My understanding is that a big appeal of sports gambling is that it adds stakes to entertainment. So instead of casually watching the game you're much more invested. Given this angle, I don't think the majority of casual sports betters are thinking about this in terms of getting rich. It just makes their frequent content more engaging.
That's funny - ride fares change, and only in an Uber have I been kicked out of the car "because the app crashed" in the middle of an abandoned road, or had a very intoxicated person pick me up, or try to drive recklessly in hazardous conditions.
I happily pay a premium for none of these things again.
If you cannot understand what made Apple successful then or today what makes you think you're not failing to grasp something? You head right on to making an argument when nakedly revealing that you can't comprehend the other side.
Not surprising, this site is made for the Woz's of the world (and that's fine!).
> This current iteration of Apple lacks the geniuses and visionaries that might have possibly justified their behavior at some point in the past, so you have a soulless corporate churn reinforcing the biggest walled garden in the history of humanity, with no apparent purpose except self perpetuation.
Except iPhone doesn't have a larger market share, and they aren't being used by 80% of the world's population. Where are you pulling these numbers from? iPhone only has a larger market share in the US, and not by much. Worldwide they are very small compared to android.
> they aren't being used by 80% of the world's population.
I said "iPhone is more appealing to 80%+ of world's population". I didn't say everyone who wants it can afford it.
It's pure speculation, of course, but given its current market share (27% of all devices sold) and its price point, I don't think it's too far fetched to say that its market share would be much higher if price wasn't an issue for people. This is somewhat hinted by the fact that it has a 78% market share in the $1,000+ segment [1], and most iPhone models are over $1K.
Also it still ships more phones than any other single vendor (unless you lump all Android phones into one bucket). In terms of revenue, it's by far the leader with 43% [2].
Overconfident in your numbers you are, just because they suit your narrative. Zero actual backing for those you provide. Not reflecting reality I can see they are.
Completely agree. General intelligence is a building block. By chaining things together you can achieve meta programming. The trick isn't to create one perfect block but to build a variety of blocks and make one of those blocks a block-builder.
I imagine it must feel like that. The reality is that engineers are blasé with data and have been since the personal computing revolution.
Legal frameworks are incredibly irritating and often defined by people who know nothing about what they're regulating. This can lead to very bad laws.
Given that we live in the real world and one can be sued for violating those laws, the stakes are quite high and low cost. Many states in the US allow individuals to bring suit based on these laws, meaning all that needs to happen is you make a mistake and some rando has time to hire a lawyer.
And that is, by the way, notwithstanding the reality that many of the annoying compliance requirements are actually not all that annoying in principle, they are annoying to implement because many software development practices involve the free flow of data.
Maybe that was fine when it was public blogs. But when it's someone's medical records or their financial data, or when it lands in the bucket of a Cambridge Analytica type, sorry, there's a higher burden.
It is frustrating, I know. But we as engineers need to take responsibility for the consequences and stakes of what we're building. It's lack of that awareness that caused many of the largest controversies in our industry.
That's an appeal to authority. Either make an argument for why his reasoning is good or don't. But don't appeal to someone's reputation.
That being said, I do think what the parent commenter is missing is that those other modes require significant investment. With cars you get profit and can scale one by one. So less up front investment. Should do nicely in all sorts of cities.
So your argument is basically that he is just very smart and good at being a disruptor therefore any questioning of his ventures is doubtful because he is successful at previous disruptions?
You really think that's a valid argument? Or is this just being an Elon fan wrapped in additional language.
No, that is indeed what you argued. I suppose I’ll repeat the same question you’ve been asked several times now, do you have an actual argument against the valid skepticism of Elon’s robotaxi business?
When you list it like that, it's incredibly impressive. He's clearly autistic, and says and does very socially awkward things, but this is the kind of person which moves society ahead by decades. SpaceX alone has reduced space transport by 10 *times.* Starlink provides internet to everyone, anywhere in the world. [This](https://youtu.be/sX1Y2JMK6g8?si=rV5_BKsbPc2GPg3n&t=195) is like something out of a really cool sci-fi, but it's real life. It's going to be in the history books forever.
Does that mean you are invested in Tesla or do you have private stakes in his other companies? Because all the other companies are separate and I feel like some people are investing in Tesla thinking they get part of SpaceX or something
I honestly think there is some place here to be anti tech. Some things, the things closest to our humanity, like love and community, are not all that better with technology in my opinion. Sure, you can stay connected with a family member or friend who lives in another city, but that same positive is a negative via another perspective because it doesn't force you to make new connections with people around you.
And love is similar. It's nice that algorithms can help you match, but the psychology by which you arrive at a compatible partner matters a great deal. The swipe is inherently dehumanizing even if it does match you with a human.
Some things are supposed to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing. Tech should stop trying to eliminate that and instead augment it. That calls for an entirely different philosophy when choosing ideas to build. Instead of looking for uncomfortable or inefficient things and trying to "fix" that, consider your values. What do you care about, what is important for a good human life? Then use your skills to enable deeper integration into those values.
Easier is not always better.
I recently had this revelation when considering how difficult it is to find events that I'm interested in. I was shocked that this isn't a problem that we had solved in the 2000s. But Facebook events is full of bar specials like ladies night and doesn't seem to match to my taste and Eventbrite is overly monetized and tends to be formal events, my friend who's very into the electronic scene told me that the way that she found events was by following people on Instagram and then following the businesses that she went to and checking their pages for events. I thought that seemed very inefficient and then it occurred to me that maybe the goal here is not to get as many people as possible to go to your event. Maybe it's about getting the right people with the right values and right taste to go to your event. This is a classic case where making something easier would not necessarily serve to achieve the goal of that ease, which, in this case would be making it easier for me to find authentic events. *The very nature of them being trivially accessible would change what they are.*
Geography still dictates some things in the diversity of the experiences it imparts, though admittedly much of our technology exists to insulate us from that stuff.
The true issue is that many middle and upper level managers are sycophantic and short term incentivized, while valuing loyalty only really shows its benefit over the long term. If you're leadership is always trying to have a green number for next quarter and your manager is always trying to only please his boss to get promoted, those two will disavow loyalty the moment anything gets in the way of that. I truly think public companies have the worst incentives in this regard.
The issue I think you're outlining is whether someone builds because they believe in their product and its value or if they are profiteers charading as believers.
I'm not saying profit isn't a factor, but a lot of these founders are five year founders, they are using the company as a means to their end. Basically I'm criticizing short sightedness and what it does to our economy. That's why I've turned against the stock market. The high liquidity means you are beholden to thousands of people who view your company as a roulette wheel amongst thousands, who want immediate gains and have no stomach for any losses. And many of the founders are the same people wearing a different hat.
> The issue I think you're outlining is whether someone builds because they believe in their product and its value or if they are profiteers charading as believers.
I do agree with your overall criticism of short-sightedness and the short term incentives of VC and the stock market, etc.
But the people involved are not quite as binary as you lay out in the quote above. You can't discount the group of people who really do start out as true believers and who become seduced/deceived by VCs. Some of these VC types are real vultures. They'll convince the founder that the best way to share their vision or product with the most people and do the most good for the world is to let the VC guys use their capital to scale up and expand the reach of the product, etc. The money surely helps to lower one's skepticism/cynicism, but I can imagine that it must be very hard to say no to getting your dream project out to millions of people.
>The high liquidity means you are beholden to thousands of people who view your company as a roulette wheel amongst thousands, who want immediate gains and have no stomach for any losses.
This sounds a lot like Warren Buffett's opinion of stocks. The Berkshire Hathaway Class A stocks are 780k each because he wanted people to act like investors, not speculators.
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