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Sundae posted:They're a total mess, and odds are that by the time they get their act together, they're going to be bankrupt. Yes, everything you posted, but also there's the part where their product literally does not exist. Uber is an overvalued hive of scum and villainy, but they actually started with a product that pretty much worked the way they told investors it would, and needed the money to scale. Theranos never had a product, and almost certainly never will.
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Feb 10, 2016 18:56
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just to go back to this statement from zenefits re: loving up the Jet.com account:quote:“We are not the best vendor for 1,000-employee companies like Jet," Kenneth Baer, a spokesperson for Zenefits, said in a statement to the San Francisco Business Times. Who the gently caress lets a statement like this out? How does an actual person with the job title "spokesperson" talk to the press this way? Here's a freebie for you, Kenneth, just spitballing here: "Jet is one of our earliest clients and our biggest success story. We're extremely proud to be part of their growth process and we're working with them to find an enterprise solution that meets their needs."
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Feb 18, 2016 20:44
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Yelp / Eat24 worker fired for posting on the internet about literally starving to death while working for food company. The post: https://medium.com/@taliajane/an-open-letter-to-my-ceo-fb73df021e7a#.5k265ghc9 quote:... Every single one of my coworkers is struggling. They’re taking side jobs, they’re living at home. One of them started a GoFundMe because she couldn’t pay her rent. She ended up leaving the company and moving east, somewhere the minimum wage could double as a living wage. Another wrote on those neat whiteboards we’ve got on every floor begging for help because he was bound to be homeless in two weeks. Fortunately, someone helped him out. At least, I think they did. I actually haven’t seen him in the past few months. Do you think he’s okay? Another guy who got hired, and ultimately let go, was undoubtedly homeless. He brought a big bag with him and stocked up on all those snacks you make sure are on every floor (except on the weekends when the customer support team is working, because we’re what makes Eat24 24-hours, 7 days a week but the team who comes to stock up those snacks in the early hours during my shift are only there Mondays through Fridays, excluding holidays. They get holidays and weekends off! Can you imagine?). ... The whole thing is a pro-read, except the comments, which are horrific. The response: http://www.businessinsider.com/talia-jane-fired-yelp-eat24-2-2016 quote:Yelp's CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, has responded to Talia Jane on Twitter: Guys. Put down the pitchforks, OK? We're moving the whole operation to Phoenix where people don't complain about minimum wage. Also, incidentally, you're all fired.
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Feb 21, 2016 20:05
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Popular Thug Drink posted:we were posting about this in the other techbro thread, she's starving because she didnt want to/couldn't find a roommate and ended up paying more than her monthly income on rent, bills, and transportation alone. thats not really yelp's fault, low wages is one thing but your employer isn't to blame if you legally commit to paying 80% of your wages on rent 1. Yelp heavily implied that the low wage position was basically a "trial period" after which she would earn at least a living wage in another position 2. Yelp is absolutely responsible to maintain a living wage wherever they're hiring. The consequences of this should be obvious, the simplest one being that turnover is expensive and stories like this tend to cost the shareholders a lot more than another $2/hour for their low wage employees. 3. $1250 is still way, way, way under the market price for living anywhere in SF, and most people with roommates pay close to that if not more.
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Feb 21, 2016 21:01
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I'm not letting her off the hook for her decisions or her responsibility. Honestly, moving to the bay area is just a straight up terrible idea unless you have a guaranteed six figure income, no family and don't intend to buy a house. I'm also not letting Yelp off the hook for thinking they can run a minimum wage call center in the city of San Francisco without explicitly exploiting the poo poo out of those employees. There is no excuse for a tech sector company that is actually profitable and pays out millions in C level compensation to do this. This is not retail. Incidentally, if it was retail, I happen to know that Apple retail employees start at nearly twice what she was making.
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Feb 21, 2016 21:34
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Kwyndig posted:Which is the biggest con since Ghengis. that leaves your employees with what are essentially worthless chits since the amount of stock provided (common, always common) is never large enough to sell off in a block through private brokerage individually at a price that is actually worth their while, but they still have to pay taxes on the supposed value of the stock. My first few jobs in tech were around the end of the first boom. I ended up with probably about 15 bullshit offers and a half dozen month-long gigs that ended in a belly-up company, lovely wages and worthless stock. It came down to two offers. One from yet another web startup, and one from an old, established, hippy bastion of the 80s tech economy. Fed up with startup bullshit, I took the offer from the established company. The startup was Akamai. The options they offered would have been worth half a million post IPO. They survived the crash and have been building slowly but surely since. The old, established company was Lotus. They'd been bought out by IBM three years before I got there, but they still considered themselves the scrappy old bastion of hippy techdom. About a month in, IBM suddenly decided to systematically burn away every part of the company that was fun, inspired or joyful to the point where it became a hellish wasteland of bureaucracy and indecision. I left after 4 months.
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Feb 25, 2016 04:58
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It's a mix of things; the internet made everybody want their music totally, completely free all of the time. The record industry blames Napster but it's more complicated than that. There's a much simpler answer to the decline of the music industry that nobody seems to remember. Not long after CDs came out, labels stopped selling singles. Why should we sell you a single song that we can only charge a buck or two for when we can sell you an album for $18.99 that costs us the exact same amount of money to manufacture? Who cares if you just want to listen to "Runaway Train", buy this whole album of unbelievably lovely Soul Asylum songs because gently caress you. Besides, we spent a lot of time and effort fixing the price of that CD, we'd have to do it all over again for singles. The problem is that consumers *love* singles. A lot. If you make them unavailable, people will figure out a way to get them. Digital downloads were going to happen no matter what but a huge reason why piracy took over before the industry could adapt was that it was literally impossible to just buy a copy of your favorite lovely Britney Spears track. Piracy offered a better product. This is one of the reasons that iTunes succeeded and continues to succeed when it's actually just as easy to pirate poo poo.
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May 25, 2016 02:25
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that august 1st presentation, and the response thereafter will likely be peak bubble 2.0 schadenfreude. i am absolutely buzzing with anticipation.
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Jul 12, 2016 06:09
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My limited understanding of this is that companies like Square and Stripe bypass a lot of this by simply acting as a card processor with better tech. If paypal didn't actually hold any of the money passing through their system, they wouldn't be as accountable for it, no?
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Jul 29, 2016 01:27
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Baby Babbeh posted:Payments is a lovely business. This is all super fascinating. Any opinions on Mastercard's "Simplify Commerce" thing? It seems like they're trying to compete with Stripe, but my experience with it a few months post-beta was that it was an even worse pile or garbage than Paypal.
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Jul 29, 2016 23:58
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Jumpingmanjim posted:Soundcloud is putting itself for sale, that dog chef must have really cleaned them out. Good, hopefully people will move their poo poo to bandcamp, aka an Actual Profitable Business with Revenue. Also, they're asking for a billion dollars. Nevermind the fact that Twitter invested 70 million on a 700 million valuation two weeks ago.
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Jul 30, 2016 16:42
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e_angst posted:If the punches they are going to pull are about posting revenge porn, then those are probably punches worth being pulled. If Gawker wasn't so specifically and egregiously unethical, they would still be around, angry billionaire or no. You're missing the point. Peter Thiel didn't go after Gawker because of the Hogan sex tape. He went after Gawker because they outed him as gay. Gawker opened themselves up to a million different defamation suits over the years. Theil found traction with the Hogan thing and went for the jugular. Gawker was trashy, but much less overtly libelous than say TMZ or Drudge or the Daily Mail or Fox News. They just happened to piss off the wrong billionaire, and didn't have the resources to defend themselves. I don't necessarily buy the "chilling effect" argument, and I agree with your basic point: the case was won on its merits in a court of law, regardless of who was financing what lawyer. Most media outlets are smart enough not to publish sex tapes that were made without the consent of the parties involved, because they would fairly expect to get sued, because it's obviously illegal. Moreover, Nick Denton already pulled his parachute even before the sale to Univision, so I'm sure he'll go on to make some other lovely website. But the narrative of this situation actually doesn't really have anything to do with Hulk Hogan. It's about Peter Theil being gay, rich, and thin-skinned, and Gawker swimming in shark-infested waters.
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Aug 23, 2016 19:22
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don't stop, i'm getting close.
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Aug 23, 2016 20:19
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I think all of us, in a way, are nailin Palin.
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Aug 23, 2016 21:23
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I'm not aware of TMZ or any of the other sites you mention outing an executive of *no* public importance. (Not Thiel, but the brother of Tim Geithner.) Outing people is very dirty pool, and objecting to being outed isn't "thin-skinned". Read my post again. I'm absolutely not defending Gawker's news policies, and what I said was that there are plenty of news outlets as openly libelous as Gawker ever was, not that anyone else was in the habit of outing people. I was making the distinction that the Hogan sex tape was not the reason Thiel crushed Gawker, only the avenue he found with which to do so.
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Aug 23, 2016 23:35
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This is maybe my favorite part of the cognitive dissonance of the Valley culture. Everyone is hyperliberal, concerned with social justice, vegan and gluten free. At the same time, they're working in exclusive young white man collectives, making their money by actively dismantling the social protections of local, state and federal government. They're the most obvious right wing conservative libertopians in the entire world. Peter Thiel is the only honest man in Palo Alto.
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Aug 26, 2016 17:26
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There's a difference between a right wing tycoon funding republican candidates and a right wing tycoon funding an actual floating office building in international waters with a stated mission to circumvent immigration laws. I'm pretty liberal but if you told me about a rich lefty dumping money into some sort of floating socialist city-state I'd think they were exactly as unhinged as Peter Thiel is.
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Aug 27, 2016 02:32
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I don't understand why people keep pumping money into "disruptors" who have a tiny, tiny chance of actually winning the fight against things like zoning laws and the FDA when there's billions of dollars floating around in completely unregulated markets. If I were a morally unhinged megabazillionaire i would just corner the supplement market or run a fine art scam. There's a hundred billion between those two markets alone, and literally nobody at the wheel of either.
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Sep 16, 2016 01:55
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ToxicSlurpee posted:They want to be in on the ground floor the next Amazon or Google. Neither of those companies were ever "disruptive" in their startup phases though. Google made a pretty cool search algorithm, which caught on, then they were smart enough to stick an ad platform to it. Amazon sold books online, then realized that Sears wasn't good at the internet and expanded into a general store. These were pretty clear opportunities to dive into with reasonably predictable revenue. When has investing in "disruptors" ever paid off in actual revenue? Practically none of the companies that we're talking about in this thread are actually in the black.
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Sep 16, 2016 02:07
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:exactly "downward" is a sort of dangerously non-specific term to use here. It's transferring wealth from privileged, older white males to privileged, younger white males. Remember that women and minorities are not invited to this party.
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Sep 16, 2016 21:02
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Some people played it off as a fluke; then Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Steam, etc. happened. Investors are also running out of things to invest in which is a very serious problem. Even so most of the tech giants now just plain didn't exist 40 years ago. The "disruptive" part happens because investors just loving love a monopoly. At this point Google is the search engine. You don't search for things you google them now. People are looking at other industries and saying "can we do that there, too?" All of these companies happened because the big players couldn't get their technology poo poo together fast enough, or didn't think it was important, and upstarts ate their lunch. Thing is, I could name a bunch of industries that you could still "disrupt" in this way without your business model literally breaking the law. Real estate is still absurdly behind the times. Food and farming is begging for better tech infrastructure. The medical industry is a colossal shitshow but that isn't stopping genuinely useful products like ZocDoc moving into the sector. Why would you put money on a horse that's going to be chased down the track by cop cars if there are plenty of other sectors where you could play by the rules and still make a buck?
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Sep 16, 2016 21:20
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Unguided posted:What're you talking about? Marissa Mayer got a ton of wealth. a lady got rich, therefore it's safe to ignore all evidence that the tech boom is a white male hegemony
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Sep 16, 2016 21:21
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MeruFM posted:Google disrupted how the internet worked oh my god there are people in the world too young to remember the internet before google.
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Sep 18, 2016 07:31
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FilthyImp posted:Google Maps disrupted the gently caress out of GPS Navigation thingies for cars I don't know that sudden, iterative progress counts as disruption. Moreover, they weirdly never licensed it to car manufacturers, or car manufacturers didn't want to pay for it, so we still live in a world with lovely rear end car GPS systems even though everyone's phone has a better one.
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Sep 18, 2016 07:34
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Milotic posted:In defence of the general idea of Google glasses: I have a small humanoid and have various systems, cron jobs and user requests to monitor. I also like communicating with fellow fans of grimdark plastic space barbies. I'd happily wear something like google glasses at home to free up my hands to hold the small humanoid when he needs holding but not talking to as it's his bedtime. Or walking back from the shops with hands full of bags from the shops. There are compelling needs for fairly basic interactions and display that don't require you to hold a phone. I'm genuinely worried about your child.
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Sep 28, 2016 06:30
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boner confessor posted:these are all my opinions of course, but i really kind of feel bad for people who are just lead by the nose through life on behalf of their phone. especially people who are busy checking virtual conversations while neglecting the physical conversations in the current time and place they inhabit. that and like the goon mentioned above, these apps actively compete for your attention like a needy child which is not a good thing. i anticipate some sort of backlash here within the next decade and we'll see a bunch of stupid thinkpieces about disconnecting as a lifestyle trend Socrates was terrified that increased literacy would destroy storytelling, since we didn't have to remember what we could write down. Conrad Gessner wrote a book about the harmful effects of the information overload in the early 16th century. If you look hard enough, you'll find an article somewhere that ascribe every one of your fears to books, radio and television. Every time we invent new information technology, the exact same concerns show up. We're all learning to live with this stuff. It's new and weird and uncomfortable at times. But it's also unbelievably useful. We are a better species because it exists. Find a balance for yourself, reconcile with your own technology, but please don't concern troll humanity about it. We'll integrate it and move on, just like we did with books, radio and television.
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Sep 28, 2016 17:11
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asdf32 posted:The fact checking during conversations is actually one of the more damaging aspects in my opinion. First, that example pulls you out of the conversation. But more generally the reality that you have the entire world of information in your pocket is a constant low level distraction. Plus, more than that, you could be trading stocks and making money or finding a better job, or researching your next project or finding a better girlfriend meaning that at every moment no matter where you are or what your'e doing you could be more productive than you're likely being at that moment. That leads to anxiety in a way that didn't used to exist. If you were on the subway with a magazine in 1999 all you could do was read it or look out the window. I rode the subway in 1999. Most people kept to themselves. A lot of people did homework or office work with pen and paper if they felt like they needed to be productive. If they didn't, they listened to a walkman or discman with headphones, or read a book or magazine, or talked with their friends. It didn't look very different than it does now, except about half the people with books or music are looking at screens instead. The anxiety to be productive is much, much older than smartphones. Just because you weren't an adult before they existed doesn't mean adults didn't go through the same things. I think you're conflating a fear of technology with the anxiety of growing up.
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Sep 28, 2016 17:20
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Milotic posted:You don't automatically have to leap to "it will curtail all human interaction ever / make everyone a bad parent". That's not why I'm worried about your child.
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Sep 28, 2016 17:22
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boner confessor posted:using a phone is fine, whatever, but learning to rely on your phone to substitute for skills you could be learning or improving yourself is what i'm arguing against - and i think some small part of the defensive reactions you get when you make this argument (i've said the same thing to people irl, and gotten similar reactions) is an inherent defensiveness that's borne out of addiction What if it's defensiveness borne out of not wanting to perform menial tasks that we don't have to waste time on anymore? I'm terrible with directions and doing math in my head. My handwriting sucks and I have a hard time prioritizing tasks. When I had a paper date book for a personal calendar, it was a chaotic mess. There is no inherent value in any of these tasks. I have a tool that makes it easier for me to deal with them now. I don't want to go back to wasting time with any of that. I am able to move on to more important and interesting things and spend more time with people I care about.
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Sep 28, 2016 17:59
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boner confessor posted:i think it's a bit silly to think that "remembering appointments" and "knowing where i am and where i'm going" and "being able to do basic math" are menial tasks not worthy of your time or attention. like, to me, that's just part of being a human being. this comes across to me like the soylent guy who thinks that cooking and doing laundry are also drags on his high speed efficient lifestyle I think your view is that smartphones somehow remove or retard our ability to do these things. I've never seen evidence that bears that out, and that's a very simplistic view of how they work in any case. Smartphones enhance and make more efficient our ability to do these things. GPS helps me confidently explore a new city, which I am then familiar with and less reliant on GPS. If it went away, I would do the same thing, only worse. My calendar lets me set repeatable tasks, makes it much easier to organize my appointments and reminds me when they're coming up. If it went away, I would do the same thing, only worse. I can do math in my head, but I will never do it as quickly as a pocket calculator. I have to have competence in these basic tasks to even use the tool that enhances them. If the tool broke, I would still know how to do all these things, and I would remember all the efficiencies that the tool brought to them.
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Sep 28, 2016 18:26
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Charlie Mopps posted:Unfortunately, no, a lot of people cannot relax just fine because they are expected to always be available for work-related calls and emails. Yes, there are always people complaining about new inventions, but the smartphone allows really quite unprecedented levels of mixing up personal and professional spaces, which is bad and totally not cool and good. drat those smartphones. We never had an exploitative labor culture before those drat things showed up. We certainly weren't dismantling unions or deregulating industry. No, the reason my boss can call me at 10PM to tell me to come into work at 7 on a saturday is that I have a different kind of telephone now. quote:Also, its amazing how defensive people get when someone says that hey, at this point in time people are really, really dependent on their smartphone and that might be a bigger societal problem. It seems a lot of people feel personally attacked by that idea. Sometimes when people ridicule your argument, it's not because they're defensive so much as it's because your argument is ridiculous.
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Sep 28, 2016 18:33
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boner confessor posted:uh i think we can pretty accurately judge whether dependence on a device has gone up historically, given that they were widely adopted within all of our lifetimes and people are stridently defending them from even mild and abstract criticism itt Like I told the other guy, you're mistaking people critiquing your misinformed and badly reasoned argument with a defense of smartphones in general. I agree that we don't know the short or long term effects of this new technology, and that it's changing a lot about the way we behave. If that's all you said, we wouldn't be jumping down your throat. Your argument is that it's BAD because REASONS and FEAR, and you haven't provided any evidence to support any of your claims. I don't know if smartphones are good. I suspect they are because books, radio and television turned out OK and didn't end society, but I can't say because they're very new. I also don't know that they're bad and neither, the gently caress, do you.
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Sep 28, 2016 18:41
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boner confessor posted:really starting to get flashbacks itt to conversations i've had with alcoholics You sure post on the internet a lot for someone who seems very concerned about everyone else's technology addictions.
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Sep 28, 2016 18:46
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boner confessor posted:this is above and beyond normal bullying, in terms of speed and impact, and it illustrates one of the ways in which ubiquitous and ill considered smart phone use actually does have a negative, damaging effect on people's real lives by taking an already extant phenomenon and making it worse Why have overall cases of child sexual abuse fallen more than 60 percent from 1992 to 2010? Why did juvenile violent crime hit a historic low point in 2014? I'm not trying to minimize the impact of bullying, but your rhetoric is conflating the rise of technology with a decrease in law and order among juveniles and between adults and juveniles, and the data shows the complete opposite.
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Sep 28, 2016 20:15
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blah_blah posted:You might be conflating that with this stat (http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/What-San-Franciscans-know-about-homeless-isn-t-7224018.php): He wasn't conflating anything, and the number is 71%, up 10% from 2013. http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes_in.php http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/san-franciscos-homeless-crisis-is-homegrown.html edit: wait we're literally talking about the same data. You're really reaching to minimize this stat for some reason. No, the data doesn't show how long they've been homeless, but if there's a 10% increase in the homeless population that were former residents over two years, that's significant and illustrates a clear problem. Dr. Fishopolis fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Oct 13, 2016 |
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Oct 13, 2016 03:53
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Waroduce posted:This is categorically false. I was in sales just out of college and closed one of the largest school disticts in the nation on printers and mfps. It was something like a 70% mac enviorment because they used to be one if apples largest public secor contracts and macs were a loving bitch. If it didnt plug and play you lost alot of time troubleshooting. gently caress macs You were an enterprise printer salesman. You believe that your personal experience gives you the authority to explain what reality is for most people. You have an ayn rand avatar.
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Oct 13, 2016 20:34
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Apple's view of the iPad was that it should be a complete replacement for paper. They tend to force this kind of change by making their systems completely incompatible with the legacy thing they're trying to replace. Honestly, I think they just got so giddy after the whole iMac floppy drive thing they made it a company directive, without recognizing the reasons that killing the floppy worked in the first place. They cargo cult their own history to a pretty fervent and weird degree.
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Oct 14, 2016 04:23
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Optimus_Rhyme posted:I like to refer to this phase of Apple as the 'WWSJD' phase. We're past the point where Steve's plans were laid out to so they're in uncharted territory. Basically everyone, in every meeting, is silently trying to figure out 'what would steve jobs do' in this situation. So they do poo poo to try an emulate him. Getting rid of the aux jack is a perfect example. I doubt he'd lose it but it's similar to what they did with the floppy so it looks like something steve would do. Innovation would've been losing the charging port altogether and making it wireless charging. I don't disagree with any of this, but Jobs was still kicking when the iPad came out. I think it's been going on since before he died.
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Oct 14, 2016 04:49
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BarbarianElephant posted:A printer that actually goddamn works would be a great thing to "disrupt." The printer industry is the absolute scum sucking bottom of the consumer electronics barrel. It's a desperate, dying technology but I'd still like to see someone go in there and just annihilate everyone with a decent product with good support and marketing.
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Oct 14, 2016 22:05
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Paul MaudDib posted:Isn't that Brother? Everyone I know who owns one of their laser printers raves about how awesome they are (myself obviously included). Simple, reliable drivers (minimal package is like 5 MB), Linux compatibility (including scanner functionality and generic CUPS drivers), small footprint, hardware that keeps ticking for a decade+, and no BS about DRM'd refills or whatever. It is, I have one and they're great, but they don't seem to give two shits about the consumer market. Their industrial design is mid 90's chic and they do zero targeted ad buys. If they got some CAD monkey fresh out of design school to make something that looks sharp and spent a hundred grand on facebook ads with a video that shows people how the printer industry is loving them, they would capture the entire market below the $500 price point in two years flat. Casper came out of nowhere and did it for mattresses, and that was a far less lovely market to jump into.
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Oct 16, 2016 04:51
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