mountainofdeath

Raw cloud computing costs have a fairly small margin over what they could be. Nobody with real purchasing power is paying anywhere near the listed retail rates. It's part of the reason smaller providers e.g. OVH, can remain quite competitive.

The other items have very strong lock-in and capture ecosytems. Microsoft Office is the first and only office suite anyone uses and its cheap enough for nobody to consider a real alternative. Microsoft could attempt to charge $10,000 a seat and while some will certainly stay, others would look for an alternative. But for just $10 a month, its a fair price to pay.

History is littered with the corpses of companies that had exceptional but expensive products that were replaced with cheap, good enough products.

Of course they would. Private equity looks for the following things 1. Things with an inelastic market and fixed demand. 2. Many overlapping small time competitors. 3. Steady cash flow, preferably with low capital costs though not always

You can take the cash flow, take debt against the companies own cash flow to buy it, pay yourself back, consolidate, then raise the prices on a captive market.

The same thing was said about the crazy build-out of fiber and telecommunications infrastructure. That infrastructure did prove useful but it took about 10-20 years before that was the case. It took 4G becoming broadly available and the ensuing increase of mobile devices to use at least of the overbuilt network capacity.

The implicit assumption in libertarian perspectives is that all parties are rational and have similar levels of information. In healthcare, this is simply not true. The average person isn't capable to judge what is and isn't necessary for them (outside of the small amount of very routine and elective care).

Likewise, if a hospital hands you a bill for 30k and you need help, are you really going to be able to negotiate and find a better price?

Healthcare is fundamentally an in-elastic good.

To add even more noise, there is a similar service from Samsung called Samsung Cash which lets you transfer cash between other Samsung Cash users using a prepaid Visa debit card on the backend. It

The unbanked in the USA don't have a bank account for a variety of reasons. Typically 1. Mistrust and fear of "being in the system" 2. Having a legal judgment against them e.g. child support, fines, overdue rent 3. Avoiding showing income to not lose income-defined government benefits 4. Hiding income from tax authorities

When I was in China, the government issued an edict that basically said "merchants of a certain size must accept AliPay/WeChat Pay/UnionPay CloudPay universally". All of the above are almost identical "Scan my QR code" to pay.

It would be nice to have such an edict, forcing compatibility outside of the ACH system but it will never happen.

Yes and no. It's still a cash-equivalent transaction, requiring you to either have an Apple Cash balance and/or an attached checking account or debit card (in the USA at least).

To my knowledge, zero. If you really mean Jews, I think there are roughly 40 between both houses of Congress. None of them are Israeli citizens. Jews are not automatically citizens of Israel though they do have dedicated pathway to obtaining it, but it's not as simple as merely showing up and claim you are Jewish.

Also, cats. I now have two cats and now I average 1-2 American roach sightings a year.

Coffee makers. I once picked up a nice, high-end Keuring machine for free from a neighbor. Later than evening, I noticed something moving around it. It was full of roaches. I put it in a trash bag and ran to put it in the garbage outside. The exterminator and landlord both said the warmth and moisture of coffee machines is a magnet for roaches and coffee is their favorite snack.

This isn't a new concept. NYC (among other cities) had networks of Pneumatic tubes to shuttle intra-city mail around.

For NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...

For Paris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_pneumatic_post

It will be interesting if the economics work in suburban sprawl.

Indeed. In my time, it wasn't uncommon to have 6 AP classes a semester along with at least one time-intensive extracurricular. Assuming each class is the equivalent of 3 credit hours, it's the equivalent of an above average number of classes in college (15 being the expected amount, 12 being the minimum to be a full-time student, and 18 considered intensive) while playing a competitive sport.

The best part: Even a decade ago, the above was considered neccesary but not sufficient for admission to a top school. Plenty of people with perfect to near-perfect college entrance exams, Intel International Science and Engineering Fair finalists, etc didn't make the cut. Of the few that did, the majority were the lower Ivy's (Dartmouth and Brown).

FWIW, I have Verizon FiOS in NYC at a reasonable price. The city of NY and the state do their best to keep Verizon and Spectrum at arms length.

By way of contrast, my parents live in the mid-west and were plagued between a choice of slow AT&T DSL or expensive but slightly faster Comcast/Spectrum/Consolidated (A terrible overbuild provider) cable internet.

The game changed entirely when Google Fiber started rolling out. First in the inner city, then to inner suburbs and just recently to the outer suburbs after spending the better part of decade fighting city councils that obviously preferred Spectrum and AT&T.

Since then 1. Prices have stabilized and declined somewhat from the incumbent carriers. 2. Spectrum did an in-place upgrade and now 500 Mbps down is standard for a reasonable price. AT&T turned around and built it's own GPON network ahead of Google fiber in areas where Google didn't have service.

Isn't competition wonderful?

I've actually seen this elsewhere as well. The local rural telephone cooperatives tend to have better service and better support if the customer base decides it and can afford it.

Having a license is not a prerequisite to buying a vehicle. having money or equivalent is. You just won't be able to legally drive it.

Correct me if I am wrong but the only material differences between contractor and employee status are

1. Who pay's the employer side income taxes. Contractors pay both sides. 2. Not eligible for benefits, you have to go to overpriced open market. 3. The contractor can deduct reasonable expenses they incur. 4. A contract will not necessarily be renewed whereas for an employee, the assumption is the job will be there in perpetuity.

This is stupid.

In an ideal US world, where healthcare insurance premiums aren't insane and aren't skewed toward large corporations, then everyone should be a contractor.

The person hiring you sends you payment and you do the work in accordance with your contract. At the end of the quarter, you total up your expenses (as already allowed under existing law) and subtract them from your revenue. You owe taxes on what is left.

With remote work, its really hard to anticipate costs you do not control e.g electricity. Furthermore, even the IRS insists that only subtract expenses that are substantially used for work. Years ago, anyone with a home office would consider their entire mortgage a business expense. Now, its subject to a complex set of rules taking into account the time spent actually working and the relative square footage of your work area relative to your home.

Furthermore, isn't this creeping into the territory of company towns? At what point would it just be cheaper to throw people into barracks, deducting room, board and laundry and simply remit the rest to the worker?

I vaguely recall DI.FM having a similar map circa 2006, complete with descriptions of each genre.

FBA de-risks the transaction for Amazon and the vendor. You sell a known quantity with a known delivery window. Small businesses often struggle with this and criminals use this to their advantage.

If eBay/non-FBA is a flea market, FBA is a online mall.

Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do. Amazon just does it more overtly and with smaller businesses. In fact, various aspects of this where pioneered by WalMart and Costco. 1. WalMart determines the expected product and expected price and tells vendors to take it or leave it. The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as WalMart gets specific SKUs. 2. On the other side, Costco makes the majority of its money from memberships. The membership is a significant sunk cost and maintains brand loyalty from a mass affluent customer base (notice the similarity to Amazon Prime). Existing vendors will work closely with Costco to tailor products to this desirable market (see Costco specific SKUs for TVs, routers, etc). Upstart brands will go even further to get their wares in front of an audience with ample disposable income.

The Amazon policy basically says that the vendor must offer free shipping. Coincidentally, nobody can offer shipping for less than what Amazon offers therefore Amazon(FBA) is by default the lowest price. The only other company that can fight this with a logistics network of its own is...WalMart.

Then you have Chinese vendors who sell through networks of dropshippers and resellers at Amazon and other venues. It's why you see many vendors of seemingly the same item.

One thing to note is that it's mostly small and medium vendors of relatively low margin items that are the most hurt by Amazon's policies. Seller's of high margin items just eat into their margins while large vendors push back at Amazon and sometimes win e.g. Toilet Paper that comes directly out of a Georgia Pacific warehouse instead an Amazon warehouse despite being labeled as Prime and sold by Amazon.com, not a third party.

So, that's like, a fraction of a percent of revenue of this particular online product? They may as well attribute it to marketing and keep doing it.

Exactly. The worry was that it would provide justification for violence against specific groups which is why it wasn't publicly entertained as a theory even if privately it was. Planting the seed of that thought in an armed populace already on edge is a recipe for disaster.

Indeed this is the case. The timing was unfortunate in that the pandemic hit during the absolute lowest point in trust of public institutions and bad faith actors stepped into the void to take advantage of that.

In terms of covid specifically, experts did what they typically do for high mortality diseases e.g. ebola, SARS where the mortality is high and the only course of action is to seal an area and let it burn through the population but at least contain it. That turned out to be the direct opposite course of action needed.

An automobile is basically a requirement to not starve anywhere outside the core of maybe 5 American cities with acceptable public transit. It's the same as having a pair of shoes.

Axis supports ONVIF as do HikVision and Dahua (if you are OK with Chinese brands). I've yet to find an ONVIF compatible camera with reasonable quality that didn't cost $$$.

Frankly I'm surprised only the Chinese are doing it. You would think large corporations would do the same against internal troublemakers, competitors, etc.

I believe none of them require proof of employment eligibility e.g. immigration papers so it's a way for those on the fringes of society to make a living. It's basically the same as why people work bad jobs for cash that is less than minimum wage. There are several layers of illegality here but nobody dares speak up.

I agree. I've seen all of the above and more. I've seen full-on motorcycles in bicycle lanes going the wrong direction. I've seen them ride right through a crowded sidewalk,

I was in China recently and it struck me how wide the bike lanes were and mopeds were allowed but everyone generally followed traffic signals.