Arsenic Lupin posted:

If you're on the old-fashioned cycle where there are actually discrete releases, I think crunch time with comp time afterward is fine. It's like finals week -- work like mad, then vacation. It's crunch time that lasts for months (or is permanent) that's obscene.

OwlFancier posted:

Can't you... just make it yourself with some eggs and a whisk?

Konstantin posted:

Artificially inflating sales figures by buying your own product happens all the time in the publishing industry. It's not surprising that startups would try the same thing.

Boot and Rally posted:

My entire family has been using the same number for 20+ years, linked with an address from that time. Even if they wanted to advertise at the humans associated with that number, I have no idea how they would.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Another day, another startup, WrkRiot (!) crashes in fraud.

Lead out in cuffs posted:

You can see some of their (now-down) website using the Wayback Machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160829050750/http://www.wrkriot.com/#home-1-section

Scroll down to the Blog section. Unfortunately the posts weren't archived, but the choices of headlines are pretty funny given the whole situation.

Subjunctive posted:

Obama gets it.

https://mobile.twitter.com/pauloCanning/status/787652161530462208

boner confessor posted:

probably nothing. other advertisers do this all the time, targeting pitches by zip code, channel, radio station, etc. facebook has just built such a sophisticated marketing apparatus that they can specifically filter out left handed retirees who like golf, so they can also filter out racial minorities with ease

it's not that facebook is doing something unprecedented here - every advertiser wishes they had that level of granularity. i think rather it's the straightforwardness with which advertising can be targeted like this that shocks people

Non Serviam posted:

There's nothing wrong with this. If you run a Facebook page and you want to advertise to a certain demographic, it's ok to get options.
What if you sell skin treatments that are mostly applicable to whites than to black or Asians? Or if you're selling Ebony magazine, excluding whites and Latinos would get you more of your target demographic

cheese posted:

Fair enough. Most of my experience is usually Uber/Taxi to the nearest BART station, and it always feels like its 8 bucks on Uber and maybe 10-12 + 2 tip for a Taxi. That is a significant difference, but still makes Uber's huge undercutting of Taxi's pretty shocking.

cheese posted:

Yes and I think the entire point is that this is unsustainable? Also, that Uber is not 40% the cost of a taxi ride but they are charging only 40% of what it costs to transport. How long can a company use investor capital to pay for 60% of a taxi ride?

moebius2778 posted:

Didn't John Glenn die kinda recently?

Typo posted:

at first I was like yeah uber's gonna get all the deregulations they want but then I remembered that those regulations are controlled at municipal levels and Trump can't do poo poo about them

Feral Integral posted:

Uber wants to put 'autonomous' cars on the road that actually require a driver. But since the driver is under the impression that the car is autonomous, they are certainly going to slack off at some point and let the car drive itself while they post on some awful forum on the internet. The car then careens into the bike line or crossing guard or whatever the anomaly du jour is and murders people.

Uber then still refuses to pay the $150 for the license

NewForumSoftware posted:

Automating 90% of the driving (highways) is still going to result in a dramatic reduction in accidents/deaths.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Elon Musk says he's going to start boring a tunnel in LA in a month. The city of LA says he doesn't have the permits. Ah, the smell of disruption in the morning!

I am viciously hoping that Musk and Thiel are feeling at least a little pain at Trump's announcement that he's cutting *all* H1-B visas. I have my issues with the program, but obliterating it doesn't really seem like a solution.

cheese posted:

Except we don't live in a world where a new 12 lane limited access highway would be created, because it is economically and politically unfeasible, and sometimes even physically impossible. New construction is so lagged behind demand for it that spending 50 million to add another lane to a freeway already way beyond capacity doesn't do poo poo.

Baby Babbeh posted:

Queuing theory is pretty well established on this point: the most efficient setup is one big line feeding into many cashiers, if you've got the space to swing it. If you've ever been in a Fry's Electronics, basically that. This setup is as much as 3X as efficient as multiple small lines.

The reason for this is that people checkout at dramatically different rates. Whenever a slow person is checking out, the entire line behind them stops moving. However, under the one long line, multiple tellers scenario, the line is constantly moving. Slow checkouts are usually a minority, so this works well.

So why doesn't everyone use this layout? Space, for one thing -- you need to set aside enough room for the single long line, and it's not always workable in a smaller-footprint store. It can create the perception that the line is really long, even if it is moving much faster, which makes it less popular with shoppers. And finally, it's rare that a store is busy enough to actually need this much efficiency, and having some line is preferable because it creates the impression that the store is popular. That's why a lot of department stores adopt it during the holidays when they're slammed by greater-than-normal traffic, even if they normally use multiple small lines.

Absurd Alhazred posted: