zhjansbnas

The whole point of cities is economic agglomeration. If you don’t want that, why live in a city at all?

Grid storage is the bottleneck today. You make the problem worse by splitting things up.

You just increased demand and took away the capital that I could have used to meet that demand. I don’t need a cartel to tell me to raise prices.

>When the stock market tops out, people will take their money out and buy real estate causing another rise.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that market sentiment that the stock market has reached its peak will result is real estate prices increasing. That’s a very optimistic take. When market sentiment thinks the peak has been reached, people start selling and you get a crash. Everyone can’t sell at the top.

I don’t think most people buy homes based on a guess of the stock market cycle. I think a more realistic model is: people sell stock and buy a house when it makes sense for their life and they can qualify. They take money out of the stock market (often a 401k) for the down payment and use it to meet reserve requirements. If the market crashes, people won’t be able to afford as much house and prices will drop.

If the stock market keeps going up, that will continue to be one of the factors supporting home prices.

The poles have already been built. This would only be relevant if we were considering building new construction that isn’t connected to the grid, or letting existing grid infrastructure fall apart completely. In this analogy, the wires and poles map to the road the car is driving on.

Why do we need any of this? Physics takes care of it if we just hook everyone up to a grid. Electricity pretty much finds the sources and sinks by itself if you provide capacity (it’s more complicated that that, but simpler than what you are proposing). It’s kind of like saying why don’t we pump and sell well water to one another instead of using a common water supply where the runoff from all our land goes to the same pipes.

Agreed that transmission losses are real, but I would be amazed if mechanically transporting batteries down a road were more efficient than a wire. Consider the capital cost of adding miles to roads and tires vs. running electricity through wires. You’d also decrease speed of transmission and availability - both important when we are trying to distribute load across time and space.

Using electric car batteries to smooth out load on the grid is a good idea, but there’s no need for the car to be physically proximate to electricity sources. We already have a much more efficient way of transporting power through space - the grid.

Most people don’t know how to keep their devices secure. I wouldn’t expect that from an employee unless they are a security professional.

Amazon, when considering whether to raise the price of prime, probably gathered a lot of information about how consumers would respond. Matte_black’s experience mirrors my own.

When I order something from Prime with 2-day shipping, it’s sometimes late, and sometimes shows up the next morning. It’s fast enough on average that I feel the price is easily worth it. If I really need something ASAP I’ll pay the extra few dollars for the one-day shipping (which would cost a lot more without Prime).

They’d have to raise the price a lot more to lose me as a customer. If there are a lot of customers like me and matte_black, it makes sense for them to raise the price.

By the way, if you do complain about late packages, they will give you a month of free Prime for each complaint or even put $10 as a credit in your account. So if it’s worth your time to complain, you could get Prime for free. It’s kind of like cloud provider who breaks SLA.

How does the printed tether enter the market?

Right, my point is Facebook supports net neutrality when convenient for business reasons. This is why net neutrality is a big political issue, unlike other concerns of tech activists with less business importance.

I found it pretty easy to switch ISPs, but it would be pretty hard for me to quit Google. Nobody expects my IP address to be static, and that’s the only thing I lose when I switch. I get that some people can’t switch.

The ISPs suck, they are the most hated companies in the world and all. The suckage takes the form of “they don’t show up for the appointment on time” or “they raised my bill by $20” which produces a lot of negative sentiment in the average consumer.

Google and Facebook, by contrast, make money from selling attention, and their business depends on having good consumer sentiments. Turns out it’s a very lucrative business. ISPs want a taste of those tens of billions so they want a troll toll from Facebook and Google. They don’t care about some startups with no money.

This whole net neutrality thing is only such a big political issue because of the lobbying of the internet giants, who can take advantage of their positive brand sentiment to fight against the telecoms who are trying to get a piece of the action. If you think it’s about freedom of information or something, check out Facebook’s stance on net neutrality in India. Silicon Valley lost this round because someone who isn’t in their ring won the election. For the sake of our profession’s prevailing wage, let’s hope it goes the other way next time.

Ability to repay is one of the top credit factors. Having the existing debt paid off improves ability to repay any future debt. If anything, the prospect of Bill Gates going around randomly paying debts makes issuing debt more appealing.

People with no product raising many millions just by mentioning blockchain - what more do you want?

No, the money materialized from the lender when the loan was taken out. Some of the money might be recouped before or upon the death of the borrower - some might never be recouped.

Amazon has thousands of employees in the Bay. Nobody’s going to hire tens of thousands of software engineers in the US and ignore the Bay completely. It has too much of the top talent.

Amazing that there is supposed to be a $100B of value here and the big announcement is a pilot program.