Huh, could have fooled me. My first experience of Austin was long stretches of ugly billboards (I think mostly on Burnet and N Lamar), and despite living here for years that first impression never left. Now that I think about it, without some kind of ban of course there would be way more billboards where I now live.
Texas only adds more clean generation because it’s way less capital intensive than building a natural gas or coal plant. Those plants require $500M+ minimum and the returns just aren’t that great. My wife is an energy attorney in Texas and handles power purchase and interconnection deals like these all day long.
Solar and wind deals require far less capital, go up faster, and aren’t subject to the supply risk of natural gas or coal.
Texas also has a lot of clean energy thanks to sun and terrain. The Edwards plateau creates some of the best wind generation opportunities in the US.
Texas also attracts energy heavy industries because it has relatively cheap power. Which we’ve learned partly results from not paying anyone to have excess capacity… which is all fun and games until you have winter storm Yuri roll in and your only option is to “shed load” which btw kills some people.
Another aspect of Texas is that we have demand response contracts whereby certain users get paid simply for the ability to “take” power when required. This is very attractive to bitcoin miners. Prices here go negative from time to time which is pretty wild.
All of this attracts a lot of energy-intensive industries to Texas.
I’m so glad I’m not alone in noticing this “provider” bs. Peel back the creepy Orwellian doublespeak and all you find is cynical ploy to save money by creating a false equivalence of doctors’ work with non-doctors. The health care industry is just the latest home of the money-grubbing vampire squid of finance. Sickens me.
Really great job. Whether it’s legal for customers to share this info or not is really a gray area.
If the data is only shared in an aggregate fashion, I doubt they can do much without a subpoena. And then what? Sue the website? Sorry, no. Section 230.
John Doe suits against anonymous customers?
Nothing requires PriceLevel to retain the PII of users… they can capture the data, validate, and flush the PII. “Sorry, we have no information about the contributor of this data.”
My sense is this will be the primary innovation of this service— how to get this info and keep it useful to end users without very much ability to vet it. Worth the effort.
How many TalkDesk customers do you suppose there are paying $91,132 for 62 users?
I'd guess TalkDesk know exactly who that is.
(I doubt that makes it any easier to prevail if they try to sue them, but I wouldn't want to be the customer negotiating next years contract wit them.
"Hi, it's TalkDesk account management here. Just letting you know your contract expires at the end of next month. Here's a new contract for the following 12 months, with the special for you pricing of $425,762 for your 62 seats. Hope to hear from you soon, and have a nice day!"
The power of stories like this never fails to humble me. There are countless (less dramatic) incidents like this in every life. Your experience brings them back into focus.
Can’t speak for OP but I moved to Exploratory.io. And the beauty of it is, it’s a GUI for R so you can export your transformation steps to R if needed.
Even then, 500 years of daily data is less than 200k observations, most of which are meaningless for predicting the future. Less than 16B seconds of data. Regression might not handle directly, but linear algebra tricks are still available.
They cost $50-70 each on Amazon or ULine. Awesome for stackable storage. With some plywood and casters, you can easily stack 6-8 tall in the garage and move them around with ease. Highly recommend.
I bought Webvan stock on their IPO day. Lost around $5k. (I was 22).
Amazing service. Terrible business model: boil the ocean, premature scale, hire the head of Andersen Consulting as CEO. Every bad, nonsensical decision.
And yet, the core was valid: a lot of people want their groceries delivered. When I went to business school a couple years later, the CMO of H-E-B spoke to my class (later, President) and I asked when they’d offer delivery. His response: “we believe people enjoy the experience of walking the aisles.” Well, Scott, whose parking lot is now 50% curbside pickup? Who spent 9 digits to acquire Favor? You’re welcome, you rich bastard.
It’s a good thing the grocery business had enough margin for error for these people to come around to learn the correct lessons from Webvan.
Curbside pickup, and delivery are quite different economically, but I agree that "enjoy walking the isles" is nonsense.
I'm not sure the economics of delivery (in a general context) work. Sure, there are folk who are time-poor, and cash-rich, and for them it makes sense, but for the rest the price either has to go up to reflect the cost, or the delivery cost has to be subsidised.
Curbside pickup is a happy medium ground. Picking the groceries is cheap, and the expensive part (delivery) is handled by the customer using their time and their car.
i wouldn't say "enjoy walking the aisles" is complete nonsense. I actually do enjoy walking the aisles myself, but as I get busier in my daily life, I find that to be a huge time sink. despite that, i still do it because I still can't bring myself to trust a gig worker to do the shopping for me. sometimes, even buying something like crackers, you need to at least do a quick cursory check on the packaging to determine if they were crushed.
Delivery cost increases logarithmically (one package more in the same truck) while revenue increases linearly when more people order / people order more. Increase in revenue outpaces delivery cost even for low margin items.
Amazon makes more money with people on Prime, not less.
https://www.kut.org/austin/2022-04-21/advertising-companies-...