261–270 of 350 posts
For e.g. in my city I can order Pizza from Dominoes or Pizza Hut. Both are located on the same road. Dominoes uses it's own staff, Pizza Hut uses Deliveroo. I've tried both but Dominoes will delivery reliably in 25-35 minutes, and Pizza Hut took over an hour and a half. Guess which one I use still!
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There's a George Carlin bit about politicians. The punchline is "the problem isn't the politicians, it's the people." His point is that nothing emerges from a vaccuum. Politicians are people just like everyone else, they're just responding to incentives created by a majority vote. Tech companies are just like any other company, except a lot more people are willing to pay for their goods and services. If Carlin were a…
Carlin's comedy peaked during near the era that I think most consider the Golden Age of America. Times have immeasurably changed since then. On the tech side of things Google has recently been hit by multiple anti-trust lawsuits, and lost them all. That's perhaps even less telling than the evidence presented. They brazenly and actively conspired to kill or buy any and all competition, but they've become so large (and…
The moral of the story to me is that the government doesn't give a crap what you do so long as it's good for them. Google only got punished, and even then it was a big "show" with no results not because it did wrong, but because it so flagrantly violated the law the government got pissed that it was being made to look a fool. They didn't really want to "punish" google because it was their buddy and they found it useful, they just wanted the appearance.
This is essentially the story of tech companies across nearly every industry where they have come to dominate. This is one reason that I see most tech companies as essentially a net negative for society at large, as the goal is nearly always to control a large monopoly (and this is fully admitted by many tech leaders, e.g. Thiel) which the Internet makes possible. Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usu…
There's a George Carlin bit about politicians. The punchline is "the problem isn't the politicians, it's the people." His point is that nothing emerges from a vaccuum. Politicians are people just like everyone else, they're just responding to incentives created by a majority vote. Tech companies are just like any other company, except a lot more people are willing to pay for their goods and services. If Carlin were a…
Turning around and blaming consumers for this while pretending it couldn’t be better both is truly a shallow take. Carlin wouldn’t let these people off the hook like you do:
> A person of good intelligence and of sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality - and it's not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing - it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street
I think the truth is restaurant food delivery is a luxgury good, literally “private taxi for your burrito” yet many people spend like it isnt.
It didn't used to be. I delivered pizza in the early 2000s, and the fee was $1 and tip, which was usually $2-3. It was pretty normal people ordering the stuff. And the funny thing is I made about $20 an hour (unadjusted for inflation, ~4 deliveries per hour + $5 an hour). Today the drivers still around that amount, the restaurants pay more and the companies operating are often operating at a loss. Something very stra…
I ordered Indian food from one of my favorite local establishments. I was home alone so I wanted it delivered. I called the restaurant and placed my order. The owner showed up 20 minutes later in his Mercedes to drop off my delivery.
Some restaurant owners know that they can buy themselves nice things and still provide excellent customer service if they don't give all their profits to a delivery service.
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Seeing how many Gen Z people use food delivery services on a weekly or even daily basis was mind blowing to me. I’ve had numerous conversations where I’ve had to bite my tongue when younger colleagues complained about finances after also explaining that they DoorDash dinner nearly every night. It’s bizarre. Not all Gen Z, of course. Most of the younger people I’ve worked with have been generally smart about finances.…
I was born in the 80s in the UK. When I was a teenager, my family had a takeaway meal delivered every Wednesday night. My dad would ring up the restaurant, tell them the order and our address, and pay the driver when they arrived. It cost us exactly what it would cost someone going to the restaurant, plus a small 5-10% tip to the delivery driver. Most places had a delivery fee only if you live outside a certain radiu…
Looking at economic stats, spending on food and drink outside of the home grew enormously between 1992 and 2004 to overtake spending on food within the home: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-3010...
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Even the subtitle of this article basically enforces that fact: > Why is my $8 burger $23 after fees - An average reddit user As you say, it's a private taxi for your burrito. When you factor in the labor costs, gas/car maint costs, and the amortized cost of providing the service, it's hard to see why anyone would think $15 for an on-demand delivery in a major urban area is abnormal.
Here’s something WiLd and crazy — “in town” or “in range” delivery used to be free in major urban areas, and you’d tip the delivery driver $2-5.
Literally the same price for the pizza for in store take away or home delivery.
Always wondered if that was tax or immigration fraud (pay-to-work schemes). Or both.
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There's a George Carlin bit about politicians. The punchline is "the problem isn't the politicians, it's the people." His point is that nothing emerges from a vaccuum. Politicians are people just like everyone else, they're just responding to incentives created by a majority vote. Tech companies are just like any other company, except a lot more people are willing to pay for their goods and services. If Carlin were a…
Tech companies are not like other companies because they can trivially create vendor lock-in without any geographic constraints on where the customers are. In fact, it's harder to avoid vendor-lock in in tech; it takes extra work to open things up, possibly a lot of extra work. Even a well-intentioned open-source program can garner a user base which can't easily migrate off it.
If there are 5 companies, doesn’t that count as “competition”? If not, how many companies does there have to be to have “competition”? If there were only 1 or 2 companies, that would seem much more of a problem.
Where I live there's only 2 companies really, and I'm guessing in almost every market it'll be 1 to 3.
I think the truth is restaurant food delivery is a luxgury good, literally “private taxi for your burrito” yet many people spend like it isnt.
Of all the things to worry about this is probably the least important.
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I’m realizing more and more that it’s rarely technological advances that make any particular company successful and impactful. It’s more often the business acumen. Were “nerds” with coding skills really ever the best ones to be starting companies? How many successful ones were founded without leadership being handed over to “suits” pretty early on?
You need nerds to build something at a baseline competency that you can sell it, then you need to be the greasiest salesman ever to sell it harder once you've gotten a foothold. People genuinely do not care about product quality, doubly so in the world of software (see: Crowdstrike is still in business).
Does baseline competency stop being the differentiator after seed? Series A? B?