lorenzobr

The sms and phone service infrastructure is more centralised than you might think and carriers probably have less redundancy than big tech when it comes to it.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/21/20974692/valentines-day-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/06/o2-customer...

Cloud

I think this revolution will need to start from the bottom, new buyers need to realise that buying an ICE car does not make sense anymore, even if having EVs everywhere would only affect climate change by a small percentage, the benefits every city would get from them are far greater than keep filling roads with ICE vehicles.

Also governments at some point will start forcing their hand (and probably China will do that way before US given the current trend).

I bet you don't believe in climate change either, do you?

The real option is autonomous cars which you can call with a Uber-like app when you need it. That way we would have less cars but we would maximize the utilization rate of the ones we'd keep on the roads.

Except that most non-technical users will never read ProtonMail blog.

Exactly.

I find it embarrassing for the society as whole how many people these days comment on articles or posts by just reading the title.

Hospitals want you to visit more often

Maybe this is true in the US but not sure it's valid point in Europe where, given how the health system works, most of the time patients are actually a cost for the business hence less patients the better really.

What really kills meal-kit companies is just one thing: churn.

If you look at some published data from a while ago, Blue Apron has 15% user retention after one year, Hello Fresh 11%.

As a consumer, at first might sound a good idea and convenient to order pre-made food you don't have to cook but soon you realise it gets quite expensive compared to just get your groceries delivered and cook.

I don't know in the US, but in Europe for an average family of 3/4 members using meal kit companies is bloody expensive in the long run and you can't even get meals for the entire week.

Also if you get 2/3 meals a week, then you have to shop for the remaining days and you inevitably end up wasting food.

Personally, I don't event think you can compare meal-kit companies with the likes of UberEats or Deliveroo. The latter can reach economies of scale far more easier than the former.

Although it doesn't sound right, on the other hand why would Neumann rent his commercial real estate assets to WeWork competitors?

Maybe the question should be, why the hell Neumann bought properties directly instead of using the WeWork vehicle?

We all know the answer to that I think.

I find it's funny how people these days think the problem is with Facebook.

Literally every company that has access to users' data has in one way or another some kind of business model based on selling that data. Every day I come across 2 or 3 articles from big newspapers giving Facebook some shit about selling user data. But what about Experian? What about phone carriers? They all sell users' data, maybe anonymous maybe not but they are still making profit on people's privacy.

And when some shit goes down, we make a big fuss about it for a few days and then we go back to normal. Equifax anyone?

Honestly, companies in the position of making profit on users' data have been doing it for the better part of 15 years now, I don't understand why we are acting so surprised now.

Surely though that's different from fake likes assuming the advertiser is aware of it.

I feel like YouTube by now is more similar to TV advertising, you take in consideration that people could just have the tv on in the background while doing something else or going around the house. Unless you don't know what you are doing with your advertising budget of course.

dodgy dealings = lobbying. Everyone does it in every industry unfortunately for us consumers.

I'm not the one who said the market is "extremely competitive". For sure is a market with high barriers to entry, very expensive to be in and profit margins are not that high either.

So if you are Ryanair you aim at doing more destinations and paid "extras", if you are Alitalia you aim at doing fewer destinations on a much bigger price mark.

Ryanair is the only airline to certain destinations

Surely it's not Ryanair's fault if others are not willing to compete for certain destinations.

I travel quite often in Europe and took a fairly amount of Ryanair flights as well. The amount of people rushing in to the plane and messing around when it's time to put their stuff in the overhead lockers is incredible, even as fellow passenger this is super annoying hence I don't blame Ryanair at all.

Also, even if you have to pay for the luggage, Ryanair still comes often cheaper than traditional airlines. If you want all the perks you can just fly Alitalia and you're set.

See, the problem is that here we don't need principles. We need real facts and real solutions.

Many - across Europe - want to leave the EU on principle. The UK is giving the perfect example to everyone that principle is not aligned with reality in this case.

For a starter, "wanting to leave the EU" without having a clue of how to do it or proposing practical solutions is not the finest thing to do.

And also the entire immigration discussion was some bs considered the non-EU migration is been higher than EU one for decades https://fullfact.org/immigration/eu-migration-and-uk/

Exactly and tbh Google could just buy a newspaper and not give a shit about it.

Many newspapers are rubbish and publish rubbish content anyway so that's the problem, not the copyright.

Do you really believe this is something politicians came up with in the first place?

This is another example of the classic lobbies-driven political decision where politicians pass legislations as a favour to their friends in corporate A or corporate B.

Also, if they think this will fix the revenue problems of the majority of newspaper publishers they are certainly wrong, newspaper are not dying because people read news on Google.

Yeah, it seems to me UKIP has good track record of things "getting rammed through without a public discussion" by now, like the 350 million for the NHS with Brexit.

It's because we are growing up with VCs teaching us that you have to burn money for 10 years before you can be profitable.

Honestly, I'd sign with my blood if I could get my business to make £5M a year in profit and own nothing to VCs or banks.

I bet ya a signed dollar it won't.

This is just another shitshow driven by publishers, unions and music labels lobbying politicians in the attempt to make money given they have no clue how to innovate and make money anymore.

I wish people in the news would call this bs out for what it is but I doubt they ever will considered news publishers are among the ones lobbying. They'll be happy for us to be forced through their bs paywalls.

This is a very different matter from the GDPR, don't get fooled.

I think it would be difficult for Facebook to acquire Airbus :) http://www.airbus.com/defence/uav/zephyr.html

It's definitely a design choice.

Generally, every city has big transportation hubs - airports, train stations and so on - located at strategic places within the city. Musk's idea is to ditch these hubs and replace them with more frequent and much smaller stations which get you closer to your destination. On the other side if they don't have to move millions of people to the same hub but rather move a much smaller number of people, they can afford to dig smaller tunnels and stations which are way more easy and fast to build.

For instance, in London every time they build a new transportation hub, it takes years. These stations are massive, they literally dig in every direction for several meters.

I don't know if it's going to work but surely there's thinking behind it.

Edit: typo

I'm indeed surprised and I'm sure there are other cases like this out there, it would be interesting to know the thinking behind it.

In my experience of working with big corps, if you are using Jira and Confluence, Bitbucket simply offers much better integration with them and lately Atlassian is rocking it with new features and deeper integration every time.

Atlassian would have pretty much no reason to buy GitHub, unless it's to shut it down.

They have Bitbucket and I think is pretty safe to say that they don't care about people hosting their open source stuff.

Of course you can use Bitbucket for free but where the big bucks are for Atlassian is the enterprise market. I don't have market data but I don't think there are many big corps using GitHub as opposite to Bitbucket together with other Atlassian products.

Also and much simpler, good luck suing Apple.

Exactly this. A lot of these "challenges" are about the theory but the real job is never about the theory of things.

I mean knowing the theory is a nice to have but I don't remember last time I used it on my daily job, especially after 10 years of experience.