It really Just Works. We’ve used Skype previously and literally every group call had issues, 75% of the time requiring everyone to restart the app entirely.
We’ve been using Zoom for a year now and have had zero issues. None at all.
FWIW, we use AWS chime. It's absolutely fantastic. Call quality is always good to great, super easy to use for all parties. We found skype and zoom didn't work well for conference calls such as NYC to Cape Town.
Being able to walk in to a room and dial a room at a different site and then have individuals connecting for screen share has been such a quality of life improvement.
not a moat per.se. - seems they have powerful enterprise sales team. Ability and luck in building it is a kind of a quasi-moat ( that for example Google still can't cross in their enterprise endeavors like the Cloud)
That sales team makes them (at the current multiples - see Mule, Qualtrix, GitHub, etc) into a $4B public or a $6-8B acquisition (my bet is that somebody of a big ones will snatch them before the IPO).
We are G-Suite at work so obviously use Hangouts Meet everywhere. However, whenever we need a company-wide meeting we switch to Zoom as apparently HM can't handle this.
I've got to say that I've always wanted to love hangouts but it always makes my laptop (reasonably powerful macbook pro) immediately max out CPU and make fan noise like a spaceship taking off, and for comparatively worse AV quality than the competitors. The only thing that kept me using it was that I didn't have to install crap. Just used meet for the first time yesterday, reserving judgement there, but honestly I didn't need yet another rebrand from google.
Zoom is the exact opposite: You have to get the client but it client works with minimal resources, on many platforms (phone / laptop is seamless for me) scales perfectly with large meetings / screenshare and video at the same time, laggy mobile connections etc etc. Most importantly it ALWAYS works. I never have to futz with it ever (whether in terms of connections, or "your link doesn't work", "you have to invite me", "user is from a different organization than you" etc). Just get the meeting ID and connect. This is how technology should work in 2018.
Meet isn't exactly a rebrand, it's an enterprise-oriented product variant. It includes a bunch of extra features that the consumer one doesn't have, and isn't free.
Zoom works more reliably than hangouts does. I use hangouts every day for some business calls, but I pay for Zoom. If you're looking for something that will work so you can close a sale, Zoom wins. Potential customers struggling to hear you on a hangout isn't a winner.
Scheduling, calendars, easy phone dial ins, and way better mobile performance make it clutch. I'm a GSuite customer, but it's still better to pay Zoom.
Zoom is also focused on one thing. Hangouts/chats/meet/whatever Google wants call it /do with it is an afterthought. If Google wanted to make a real run at the market, they should buy Zoom immediately.
disclaimer: Used hangouts and zoom extensively, for several years now.
Unless Google rewrites or majorly reworks hangouts, it's not going to touch zoom. You do need to be worried about msft building something though, almost anything is better than hangouts right now.
Hangouts has been a miserable experience for me. My CPU fans spin up instantly when I start using it, and as a multi-account user I'm often greeted with "There's no one in the meeting" messages (not "you don't have permission for this meeting", just a false "no one here") because I forgot to put ?authuser=1 in the URL to switch to my work account.
Totally, there are only 10-20 features missing to make me do that, and then the surveillance part and maybe support. The 10:1 energy consumption advantage is also there but maybe not as relevant.
It comes from taxes. Most Americans are supportive of taxing the rich if they get some sort of fair benefit, which a across the board dividend will be.
Yang says flat out that he calls it "Freedom Dividend" because that's the phrase that polled best. Maybe you can come up with a phrase that would poll better, maybe not.
Dividends have a real capitalist connotation, and who doesn't like freedom right? It's a dividend for being a US citizen, in theory you're contributing to civic life.
Not necessarily. If you think of resources as something we all own as citizens - like air, water, broadcast frequencies, patent offices, etc - then it's quite reasonable for Americans, as the owners of these resources that businesses profit from, to charge rent for the use of those resources.
This is how the Alaska Permanent Fund works. The oil underneath Alaska is considered the property of all Alaskans, both current and future. The state charges a substantial fee for its extraction, and redistributes it to all Alaskan citizens every year (about $1k-2k). And it's in a trust, so it will still be there for Alaskans even when the oil runs out.
I'm quite okay with my government charging a fee for the use of scarce common resources, and cutting me a check.
These people used to spend 100% of their paycheck at Walmart, local grocers, fast food. Now they spend 0.
So big retail/fast food shops close, more jobs lost.
UBI puts money in people's hands --the people who spend it all in their own local economy.
They can do more to get some of that back through taxes so it's more like 'recycling'. People with money aren't going to commit crimes to feed their family. People w/ rent/food/health ins are happier, more productive, less stressed, and more motivated to work on self-betterment.
Hell, if I had an extra 2-3k/month from a UBI program, I'd quit freelancing and go all in my SaaS I'm building which if it's successful could have at least 10-20 new jobs created. How many other entrepreneurs could have better success if they didn't need to put in 50-60 hours a week on their day job?
You can say it'll never happen, because you think everything will always stay the same, but that's just not the case. 40% of jobs never to be replaced by 2030 is a solid estimation.
What is your suggestion with what we should do w/ that sector? You can't retrain when there aren't jobs for them to retrain to. Should we just euthanize anyone who hasn't worked in the past year or two?
Compared to the US, Montreal seems to have a larger proportion of people with “weird jobs”: artists and performers, but also small, non-VC backed startups with unusual ideas. I think part of the reason is the more generous social safety net: you can follow your dream of becoming a circus performer or building highly-instrumented clothes for athletic training, without worrying about ending up sick and broke. As a result, people are happier, the city is more interesting, and some of the innovations seem to be panning out.
I don’t actually know of anyone who is out-and-out abusing the system. I’m sure there may be some, but I think a lot of people seem disproportionately worried about someone, somewhere eeking out a meager existence vs. the possible benefits.
I think another reason is the cost of living in Quebec/Montreal is low because they don't allow foreign real estate speculators. You can still rent a one bedroom for ~$800 in Montreal in an area where you don't need a vehicle, or a studio for ~$600 that includes tennant insurance. It's even cheaper in Quebec City, $900 for a large 2 bedroom. In Vancouver or Toronto that same studio in an area where you don't need a vehicle would be well over $1k/mth which is probably why it seems more people with wacky jobs like street juggler live there and not in Vancouver or Toronto despite having a similar safety net.
It's not just speculators. Toronto and Vancouver have large foreign student populations who obviously need a place to live in. Most of them are not the cash-and-cars-flashing millionaires the newspapers constantly feature. Many are middle-class and had to take out loans from their community to afford the tuition.
In general, the major landing points for Canadian immigrants are Toronto, the GTA or Vancouver. The GTA is where the jobs are, so that's where people congregate.
There are some big employers based in Montreal, but you usually need to know French unless you're a developer or in an otherwise non-client facing role. You don't need French to get around in Montreal though, although of course it's appreciated if you make an effort.
Sure, there are a lot of reasons for cost-of-living differences. I think Quebec might have a stronger safety net: childcare and college tuition are considerably cheaper, for example, than in Toronto, and those are major expenses for many people.
I still think the broader point stands though: th city is fun because the cost-of-living (including fallback plans) is low enough that people don’t feel compelled to chase only income-maximizing careers. If I lived in New York instead, I think it’s much more likely that I would be in finance or something similar because I’d be only a few bits of bad luck away from destitution. In Montreal, I feel like I’ve got a reasonable life on a research scientist’s much lower salary.
What's stopping the U.S. from making it illegal for foreign real estate holdings? Take back all the real estate, and auction it off at reasonable values, would go a long way to fix the rent issues. We don't owe foreign nationals anything, you should have to be a U.S. citizen or legal resident living stateside to hold/own land in America. If you live in the house as a legal resident that's one thing, but if you live in mainland china, or hong kong, and are just 'holding onto the real estate' - they should give 1 year to sell or your property will be auctioned and you'll receive 50/50 split -- govt getting the other 50.
Can you explain _why_ you think that would be beneficial?
Why moving abroad for a year you automatically lose your property rights? Does this just apply to real estate or do you release all property rights, such as cash, stocks, property left in a storage unit, car, etc?
Moving abroad you're still a U.S. citizens, I'm talking about non-us nationals buying up property strictly to hold/sell later, or to use as AIRBNB, etc...
A little old but here's an example: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/foreigners-snap-up-record-nu...
I get if you are a U.S. national and live abroad some times and come back sometimes keeping a home, but a business man in china just holding 5-10 homes, or using U.S. real estate to launder money, definitely serves no purpose.
A dividend is something you get for owning an asset, actually. But yes, if we view payments for passive asset ownership as "handouts", well, yes, a "Freedom Dividend" would indeed be a handout.
And so would actual dividends for equity ownership, as accrued by the capitalist class.
So, if we want a Marxist take, your comment is pretty fair.
I hear/see why business do it, but I think this quote from the councilman sponsoring the bill is the right take: “In the end, I think the need for equity outweighs the efficiency gains of a cashless business model. Human rights takes precedence over efficiency gains.”
I think the general theory is that if we allow them to continue getting bigger and swallowing up all potential competitors, we’re basically saying these four or five companies will run everything, forever.
I think that wildly overstates the influence these companies have. Amazon is trivial to avoid. Just don't shop there or at Whole Foods. Facebook is a bit trickier because you might be forced there by a social group and they have a huge web of trackers.
Google is really the issue. They are dominant in search, browser, and maps, and they're half the mobile duopoly. It's very difficult to avoid using their products entirely and even if you did, their dominance allows them to dictate how the internet works, to a certain extent.
Not a huge disagreement here, but I think Facebook is completely trivial to avoid, while Amazon is much less so.
I couldn't care less about Facebook. Yet, while I certainly could live without Amazon (or Whole Foods), their service is very nice and WF has things I can't buy at other grocery stores around me.
Cool idea! Seems like there might be some big blind spots though? For example, when I search for "Data", the only thing that comes up is "Database Administrators", no "data analyst", "data scientist", etc.
most definitely there are some blind spots I will need to fill in. Other ones I saw that were missing was UX Designer and other designer type roles. I will probably add these in the future, but want to make sure I can find a reputable data source.
