I've seen a lot of interest for Fulfilled by Amazon e-commerce businesses on Flippa.com last few months. If you're making $1K or more per month in revenue, lots of buyers.
Except that it's the state closest to bankruptcy... and has the most underfunded pension system in the country. The state can't go bankrupt, and they can't print money, so they are raising taxes and as a result many people are leaving the state (500K emigrated in the last decade).
My wife and I bought a house in May and my mom wanted us to move to Northwest Indiana due to how bad Illinois has become and how hard it will be to sell property in the coming years due to the tax increase to pay off all the debt the state has from a lack of a budget for nearly 2 years.
It has affected public education as well. The school district my wife teaches at relies on state money (she claims it is the only one outside of Chicago that does) and because of lack of budget and various debts the state owes there is not as much money for education. If things don't change shortly the district will have to shut down in February of 2018. If teachers want to stay past that they can but they just won't be paid. Now, granted this is the far southwest suburbs so it may not be exactly where the new amazon workers may live but it is still a reflection as the state as a whole.
Your hiring manager, the people you interviewed with (6-8 people probably?), and some of the management at company A will know you rescinded your signed offer.
What are the chances that one of those folks ends up working a company with a job you're applying for 4 or 5 years from now when your application comes through?
Yeah, the HoloLens form factor currently is great. Had a chance to try it a few weeks ago.... When it becomes available to consumers, I'd definitely pick it over Vive or Oculus for gaming applications.
The wires on the current VR setups are a nightmare, as is the requirement for a $2K PC setup.
You can probably get away with a $1k PC build these days, and the HoloLens itself is pretty expensive now as a devkit ($3k IIRC).
The HoloLens is great, but it doesn't really seem to be designed for gaming. Games are cool to demo in AR, but less practical I feel, given the requirement of meshing with the real world. Meanwhile, gaming in VR is taking off decently, and the FOV in the current generation of VR devices is much better than what the HoloLens has, and that's a pretty big deal for gaming.
Also, as far as the $1k-2k PC thing goes, I think that a lot of people (especially early adopters) will already have a decent PC so the cost of a nice GPU instead of a more modest one is a lot less than the cost of a whole computer.
That was my experience when messing with the Rift dev unit I got a couple years ago. It was more an excuse to buy a new video card than a need for a whole new computer.
Would be fascinating to see how many people from TCS, Wipro and Infosys ended up moving to Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft after a few years in the US.
Some of the larger product companies employ contractors from those firms. I know quite a few people employed by TCS who work at Apple, and some of them plan to stay with TCS for 10 years or more. Those big companies are still taking advantage of these cheap visas even if they're not employing the people directly, and that definitely impacts wages in our field.
I want to know if anyone did NOT find it disturbing. So, yes, I found it disturbing.
Related -> a cool synchronicity happened to me while reading this article. The Roky Erikson song Two-Headed Dog came on and I realized it must be referencing that experiment!
U.S. corporations have issued more than $9.9 trillion in debt since 2008. Last year, corporations issued a record $1.5 trillion in debt.
76% of the companies in the S&P 500 bought back their own shares ...most companies used debt to pay for these buybacks, in a clever move of financial engineering to boost EPS.
To top it off, we've been in a multi-quarter earnings recession for the S&P, and total retail sales growth has dipped below 3% which has always correlated with a recession:
The stock market seems sane when compared to real-estate prices in major cities. In Canada, people are mostly pointing fingers at foreign buyers. People are generally ignoring the elephant in the room - lowest rates in a generation. Despite being in the 1% of wage earners, we personally are so badly screwed ... we'll never be able to afford property in hour home towns unless there is a 50% crash. I don't think that is likely at all ... so we're (and most of our friends who missed the buying opportunities of 2011-12) are figuring our what remote town to move to so we can earn some fraction of our salaries but have a shot at home ownership. As rational people, we know we cannot afford million dollar homes if interest rates ever normalize. In Canada, you cannot get mortgages longer than 10 years ... so it is very grim for us. People who don't know math are raking it in while we are suffering in no uncertain terms. But no one seems to care.
I am just hoping self driving cars come out in the next 5-10 years and hopefully that expands the geographic area you can reasonably live in and still commute to work.
The LA to SF bus comes to mind. Seems like a miserable existence to spend so much time couped up in a car but the self-driving option will allow more productive use of time.
Traveling long distances is a pain even by transit -- mobile data needs to catch up first. Dropped calls, dropped vpn connections, slow speeds... it sounds great to work during your commute until you have to actually do it.
You are right, and there is no fracking boom on the horizon to save us. We just had 0.5% gdp growth. Where is the growth needed to sustain the stock market going to come from? If you read between the lines, Icahn is essentially saying that monetary policy is not effective as an elixir for the economy, though it may be a short term elixir for speculators, and that absent Keynesian fiscal policy(thank you politicians) he doesn't see growth drivers.
