I honestly cannot keep up with Google's constant brand churn. I have never heard of Android One. I'll probably forget what Google One is by next week, because it's just plans on Google Drive which itself was born out of Docs, and so on.
I think providing supports to regular consumers may not have been in their dna, but I've been using the business chat/phone/email support through Google Apps, and they have always been top notch. While their answers weren't always what I wanted to hear, that was because of Google policy, versus the reps themselves. Most all of which have been very knowledgeable and human over the years versus most all of the other support channels I've used for companies other than Apple of course. However, there is an enormous amount of more consumers than business customers, so no idea how that support will scale, and if the consumers will get the same level of expertise as business but will be interesting to find out.
The cost of support has to come from somewhere -- is either Amazon or Google generally cheaper for cloud computing? (I know ~nothing in this area). I could definitely imagine a market for both a cheaper service that's lacking support and a more expensive one that offers increased support.
With that said, with Amazon's efficiency in logistics, I could definitely imagine them implementing support at a negligible cost.
Not only is formal methods more effective for HW, the incentives are also more tilted towards HW. If you fuck up the HW design, well..you're fucked. With SW, "you can always push out an update" mentality exists. I'm not saying this to criticize SW, but this is more an example of how you conform to the ecosystem in which you exist.
Which is why people are keen on developing formal methods for smart contracts, which generally can't be updated. Plus they're a lot smaller than most software.
>Sometimes I think people on the west coast seem to think of a city as a place that's supposed to stay the same forever ("forever" being defined as starting at about 1960).
No, forever is defined as "the day after _I_ moved in"
And this is perfectly rational! People move to a neighborhood because they like that neighborhood. This is almost tautological. Of course they don’t want it to change!
But that’s why we have to be very clear about rejecting the complaints this mood inspires. I don’t want to tell people they’re wrong to have these feelings. They are perfectly valid and normal feelings. But those feelings don’t outweigh the benefits of allowing the functional and unavoidable change that happens in neighborhoods over time.
And when you really start to dig deep into the types of things people want to do to stop this change, you end up with well-meaning, but ultimately counterproductive interventions. And that’s the nice way to say it; much of what incumbents want to do to prevent the free flow of people into and out of neighborhoods is positively dystopian.
I am sure there are reasonable things we can do to help more people afford and benefit from booming cities like Seattle, New York, and San Francisco. (For starters, we can build more housing!) But the language of gentrification is such that one new luxury tower in a sea of affordable housing is now opposed in cities like Cleveland and St. Louis on the grounds that it will change its immediate neighborhood.
That sort of stuff isn’t just nonsense; it’s harmful nonsense.
It turns out that it's really hard to be against communities democratically controlling their own destinies and not look like a monster. Local governments and the policies they make to preserve their built environments are about as pure and non-corrupt as democracy gets.
Does any place in America have high-density market-rate construction because the community genuinely supports it? Far as I can tell, it's only possible to have a city in America when the government is sufficiently corrupt / community is sufficiently disempowered that developers can cram it through.
I'm grateful for these places. I'm happy to live in one. But you have to recognize that cities in America are only possible to the extent that America is corporatist and undemocratic. Any strengthening of our communities, our democracy, or local government has always and will always reinforce the overwhelming majority support for sprawl and "fuck you, I got mine."
Yes, you’re right, it’s pretty difficult to develop a politics around this subject that isn’t awash in contradictions. But that’s because if you really drive down into what it is that people want, you’ll find that they want the impossible. They want to live in a quiet low-density neighborhood directly adjacent to a big, interesting, dynamic metropolis that never encroaches on their space. It’s not clear how an entire population who says they want that could ever actually get that.
I know what I sound like when I get deep enough into a rant about the way in which Americans fetishize local control. But I still think that what I am proposing would generate the best outcomes for the most number of people.
Isn’t that the whole idea of “the community”? Acting in the narrow self-interest of incumbents and not caring about outcomes for the population in general is exactly what we fetishize when we fetishize community activism and local control.
Sure. And I guess what I'm trying to say, in short, is that the wishes of incumbents can be both understandable, but best ignored. If that sounds like a contradiction, it's probably because it is. I think it's really hard to develop a coherent set of politics on this topic.
They try super-hard to do so every time there's a change on the account (probably 90%+ were lost when the "free phone" came with a new contract), and they've raised prices (+$20/line). They also instituted the 200GB (maybe 100GB) limit.
The amount of hell they would receive for doing so, T-Mobile got a large amount of flak for transitioning legacy customers to Simple Choice plans. Instead of incurring the PR nightmare that would be, Verizon is just making these plans unappealing with soft caps (they did this to force people off unlimited mobile broadband plans, the number of customers I had yell at me when I worked for a VZW call center because their internet connection was severly throttled was mind-boggling) and by refusing to give subsidized upgrades without changing to a newer plan.
Just to be clear. Emil Michael never floated the idea about doing oppo research to her face. This was done during a gathering with some journalists where Ben Smith from Buzzfeed was present and reported on it:
"Michael at no point suggested that Uber has actually hired opposition researchers, or that it plans to. He cast it as something that would make sense, that the company would be justified in doing."
GTFO with that family shit.