Uber serves millions of customers around the world by providing lower prices and better service, something that is not matched by taxi cabs or any similar services. Calling businesses that create so much value parasitic is a way of comparison.
Anecdotally, I have taken a trip from London to Heathrow airport 2 times, one time with a taxi cab and the other time with Uber. Uber cost two times less, and the service was on the same level or better.
Selling a dollar for 90 cents isn't revolutionary. Anyone can serve millions of customers when you operate out of the bounds of what's normally required for a business.
The main selling point of Uber/Lyft are the network effects (same app working everywhere) and the ability to judge drivers by their rating. Price IMO is not that important because people who are price-conscious drive their own vehicles. Cab companies are too fragmented to get something like such a system running.
This ironically shows how size matters a lot. Be it state investment or huge VC, more cash, more power and more centralization means better service (if the megamoney was spent well).
I agree that Uber's way of underpaying drivers is not scalable (basic mathematics) and price hikes should happen to make the numbers work out. However the service level now people expect is very much innovative.
This is the same reductionist nonsense Chomsky engages in.
What "real reason" is there for anything to "exist" and what do those terms mean? There's no real reason for corn in a can to exist, you have corn on the cob!
It's a subsidy whenever any product was developed based on parts of a project the people in a state created, because the state was paying them. Well, then I guess I exist because of state subsidies. The state reimburses and sets standards for medical procedures and I had open heart surgery at 2. Hell, is Steve Jobs' Apple the result of state subsidy because he formed a company that's state sponsored, when he should have struck out on his own to be a fingerpaint artist from his own materials and talent?
These arguments feel like ridiculously cherry picked characterizations that have no weight and contribute nothing.
> or give out a lot of grants to individual people who are just maintaining open source projects or making/maintaining something similar that many people benefit from but the value would be lost if one were to try to make money off of it.
There is definitely a lot of missed opportunity in not supporting some open source projects that provide general public benefit.
Some of those products would compete with parts of the services Google and co offer.
I don't understand the duplication of alerting with Grafana/Alertmanager. Is it not better to keep all alert configuration central in prometheus alerting rules ?
Internally (in the Grafana team), we call it unified alerting because it is a unified UI for non-Prometheus data sources together with Prometheus alerting (and Loki/Cortex/Grafana Cloud alerting) and allows you to see all your alerts together.
- For non-Prometheus data sources, uses the Grafana alerting engine but also has an embedded Alertmanager. Can use the same routing, grouping, deduping and silencing features that Alertmanager provides but for data sources like InfluxDB or MySQL.
If you use Prometheus and have everything that you want to alert on instrumented with Prometheus then of course that makes sense.
But if you want to alert on other data sources, and especially to see and manage all alerts in one place, then this is what Grafana Alerting now enables.
Example I encountered a while ago: Alert on billing throughput within a third party (not instrumented with Prometheus) billing system that has a RDBMS backend. The alert can be written in SQL and with the changes in Grafana 8 could be acted upon and routed just like the Prometheus alerts were.
Prometheus's language PromQL is pretty inscrutable and the alert manager is very bare-bones. I find the entire project is pretty user-hostile wrt documentation and examples actually.
