Currently over 20% of Houston office space sits empty (compare to Denver/Chicago ~13%). That’s because we haven’t even absorbed the empty office space left from the 2015 oil downturn. Office owners are now doing very favorable deals for new tenants as they brace for the coming bankruptcies, rent relief letters, and space reductions.
This is likely to be painful for many more months in Houston, even if there is a quick recovery from COV-19.
I sell a product on Amazon and have seen it be AC one day, not the next day, and then two days later, back to AC. Return rate and star rating were constant throughout the period, so I'm at a loss for how this "choice" is bestowed.
A factor may be availability and not wanting to overload a choice.
Let's say you are way down in list, and pop up to be the Amazon Choice. That drives real sales increases. They might look at how many in warehouse local to you. Persons A, B, C put in cart - they slow rate at which AC shows up until they get a sense of whether all those will become sales or some will expire from cart etc.
Amazon has some places that feel like they have softer consistency guarantees. Ie, something shows up, but with some time passing things like price might change even while in your cart etc.
I thought the same thing. A) The dude clearly had some loose screws. B) He was convinced his actions were just. After crossing that line, you can justify plenty of stuff to yourself.
Sure - you'll get video streaming from content providers who are able to pay large sums of money without hitting against the artificial caps currently in place.
Of course, that also means it'll kill any competitors not willing or able to pay the same extortion, so in the end you'll have less choice, but at least you'll have saved money. Except you won't really save money because once the current administration allows further consolidation in the wireless sector, prices will rise with authority.
> Of course, that also means it'll kill any competitors not willing or able to pay the same extortion, so in the end you'll have less choice, but at least you'll have saved money.
You might save a few bucks in the short run, but lack of competition doesn't tend to be good for markets - especially ones which can rapidly change like online services. Less choice generally means you're paying more.
They get things like the Binge On program T-Mobile did. Which was really not beneificial to consumers either, but consumers can perceive it as such - ie, T-Mobile knew they had revenues in excess of the cost of subsidizing favored video and music streaming services, so they made them not count for the data cap they put on their customers. They spin the story to be their great charity in giving away all this data, when the reality was the cost of operating their network was sufficiently low enough they could be providing unlimited bandwidth (or just substantially higher caps) while still profiting, but would rather have the best of both worlds where large media consumers use their platform for the cherry picked unlimited while still exploiting their customer base on every other network attached service they use.
Naturally, ISPs (if they care enough to do so) can spin their money grabs as giving away popular services for free (often after said services paid them off) while simultaneously limiting data or bandwidth for everything else.
Anything but the dumb pipe ethernet grid is a money grab. Hell, fixed data speeds we have now are money grabs. The reality is that there is a variable amount of bandwidth in a given network, and if ISPs were not exploitative they would guarantee a minimum speed but allow users to saturate the network as much as they can, because that is how the reality of the network operates. As it is, you get somewhere between 0 and your cap speed and are artificially throttled at the cap through anti-consumer behavior they can get away with because there is no competition in infrastructure.
"You wont have the government standing between you and your internet!" is the response I've seen around. I'd really love to see if there was any legit defense of this action though...
They get submarined costs from both their ISP and any services that come over the network with no market visibility or competitiveness to allow customers to switch away from bad product mixes.
Work at McDonald's or drive Uber? Drive Uber because it's cooler than making fries. Make fries because there's a matching 401k program at McD's. These drivers have a choice.
If Job 1 pays $100/day and Job 2 pays $110/day, the person should choose Job 2. When other things come into play like fulfillment, entertainment during the day, interest in one's work, etc., the choice becomes less clear, of course.
The big thing for me is that these drivers have costs that aren't immediately realized, like the wear and tear on their vehicle or the lost compounding benefit of matching funds in a 401k that they could find at another job. They continue to make an economically poor choice because these costs are easy to forget/ignore/be unaware of.
Someone with significant wealth who reached 18 without any cash/value other than what he earned himself. Meaning self-funded university studies, pretty hard in US from what I heard. Would earn great respect not only from me.
In more lenient fashion, somebody on top of this who finished university without debt, and no money apart from self-earned.
Look, I've failed and passed many many interviews in my time. I’ve seen many different interview processes.
I've passed many interviews where I thought: "Wow that interview process truly sucked, even though I made it through".
I've failed many interviews where I still walked away thinking "That was a great interview experience, I respect everyone I interviewed with, it didn't work out, but I still admire the company and will cheer them on, and I learned some things too“.This was not one of those experiences, and I have no reason to dress it up as such.
If you think I’m an empty cart making a racket, feel free, I don’t really care for such one-liners. The only reason I even shared my experience interviewing at Coinbase is because I think we’re obligated to share our experiences in the industry for the benefit of our colleagues (past, present, and future!). I literally don’t gain anything from unfairly ranting about some random interview experience from a couple of years ago. This post just happened to remind me, and I figured some people might find it useful.
For all I know, Coinbase might have changed their process significantly since then and maybe the CEO stopped being rude to potential hires. Who knows? Certainly not me. They could even be an awesome employer today. But I do know that I personally won’t recommend the company just based on my single personal datapoint.
