151–160 of 229 posts
The thing that really strikes me about this list is how nearly everything on it is offered at a premium price. One thing I loved about the tech world while I was growing up was that it was consistently doing more with less. Wikipedia displaced Encyclopaedia Brittanica by being both better and free. Hotmail was a clear win over AOL and Yahoo's offerings and then Gmail was faster and handled spam better while giving mo…
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This is true in one way of looking at it, but the other way of looking at it is that these are companies offering products that were always out of the price range of the average person, but they've managed to drive the price down. For instance, handmade leather shoes are between $300-$500 for the entry level, but Markhor is selling them for $120. Yeah, maybe your average person can't spend $120 on a pair of shoes, bu…
That is trickle-down consumerism.
The thing that really strikes me about this list is how nearly everything on it is offered at a premium price. One thing I loved about the tech world while I was growing up was that it was consistently doing more with less. Wikipedia displaced Encyclopaedia Brittanica by being both better and free. Hotmail was a clear win over AOL and Yahoo's offerings and then Gmail was faster and handled spam better while giving mo…
This is true in one way of looking at it, but the other way of looking at it is that these are companies offering products that were always out of the price range of the average person, but they've managed to drive the price down. For instance, handmade leather shoes are between $300-$500 for the entry level, but Markhor is selling them for $120. Yeah, maybe your average person can't spend $120 on a pair of shoes, bu…
And, despite being handmade, are not available in my size.
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More accessible, maybe (unless you're black [0]) More affordable, no. In my recent travels to NYC and SF, I was always able to get a hotel room via HotelTonight or Hotwire cheaper than an AirBnB unit. I know its not always an apples-to-apples comparison but even for just a private room (not an entire home), an AirBnB in SF is $100+/night.[1] All that to say, I think you're wrong. [0] https://medium.com/stay-woke/i-re…
I travel a lot (including in SF and NYC) and you're objectively wrong. I prefer hotels to AirBnB, but still almost always go with AirBnB because it's significantly cheaper. For your suggested dates of Dec 18-20 I found literally dozens of AirBnBs for trivially easier to find AirBnBs which are cheaper than hotels. [0] https://www.airbnb.com/s/San-Francisco--CA--United-States?gu...
Take that for what its worth. If I'm objectively wrong or a liar to you, cool.
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I travel a lot (including in SF and NYC) and you're objectively wrong. I prefer hotels to AirBnB, but still almost always go with AirBnB because it's significantly cheaper. For your suggested dates of Dec 18-20 I found literally dozens of AirBnBs for trivially easier to find AirBnBs which are cheaper than hotels. [0] https://www.airbnb.com/s/San-Francisco--CA--United-States?gu...
Yeah, I have so much incentive to straight up lie. The average for the link you have is $108/night. That's above several hotels in my search. Also, most of these AirBnB listings only allow 1 person. Every hotel room will support 2 people and most will allow 4 (if you can get 2 beds). Take that for what its worth. If I'm objectively wrong or a liar to you, cool.
The average hotel room in SF costs hundreds of dollars a night. [0] So the average hotel is much more expensive than the average AirBnB.
Likewise, I showed countless examples of AirBnBs which have a lower price than the cheapest hotel you could find.
If both the average and the minimum for AirBnB is much lower than for hotels, we can safely conclude that AirBnB is substantially cheaper.
As a frequent traveler, I know that to be a fact. I would love if hotels were cheaper than AirBnB (I prefer them), but it's objectively not true.
[0] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/morning_call/2015/07...
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I seriously hope that happens with Acre. They could be amazing.
Went to check them out. Their houses are beautiful, but they truly are targeting the high end—double the price of a mid-tier-fixtures McMansion-build-quality house of similar size, at least around here. I'm also not sure how I'd get one of them built anywhere near the city here without buying a house in a no-HOA, low-home-value neighborhood and demolishing the house already on it, which'd be throwing away a ton of mo…
What, no STEM toys!? Have you visited the toy gadget section of your typical store, e.g. Target, BestBuy lately? It's full of crappy stuff marketed under the buzzword "STEM" for unknowing parents. Examples: Construction kits from Vex Robotics, WowWee's CHIP Robotic Dog, etc. etc. Problem with these "STEM revolutionary" toys is that they are not open ended, even with the so-called programmable ones kids get tired afte…
Erector / Meccano is a nice open ended STEM toy that could use some disruption and metrication and modernization and no themed disney licenses please. Unfortunately there is this strange attractor that sucks everyone who trys it into "I wanna make kids version of 80/20 because 80/20 is both cool and insanely expensive" leading to "heres my custom aluminum extrusion of immense expense that works with nothing out there…
I was going to say Capsela is great too, but did some quick searching and found it's been sold and discontinued :(
The thing that really strikes me about this list is how nearly everything on it is offered at a premium price. One thing I loved about the tech world while I was growing up was that it was consistently doing more with less. Wikipedia displaced Encyclopaedia Brittanica by being both better and free. Hotmail was a clear win over AOL and Yahoo's offerings and then Gmail was faster and handled spam better while giving mo…
True for web software - but that's never been true for hardware. Hardware always starts expensive for early adopters and gets radically cheaper as adoption scales up. The cheapest Apple 2 was over $5,000 (in inflation-adjusted dollars) at its release, the IBM 5150 debuted four years later at a more competitive $4,000, and the monitor was separate in both releases. Besides hardware, lots of the other current startups…
"[...] formerly for the super-rich and making it accessible to the upper-middle class (eg: a private driver, a personal chef, custom-tailored clothing, custom paintings)"
Don't really buy it. Before it was only for the rich it was for everyone. You go to rural places that's how it works. The latest incarnation of modern society is, for better or worse, based on people having their own car, camera, kitchen and being able to buy the latest fashions.
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> Unless there's a significant financial incentive to do so (ex: 2-to-1 match), don't give people gift cards. Gift cards are the biggest scam ever pulled by the retail industry, or more specifically, perpetuating the idea that giving cash is taboo. The problem is that cash often feels like not giving a gift at all. If you exchange fifty-dollar bills with a sibling, it feels pointless. Gift cards can alleviate that fe…
My (to be fair, minor) issue with gift cards is that they're essentially saying "hey, have some money...but you can only spend it at this one place of my choosing, not yours". I'm aware that this is pretty low on the list of problems you'd hate to have but it's there nonetheless. Let's say a relative has heard me talk about some Arduino project I'm messing with or something to do with building a computer. They don't…
It's often a lot easier to know someone well enough to know which store gift card is something they'd be likely to use by choice than to get a more specific gift right.