thefallsman

The world growth rate has slowed down some since the 60s, largely due to the economic modernizations someone mentioned earlier. The current doubling time is roughly 50 years - http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lect...

As you can see here - http://www.zetterberg.org/Lectures/l96bTab/doubling.htm. More industrialized regions have slower growth rates. Africa will double in just over 20 years while North America will double after over 100 years, for example.

Many countries, like japan and Italy are finding their population is actually shrinking, this tends to be bad for economic reasons. The US gets a lot of population growth from immigrants which keeps the country growing despite having only about 2.0 children per family (2.1 is optimal for maintaining a steady population.)

I'm curious about this too, because once the visa is up do they have to go back? How hard is it to get a permanent or semi-permanent status? I'm assuming an H1 B or similar would not apply here since the founders would be immigrants..

Too true. Another hilarious example is google banning BMW for using doorway pages - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4685750.stm

If I remember correctly the site was completely deindexed.

Interesting point, write a controversial article, get love link love then link out to your money page (ranking lyrics for Bieber must be a goldmine...)

This seems like a good SEO method - point out that you were doing something extremely minor in violation of Google's guidelines, then point out that everyone else breaks most of the guidelines. All the same time do this in a niche that is known for spam, all the while hoping that Google will read it and manually slap everyone else, giving you a better overall ranking.

I agree, I think it will, at least somewhat, impact snapchat because the products are similar.

I'm sure that was the aim here, to create a product that took inspiration from snapchat. Given that it's one of the most popular apps out there with an insane amount of users, and we know that facebook already tried to buy it. I'm sure they didn't want to copy it outright, but if they can integrate some of it's features into their existing products, they may be able to steal some users.

Uber has been making huge strides. I think it is a much better company that lyft. With lyft you're supposed to talk to the driver, keep them entertained so that you get a good rating. Uberx is not that much more expensive and the drivers are much nicer and have much better manners.

I'd much rather pay the extra few bucks on an Uber.

Has anyone noticed that they give you gigantic bags for free? Our office (LA not SF) orders fresh all the time for basic food and they always give us enormous re-usable bags.

I'm trying to figure out, are they doing this on purpose (paper bags would be cheaper)? I'm assuming they are, hoping that you'll go shopping and use their cool bags and using this as a method of free advertising.

I agree completely. Google apps have already come a long way. Even right out of the box, I liked the spreadsheet functionality. Excel is great for complex projects but for simple data storage, I find docs to be easier to use.

I believe they were the first to auto sum columns in the bottom right hand corner, a feature which excel later added (feel free to correct me if i'm wrong). Something simple like this can be great for quick projects. I also like the ability to share within a group and allow multiple people to edit it. Imagine how much longer it takes to pass an excel sheet to 10 people and have them edit things.. I like the new update to edit without making instant changes that others will see.

More to your point, I would say that the spreadsheet app is definitely "good enough" for basic use but the word copy in docs needs some work. I like the share-ability feature, but I think word is better in almost every way.