fluxic's comments

Looking back on the 2010s app wave, it's hard to think of any other app (including FB, Uber, and Airbnb) who have had a bigger cultural impact than Tinder.

Love to revisit this piece every few years. Why food delivery will never be profitable: "The Food Delivery Death Star" https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death-star-85f9...

Wow, it's almost as if workers will have to fight for better work-life balance themselves rather than relying on the mercy of their benevolent broscience-inspired bosses

Sure, Jeff Bezos isn't walking around the streets of Seattle stealing people's chequebooks and ratting to their bosses so they can't make rent. But he and Amazon are exacerbating INSANE wealth inequality in Seattle. Amazon is the seat of economic power in the city, and its employees are the ones bidding up property prices. It's great that Bezos is giving high-paying jobs to thousands of people, but those same people (following the "bro logic" you espouse) are bidding up property prices, and then lobbying for NIMBY policies that reduce housing supply—which DEFINITELY drive up rents and force people out of their homes and onto the streets.

If you're an affluent techie in Seattle it's easy to say "not my problem bro", work your great job, buy your expensive house, lobby your local councilman to curb new developments and head taxes, watch your property value rise and your chequing account blossom. But there are swathes of other people for whom affluent tech jobs aren't desirable or possible, and there's no need for those people to be priced out of Seattle. Building homes isn't hard.

I agree that it's insane to expect Amazon to behave differently than what's expected of a contemporary American corporation™ (aka: pure profit extraction, no consideration for local social conditions or the greater social contract.)

But rather than accepting Amazon's mundane corporate naughtiness, we should be vigilant and outspoken about it. The corporate norms we have now in North America are not etched in stone; we can inveigh against shitty behaviour while also doing what you suggest: electing better politicians and pursuing fairer tax policy.

Your argument:

1. Amazon is not the government.

2. Amazon has no obligation to solve civic issues.

3. It is the government's job to solve civic issues.

(The government tries to solve civic issues; Amazon uses its undue influence in Seattle to undermine the process.)

4. Ergo, it's all the government's fault.

Sure there are simply better ways, there are always better ways, and those better ways will be likewise crushed by the muscle at Amazon who make sure the company can extract as much value out of Seattle without having to pay its fair share in taxes.

In the past 24 hours, Jeff Bezos added $405 million to his net worth. In the past year, Jeff Bezos added $41 billion to his net worth. And yet somehow, Amazon can't throw a $50 million peanut at the epidemic of homelessness ravaging their hometown.

Burn it all

I did this with the CEO of Breather. Back then, you could target based off of employer, job description, school, and interests. You could also make these target options mutually exclusive—which, in the case of Breather CEO Julien Smith—meant an audience of 1.

My unlisted Medium post got 1 read. Felt like a damn king when it worked. Cost me (I shit you not) 20 cents to pull off.

Epilogue: I quoted him too high, and didn't get the job. Oh well. Still one of my best stunts ;)

-pizza keeps well in a car (fries/buns get soggy)

-pizza is still good when it's merely warm (whereas pasta/chicken aren't)

-pizza doesn't come in individual servings (you don't order $2.50 slices. pizza delivery has effective $10+ order minimums)

-margins on pizza are huge (it's literally just a cheese sandwich. the cost of a large domino's pizza is <$2.50 iirc; margins on fancier food are not as high)

A great in-depth look at the shaky unit economics of the food delivery business model:

The Food Delivery Death Star https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death-star-85f9...

Lullabies for little criminals is an INCREDIBLE book.

So cool!!! What a slayer

Even if you're a New Yorker-calibre writer, you won't be able to write anything of "quality" in less than an hour.

Now imagine if you're not a New Yorker-calibre writer!

(I'm a pretty snobby reader and still like the occasional techie-founder post. You don't have to be a copywriting wizard to write something substantive, but it isn't enough to just commit text to the page. You can tell when someone has thought deeply and laboured over a piece of writing. The idea that you can write something worthy of other people's time in one hour is cut-and-dry clickbait.)

Take it from a very expensive copywriter: you cannot write a quality blog post in 1 hour.

Consider the content of this post:

1. research

2. draft

3. edit

...revolutionary. Maybe there's a reason why Baremetrics writers aren't in the New Yorker ;)