And just how many people have to wear these headsets for how many hours to justify the billions being poured into this Big Next Thing..? Married couples can sit in front of a tv together and play console games… are they going to sit next to each other with face masks on for hours upon hours..?
Earnest question: I’m not a gamer nor would ever consider buying a VR thing.
The experience is much better as you've mentioned; the question in the article is whether a company needs to exist around making the experience better.
Now that the ideal experience is available, the question is whether people are willing to pay for it.
Right now - it's being paid for (all salaries, etc.) by shareholders as the company runs a massive operating loss.
The question these articles lay out is that - at least in theory - this can't last forever. No one's hoping Uber fails - they're just saying that a company eventually needs to make money, and they don't see a path forward for Uber to do that.
A bank wouldn't keep lending to a borrower that could never pay them back; at some point - without a fundamental change in economics - this situation will happen to Uber.
Yeah, this is a more nuanced critique that could definitely have teeth.
That said, I'm kind of skeptical that it's really true that shareholders are keeping the whole enterprise afloat? Here I admit I haven't delved deep into their financials, but isn't a big part of their operating loss related to huge R&D spend for self-driving plays, outsized engineering dev teams that might eventually be reduced as the app stabilizes, etc.? It seems like riders have been willing to shell out a lot more money for the experience, which I would imagine leaves plenty of margin. They are essentially a global taxi company with good market position and value added. It seems hard to believe there is no way to operate that company profitably, even if they're not currently achieving it. It's not like they're being strongly pressured to reach profitability either, though, so this isn't a particularly fair litmus test as to whether they're capable.
Anyway, you raise a good point that it -could- be true the Uber model is fundamentally unsustainable. I was reacting some of the hotter revisionist takes you see, where Uber was never a good idea, offers no value over a normal Taxi, is a big brogrammer pyramid scheme, etc.
Unfortunately Sam wholly misses the point of college: it's a social club / network. The issue is "for-profit" colleges and the common misconception that college is about skills / education, when it's really (again) an expensive country club.
Sadly, the further in your career you go, the more it becomes pertinent who you know, and how many people in your network succeeded and can pull strings for you.
It's not everything, but it's these breaks that often separate the smash successes and the grinders-for-life.
Getting drunk and party and studying for 4 years is a durable way to build bonds.
Hopefully most schools begin to focus on trades, and the Harvard / Princetons of the world just openly accept they're not for learning.
The piece just seems to fully encapsulate Silicon Valley Hubris. It's amazing that he thinks he's settled a debate on 'quality' or 'taste' with a logical argument, and that people consider this an 'objective' answer to the question.
The rhetorical trick is one that many have pointed out: 'technically' superior is - in fact - easy to recognize. That doesn't mean that objective judgment of technique is synonymous with taste.
"Taste" in that sense becomes something more about having a pulse on how humans will ingest certain ideas. You can have an intuitive understanding of this in a given time and space (creatives get paid a great deal to do this). But that has nothing to do with 'taste' as an objective quality metric, it has to do with how humans will perceive or interact with an object.
He is making an argument that in a narrow sense good taste exists. He does not judge that that Italian artist that canned his own faeces is inferior to the Italian artist that sculpted the statue of David. One can appreciate the size and labelling of the can, the way it was lit and photographed, the fact that it was sealed. It is possible to imagine an inferior version of the canned faeces. This doesn't seem to be a crazy claim to make? To be honest I think taste is somewhat the wrong word, it seems to get hackles up about elitism.
To me he missed the easiest way to argue that good taste exists - due to the constraints of human perception, we can generate every possible work of art that fits on a canvas of a certain size. Should we do this, fill an online gallery with all these pictures and then declare that the visual medium is finished? That is a reasonable claim if there is no good taste, and it is absurd.
Furthermore, in the face of this omni-corpus an artist then transforms into a critic, who will browse this archive and highlight pictures they find interesting. Nothing is created, only curated. The outcome of this process is a work of art that someone may appreciate, which exists purely as the outcome of the artist/critic's taste, divorced from any act of creation. Yet this work of art is equivalent to one which was 'created' in the usual sense. The conclusion from this equivalence is that if you don't accept there is good taste, then you also accept that nothing is worth creating.
Post-modernism amounts to making a weaker claim, essentially saying that nothing is worth creating any more.
I don't bother reading these peices anymore, they no longer suit me. I suppose commenting on this forum will fall out of fashion completely one day as well. For my tastes change and my perpectives widen and narrow.
I do however hope that I find more people in tune with my current flavor, perhaps more who can add their own spice. Wouldn't that be nice.
If Amazon wasn't directly competing against their sellers, and doing exactly what you said, while lying to Congress about it [1], then maybe journalists wouldn't be writing about Amazon stealing secrets from sellers.
Clearly you have to be a megacorp to get it both ways. Amazon shouldn't be able to evade liability for products sold on their website if they compete against their "sellers" as well.
2 thoughts:
* Only ~200 people out of 1000 completed the survey. Many of these people were found by the researchers, so there's likely bias (given the nature of the report)
* Basic income's benefits will eventually go away in a society with easy access to credit. Similar to comments by throwaway13337.
The original article (posted below) hits the nail on the head:
regardless of 'inflation' or 'quality increases', a single breadwinner (assumed male in this case) can't support basic parts of the 'American Dream'.
They could in 1985, with some money to spare.
That's a HUGE difference in social structure and the 'feeling' of society.
A part of the socialist mindset is the idea that people in fact should be able to live in an economic system and afford the things that everyone wants. Socialism doesn't deliver that exactly (see Spain, Greece, France, etc.) without huge amounts of natural resources, but it's similarly clear capitalism has driven out most people's abilities to do that too in the past 30 years.
Thus the impasse (political and economic) the US finds itself in right now.
Agree with @bradlys' comment:
This just suggests more highly paid people are being allowed to work remote, vs. remote jobs being paid more.
Given the expansion of high paying roles across geographies, this could be driven almost entirely by FAANG opening engineering / R&D centers in other cities like Denver / Dallas, etc.
Also 'remote' could be laxer standards for these same companies on going down to Mountain View / Menlo Park driven by commute and traffic. Many of my friends commute 2x a week, passing the 50% threshold for remote work, even though I wouldn't consider Menlo Park / Mountain View to SF 'Remote'
To be honest, of course. If remote work is paying substantially better it's because higher paid people have jobs that fit under some technical definition of remote.
To your example, I don't work in the Bay Area but I'm theoretically in an office about a 30 minute drive away. However, I gave up my desk and only go in for meetings sometime. I'd definitely self-report as Remote even though I technically aren't.
I wonder if some of it is just changes in attitudes. Lots of people in tech and elsewhere (e.g. sales) have long spent very little time in their offices even if they had one. I wonder if they consider themselves Remote today when they wouldn't have in the past because they were technically in an office.
