Viewing profile — 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 re…

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 …

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 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 per…

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 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. chi…

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 …

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…

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 i…

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_…

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 hou…

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 …

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. No…

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 perso…

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 …

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 WalMa…

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. Pl…

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 …