. Even some really simple metric like average distance traveled vs. average GPS route distance during surge vs. normal should give a fairly unbiased view of how often this is happening.
I'm not sure the math works out. It mentions a weekly lease price of $780 per medallion in Chicago. Assuming 15% tax and 15% cost of insurance that comes out to $600 to the leasing company. Assuming the car costs $25,000 and has a depreciated value of $10,000 after 3 years as a fleet car, that means the weekly "cost" of the car is $113.21 (assuming a 5% financing rate), which prices the medallion at $486.79. A perpetuity of $486.79 per week at an expected 20% gross return only costs $126,566.15, less than a third of the selling price of a medallion in Chicago today. Even at a expected 10% gross return still only comes out to $253,132.20. Am I off on my math somewhere?
Unsourced wikipedia articles seem to suggest that Wheeler believed the exact opposite on retrocausality. Since both pieces seem to cite no academic sources I will leave it to you to determine which is true.
Wow. this is misleading. Convertible notes are the best things to happen to startup founders in the history of fundraising.
Take a modern convertible note to an angel investor from the pre-bubble 90's and they'd laugh you out of whatever coffee shop you happen to be sitting in.
All of the "examples" shown in the blog post make irrational arguments. Show me one scenario (in numbers) where using a convertible note for a seed round was suboptimal compared to an obtainable equity deal.
If I didn't know better I'd think this was an example of a VC trying to smear an awesome instrument so hopefully they won't have to compete with investors willing to write them.
This is wrong. The reason pay and job security are no longer powerful motivators is because of the way society evolved in the past few decades. It used to be common to work for the same company your entire life, forced separation from that social structure causes a lot more pain back then than now.
In addition, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a generalized framework, it's not a guide on how to day to day manage your employees. Saying it's "outdated" because its previous misinterpretations no longer apply to today's world is irresponsible.
Well... I'm pragmatically there's things I'm going to agree with and things I'm going to disagree with for every. single. administration. So the choices are either working within the context of the system that exists today, or anarchy. Working within the context of the system includes reinforcing the things that can positively affect people's lives (healthcare) and fighting things that can negative affect them (spying). Fighting "the system" as a whole is paramount to advocating anarchy.
With absolute neutrality towards the topic of the article, here are some warning flags for the data presented.
"Employed Americans" isn't a typical survey category, and the author makes no attempt at explaining why "Employed Americans" was a more relevant demographic to survey than all americans, all adults, all adults between ages of x and y, etc. Nor does the author present equivalent statistics for the more commonly surveyed demographics.
"Nearly one in two employed Americans" really just means almost 50%, and could be misleading on quick glance.
Well he said if you kept giving the AI exponentially more computing resources it would get linear growth.
I think it's fairly obvious that providing 1 computer exponentially more resources isn't much different from creating exponentially more brain simulations...
Seems like you guys kinda just threw in the towel and said "fuck it, its for philanthropy"
Here's a better answer - Lending Club and Prosper both lost their shirts when they first entered the market, and now they are both making their investors money. It just takes time and, more importantly, data.
YC's purpose is to advance the goals of the startups that it represents and make its investors money. Secondarily it tries to help develop the startup ecosystem regardless of whether the companies are in YC.
I don't understand why politics can't be a tool to achieving those ends. Especially when the DNC is aligned with the startup community on many of the key political issues, like founder immigration reform, that can affect all of us.
A lot of advice on lawyering up and fighting this tooth and nail, and gotta say, this is extremely childish and a terrible idea.
If you sue your company, you increase its chance to fail by an order of magnitude. If you lose, you can laugh as your former founders and friends struggle to recover to pre-lawsuit levels but probably fail. If you win you would've won worthless shares in a company that's shortly going to fail.
Be pragmatic. You even admitted yourself that you are not a great coder - be the bigger person and do what it takes to help the company succeed.
Oh and when you exit, negotiate for an automatic vest for 25-50% of your remaining unvested shares.
Just make the selection process really difficult. Those who want it will get it.
Everyone shits on bankers but the reason there's so many successful ex-bankers outside of banking is because they're goal oriented people who don't take no for an answer. Very similar to startup founders.
Your point #2 doesn't really work. You can manipulate the market in the short-term but you can't control the inherent value of the currency. Fiat currencies issued by governments can do that because they can literally just print or destroy money through monetary policy.
And I'm talking purely about bitcoin. I'm a lot more bullish on the future of crypto-currencies in general, but bitcoin has a lot of flaws that are probably deal breakers at this point.
See point #2. Central monetary bodies specifically change monetary policy to prevent deflation, worse case they can just print more money to cause artificial inflating to combat deflation.
Between Instacart (which in it's "final form" is basically amazon for groceries) and Amazon (don't forget the Echo, which was basically built for the same usecase) grocery stores don't really have long left. Certainly less than 10-15 years?