Uber's insane valuation hinges on growing from a cab service into a Dominoes competitor? A Peapod competitor? A Zipcar competitor? An Amazon competitor? All of them? It just seems so improbable that one company would capture every single market segment that falls under "Cell phone app to get things in near-real time"
It hinges on them getting public transportation agreements locked down with cities before Google or Tesla do. Imagine a major city where 80%+ of the vehicles are run by a single company and the rest are paying a toll to be on the road.
Uber doesn't appear to be any more overvalued than stocks and bonds, broadly. It may be a big gamble but so is buying $1 billion of bonds that yield .25%.
"Imagine a major city where 80%+ of the vehicles are run by a single company and the rest are paying a toll to be on the road."
Wait, what? Is that really the goal? Is that even legal? I guess the closest approximation of that is legal monopolies for companies like the telecoms and maybe utilities like electricity & gas, but I doubt if Uber et al. want to be treated like that?
But they're not your standard monopoly in the sense that they can charge anything they want. The city retains at least nominal oversight on what they charge. If it's a utility, they're subject to more scrutiny than is probably worth it. And even if we get to a point where such a monopoly exists, Uber isn't really in a position to bring much to the table that Ford/GM/Honda/whoever can't also do easily.
Uber wants to become public transportation. To become infrastructure. They want to get their hooks in before anyone esle has a chance. Their labour will organize. They'll be regulated as a utility. They'll be too big to fail. The government(s) will subsidize them.
In theory, with autonomous vehicles, public transportation will be 10x what it is today. Maybe even 100x if private vehicle ownership goes the way of the dodo.
Their Otto aquisition signals an interest in shipping. With the right kind of network effect, they could be in charge of everything that moves. You can't get to that kind of scale unless you merge with the state.
That's the plan, anyhow. We'll see how it plays out.
One needs a core advantage that's exclusive to them to become such a monopoly. In other words, not only they must win, everybody else must lose. What's the core advantage that other players won't be able to replicate?
Scale and mindshare, more data, and the ability to operate with slimmer margins, or to operate at a loss in any local market long enough to muscle out competition- which they already do.
Uber has the same kinds of advantages that Google, Amazon, Facebook and Starbucks have in their respective domains.
Existing taxi industry got upended by Lyft, which then got upended by UberX. I think the value of mindshare is overestimated, and most consumers will happily jump the ship for whatever is more convenient.
Scale is a competitive advantage in homogeneous markets. But even if you're the most efficient ride facilitator on the streets of New York, this does very little to someone looking for a ride in Des Moines or San Sebastian.
Why would rational city residents vote for such an exclusive and extremely punitive proposal? Usually firms that are vying for public monopoly status lose their flexibility, e.g. each electric rate increase has to be approved by the state regulator.
As I see it, the only acceptable outcome for Uber at this point is gaining a huge lead in the establishment of an autonomous driving fleet.
I don't see any way its current businesses (e.g. app-based taxi service, food delivery, etc.) justify its valuation. The question then is whether reliable fully-autonomous cars are 2 years out, 10 years out, or more; even the experts can't agree. Uber needs it more than Google needs it, more than Tesla, more than anybody.
Uber needs it, but so many companies began moving towards self driving cars as well. Is Uber even doing any in house research? Does Volvo need Uber?
Volvo can just license the Dominoes app and have the same technology backbone Uber has, plus cheesy bread.
Sidenote: I thought of another market segment to compete in: AirBNB! Except instead of daily rentals it'll be half-hourly rentals. Brilliant!
Ignore those pesky anti-prostitution laws. They're outdated regulations that just stifle the market. Plenty of guys named John that just need a bed for 30 minutes or less.
If excel isn't the first item on your list for teaching programming you're already out of touch.
Let's pretend you're a high schooler volunteering at a charity.
"Donors who attended our last five fundraisers?"
"Email list for our whale donors from this fiscal year?" (>100, 1000, 100000+ whatever)
"Who are our best fundraisers?"
"Was the dinner last week a success?"
What are the odds the student who can answer these questions is helped by a teacher who ticks off any of the five principals in the submission? Logo? People aren't drawing basic geometric shapes. "Cognitive load" referencing types? I'm not even sure how to address this. Any beginner expects 1/2 to display 0.5. That entire paragraph is nonsense. Be honest Ok, learn how to excel in your field with programming/excel/sql/etc as tools to succeed at your job. "Computer Science" isn't programming and it isn't a job. Never confuse any of those. #5 is just generic filler for being a not-bad teacher.
One doesn't need Excel to answer those questions. It has convenient GUI features, but it can also be efficiently done in a variety of languages made for processing of data (or even simple command-line pipelines), many better for the task. That's also a good application for teaching about SQL and databases. These yield broader skills that can be applied more generally.
In any case: I hope schools don't start with Excel, since that cements students in relying on proprietary software and Microsoft's suite of software. If they teach it as a generic spreadsheet program---e.g., the same things can be done with LibreOffice---that's another thing.
You expect your average high school student volunteer to be comfortable with command-line pipelines or be briefed in that vs. just using excel??? The conceptual overhead for a beginner vs. the payoff is just not there.
Command-line was just an example. In some instances, a seemingly difficult problem can be solved trivially with standard tools found on most Unix-like operating systems like GNU/Linux.
But if we're talking about programming, then we're not talking about putting some formulas in Excel---that's what I'd expect of far less technical positions, ranging from accounting, to data entry, to your average person looking to understand some simple data a little bit better. Someone trained to use Excel is stuck with morphing problems into Excel's domain rather than being able to apply general building blocks to other problems.
You can do some pretty complicated stuff in Excel that requires strong technical skill; I'm not implying otherwise.
> a seemingly difficult problem can be solved trivially with standard tools found on most Unix-like operating systems like GNU/Linux
You forget how difficult is getting to the point where you can "trivially" solve problems at the command line. For one you need to be aware of the tools' existence and then understand their functions and how they cooperate and fit in together.
My argument is that time can be better spent teaching general skills than teaching students how to be locked into a single proprietary program and try to force certain topics into its domain so that they can use the tool familiar with them (Excel) to solve the problem.
It should be the job of the environment. While i agree about learning general skills, Let's face it that Unix commands just aren't discoverable outside of the curated list by a teacher or other resource.
I never understood Excel or any other spreadsheet's database features (as in "why such a convoluted thing?") but we did have set theory in high school. There must be better environments for such data processing tasks. If there isn't, one ought to be devised. (There used to be DabbleDB for some time, but that's gone now.)
Excel is a tool, not a programming language. Nobody teaches Excel (or nobody should) in an introductory programming course. It might be Java, or Python, or C++ or what have you, but you're starting someone off programing with an actual programming language. As a tool, Excel is useful, but limited to what the tool was made for. With a programming language, you can make any sort of tool you need.
Also, I don't think kids should be learning commercial products in school. That should be on the job training. Companies like Microsoft are leveraging education to sell and market their products.
God yes. We got taught how to use MS Works Spreadsheet in middle school through some sort of exercise sequence that each student worked through independently. The first bit of programming I ever did on my own was to make a spreadsheet that automatically calculated scores (with an unnecessarily complicated scoring system and a leaderboard) for a March Madness pool I was running. It wound up using a 900 byte formula that had to get split across four cells.
Your third to last sentence is precisely the point: we aim to teach computer science, not programming, not calculation. That was a very conscious choice when developing our curriculum - and it will probably come as little surprise that Excel is therefore not what we started with.
I read the whole drama bomb which could be a high school aged spat as easily as the adults involved in the Tor project, but this stood out:
>To be clear I believe Jake has hurt people (which he has admitted himself) and didn't respect people's boundaries. I do not believe he is a rapist or a harasser and I am wondering what the people who started this campaign are trying to achieve.
Admitting he's abusive and ignores boundaries while at the same time saying that behavior isn't harassing or rape is some Grade A dissonance. There wasn't some conspiracy. This woman even admits the guy hurts people and disrespects boundaries. The fact she doesn't have specific details about a rape or other harassment is irrelevant.
She knows the guy has hurt others, and then thinks there is a campaign allied against him?
I'd want any person like she describes removed from any communities I belong to, and not surprised the Tor Project decided the same.
> Hurting someone and being abusive are not the same.
Disrespecting boundaries and being abusive are the same. What boundaries differentiates between emotional and physical abuse, and in some cases between whether the abuse is merely an ethical issue or actually a legal issue, as well.
In Emacs I use mu4e pointed at a local Maildir and sync against an imap server using mbsync (switched away from offlineimap because of UID validity issues, which is apparently offlineimap's only method of tracking messages, may be a flaw with microsoft's imap implementation, but offlineimap can't handle it).
mbsync needs (setq mu4e-change-filenames-when-moving t) so it can properly handle file moves.
Haven't used it against gmail, but because microsoft wants you using outlook only, imap is a bit buggy so you need to set PipelineDepth 1 in your .mbsyncrc IMAPAccount block because it seems that the microsoft imap server has account global variables so multiple threads/connections will step on each other.
And perversely, (setq mu4e-view-prefer-html t) has to be set because many rich html composing clients will send a text version that's completely blank, leaving you staring at a blank body if the client defaulted to text only.
You'll have to find a html rendering command that works for you. Something like (setq mu4e-html2text-command "html2text -utf8 -nobs -width 72")
Or google around for custom commands other people have published.
I wonder what was Seth Rich's job at DNC ? Technically, could he have leaked those emails ? How can we be sure Assange is dishonest when he implies Seth Rich was the source ? Is there solid proof that Rich was really the victim of a failed robbery and not revenge disguised as robbery ?
>"Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks," Assange said. "As a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington."
>When the interviewer interjected that the murder may have been a robbery, Assange pushed back.
>"No," he said. "There’s no finding. So… I’m suggesting that our sources take risks."
>When pressed as to whether Rich was, in fact, the leaker, Assange stated that the organization does not reveal its sources.
Assange's transparent conflation of the murder of Seth Rich with "our sources" is obvious. He won't outright lie and claim Rich as a source, but he's nakedly prodding you to form your own conspiracy theory.
> Assange's transparent conflation of the murder of Seth Rich with "our sources" is obvious.
Exactly. It would be careless in the extreme to just accidentally out a source like this, and for all his faults, Assange is far more intelligent and careful than that.
Not in this case, but if it turns out Seth Rich was the source, then I imagine future sources will be wary about leaking to an organisation who carelessly gives away their identities in media interviews.
Also compare it to Assange's previous statements about the importance of protecting the anonymity of their sources and that creating ambiguity and uncertainty is one way of doing that.
Identity was given away after he's been killed. That is to say, he was already outed. There is no danger anymore as it's been realized and the people out for blood already got it.
When I said 'careless in the extreme' in my earlier post, I meant that it undermines the entire credibility that Wikileaks is able to protect the anonymity of its sources.
If it loses that credibility, then future leakers will be dissuaded from leaking out of fear that they too will accidentally be outed in a moment of carelessness, and Wikileaks is doomed.
I don't think Assange would risk the reputation of Wikileaks like that, and think that the death of Seth Rich is unfortunately being used as means of subterfuge.
Oh believe me he will leak the proof for it too. He will slowly destroy the Democrats by constantly leaking proof of their outright criminal conduct.
And Trump doesn't strike me as a man that will allow the Clintons to get away from this. He will definitely persecute them to the fullest extent after he has won the elections, he even said himself that he believes Hillary should go to prison.
Why would I believe you when you have no proof and Assange has no proof. If Assange has proof he should release it, otherwise he's just injecting more conspiracy theories into an election that is already poisoned by them.
> Is there solid proof that Rich was really the victim of a failed robbery and not revenge disguised as robbery ?
What would "solid proof" look like? Someone confessing? What if that person were paid off?
This is the problem with conspiracy theories: they are impossible to disprove to believers. Any evidence against them just serves to prove how deep the conspiracy goes.
I think that's a bit quick to accuse someone of conspiracy theories.
At the moment, Seth Rich's death consists of a nighttime shooting, no killer caught, and nothing stolen. Police are treating it as a "presumed attempted robbery". If some local criminal is found with the murder weapon and no alibi, I think that would satisfy a lot of people that it was a robbery gone wrong.
Yes, there will be conspiracy theorists, but we're not really at "impossible to disprove" yet. There's still plenty of room for ordinary discussion - it's still an open investigation to the police even. I don't believe the 'revenge' story at all, but I don't think people are crazy for asking "Hey, what was Rich's DNC job? And is there evidence for the robbery story?"
I think that's a bit quick to accuse someone of conspiracy theories.
"The DNC is rigged and Hillary Clinton is closely connected to many mysterious deaths."
Conspiracy theorist!
leaks occur supporting the conspiracy theory
Look, the real issue here is that Assange is meddling with elections! Our corruption is our business alone! Look how he implies conspiracy theories (which we all know are never true). How reckless!!
I used "solid proof" as a placeholder for "more facts, not opinions, indicating that". Some facts indicate it was not a robbery: "They took his life for literally no reason. They didn't finish robbing him, they just took his life,". Others leave robbery as a possibility: "signs of struggle, bruised hands and knees", "walking at 4:20 a.m while talking to the phone".
Well there's no solid proof it wasn't David Icke's lizard people shooting him for knowing to much either. Or a jilted lover, or one of Trump's Second Amendment People, or that he shot himself and then threw the gun down a storm drain before bleeding out.
You've already jumped to "guy getting shot in DC because that shit happens sometimes" as merely a possibility that hasn't been completely ruled out.
He was working on a GOTV project. No, he wouldn't have those emails. And yes, there's evidence of a struggle, so it certainly sounds like there was a mugging, but he put up a fight and was killed -- and so after killing him, the criminal took off without the wallet.
Having known some weight lifters, they generally dislike BMI because they are typically considered 'obese' due to their unusually high weight in muscle, whether or not they are in good shape (typically they are).
Calipers are also $10 and measure body fat accurately enough for health purposes (body building may be an exception in this as well, but only in extreme cases).
I just flew on an a320 and watched the plane taxi to the gate. Someone on the ground crew in an orange vest walked around the plane and did a visual inspection using a flashlight. At no point did someone from the flight crew leave the plane.
Are you referring to only the first flight of the day?
A plane lands, taxis to the gate. Passengers disembark, the plane gets cleaned and refueled, people on the ground checked it out, new passengers board (me), and it taxis from the gate. At no point did the pilots leave the airplane to "walk-around".
This is typically what happens during our hot seat evolutions in the Navy, as well. As Aircrew, I'm more concerned about performing my own walkaround if any maintenance had been performed between flights and/or it's the aircraft's first flight that day.
