Similarly, how many small firms that could grow up to be serious competitors won’t get started because of regulatory compliance demands. There is a reason companies become much more amenable to regulation once they are large and established. Lobbying for arduous regulation is often much cheaper than actually competing with new companies.
> The question is how to make more accurate guesses.
I think the question should be about how to maximize the net return on time dedicated to development, which may mean spending less time on (and investing less reliance on) estimates rather than expending unbounded effort improving the quality of estimates.
I prefer privacy too. But there is something entitled about wanting to interact with a company but keep the details of that interaction secret from that same company.
Is there a way to search for fiber optic cables nearby? Calling the local telco has always been a dead-end -- I can't get beyond the sales-rep who's computer shows fiber service isn't available at my location.
No idea about bigger cities. I'm in a rural community, with 300 subscribers to our local telephone office. We can get service just by calling the manager.
My grandfather was an initial stockholder in the company when it was formed. See, back then you bought a share, you got a line run to your farm. He needed the line so when the federal liquor tax man came into town, his friend could call and let him know. He'd throw the still in the wagon and head for the woods until the coast was clear.
When I was a kid, we still had a wooden box on the wall with a horn coming out the front (microphone) and a cloth-covered wire to an earpiece hanging on the switchhook out the side. You took the receiver off and rattled the switchhook to get the operator's attention - a little light would flash on her board. Told her who you wanted, she'd plug you to them and operate the ringer crank.
It's all automated now, and most of their revenue is cable services and internet. Plus fees for all traffic crossing our territory, which is between several middle-sized communities so that's a big deal. Amounts to some millions a year revenue! But not enough to install fibre until now.
My mom had a lot of trouble with this. The best route ended up being to stop and talk to the workers every time she saw a cable company truck. Eventually, she met the foreman for the team that wires up new housing developments. He was able to give her a number to call. Thousands of dollars, dozens of phone calls, and about two years later, she had cable at her house!
Price and functionality. It’s incredibly easy to use, unlike AWS and Google Cloud. The downfall is that you have a bit less control, but that’s never been an issue for me. Their servers have been incredibly reliable, they offer managed databases now, load balancer, S3 compatible Spaces. Everything I’ve needed so far, predictable and affordable pricing, and none of the complexity.
Its very difficult to control for all factors when comparing breast-fed to bottle-fed babies. In 2014, a study [0] was published at Ohio State that compared babies over a long period. When looking at only sibling-pairs (babies in the same family where one was breastfed and one was bottle-fed), the differences in outcome disappeared.
Quote from the link:
"As expected, the analyses of the samples of adults and their children across families suggested that breast-feeding resulted in better outcomes than bottle-feeding in a number of measures: BMI, hyperactivity, math skills, reading recognition, vocabulary word identification, digit recollection, scholastic competence and obesity.
When the sample was restricted to siblings who were differently fed within the same families, however, scores reflecting breast-feeding’s positive effects on 10 of the 11 indicators of child health and well-being were closer to zero and not statistically significant – meaning any differences could have occurred by chance alone.
The outlying outcome in this study was asthma; in all samples, children who were breast-fed were at higher risk for asthma, which could relate to data generated by self-reports instead of actual diagnoses."
> I thought one of the primary functions of public schools was that they were government provided daycare.
Yes, but lots of people don’t want to admit that, especially teachers. The school system doesn’t need college educated, subject matter certified teachers to run a day care.
If these companies are as bad to work for as this author describes, why on earth would she continue to work for them? The author’s rebuttal might be that she has no choice because these are her only options. If that were true, then I’d be much more grateful and wouldn’t advocate for laws that might destroy them. These companies didn’t exist a decade ago and the continued existence of gig work is not a foregone conclusion.
Also, it seems like the far more reliability successful path to improve ones lot in life would be to work to personally improve your skill set instead of focusing on legal changes in the hands of millions of people you don’t know and don’t control.
My cynical take: the alternative is to write freelance articles that are sufficiently tribalistic to fit in with modern digital media. Luckily for the author, freelance writing was carved an exemption from AB5 after AB5 originally crushed freelance writing opportunities.
