In the UK there’s a lot of screens on pedestrian walkways, and small adverts on roundabouts but very few motorway (highway) adverts.
On the motorway there’s signs for services (rest stops) with all the major brands logos on, and maybe one or two billboards every 30 / 40 miles outside of city centres, then more as you come into a city centre.
I’ve also recently noticed a massive vertical screen on the side of a building near a busy interchange in my city (Manchester).
Public transport is littered with small adverts - on underground’s / metros there’s a lot of posters on escalators and buses have a lot inside, plus usually a big banner on the side (or a full skin of the bus but they’re fairly rare at least in my city).
Political advertising is capped at £20 million per party, but our newspapers do most of the real political propaganda come election time in terms of what stories they cover / who they endorse in their editorials (or sometimes they allow a major candidate to write one). The BBC also lets all parties with some traction do a 5 minute party political broadcast.
When I’ve watched some live US TV channels I’ve been amazed by how many “Vote X for Y, paid for by Z PAC” adverts there are and am thankful UK parties can’t spend anywhere near the same amount.
This is a reason I’m very keen on making sure tests are focused on requirements rather than code.
A few jobs ago I would often be in a team where the entire team had turned over several times, we would be asked to do large updates to a legacy application or bump lots of dependencies and just not break anything. When pushed the product owner wouldn’t be able to describe what the app was supposed to do, particularly for unusual types of users (the account / user modelling was chaotic so say, several billing accounts per user, each with different products and access levels). At that point “foo calls bar” doesn’t clarify much intent.
They're ignoring start up successes within Europe. I suspect most complaining about this use Spotify - started in Sweden. Revolut is also very popular for people after a crypto-friendly bank. Monzo is credited with revolutionising bank accounts within the UK.
Afaik, until recently it was difficult to send money between two bank accounts in the US for free - hence the proliferation of "tech solutions" like Cash App and Venmo. That just isn't a thing in the UK, banks have supported free instant bank transfers for years. So, maybe just maybe - we have fewer startups because our systems aren't as crippled as the ones in the US?
Also ignoring that some of the economic activity created by these companies can be a net negative benefit to society, cases like: startups trying to solve the mess that healthcare is in the USA, it will generate income, have customers, etc. but it is just providing a service that shouldn't exist at first, similar to how natural disasters will increase a country's GDP because of all the construction required to deal with the aftermath, economic activity generated by patching issues in society is not necessarily a positive. Same with everyone requiring a car to go places, amazing for car sales (and increases in GDP from the production chain) but it's not the most beneficial way for a society to transport itself, incurs recurring costs on car maintenance, insurance, increased road/infrastructure maintenance, injuries/fatalities from road accidents, etc.
The USA has a lot of startups trying to solve issues that probably shouldn't exist in the first place (filling income tax reports for example, what the fuck?) but those bullshit products generate wealth to some people.
Hey! Thank you for your feedback, initially this product was going to be a SaaS, and I just forgot it to remove from the main website, but i change my mind and then make open to everyone, I just need to remove that, thanks!
I don't understand why the government don't do more to support these kind of tariffs that incentive demand shifting.. it seems such a powerful way to make the grid greener without huge infrastructure projects
They're very unpopular with consumers, who are allergic to price increases and particularly to variable price increases. Look at the blowback to Wendy's surge pricing on burgers, or to Uber surge pricing, or to toilet paper scalpers in COVID, or to any notion that you might lose your job and need to retrain in a different one in response to changes in the economy.
The last thing a politician wants to do is lose an election, and losing an election is usually what happens when you suggest that the electorate bear the consequences of their behavior. As a result, we usually drive straight off a cliff, have a war or societal collapse, and then whoever survives it can go build a new system out of the rubble.
I started my career working on gambling apps, and it’s one of my red lines now when looking for work.
It’s an evil industry - full of dark patterns. I remember implementing a “cancel withdrawal” feature where essentially: the casino could deposit money in a customers bank account in a day when they request it. They instead choose to hold it in a pending state for a week, and allow them to cancel the withdrawal at any point in that week to immediately play with. Presumably so it didn’t feel as real as money leaving the gamblers bank account.
Pretty standard for most cloud services, especially as you get more "cloud-native." If you adopt DynamoDB as your DB of choice - you'll struggle to get off AWS should the need arise, without rewriting parts of your app.
But in practice - is this important? The hyperscaler clouds are similarly priced, and if you're able to leverage the proprietary tech in one to speed up development, or simplify operations, maybe it's worth being locked in.
> But in practice - is this important? The hyperscaler clouds are similarly priced
Similar prices as advertised maybe, but big companies and governments do enough volume that they can negotiate discounts. If they're locked in they lose leverage though
It looks pretty clear cut to me - and just because MS is massive doesn't mean that someone somewhere hasn't seen this as an opportunity to improve their personal / department KPIs.
I'm not familiar with hardware business models though, so what do you think it is about instead? Reducing hardware cheating?
Eh, in my current role (engineer) we have a PM but they’re not all that useful. In theory, they do what you describe, but because they don’t have a technical background they struggle to identify blockers & engineers drive most prioritisation sessions.
They may jump in occasionally to tell us another team needs X or the business wants to see more Y so we should re-think what we work on next, but I struggle to see why that couldn’t be handled by our technical team lead.
Spitballing here but perhaps it's because people don't realise the DevOps work that can be done in a team, rather than just what has to be done.
I work in a cultural DevOps place at the moment, and often spend my time improving CI workflows, improving the local dev environment and upgrading dev tools to make it easier to write features when requests come in. I could easily spend my entire week doing things like this, and it seems to pay off as we have a very low cycle time and fix bugs within minutes.
However if you have a non-technical manager - they struggle to see value in this work. DevOps becomes "the way we get the project we built into our production environment" which is usually quite a small piece of work compared to actually building the project. So it becomes - we don't need one per team, hmm, maybe they should be centralised so we can share their time between teams, and then you lose the culture DevOps was supposed to create.
On the motorway there’s signs for services (rest stops) with all the major brands logos on, and maybe one or two billboards every 30 / 40 miles outside of city centres, then more as you come into a city centre.
I’ve also recently noticed a massive vertical screen on the side of a building near a busy interchange in my city (Manchester).
Public transport is littered with small adverts - on underground’s / metros there’s a lot of posters on escalators and buses have a lot inside, plus usually a big banner on the side (or a full skin of the bus but they’re fairly rare at least in my city).
Political advertising is capped at £20 million per party, but our newspapers do most of the real political propaganda come election time in terms of what stories they cover / who they endorse in their editorials (or sometimes they allow a major candidate to write one). The BBC also lets all parties with some traction do a 5 minute party political broadcast.
When I’ve watched some live US TV channels I’ve been amazed by how many “Vote X for Y, paid for by Z PAC” adverts there are and am thankful UK parties can’t spend anywhere near the same amount.
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