Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Aspect dominance, competitive landscapes, and other reasons why the Amazon acquisition of whole foods may not be that big of a deal.

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Also ran this one in the food blog . First off, let's look at some numbers. [From Wikipedia] National chains     Albertsons LLC - ...
Tuesday, June 20, 2017

The scariest quote you'll see on antitrust this week

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 For reasons I'll try to go into later, I'm not all that worried about the antitrust issues with the Amazon-Whole Foods merger, thou...
Monday, June 19, 2017

An alternate model for the rideshare business

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One of the problems with hype-driven businesses and next-big-thingism is that it tends to drive investments and strategies in questionable d...
Friday, June 16, 2017

I know you've probably already seen this, but it's too good not to post.

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Great work from XKCD. Of all the embarrassing sub genres of statistical pseudoscience journalism, there is not that beats the popularity an...
Thursday, June 15, 2017

Keeping the Uber thread going

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For those joining us late in the show, we've spent this week discussing some of the problems with Uber's current business model and ...
Wednesday, June 14, 2017

A follow-up to Mark's post

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This is Joseph I wanted to follow-up on Mark's recent posts . One thing that needs to be carefully thought about with disruptive tech...
Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Ponzi Thresholds

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Another post based on Reeves Wiedeman's Uber article in New York magazine. This one sets up a concept I've been meaning to discuss w...
Monday, June 12, 2017

Even evil plans require a certain level of competence

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This article on Uber by Reeves Wiedeman is less than the sum of its parts, but some of those parts are very good. I particularly liked this...
Friday, June 9, 2017

Explaining the upsell model with Porky and Daffy

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Upsell models are not necessarily innately evil, but they often align the incentives that way. If the model is based on leveraging custome...
Thursday, June 8, 2017

Sometimes, "I forgive you" is evangelical-speak for "____ you!"

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There is an oft noted truism that combining religion and politics tends to corrupt both. This is especially true with secular evangelicalism...
1 comment:
Wednesday, June 7, 2017

A few thoughts on Twin Peaks

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I don't want to spend a lot of time on this one, but a recent post by Ken Levine about declining television viewership numbers got me t...
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Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Immigration woes

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This is Joseph This story has some rather chilling implications.  Duncan Black makes the point : I bet half the country would have a h...
Monday, June 5, 2017

And how the hell do you make an adverb out of "grammar"?

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Though it lacks the immediate punchline quality of Soylent and Juicero, Grammarly maybe an even better example of the dysfunctional Silicon ...
Friday, June 2, 2017

Living in a post-truth world

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This is Joseph. Larry Summers on the heroic assumptions needed to make the current budget deficit neutral : The Trump economic team has ...
Thursday, June 1, 2017

Liz Spayd was a disaster for the New York Times because she was exactly what the paper wanted

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From TPM : The publisher of the New York Times announced Wednesday that the paper was eliminating its public editor position, a role curre...