johnloeber

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Where does it say that I lived in the US my whole life? You're getting ahead of yourself.

From another blog post:

> I grew up in Europe (mostly Germany, Denmark, Switzerland). I had never even set foot outside the continent until I was 18, when I moved to the United States. I have lived here for 12 years now, with most of that in San Francisco.

I'm amazed that this is still an ongoing discussion. All of these "studies" have been distracting with muddied data from a very simple, unambiguous scientific fact: alcohol is a poison. By its immediate biological effects, it literally is a poison. And you shouldn't drink poison.

Decades of studies rationalizing that "actually, people who drink two glasses of wine a day live longer" and their ilk, have only ever distracted from this simple truth, obviously so hard to contradict by first principles.

I've had the same thought for a long time. I think this is spot-on. Ballmer is underrated in that he put Microsoft into a profoundly well-resourced position that a better product leader was then able to make productive use of.

I've been very happy with Dynadot. I don't like that domain hosting is just one of many products for Cloudflare and others (as we've seen come up for Google!) and have had bad experiences with Namecheap et al.

Any idea how it was quoted without being published?

The natural monopoly emerges from the economy of scale: eventually you are offering a product at a price that nobody else can profitably undercut, because they do not have the same infrastructure that you do. And obtaining that infrastructure is too expensive for anyone to fund.

Hi, author here. This is a good point that's worth addressing.

Technology is not the reason it's a winner-take-most market. It's helpful, but in the long term, many players will have comparable technology.

Utilization is the reason why it's a winner-take-most market. If you have the most popular app with the best drive liquidity, that's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. In turn, it means that your economics are better because your cars are going to be utilized at a higher % of the time. This in turn means that you can charge lower prices, and so forth. (A similar dynamic has been the case for Uber, for example.)

Author here - Good catch, thanks for pointing this out

Author here - not an ad, I don't even know anyone at Waymo and don't hold any associated financial incentives.

"In places with working public transit" is a huge caveat here. The vast majority of the US does not have what I would consider "working public transit". And those places aren't going to get it any time soon.

Unfortunately, sitting in a Waymo is experientially not at all the same as riding the BART or NYC subway.

Hello! Author here. Quick responses:

1) With superior scale, the utilization of each Waymo approaches 100%. "Empty rides" going to a new pickup spot become more and more rare because they immediately get a ride close-by.

2) I think you underestimate the case for shared rides. Any Waymo with >= 2 passengers is reducing congestion, not adding. When you consider small bus-shuttles, e.g. 6 or 12 or 18 seats, it gets even more impactful.

3) The point with suburbs is that they become more accessible when the price point comes down. If you have a 45-minute commute to drive yourself, an Uber might cost you $60, which would be prohibitive. If a seat in a carpooled Waymo costs only $5 or $10, the incentives and customer behavior change significantly.

Create one DB for the whole test suite, and then re-instantiate tables/schemas on every unit test.

Worrying about the environmental impact of books is misguided. You use far more paper products in the course of your everyday life: paper bags, cardboard packaging, paper towels, etc. etc. Even for an avid reader, the impact is negligible.