Ask HN: What Hacker News comments have you bookmarked?
Frequently while browsing this site I see a comment that is profoundly insightful about culture, mindset, career, relationships, coffee grinders, etc.
I realized today that I’ve always considered them in the moment and let them go. Perhaps I should have been bookmarking them and revisiting with a different perspective.
189 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadAnd here's the live (well, lagging a few months, but this is a very slow signal anyhow) version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14950203
Edit - here you go: http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2013/12/valuation-and-...
The value of the stock allocation metric is in that it seems to be the strongest mean that the stock reverts to, in the sense that it has strongest predictive power. It is not that surprising because it uses to the raw supply/demand dynamics.
Am I wrong?
Reversion to what mean, is the author’s point. The mean for the twenty years between 1900-1920 is different from the mean for 1900-1940, is different from the mean for 1900-1960, etc. The mean is continually shifting. All data sets revert to their own mean, on average, by definition. The mere fact that a data set does so is tautological and thus provides no evidence — no confirmation of any scientific hypothesis.
Edit: see my other comment for the quote of what I consider the key passage in the article.
Charts like these (including my own) that attempt to correlate valuation metrics with future returns start off at a significant unfair advantage relative to other types of correlation efforts. Note that a valuation metric is just the current price divided by some variable (earnings, book value, sales, etc.). Neglecting dividends, the long-term future return is just the difference between the current price and some price far out in the future. Notice that “current price” shows up in both of these terms. Is it such a surprise, then, that valuation metrics and future returns seem to correlate well?
Roughly:
(1) Valuation Metric = Current Price / Variable
(2) Future Return = Future Price – Current Price
If future prices are inclined to rise at some rate over the long-term, then any time current price falls (and the same fall isn’t exactly mimicked way out in the future), (1) will go down, and (2) will go up. The valuation metric will fall, and the return–the distance between the future price and the current price–will rise. Hence the (inverse) correlation.
Now, if you choose a denominator for the valuation metric that is highly noisy, its noise may get in the way. But if you choose a denominator that is smooth over time, the pattern will hold. Notably, the plot of the valuation metric versus future return will end up producing a series of coinciding squiggles and jumps that create the visual illusion of non-trivial correlative strength, when there is none.
I've never used it, but it states in the README that there is no rate limit currently (~8 months ago).
0. https://github.com/HackerNews/API
https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-api
I always enjoy the satirical content about last weeks hackernews posts
> Did you win the Putnam?
> If not, please don't be "bolder" than this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravi_Vakil
> cperciva on July 18, 2007 [-]
> "Did you win the Putnam?"
> Yes, I did.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083
(Oh my, I recall reading that roughly in real time when Colin wrote it, can't believe that was 2007 already!)
Crazy to look back and see how things panned out for these two random internet commenters.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095 (Same thread btw.)
It's easy to look back at the "good old days" with the benefit of hindsight, but I'm sure that even today many of the famous founders of tomorrow can be found commenting here on HN. We just don't know who they are yet.
On the other hand what would this minimum char/word length be? Even your comment is fairly short, but it's descriptive and fully communicates your point...
> The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior (in whose honor I had a day off of work today) never once called for 'tolerance', the boycotts and sit-ins were not a demand for tolerance - they were a demand for integration. To tolerate is to "otherise" - you are _allowed_ to continue being as your are, but on the outside. To integrate, you do not require permission, but you do not continue as you are - both "sides" are transformed by the process.
https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=weinzierl&comments...
I didn't put a lot of thought in it, I just favourite stuff I might want to reconsider later. One example I still like is:
>You can hide from your your boss, your wife, or even your mother, but you can’t hide from Facebook.
Browsing others pages can be quite insightful for what they find notable. Not everyone uses this feature, so not everyone has favourites and it takes a little digging to find good ones. For example here are Thomas Ptaceks:
https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=tptacek&comments=t
Favouriting a comment is a public bookmark, without boost
Liking / upvoting a comment is a private bookmark with boost.
"OOP is just a mental model. Deep down everything is made of bits. The church of OOP has failed but if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck it probably is useful to make a duck class. We're now down to fighting for nuances. You can do most things with OOP or without OOP but each path has some upsides and downsides and most of the time it's good to use some things it provides where it makes sense and not get too religious about it. The great architect has the foresight on how the code will be used in five years and design it accordingly." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18250466
"Salaries never stay secrets forever. Hiding them only delays the inevitable. Last year we were having a discussion at lunch. Coworker was building a new house, and when it came to the numbers it was let loose that it was going to cost about $700K. This didn't seem like much, except to a young guy that joined the previous year and had done nothing but kick ass and take names..." (edited for brevity).
"...The conversation ended up in numbers. Coworker building the house pulled about $140K base (median for a programmer was probably $125K), and his bonus nearly matched the new guy's salary, which was an insulting $60K -- and got cut out of the bonus and raise in January for not being there a full year, only 11 months.
Turns out he was a doormat in negotiating, though his salary history was cringeworthy. It pained everyone to hear it, considering how nice of a guy he was. In all honestly, $60K was a big step up for him. Worst of all, this wasn't a cheap market (Boston). The guy probably shortchanged himself well over a half-million dollars in the past decade. This was someone who voluntarily put in long hours and went out of his way to teach others, and did everything he could to help other departments like operations and other teams. On top, he was beyond frugal. Supposedly he saved something around 40% of his take home pay, despite living alone in Boston. He grew up in a trailer park.
He spent the next day in non-stop meetings with HR, his manager and the CTO. That Friday he simply handed in his badge without a word, walked out and never came back.
Until 3 months later. As a consultant. At $175/hour."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2439478
For example: The $175/hour number you just mentioned, and the fact that you seemed to imply that you're taking it for granted that it represents a successful outcome would be clearly a source of cognitive dissonance for most people. -- If he manages to do 2000 hours at $175 every year, that would be $350k which would be impressive. But then it may be nothing: if it is a highly specialized thing where you don't manage to get a fulltime workload out of a year, where you might spend the majority of your time with non-billable hours for project acquision, where you maybe have to cover costs of travel or time & money for certifications, where you have to carry high risk, etc. etc. ...it is usually impossible to properly resolve such questions to the point where it's useful for benchmarking and for extracting conclusions that are actionable to yourself. But the cognitive dissonance remains.
You're not disagreeing with him, you are disagreeing with a post by someone else from 8 years ago, that he bookmarked in order to prevent himself from making the same mistake.
You being ambivalent suggests that you're okay with less informed people being screwed. I think that's grossly unfair on a bunch of people, especially the highly technical folk that can't bullshit their way to a good pay packet, despite being technically capable. Keeping salaries open is a good thing in my opinion. The fact that companies at times will discipline employees for discussing salaries should make you see that it's a bit of smoke and mirrors used by managers to screw people, while paying themselves handsomely. It's total rubbish, and quite frankly does more harm than good.
Apart from boosting my annual income x4, I am no longer involved in backstabing, politics, shitstorms, and other permanent employment 'pleasantries'. The C-levels who sign my invoices keep me out and away from all that. I have gained their trust and they keep me around to get-the-job-done. I do get some surprises every now and then, but nothing I can't dance around those. The gig economy (up to a level) works for me.
>where you don't manage to get a fulltime workload out of a year
I only NEED to work 3 months in a year, and spend the other 9 sitting on my behind doing my hobbies. Of course I work as much as possible (8h/day - 5d/week) and I do take some time off (by European 'standard'). I found it that once I start monitoring the contracting market, getting weekly alerts, see the trends, etc. it is possible to build on your existing skillset to make sure you remain relevant. E.g. anyone in Europe with a good GRC knowledge had plenty of time to get in shape for GDPR.
What data sources and techniques do you use to monitor trends?
It looks tedious and time consuming, but after the first month, just scrolling through 3-4 emails gives me a pretty good idea of where the market is going.
"I help companies pass their audits".
You tell me what audit you have to pass, and I will work with you to pass it successfully. It could be just a 3rd party audit you got coming up, or some regulatory/contractual requirement(s) you need to fulfull (PCI-DSS, VISA PIN, GDPR, HIPAA, SOx, ISOs, etc.)
You name it. We sit down, make a plan, put dates on that plan, put names and roles on that plan, provide the proper support/Sponsor and (with a little/a lot of pain) you pass the audit. But you PASS your audit. There is no miracle recipe, no 'feeding the multitude'. Good old smart and hard work.
For some reason many people are hostile to the idea that, at a minimum, you can make more money doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same company. Perhaps this shields them from the horror of the money they are most certainly leaving on the table, or the uncertainty of pursuing that money. The nice thing about being the lowest paid serf is the lord knows he's getting you for a song, or at least that's how the thinking goes.
I'll just leave you with this: I make a minimum of $3k per day. I am not special. I have an IQ of 118 which is probably low for HN. The difference is I've never accepted that what they're paying me is the most the company (or market) can bear. My first programming job out of the Army (with no education) was 50k/yr. My current rate is the result of 15 years of continually challenging the offered rate and searching for higher rates.
Today, I work part time and have tons of time for myself and my family. I'm so expensive that my clients honor my work and value my time. I know you'd prefer this lifestyle to the daily grind of 40+hrs, a middling salary, and little respect so why not test my model and see if it doesn't bear fruit for you.
I assume you're an incorporated consultant and the rate of $3K per day is gross revenue and not net income(?)
Certainly this is achievable, but people need to understand exact comparables so they're not comparing apples to oranges.
I do consulting, the kind I do is irrelevant because there are others with high bill rates too (I know of some iOS devs that make $2,500/day). I have friends who are Java devs making $250/hr. They're not dummies but they aren't exactly Linus Torvalds or Chris Lattner either.
Since you asked, I advise companies on how to implement certain development practices, things like DevOps, TDD, etc.. Before you totally write this off, hold your horses. I'm not saying this is THE path for you. It's one of many. I just happen to care a lot about how we work together to make software and I always found myself drifting into those discussions on the team.
I'm based in Houston, TX. I charge $3k - $5k per day. I usually pay my own travel expenses. I haven't been charging that for long and the first time I submitted a proposal at that rate I almost threw up I was so nervous. I work usually two weeks per month. I usually travel to my clients. I also sell support contracts where I offer them unlimited Slack and 1-2 calls per week. I offer them coaching, feedback, guidance. Sometimes it's pairing on building out a Jenkins pipeline, sometimes it's just explaining why "change fail percentage" is a good metric to track backed by industry studies.
I have a friend who couldn't join us for BBQ this weekend because he's traveling to SF just to visit with a former client who paid him something like $100k for a handful of Java classes he taught. I'd have to look at the invoices to know the exact amount and I have a call coming up. He went through my company. The nice thing is once you set up a company properly it becomes a vehicle for all sorts of financial endeavors. People think creating a company is scary and complicated and can really fuck you up. That's wrong. It's trivial to create a functioning company and the upkeep just to keep it compliant is absolutely minimal if it's incorporated in a state like Texas.
If you've read this far, here's the golden nugget. I wish someone had told me what I'm about to tell you.
1. Follow the things that really interest you, not in your head, the things that make your heart pound. Maybe that's picking up certain types of stories in the sprint, or helping a coworker with a certain kind of bug. While your energy will come and go, that thing that makes your heart pound will always be there. It's connected to your calling, which you might not understand until you're in your 40's (like me).
2. Always ask for more money. Ask nicely, and after you deliver something of value. The company ALWAYS can afford to give you more. If giving you $20k more will bankrupt the company then your company is dying and you're going to be out of a job anyway. People who aren't business owners (myself included at one time) do not comprehend the decision flow business owners take. Ask for the money until they don't have any more. It is more ethical than letting them waste it on another kegerator for the office. Programmers in particular have a very skewed sense of the value they provide. Even a mediocre programmer is worth 10x his salary. You have no idea how valuable you are to a smart business person. Instagram had 30 employees when it was sold for $1B. Think about that.
3. Be polite and talk about the things that interest you with others. Share what excites you. It will be genuine and people will like that. It will link you up with the kind of people you should be linked up with.
4. Only invest time in the people with the most potential. Don't waste your time having coffee with people who aren't passionate, smart, hard working, or creative. This means avoid shit-magnets/pin-cushions. Within 10 years these high potential people will pay off for you in multiples. For me they've become great friends and have fed me most of my business. Back then they were just "I like this person".
5. Show your work. Imp...
Nope. Sales is human. If it were a codec it would be non-deterministic and lossy.
I quote whatever the market will bear. I try to quote $5k and often get negotiated down to $3k by procurement/vendor mgmt. dept. There's been plenty written about how this works by folks smarter and more experienced at sales than myself.
This sentence alone is a worthwhile comment, though the rest is great too. Thank you.
To a developer who makes, say, $120K (which at least in the Bay Area is around median based on Salary.com and Glassdoor), that kind of claim is an emotionally-charged fantasy: provocative, maybe a little humiliating, but ultimately empty and unattainable. Again, fits the “porn” theme pretty well.
I’m not saying you’re a phony. Maybe you do make an enormous amount of money. If so, congrats, you are an outlier among outliers. I don’t see how talking about it adds any more value than talking about how you’re any other kind of fortunate outlier, like a hotel heir or lottery winner.
Our mindset is our greatest limitation.
That, and the nature of distributions. Salaries are not exactly normal, but there’s still a long tail on the right, with only enough room for a few. Some people find it fun to read/dream about being over on that tail, just like some people aspirationally watch Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
If outsized results were achievable by merely applying hard work, adopting certain principles or following articulable steps, more of us would be able to show outsized results. Even for athletes, more training and better mindset means better performance but not necessarily outsized performance. There are only so many Olympians and pro ball players to go around and the farther right you go on the tail, the more of a factor random chance is.
The guy may not be making the equivalent to a $175k/year salary but he was almost certainly making a lot more than he previously was at $60k.
It is better to heed to reality sooner. One way to do that is not to change the way you think, but the way you live [0][1]. Modify your work and life such that you can make the maximum out of what the world has to offer [2].
Another interesting insight is the fact that the conclusion arrived to from a problem is not always the right one. For instance, when Henry Ford asked customers what they wanted, they said 'faster horse' when in reality they wanted to get from point A to point B as fast as possible. If you think you hate money games, perhaps it's worth being inquisitive about how you arrived at that conclusion-- what's the underlying cause: is it because you find the economic system is rigged, or because you have had bad luck with money and investments, or you have seen money gained by folks around you through means you don't agree with, or...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19589434
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16693885
[2] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Very true. I'm also very reflective about my own thinking process. Why I don't like money is that it's too relativistic. I can get money by doing something useless that someone believes has value. For instance neighbors pay me to do the most simplest tasks on their computers. To me this has no value, I now accept the money because I'm a bit angry as the world requires me to make money. In my few IT jobs I found the work was moot and drowned into accidental complexity. But that doesn't stop the world from playing the money game. Raises, politics, inflated product costs, improper jobs .. It happens in other places too. Basically a lot of sales is super dirty and driven by competition economics only.
Maybe it's not money but the average western person mindset that I have a problem with.
I find it very asocial and inhuman. I'd rather carry an old person's bag.
I call this the "I'm smarter than them" fallacy. You think it's useless, they believe it has value. Why do you think they can't see it "your" way? Is it that you know something they don't (in which case, your knowledge clearly has value), or is it that they see something you don't, which then explains why they are willing to pay you for that "useless" work?
I guess it's better than saying "Sometimes people don't know what they want".
https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast
money is the #1 stress factor in relationships and also just in general. having enough money goes a long way to eliminating whole classes of stress, mood, and other mental health problems. you don't have to be rich to be happy, but generally you do need to have enough money to live a satisfying life that you're not constantly struggling against.
Oh yah, and I have no high profile github stuff, nor am I a whiteboard wizard. I guess I should just "git gud" though, which I'm sure is a negligible stress investment with a guaranteed pay off?
/s Truly, I'm not allergic to the subject, but the cavalier attitude kills me sometimes. So much "What's the problem, peasants?"
Eventually, you get to a point where you're comfortable, and $10k begins to equate to more time off, less after-hours calls, etc. (and be worth more)
When I said peace of mind, I meant having to avoid with stressful relationship. I wasn't thinking about intimate ones of course but it's not entirely different.
This is why I thought it might be a generational thing, as that's the only common denominator I was able to make out.
I had people repeatedly asking me for my salary after accepting a new job. I think things have seriously changed.
In both cases, the person giving the pay/candy has something to gain if it stays secret and the person on receiving end is being manipulated.
Some people aren't good at negotiating; that's understandable. But not knowing he was settling for such a pay-cut is almost appalling. That company must have enjoyed him being there knowing they pulled a fast one on him. Maybe there is some shady backstory here or something else influencing the situation..?
I'm not surprised at all by stories like the OP's.
You can occasionally see job postings with salary ranges.
I am also one of them. And after all these years is still no good at salary negotiation. And unless you are exceptionally good and could afford to do consultation, ( which isn't really a thing in my country ) you still have to suck it up.
I know I am late. But I am starting to think may be claiming the ladder is a different set of skills.
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1. Find a popular SaaS product. Like Intercom, Algolia, Segment. Make sure it doesn't have a free plan. This guarantees there's a market for the tool. Check out GetLatka for ideas. https://getlatka.com
2. Build your own take on the product. Find the minimum set of features that make it valuable. 10% of the work for 80% of the value.
3. Sell it at a 50-90% discount. There will be price sensitive customers that want the popular product, but don't want to or can't afford it.
4. Target bottom of funnel marketing channels: Targeted quora questions. Paid/organic search queries. Set up retargeting ads on Facebook. Product hunt launch it. That should get you a steady stream of customers.
I don't think this is a great way to build a million dollar business, but is a very easy way to make a few hundred. Shoot me an email if I can be helpful.
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Don't exactly copy another product. It's damn important to reinvent defensible products that either, and hopefully do all of:
a) solve a slightly different problem
b) target different users
c) solve the problem in a 10x better, compelling way
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TIME. Time is the MOST precious commodity. Help users SAVE TIME. Save time finding something of value to the USER. You can't "presume" how much to charge. You have to "TEST" pricing then keep jacking it up until your customers don't pay. How can you pay for something what does not offer value. Stay small. Stay NICHE. Grab a slice from a BIG market. Forget millions. slap-yo-self with fury with delusions of becoming a millionaire, and make a goal of making enough to avoid being trapped in a 9-5 lifer situation. It take a LOT of luck + skill + market segment expertise. Like you have to KNOW the market you are going to be competing in. Assisted living , senior care , retirement calculator is VERY hot now. You'll be at it after your day gig 6pm-2am testing / building / iterating. Good LUCKY. launch a free beta version learn what customers value and how much they will pay ( ask them) THEN when you have enough people crack addict addicted to your service / app start charging. Be merciless. But offer excellent customer service. Always be honest.
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While I agree with some of the tactics here (make a twist on similar ideas, contact businesses, buy a business, brush up an existing product you built)
I'm going to suggest an alternative method that has worked for me.
Start with the money.
If you want monetization to be guaranteed you need to prioritize that first.
Take this method and rinse/repeat for you and your skills.
1) How much do you really want to make from this a month, what would make you happy?
Let's say you decide $1k a month would make it worth it after time, expenses and payment processing fees.
2) You then decide how many customers you really want to have to find and how much support email you want to answer.
Usually developers pick prices like $6 and wonder why no-one buys. This low price screams a lack of confidence in the product. That you aren't taking it seriously. That you may not be around in 8 weeks.
Starting without monetization in mind or equally, pricing low is the death of a product because for someone who dislikes marketing you just set yourself a huge marketing mountain to climb.
At $6 each, finding and selling to 150+ customers - when you don't even have one yet is a huge trek to your $1k happy place.
Let's say you feel more confident about finding and serving 10 customers really well. That seems achievable, right?
So with just 10 customers we're looking at a $100 a month product, right?
Whoa, you're t...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3360051
Sometimes someone will stop at my fire and warm themselves without my ever having paid attention, but to them it may have meant all the difference in the world. By keeping this obligation in mind, to simply expect people to need a place to sit a spell, I can at least believe I am helping.
The campfire is a nice way for me to remember we're all suffering, that not a one of us is unique to loneliness. Because sometimes that person who sits down at your fire is the person you have been waiting for, and only by making a seat for them were you able to ever meet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18536601
I’ve often been thinking of time distribution and personal CRMs lately. It’s very easy to fall in the trap of spending all your time with a significant other - and find out years after that all your relationships are ghosts of their former selves. I see that in my parents: at 70 they might have 10 people between them that they care about and see more than twice a year. How sad is that in a marriage that hasn’t gone well for two decades?
But the campfire analogy is so bleak, so distant from other people. I don’t have a neat visual for it but what I would like is to spend quality time with a core group of 10-20 people per week, good times with another 20 every month, and see another 100-200 every year at least (mostly family). Is anyone managing a schedule like that?
I mean, there's the phenomenon of building over-expectations on someone else and becoming excessive in trying to monopolize their attention (although I believe it's mostly only a problem when not reciprocal).
Let's not go the other extreme though. When no one can really connect and trust someone else, you're just sharing a moment of warmth in the vast darkness...
I have some friends that understand me very deeply, and that I also understand very deeply. Spending time with them and talking I feel like discovering the same things they did.
And then I try to cultivate friendships with people quite different then me (but that I admire of course). This is to not be caught in a bubble thinking my field is all there is in the universe ...
( Funnily enough any field can suffer from that -- Your field Technology? It is the structure that supports everything; Your field is Language? It is the medium that underlies all thoughts; Your field is Mathematics? ... )
Overall it shouldn't be about number of friends, but about being able to share deep (in the sense that you both really capture what's being shared), good things (feelings, emotions, lessons, etc) as much as possible. If you feel you're having that you're in the right path.
"Emacs is basically a text centric computing platform, built with a flavor of Lisp."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19650942
“Augmenting human intelligence, while leaving the hearts as they are, is a loss, not a gain.” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17196155
We saw the same with the printing press: the Powers That Be first banned it, then tried to control it, and eventually had to relent. It will happen with data sharing too, eventually. It might take a century, but it will happen."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19034200
https://e360.yale.edu/features/extreme-botany-the-precarious...
Once there was a longish story about how to fix a furniture company (in context to Evernote). I have shared that with quite a lot of people, including quite a few CXOs.
How do you fix a broken company?
Let’s say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it's good furniture but even despite huge investments they can't seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around.
You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a combination of machines and human workers. Some people are employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture, either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and operating the automated machinery. Things aren't perfect, but you aren't going to make any changes on your first day so you make some notes and move on.
The furniture hasn't changed much over the years, it is still basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The furniture gets 'improved' from time to time, you see a step stool with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a webcam built into it, but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the webcam on any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so they can reach things that are up high.
There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the product managers have decided that the next feature will be to add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out the press release announcing "ScentedStools", so the machines need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like "Fresh Linen" by the end of the week. There are daily status meetings to update them on the progress. If the "Fresh Linen" stools aren't being produced by Thursday they are going to start having two status meetings per day.
You hear it's someone named Jim's last day, so you set up an exit interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs don't really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he just sits and reads the news, his "nontechnical" manager doesn't know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there's no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting at his desk and looking at his monitor.
Since it is not a Startup thing to set Jim's specific hours for him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren't done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody upstairs "could tell white oak from red oak". It takes about 5 minutes to give his status update but he's expected to stay for the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read that FurnitureNews website. He says he is quitting to take a much lower paying job because he is bored and doesn't respect his manager.
Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people having meetings with each other about annual plans and prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day, but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks really understand furniture very well, they can&#x...
You enter a coffee shop. Before you can do anything, the owner takes a photo of you, and grabs your hand to take your finger print. He quickly writes down the date, time and what clothes you are wearing.
He gives you a smile as he starts his speech. "Before we continue, we at Coffee City want you to know we deeply value your privacy. We need your permission to store your information, improve your coffee experience, personalize your coffee suggestions and share it with our partners. Do you consent?"
You don't fucking value my privacy. I get some serious doublespeak vibes. If you valued my privacy you'd leave me the fuck alone and stop saving information about me.
The fact you pay isn’t besides the point… it’s literally the entire point.
If a Starbucks did that and said “btw, the coffee is free”, there’d be a line out the door and half way around the block.
In fact, Starbucks does that and they don’t even give you free coffee. You use their wifi and next time you walk in they’ve got your fingerprint, if you have their app they have even more info, and people accept all this gladly for what? Free wifi and occasional rewards in the app?
You’re underestimating how much people value anonymity over privacy, and free stuff over both.
The Starbucks app will send you daily notifications and targeted ones, people do not care.
Has it ever occurred to people who are so anti-advertising that the reason we live in an ad driven world is because that’s what consumers want over just paying fair value for things?
Otherwise why would a paid alternative to gmail not exist? In fact, if people actually wanted that, why would Google not sell it to them? Google's accounts do not care if 10 cents comes from ads or from your pocketbook.