I agree with the gist of you're saying, and I didn't personally dig into their last few fillings, but I suppose what the parent comment is trying to express can also be stated as "Uber's core ride-sharing business model is not cash flow positive", which can be obfuscated when arguing GAP vs EBITDA.
Yeah, I get the insinuation and I'm responding to that: ignoring for a moment the thing about the proper definition of a ponzi scheme (sibling threads already go into that), the claim is more or less that Uber's business model bleeds cash unsustainably on core verticals to capture investor endearment, but that cash is limited and the party has to come to an end.
What I'm pointing out is that a) the argument about "duping investors" doesn't really make any sense anymore now that Uber is a public company (since raising VC rounds by giving them paper equity is no longer really a thing), b) the balance sheet numbers have been trending towards positive cash flow (and fairly aggressively, at that), even despite a pandemic that could accurately be described as the worst thing that could possibly happen in this industry segment and c) the core vertical (rides) is actually cash flow positive and funding other parts of the business.
Thank you for the informative reply. I definitely agree on all counts, especially re "ponzy" etc.
I think that the pandemic forced the entire sector to focus on profitability and cut most loss-leading initiatives, so hearing they're trending towards core profitability makes sense!
I've seen this argument touted frequently in housing related threads and it always confuses me. Housing prices have soared over the majority of the developed world - dozens of countries[1]. Is NYMBYism and prop13 driving the housing crisis in Luxembourg? Chile? Estonia? Do you think the entire world property market, taxation and legislation is structured exactly like in the California bay area?
The whole "just zone more high rises" argument is so obviously reductive, I can't help but think it's pushed primarily by property developers and speculators.
Housing prices continuously rising to slurp up any marginal income has been studied by economists for a couple of centuries (rent extraction), and taxation solutions such as a Land Value Tax were suggested by Adam Smith himself.
I agree. Here in the Netherlands, NIMBYism isn't really a thing. If you don't own the land, you as existing resident have very little say in new developments around you, exceptions aside.
Even in this situation where almost every development is approved, it doesn't lower prices at all. The reality is that when demand is continuously high, you can never keep up with supply. It just keeps coming.
Which is what happened to my town. A small, quiet, rural town. That was 20 years ago. Now it's packed. Every inch used. Traffic jams just to get to the center. Agricultural and nature areas transformed into concrete.
Quality of life is down whilst prices just keep rising regardless. Do these people have a right to live here? YES. Do I have a right to forever preserve my old town? NO. I'm just saying NIMBYism isn't some roadblock standing in the way of an actual solution.
Yup. Essentially, housing is an in-elastic demand, and livable land is a finite resource, further exacerbated by the realities of emigration. Combined with extreme wealth inequality, it brings us to this type of dystopia - https://ssir.org/articles/entry/tackling_the_housing_crisis_...
I agree that livable land is finite, but far from scarce. The US has an enormous supply of livable land, it's just that everybody clusters into hot zones. It's obviously not easy to break that pattern, but I consider it the only real solution.
Yeah, the US is at a point where there is a lot of built environment that is underutilized because job opportunities are concentrated in other places, never mind the large amount of land that can readily be developed.
He's just wrong - in cities that have more building (Austin TX for example) the housing is more affordable.
That doesn't mean 'cheap' if demand is also increasing, but it does cause prices to be lower relative to cities that restrict supply. This is just basic economics, people twist themselves in knots to come up with reasons why the obvious supply/demand is somehow not applicable in this case.
If you allow building in capitalist markets then increased supply will reduces prices as demand is met.
It's not a question of "would it work", the point is that real-estate prices are rising in dozens of countries, and thousands of cities. Zoning is a local issue. Assuming that the reason homes prices are out of control in Santiago, Chile and in Tel Aviv, Israel for the same reasons as in San Fransisco is, well, silly.
Arkansas was one of the last states to seceded the union. The very second sentence in the ordinance linked is "In addition to the well-founded causes of complaint set
forth by this convention in resolutions adopted". You are more than welcome to look up those "causes and complaints" and let me know whether they are slavery related or not.
While I don’t have time to do that right now, I will make a point to do so. I’m curious now, and haven’t enumerated all of the resolutions before.
I have read a ton of contemporary writings by the various politicians who signed Arkansas’s OoS, and with a couple of exceptions the vast majority claimed at the time to have supported secession in response to the military actions of the Union. There were relatively few slaveholders in the state at the time, and they were largely concentrated in the Delta, along the border with Mississippi.
If only the slaves had any appreciation to the important component they were in their slave master's culture, they'd probably complain a lot less and try harder to accommodate their agrarian needs.
Are you serious? Even the mayor of Portland wants help cracking down.
And what about BLM protestors attacking Republicans like Rand Paul in DC?
But the media conveniently made excuse why it was “mostly peaceful” then a few Trump loonies barge their way into the capital, one of them gets shot, and “it’s a coup attempt”.
"they accomplish the same goals as full VMs in a different way."
They are explicitly not that. Docker containers do not provide you any real isolation guarantees from a security POV and make no attempts at such. This is extensively documented. [1]
"If you're running Docker in a VM on a bare metal server you're doing it wrong. "
Ummm... Running Docker inside a VM is by far the most common deployment type of Docker there is. What do you think is an EC2/ECS/GKE deployment? Hint, there's a VM running your containers in all of them. This is also what Docker the company recommends - https://www.docker.com/blog/containers-and-vms-together/
GE’s breathtaking growth under Welch was fueled in large part by its transformation into a financial services superpower. By 2000, nearly half of the company’s revenue—$96 billion—came from GE Capital
GE’s exposure to finance proved to be an enormous vulnerability after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and particularly during the financial crisis of 2008. While Welch’s successor, Jeff Immelt, tried to diminish GE’s reliance on finance, his efforts came too late.
I'm trying to interpret your words as something other than "well, yeah, my weekends were interrupted, but it wasn't my choice so it's not worth mentioning." I can't come up with another way to read it, though.
So, don't you think that, in the context of having to give up nights and weekends, you should mention on-call? Your choice or not, the weekends and nights are affected, in fact isn't it kind of worse when it's not your choice?
i agree with you that the oncall is not ideal. it is also widespread in the industry. so what’s the point to complain about something that is an essential part of the job? (advertised or not, if you don’t want to do it you will have to look for another job)
i also think there is a huge difference between being oncall and having to respond in case something breaks vs mandatory death marches all day, every day.
I guess it depends on your definition of widespread. It is relatively common, but it's also far from universal, and there are companies that use on call which have a vastly different experience that what many people at Amazon report. In fact it seems like even different teams inside of Amazon have drastically different experience of on call. Treating it like a fact of life, like the weather, leaves you in a frame of mind that makes it impossible to advocate for change. Your own phrasing "be the change you want to see in the world" could as easily apply to on call as much as it does anything else -- but you won't take that stance if you think it's inescapable.
hmm. no. you do have agency. you have agency during writing the code. you have agency during the code review. you have agency during wiring of alerts (if you do stupid shit you will receive a lot of pages. don’t so stupid shit). you have agency during the events. you also have agency after the events when you do a coe/post mortem. you can defined prioritize things to improve the life quality of other developers.
to give you an example. the team i was in at amazon had 3000 tickets in the queue when i started. anything except sev2s were basically ignored. lower severity tickets would escalate when shit hit the fan. i advocated for fixing classes of issues instead of myopically focusing on one-offs. by the time i left the queue was tens tickets and mostly feature request or higher level investigations.
to give you another example: i would basically remove all alerting that was not actionable. the worst possible thing that you can do is wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to do anything. i would ask for runbooks and the test was “if i take a developer from another team and put them oncall can they function independently 95% of the time”. i would think about what the experience of being oncall was (ie you don’t take people and throw them in the deep end of the pool and wonder why they drown)
so i guess what i’m saying is that oncall for me wasn’t that bad or stressful. it sucks having to be near a computer but I was rarely paged for stuff that broke or needed to be fixed right NOW. (once stabilized our team had 1 sev2 every other week)
Okay, at the risk of putting way too much effort into this, I'm going to assume you have 5 people on your team, therefore you're on call 10 times a year roughly. 5 weeks out of the year then you'd be oncall during a sev2. Assuming sev2's are uniformly distributed you are probably interrupted outside normal working hours ~80% of the time, so call it 4 times a year you have your work-life balance negatively affected by on-call.
you need to generate some 3d graphs and after that write a paper about using gradient descent to improve the WLB of SW developers :)
our team had 7 people and at some point we started sharing the oncall load with a sister team (ie you were oncall for the services on both teams), meaning that you would be oncall roughly once every 3 months. not ideal - but not the worst thing in the world.
