171400+ entries in 0.056s
mircea_popescu: in general, socal ditz does not call the other socal ditz "like, totally, a slut" for any other reason than you know, the slut getting the attention of the boys she wanted for herself.
mircea_popescu: "Socialists revile the church not for its promulgation of irrational faith but because historically churches have championed the improvement of the world as a thing that the devoted do—not a thing which may (or even should) be outsourced to le etat." << quite exactly.
mircea_popescu: hm... well, other than the cost of keeping the stuff around forever to verify blocks.
mircea_popescu: moreover, there's no extra cost for adding more items to one block
mircea_popescu: technically speaking all that goes into the chain is 32 bytes per paste
mircea_popescu: aha, and now we understand teh point of the entire exercise.
mircea_popescu: "Jeff Bezos of Amazon has, according to HBR, toppled from #1 to #87 in their list of Best Performing CEOs."
mircea_popescu: This year HBR changed the evaluation criteria from "stock price only"1 to an agglomeration of fuzzy metrics that include stock price in addition to Sustainalytics' proprietary "goodness evaluation" metrics.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: Quennesson had noted that the more photos he took, the less likely he was ever to look at any one of them ever again. "People take more and more photos, but paradoxically, they become more and more disconnected from them," he said last month in a conference room at their co-working space. "You don’t want to go back to this whole life that you’ve captured, which is counterintuitive. It's the most important thing —
mircea_popescu: here's a fun fact : the classical gestapo didn't know what to do to keep the idiot population from givingthem tips.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform and for this exact reason medicine is a losing proposition. except THAT gets swept up into "obamacare" and so on. there's not going to be an obamacare for photographolalia, your ft meade wet dreams notwithstanding.
mircea_popescu: after reading that sort of nonsense i half expect the author has some "science" in a jar in his basement
mircea_popescu: "By 2009 both men had left Apple and were working at Cooliris, which makes photo viewing software. Latour set up an office for Cooliris in Japan, and after spending some time traveling through Asia with his girlfriend, he became frustrated with how difficult it was to store and organize all the photos he was taking. He discussed an early idea for a product with Quennesson, who was interested in using math and science t
mircea_popescu: people take pictures in total violation of the economic cost of the energy expenditure for the camera, let alone any other considerations.
mircea_popescu: if you pay 35k monthly for hardware you'd better be doing something more interesting than "we store 400 million photos"
mircea_popescu: dude wtf, a) never heard of it and b) it fucking sucked, get lost.
mircea_popescu: "Out of the picture: why the world's best photo startup is going out of business. Everpix was great. This is how it died. The immediate concern in the room was a forthcoming bill from Amazon Web Services, which hosts the 400 million photos stored with Everpix; the team estimated the bill would be about $35,000."
mircea_popescu: We should have packed it up early right then, but we felt like we had already gone too far to quit. We rebuilt (and re-designed) the majority of the software, got approved by Amazon, and reached out to over 1,700 artists (each individually through different platforms). We got between 1 and 10 artists interested. Again, this just screams “PUT IT OUT OF ITS MISERY!” But we kept going.
mircea_popescu: "Our first beta test was a disaster when Amazon (who was our payment processor) suspended our account for not complying with money transfer issues. Fans were able to participate in the sale, but we were unable to capture their billing. We ended up paying the artist out of our own pocket and giving everyone his music for free (and we never told him that happened until now)." <<< derps were going to bypass amazon on an a
mircea_popescu: hard to beat "cheap calories" as a warm blooded lifeform.
mircea_popescu: "More importantly though, people really didn’t really LIKE anything about our product. No one that used the service thought it was that cool. In fact, some people that participated in the sale didn’t even like our “dynamic pricing” system."
mircea_popescu: punkman i never had a tailor go "breathe in" "now exhale" before.
mircea_popescu: a) the people who had a dacha were happy as is, no need to chase it
mircea_popescu: why didn't "Better Homes And Gardens" exist in 1980 Moscow ?
mircea_popescu has enough experience with 1990s state of the art 3d modelling for games on basis of laser scanning nude female models to not need the first part explaiend.
mircea_popescu: "The single factory willing to work with us said they’d quote on our items while showing us around the facility. When our guide accidentally led us full-circle, we caught their product team copying our patterns and that was the end of our sourcing trip."
mircea_popescu: recast of 5000 units per style was daily output for these guys."
mircea_popescu: We added a line of jersey basics to our denim line, packed up our lives, ended the lease on our house, loaded our portfolios and patterns into suitcases and boarded a plane for Malaysia, where I had some contacts in the manufacturing industry. At one factory after another, we were wooed by the boss, we got the grand tour, we were asked our volume projections…. and we were shown the door. Our (very inflated) annual fo
mircea_popescu: "So we decided to wholesale, on the condition we could establish a cost-effective supply chain. This might all seem like a juvenile, ill-informed, poorly researched, gamble. And it was mostly, but I heard an irrepressible voice day and night,asking what if it works?
mircea_popescu: "Why did we launch with 12 million variants? Because we thought we needed to. Would the market have been happy to customise just the length? If we’d done proper validation, we would have known, that yes, it would have been happy — thrilled even. It only became apparent, too late, that 90% of our orders were for very typical jeans from atypically tall women. Stonewashed stovepipes with a 36-inch leg, anyone?"
mircea_popescu: s hours, and when I went off to a night job managing a restaurant, she’d code, with Sex and the City for company, until 1 or 2am when I stumbled in again from night shift."
mircea_popescu: All of them said the site we wanted was impossible, apart from one who quoted upward of $40k for build, excluding the photography and image editing that would be needed. At this stage we only had $20k total capital for the entire venture — sampling, pattern making, inventory and production. So my co-founder taught herself to code. She worked day and night — we did all the operational planning during busines
mircea_popescu: customers needed to see exactly what they were going to get.
mircea_popescu: "Partnering with a uni friend, we pitched our concept to a whole bunch of web developers we knew. The challenge we posed was that it couldn’t be customisation by drop-down list or radio buttons (solutions we were offered repeatedly). This was 2005. We needed to show customers high-quality photographic customisation, where every selection changes your product. Custom-made product required a strict no-refund policy, so
mircea_popescu forces slavegirls to eat livers. it's a show, i tell you.
mircea_popescu: yup. take chicken liver. i love it. so does everyone who had sane enough parents to have it as a kid.
mircea_popescu: "flowtab joined my two life's passions, inept geekery and strip clubs"
mircea_popescu: rly in those bars without being there. It quickly become a distraction to our operations in San Francisco."
mircea_popescu: "We hired a local operations manager in Denver (Sasha Juliard) and soon launched at Shotgun Willie’s (the highest-grossing strip club in CO) and two other bars. We made about $1,200 on each deal (50% went to DexOne, we spent $800 on each launch event and we had $500 in hardware costs), this was the only sales revenue Flowtab ever made. We were tightening up our sales process, but it was hard to market ourselves prope
☟︎ mircea_popescu: asciilifeform complicated. but their key people don't actually buy into the stupid.