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Advancing our amazing bet

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Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#141
post #87
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Comcast does offer higher speeds, it's prohibitively expensive. In a typical market where Comcast has an effective monopoly the 2Gb service is $300/month and even just 250Mb is $150. Their upload speeds are also pathetic, the 250Mb service is only 30Mb up.

Yes, the 2G service is expensive (it's also delivered over 10G fiber, rate limited on the required router), but their 1G service is more reasonable (i saw $140 on http://www.xfinity.com/gig-offer ), not sure what the upload is, and availability is meager, of course.

The question is whether it's symmetric speeds and in-metered. Asymmetric speeds with caps is a fantastic way to offer 1Gb speeds with almost none of the real benefits or innovation opportunities.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#142
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh that's an interesting question. When I speak a different languages I switch to thinking in that language (this goes for human and computer languages). If I talk with a Russian friend, I think in Russian. When use a functional programming language I switch to thinking in functional concepts (maps, folds, list comprehension, closures). When in an OO language think about composition and so on. So when they write that…

That's absolutely fascinating, because I personally always think the same "way." Are you aware of any research on this subject?

There's a lot of research that shows that polyglots exhibit different personalities when conversing in different languages. Empirically, I experience this.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#143
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh that's an interesting question. When I speak a different languages I switch to thinking in that language (this goes for human and computer languages). If I talk with a Russian friend, I think in Russian. When use a functional programming language I switch to thinking in functional concepts (maps, folds, list comprehension, closures). When in an OO language think about composition and so on. So when they write that…

That's absolutely fascinating, because I personally always think the same "way." Are you aware of any research on this subject?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

"Linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or Whorfianism, is a concept-paradigm in linguistics and cognitive science that holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' cognition or world view."

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#144

This announcement needs a little bit of translation from the marketing language it's written in: > And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue. "We're not yet profitable." > We have refined our plan going forward to achieve these objectives. It entails us making changes to focus our busine…

This is why I read the comments first, just avoided another painful article. Do people who communicate in spin-speak start to think that way on the inside too?

> Do people who communicate in spin-speak start to think that way on the inside too?

A friend rose up through the ranks in a Telco to become a Director, and I genuinely think she believed the spin-speak was/is real.

She spent so many years of her life in meetings having it hammered into her head, then spent so many years hammering it into the heads of others, she actually thought it was real life.

Even when we were on vacation out camping away from the office, she would talk about the company using spin-speak. It was not possible to say "cut the crap, let's be frank". She was unaware there was any crap to cut.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#145
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> investors would have priced the loss into the stock price long ago That's a misconception. The investors had done expectations. They were either met or unmet. But unless there is insider info, a project going bad won't get priced before the news is known. Stuck prices isn't some magical thing that knows all. It's simply an average of what everyone believes. Beliefs are sometimes wrong.

Thinking about your last statement: If the price were an average of beliefs, we would have people that believe it's worth more and people that think it's worth less. Those that think it is worth more would, logically, buy Google stock, and then the price would increase until we reached the price where people are somewhat on agreement that it isn't worth more. So, either there is a lack of funds to make the purchases,…

> the given price reflects the highest price someone is willing to pay for it, right?

Sure. But how far can you infer backwards from that?

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#146
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> investors would have priced the loss into the stock price long ago That's a misconception. The investors had done expectations. They were either met or unmet. But unless there is insider info, a project going bad won't get priced before the news is known. Stuck prices isn't some magical thing that knows all. It's simply an average of what everyone believes. Beliefs are sometimes wrong.

Thinking about your last statement: If the price were an average of beliefs, we would have people that believe it's worth more and people that think it's worth less. Those that think it is worth more would, logically, buy Google stock, and then the price would increase until we reached the price where people are somewhat on agreement that it isn't worth more. So, either there is a lack of funds to make the purchases,…

The people who think it's worth more buy. The people who think it's worth less sell. They meet in the middle.

I suppose there is a bias in the fact that not all long positions have corresponding shorts, but that seems like it would be pretty minor.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absolutely fascinating, because I personally always think the same "way." Are you aware of any research on this subject?

I always think in the language I am currently speaking/listening to. And I'm pretty sure everyone else does. As for programming languages, I myself haven't done functional programming, but I'd imagine if I did, I would temporarily discard any OO programming knowledge I have, while busy coding something in a functional way. Because OO concepts are mostly irrelevant in that case, so why would you be thinking about them…

After working in F# for a while if I flip back to something else I'll spend twice as long getting anything done as I'll model my process in my head with tools I don't have access to. I just keep getting stuck, and having to force myself to think without maps and folds and so on.

Like any context switch it takes me time to get back into the right mindset and process meaningfully.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#148

This announcement needs a little bit of translation from the marketing language it's written in: > And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue. "We're not yet profitable." > We have refined our plan going forward to achieve these objectives. It entails us making changes to focus our busine…

It certainly does sound like a riff on the "our incredible journey" format.

I suspect this is not a coincidence. It looks to me like a coded message written by a real person trying to get a press release past a bunch of PR flacks.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#149

This announcement needs a little bit of translation from the marketing language it's written in: > And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue. "We're not yet profitable." > We have refined our plan going forward to achieve these objectives. It entails us making changes to focus our busine…

Plus, anyone who self-describes their actions as 'amazing' should never be trusted.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#150
post #82
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATT is rolling out new fiber (and running fiber they already had at decent speeds), Comcast has their 2G offering and a 1G doccis offering. Speeds have changed, but the fundamental issue is still there: It's impractical to have robust competition in the last mile, and nobody wants to wholesale last mile and make competition an option. Google fiber's early press releases included it, but stopped before they started bu…

While Comcast does offer higher speeds, it's prohibitively expensive. In a typical market where Comcast has an effective monopoly the 2Gb service is $300/month and even just 250Mb is $150. Their upload speeds are also pathetic, the 250Mb service is only 30Mb up.

For comparison, I pay 50€/month for 200/10 Mbps in Germany (including some phone / TV service that I don't use)
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