Yes, it's far too expensive. You can get a rental car for $20/day. The pricing scheme mentioned in the article with $1/trip would be far more attractive, along with drop off flexibility.
What I find missing from this discussion is the safety aspect of wholesale ultrasound. Yes, we've been told they're perfectly safe. That was once said of x-rays as well and physicians were routinely x-raying fetuses in the uertus up until the 1970's. That was before the evidence of birth defects from exposure to x-rays became so overwhelming that the practice finally stopped.
See http://sarahbuckley.com/ultrasound-scans-cause-for-concern and references quoted therein for a good overview of the current discussions on side effects of routine ultrasound screening, including tissue damage due to cavitation and hearing loss in fetuses.
I'd be curious if the distribution of salary data from H1-B filings was more or less the same. Anecdotally for brand name companies, eg Netflix, the selection bias of Angel List data to the lower end seems to be confirmed. The database publicly searchable and I had seen a visualization once but can't find the link.
Your judgments aside, we have and are vaccinating our child.
While it's correct that bipedal locomotion and big heads make childbirth more challenging for humans, it still is not a medical emergency. You'd be surprised, if you did some reading beyond what medical school curricula teach, how many of the medical practices that are taken for granted in managed birth have never been rigorously tested with double blind studies, or have had long term empirical studies about effects much later in life. The routine administration of antibiotics is just one of them. An excellent reference on the matter is this book by an M.D. in Australia, and all the referenced cited therein, many by peer-reviewed journals:
The entire mammalian animal kingdom is fully capable of giving birth, autonomously and unassisted (if necessary). Human females, too, can tap into that part of their brains, if you let them, and don't distract or scare them with bright lights, beeping machines, cramped rooms, force them to make complex decisions that require cognitive function. Birth is operating from the mammalian part of the brain, not the pre-frontal cortex. If this wasn't true, mammals wouldn't exist. Think about it. As a male, however, you'd have to have seen it to believe it. I'm a male, and I saw it. It blew my mind.
It's heart-wrenching stories like these that prompted my wife and me to have our daughter at home. It was a beautiful birth. Birth is not a medical emergency, but hospital economic incentives are such that they're always trying to make it one.
That depends on the service. If you can afford outages that may be fair game. But if you have a high traffic service that's running hundreds or thousands of hosts, you can't take them all offline at once. Deploys can take hours, so can rollbacks. In that situation with high SLA requirements you can't really "expect" bad deploys.
This is actually BMW's second foray into ride sharing stateside. They ran their Drive Now service in San Francisco for a couple of years. It never took off, because there were too few places to pick up and drop off cars, and their all-electric fleet never solved the fleet management aspect, eg charging, etc. Their mobile app also was clunky at best. Coincidentally Drive Now works fantastically well, eg in Berlin, where you can find a car on pretty much every city block. You drive it where you want to go and can drop it off at any public meter. You only pay the distance traveled, in the neighborhood of 0.40€/km. Typical inner city rides work out to a few bucks. It's cheaper and faster than cabs or Uber. It didn't take off in San Francisco, I would speculate comma because they never cut a deal with the city to let them use any parking meter as drop off point.
You can't build a career on that behavior. Especially if you stick around a place for a decade or so, you'd be surprised whom you run into and whose help you might need down the road. Unless you're leaving town and the industry for good, don't burn bridges.
But you can. The Brazen Head in the Marina, Thai Noodle on Haight and a bunch of places in North Beach will happily serve till 1 AM or later and at a quality that doesn't even compare with fast food. In fact since I've moved to SF, going on ten years now, I've found pretty much most of the rest of the country (NYC and LA excepted) to be quiet a sad food desert.
This is why Google canned the whole idea of requiring a human to be alert and ready to take over. They want to get rid of the steering wheel and pedals, because they found in their extensive road testing that their own employees just didn't pay as much attention as they wanted them to.
This is still facing regulatory hurdles, obviously.
Real Estate:
The core Bay Area cities, the pinnacle of which is San Francisco, have not seen substantial real estate slumps in either recession in recent memory (the dot com bust and the mortgage bubble). For outlying areas, like Antioch, the picture was pretty ugly, however. Location matters.
Tech jobs:
As someone who joined the Bay Area tech workforce in February 2000, just a few months before the market peaked, my observation has been exactly what you describe:
* employed people won't see their salaries drop much, they might even see slight increases
* some perks will be cut
* income from equity packages will be much lower
* there will be some layoffs at established companies
* some startups will go bust, others will see their valuation drop and fundraising will be a lot harder
* there will be fewer tech people employed overall
* new arrivals in the job market (eg new grads) will have a harder time and see substantially lower starting salaries compared to their peers just a year prior. Timing matters.
Being a parent of a young child myself, I can very much empathize with this article, and the plight of child care workers. The conclusions are only logical that this is an area where government support and intervention can reap vast societal benefits. There is an increasing body of research indicating that the quality of the care a child receives from birth, as well as the safety of socio-cultural environment a child is born into (which can be controlled by high quality child care), are strongly correlated with how productive a member of society the child grows up to be. Why wouldn't the government want to maximize that? If we can pay for elder care via social security, how can we afford not to pay for child care? Some countries are ahead in this regard.
This is pretty interesting. Aside from the security questions already asked, and assuming they can be addressed satisfactorily, I have this question/suggestion:
Financial institutions all differ in their online offerings and most live in the stone age (i.e. no useful API's), such that accessing transaction data relies largely on screen scraping. One of the biggest make or break moments for services like yours is getting critical mass in coverage of financial institutions. I use two services, Mvelopes and FileThis and have connected dozens of accounts to either, everything from large credit card providers like Chase to obscure credit unions and mortgage lenders. Neither service covers all my institutions. I've offered my help to build scrapers but have not been taken up on that.
I think what could really revolutionize this is creating an open source marketplace for these scrapers that anyone can contribute to. The scrapers would implement a standard API to return data in some common format and would call a number of standard methods to access login credentials, etc. You'd have to develop the framework that these scrapers get plugged in to (also open source) and a test framework. The calling/consuming code of your service can be closed source.
In the long term hopefully this would inspire banks to implement the required API's natively such that scraping is no longer necessary.
Agreed. In fact markets can from time to time exhibit systemic inefficiencies. What this means is that the very fabric of the market itself can give rise to bubbles or crashes. A brilliant book that I found an eye-opening read is by Didier Sornette, a physicist by training, "Why stock markets crash," circa 2003.