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Heard a talk by their CEO and I was impressed by his focus on technology as a differentiator and competitive advantage.

I will also say that technology is more than just the website/app - it is also their supply chain and how they run the stores.

Recently, I've heard of several companies folding up SRE and moving individuals to their SWE teams. Rumors are that LinkedIn, Adobe, and Robinhood have done this.

This made me think: is SRE a byproduct of a bubble economy of easy money? Why not operate without the significant added expense of SRE teams?

I wonder if SRE will be around 10 years from now, much like Sys Admins and QA testers have mostly disappeared. Instead, many of those functions are performed by software development teams.

Questions for the founding team, and others: What books or resources did you helpful in understanding the plumbing of the US banking system?

That the IRS is not overwhelmingly prosecuting this type of crime.

What's the basis for the converse?

What numbers don't add up?

This has been true for decades. When my dad ran a gas station, the profit came from selling goods like food and cigarettes, or repair services. But he stopped selling cigarettes in the early 1990s when my mom, a nurse, thought it was not right to be selling poison. My dad had a few angry customers, who asked him, "What kind of gas station doesn't sell cigarettes?"

I was so fascinated by the business and life lessons he taught me. There are unscrupulous ways to make money, but fortunately these are not done by the majority. A gas station dealer has to buy gas from the company at a set price. Often times, there is a "black market" of gas, sometimes mislabeled, sometimes stolen, that is offered to dealers by unscrupulous people. You can buy this gas for cheaper and make more money on the margin. If the company catches you - and they have every incentive to catch you since you are not buying from them and selling an inferior product with their brand - you are in trouble.

That may be the case for some gas stations but it is hardly the case for the vast majority of them. The majority of them are run by law abiding citizens who want to follow the law. They want no legal trouble.

I am Indian too, with a father that owned and ran a gas station. (My dad's shop was among the top gas-volume stations in America during his time, I forget exactly how much, but he had a few trophies from the company for it).

They preferred cash during his time because the 2-3% charge was a significant dent in margins. When credit cards started becoming popular, dealers still did not want to take it. So the company encouraged dealers to accept it by promising to refund the charges for a time.

I don't dispute that cheating like what you described happens. I dispute the implication that cheating the IRS is why most businesses prefer cash instead of credit.

My father sold gas back in the day. He told me a story of an incident where he accidentally sold water instead of gas. When the supply tanker was filling up the underground reserves, someone forgot to close up the underground reserve. A heavy rain came overnight and water infiltrated the tank.

It was an accident. Repair costs for customers were handled through the gas station's insurance.

I want to like GnuCash but I just can't. I have found the UI to be confusing. I still use a freeware, abandoned version of Microsoft Money: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=207...

The UI is still excellent. It is the only reason I have Windows installed on a spare computer. Despite never being updated, the principals of personal finance haven't changed that much.

I just started looking at Pinterest as a company to work for. From the outside, the way they treat their employees looks amazing. Things like KnitCon (an internal conference for employees led by employees) reflect well on the company. On the other hand, some of the reviews on Glassdoor are not so kind.

I hope Pinterest can succeed and overcome its current challenges. Even if I do not ever get a job there, what is good for one company lifts everyone else in our industry (unless you are a direct competitor!)

Amazon is still up almost 10x from its peak!

Regarding Mumbai, it depends on how you define "foreigner". The native population of Marathis only totals 22% in Mumbai. For some in India, these inter-Indian distinctions matter greatly.

It is just pedantic nitpicking. The remainder of your argument still stands and is interesting to think about.

That doesn't sound normal. Many alcohol stills use copper (wikipedia has this bit of information: "(a copper still) removes sulfur-based compounds from the alcohol that would make it unpleasant to drink")

I have much disdain for GM's corporate culture. It is a company culture that knowingly allowed dangerous vehicles be sold for a decade until a Georgia litigator connected the dots (source: http://jalopnik.com/your-guide-to-the-problem-gm-didnt-fix-u... )

As for Cruise Automation, I am not convinced they have accomplished anything groundbreaking relative to their competitors.

I can't speak much about the Bolt. A quick Google search shows a Bloomberg story stating they will lose 8-9k per car sold. GM better hope it doesn't sell well, if that is the case! (link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-30/gm-s-read...)

The Ford family controls the stock with its supervoting shares. Their opinions are what matter.

Otherwise, I agree with your comment.

I have been a Ford investor for several years. This is a big surprise for me.

Ford has said they expect to have a fully autonomous vehicles by 2021 (link: https://corporate.ford.com/innovation/autonomous-2021.html). That always seemed too ambitious to me, but I welcome being proved wrong.

I invested in Ford partly because I think, unlike GM, they recognize an existential threat to their business and are trying to take steps to avoid it. It has been a horrible investment for me this far.

With IBM, one can't help but feel this is a tactic to force layoffs without having to actually do a layoff. I believe they tried similar tactics in their Global Business Services division in the mid-2000s.

It's already happening. Several examples come to mind, but for now I'll use one that is relevant to Cisco: Palo Alto Networks offers several subscription based services for its security/networking hardware.

I was convinced to install an ad blocker solely for the safety reasons. It is the new antivirus.

The article says: "Transferring four petabytes of data, it turned out, took about a day."

Quite a feat - How did they manage to get 4 PB from S3 in a day, over the internet?

But Amazon wasn't the first. The Sun Grid was first (launched in March 2006).

"Talking your book" == putting money where your mouth is. Bill Gross, especially when he was at PIMCO running the world's largest bond fund, had to invest in what he believed in. They couldn't market themselves out of a losing position.

If they can do this right, they will get a lot more customers.

Right now we use Lync/Skype for communication, which I loathe almost as much as Lotus Notes. This sentiment is shared by many. Slack usage has organically grown (as a reaction to the failings of Lync) and I can envision Slack displacing Lync in many companies.

This reminds me of the NYTimes Amazon story a few months ago. There were several people who wrote that their experiences were nothing like what the story portrayed. It was possible for both sides to be correct.

It takes a lot of data points to draw a reasonable conclusion. Even then, it won't apply to everyone in a company.

I thought it was creative, entertaining and different than the usual boring charts. It's not perfect but I still liked it!

They often called themselves "AJ America" or "AJAM"

For influence? If you can't outright bribe a politician, you pay well over asking for his company (or house, or anything else). And then you hope he lends you a willing ear when you need a favor.

Thank you for this site! I am going through the interview process now and there are times where I feel like a fraud. Some call this impostor syndrome. It's encouraging to read others who have travelled the same path I've been on.

Thanks, Steve Dorner. I liked Eudora a lot.

And now I always remember what happens when you chop off a branch while sitting on it (a question on Eudora's help menu).

I recall there being quite a few Yahoo employees and execs with McKinsey backgrounds. I think many of them were on previous projects that Yahoo hired them for.

If this is the case, I hope they get better results this time.

As the article highlights, the Arab revolutions were led by the youth. I wonder what, if anything, will happen in the USA when the current generation, saddled by seemingly insurmountable college debt, comes to the realization that it cannot find stable work or afford decent housing.

I truly believe that moment will be an earthquake for the current political environment; what we characterize Republicans and Democrats today will dramatically change (just like it did after the Civil War and also the Civil Rights movement).