251–260 of 393 posts
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$7 beer? Frugal? In Berlin a beer costs $1 from the shop and maybe $2-3 from a bar.
Im thinkning of moving to München, this might be another reason too. A Heiniken 33cl beer in Stockholm costs around 12 USD if you are at a nightclub, otherwise around 10 USD.
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Unless microtransactions for content take off, and they haven't, ad tech is necessary to incentivize content on the web. 90% of the websites you read could not exist without the ecosystem that appnexus is a big player in. Hacker News, being one big ad for ycombinator, doesn't need to bother. So he's doing a real thing that provides real value to the web. And it's actually a sustainable business, to boot. Lastly, ther…
See, whether a startup is silly or not is an opinion. I happen to have an opinion that adtech is evil. Whether it has a side benefit like allowing "content" to exist is tangential. I usually keep that opinion to myself because it's not a popular one, but in this particular subthread we are not discussing the article, we are discussing the author who volunteered his "I am very hypocritical" comment. Elsewhere in this…
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$7 beer? Frugal? In Berlin a beer costs $1 from the shop and maybe $2-3 from a bar.
Years ago, I met a French woman who had decided to take up residence in Berlin. She told me that the city's unofficial motto was "poor but sexy".
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The reason free markets are great isn't their speed (though they are often faster than your average politician); it's the self-regulating nature of it. You don't have to tell people to stop buying overly-expensive food, nor do you have to tell the food stores to cut their prices. Over time, they each realize that the higher price isn't working; the customer buys elsewhere (either across the street or aceoss the state…
> Companies don't have to be told to improve, either, not when their competitors are improving and eating market space. At least, that's how it works in theory. A lot of industries have turned into demilitarized zones, both sides opposed but neither making a move. Telecom is the best example of how bad this gets. And yet even telecoms have invested huge swaths of capital to get us to 3G then LTE.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decad...
> Everything is too expensive. I’m from New York... I take issue with this one. It's entirely possible to live frugally while living IN San Francisco. I moved here about 7 months ago and expected it to be incredibly expensive but it hasn't been the case (beyond rent). The author mentions $15 crappy local IPAs but I've actually never found a beer for this price. There is no shortage of $7 craft beers you can buy at a…
$7 beer? Frugal? In Berlin a beer costs $1 from the shop and maybe $2-3 from a bar.
This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…
Ok, as a perennial voice for free markets I agree with your observations, but not your point. Having lived through it I see the damage it is doing to individuals who will take years to recover. Too many engineers today, perhaps like sports players, take a big salary, project it across 30 years and then say "Wow I've got millions headed my way, do I really need to bag my lunch?" I've watched as they became both broke…
Yes, there are a lot of dumb startups but I'm still not convinced this is a bad thing. Why does every 24-year old have to be changing the world? Imagine you have a 2x2 matrix where the x-axis is positive value added to the world and the y-axis magnitude of impact. You want your job to be in the top right corner, high impact, high value added to the world but there's two ways to get there. You could do something that…
> Also, it's a complete myth that San Francisco is expensive to live in. Cool. Can you point me to where I can get an apartment in SF for less that $1k/month?
There are a lot of cities btw where you can't get a single one-bedroom apartment for < $1,000
This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…
If only that were the case. Especially in the internet age, one would expect that you could work in some far off place where you can get a mansion on a huge piece of land and have a drive jusr for the amount you pay in rent in SF, yet for some reason (it's free money bubble, stupid) people, i.e., kids that drank the Tech Crunch Kool-Aid, all cram into tiny little apartments to do useless shit. Ultimately the missing…
Love the quote :)
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Yea no kidding. "AppNexus helps brands connect with consumers, empowering agencies and advertisers with a uniquely powerful approach to programmatic online advertising." Thanks for working on Ad Tech, the very thing that powers this bubble by trading attention as a commodity. Other people work on silly startups, but this shit is akin to HFT.
Unless microtransactions for content take off, and they haven't, ad tech is necessary to incentivize content on the web. 90% of the websites you read could not exist without the ecosystem that appnexus is a big player in. Hacker News, being one big ad for ycombinator, doesn't need to bother. So he's doing a real thing that provides real value to the web. And it's actually a sustainable business, to boot. Lastly, ther…
We're in enough of a media bubble already - there's so much media and so few trusted sources that its impossible to filter content anymore. Ads inject themselves after people's ability to filter burn out like a virus. Its not good for society.