Having a real estate agent as a buyer can be extremely useful. Time savings: they'll actively search out properties that fit your needs, handle negotiations, schedule inspections and work with the city or county, etc. They're also experienced with all of the legal aspects, and work with mortgage and insurance companies.
"Tech Bros" have a stereotype of thinking they can do everything themselves. Sometimes they should maybe step back and acknowledge that someone's profession is a bit more than what they can pick up in the course of reading blogs for a few weeks.
Now, it's understandable that there's plenty of bad real estate agents -- finding a good one can be difficult. And I'm not saying that the industry is perfect, there's certainly room for improvement. I just think that it's unfair to say they don't have value.
> Having a real estate agent as a buyer can be extremely useful. ... handle negotiations ...
I'll never understand how anyone can think someone who get's paid only if you agree to a deal could have their best interests in mind.
Even the seller's agent generally have perverse incentives as pushing to close a deal for $N,000 more only get's them $N,000 x %C vs. losing 100% of it if the deal does not close.
If you are working with some random real estate agent then sure. They are just going to push crap on you and hope you sign.
You should build a rapport with one you trust. Then they don't get paid until you are happy, since you aren't going to buy something you aren't happy with and they know that. It took 2 or 3 to find one that I felt was working for me. Dragged him to all 20 properties I wanted to see in a day and told him no on everything and that was that, until the one I wanted popped up. Then I let him argue with the seller about things that I wouldn't have any idea how to approach.
I understand all that, which is why I said the industry has room for improvement. What I'm arguing is that they have value -- they save you from taking on what is essentially a part time job that you're going to be bad at, and that they have potentially years of experience in. Whether the way in which they're compensated is fair or not is a different argument.
The tech bros are right about searching out and notifying you about properties, computers do just fine at that. As far as title, legal, etc, certainly something best left to a professional. But it should be fee based, not 6% of the value of the asset.
Even with an agent you separately hire a fee-based lawyer, title search, appraisal, and house inspection. The agent helps coordinate things but that's not really a specialized skill.
They could be consolidating all of the DB infrastructure for their platforms.
A zero down time dial-up would not be possible as they would need to nearly double their DB infrastructure.
Short planned temporary outages of various features probably become long unplanned cross-platform outages.
They probably decided to not rollback the migration after the first outage.
I'm not sure how that's a big deal for Lyft. It seems like a pretty healthy supply and demand curve -- if the number of drivers drops, it becomes more profitable to be a driver. And there's always people looking for supplemental work, who'll go where the money is.
I suppose the part I'm missing is the reduction in riders if there's not enough drivers, but that is apparently not a huge issue (according to their rider-retention numbers).
Maybe. The churn for Uber is reportedly 96% annually[1]. The Uber booth at the mall is for recruiting drivers, not riders. Ads on the radio are for drivers.
And if you look around at what they spend all of this money on, it's incentives and marketing towards drivers (as well as insurance). That's a lot of churn given the loss they're taking on these expenses towards drivers.
Re: your other point about demand. A piece of anecdata that weighs on my mind is, 10 years ago, there was some extreme economic disincentive for a cabbie to come to my residential neighborhood. Uber's black car service was a godsend, even though it cost twice the price of a cab. The supply/demand curve made sense, since I was paying more for my sparse neighborhood.
Now I get 10x quicker service for half of the cab cost and a quarter or less of the black car cost. Wat.
What I want to know is whether this is because there's a supply of 96% of yearly suckers who come to my neighborhood without doing the math like cabbies in 2009? Or is it just that Uber/Lyft is dumping incentives on them? Because my neighborhood hasn't become more dense, and the math got far worse for the driver.
I keep wondering what a reversion to this norm means for Uber and Lyft. If drivers have a lot more pricing power through churn, is 2009-cab-refuses-to-come what it looks like? If you can't get a car due to supply constraints, somehow would that be good for these companies?
Anyway, it seems like Uber/Lyft pour most of their money into making drivers happy, and yet they fail to keep them on "the platform". I don't know the full ramifications of it, but it seems like a major issue.
Are you in a union? Your description sounds very similar to my father's experience in the USPS. If so, are the problems you describe related to the fact that it's a government job, or the fact that it's a union job?
That's noble, but many aren't inclined trade personal profit for the company's profit. I don't think they should be, either. It's the company's job to ensure that their success is aligned with their employees'. Raise the issue to management, and if no action is taken, then you've done your due diligence.
I can imagine situations where you should care about the company's performance, like a non-profit or certain startup situations, but I think the majority of enterprise developers fall under the above.
From the article: "The app brings up the (scanned person's) vital information, including name, ethnicity, gender and address (..), the address of the hotel where they are staying and information related to their internet usage."
I've never heard this before, and a skim of the wiki page doesn't mention it as a prerequisite. Mind explaining? The scores are just integers, so the addition is well defined. So you're saying that the context is what's relevant?
Not that the mean is the only (or even the most useful) statistic.
Well, take decibels for example. They are a log scale physical intensity, so averaging them make no sense whatsoever (e.g. absolute silence is negative infinity dB). I would argue these scores are more like labels than actual numbers (i.e. a 3 plus a 5 doesn't really equal an 8 in any real sense). You can of course take the mean of any collection of numbers, but I've heard many a statistician lament such careless practices. The median is at least more easily interpreted for cases like this.
Ah, thanks. The decibels example makes sense (an alternative would be to take the log first, and then convert it back after averaging?), and I can see how the 0-10 system can also be viewed as categorical rather than discrete.
It's because the NPS rating numbers are ordinal, meaning that you can put the rating numbers in order, but the likelihood gap between the numbers may not be equal.
For example, 6 on the NPS scale would be less likely to recommend compared to 7 and 7 would be less likely than 8. However, the gap between 6 and 7 and the gap between 7 and 8 may not be equal. If you were to get the mean of 6, 7, and 8, you would get a value of 6, but there is no guarantee that the average of the participants' likelihood to recommend was actually equal to a 6.
I got lost in 2.2, I can't work out how applying the transformation leads to the result. Which is frustrating since it's the only non-trivial line in the proof, lol. Also, after applying the transformation, the author states that "a1(λ1 − λ2)(λ1 − λ3)...(λ1 − λm)v1 = 0" => "a1 = 0". But he never says why we know "λa != -λb for all a, b in 1..m" -- that seems non-obvious to me.
If v is an eigenvector of T with eigenvalue λ, then (T - bI)v = λv - bv = (λ - b)v. The image is a rescaling of v (and in particular has the same eigenvalue). Therefore
Well, all of that is really just Hungarian Notation [0] with typesetting rather than extra characters, so it's not 100% necessary to fully understand -- just look at the definition again. The exception is standard sets, like the Reals or Natural Numbers etc. (which use the double strike through). But that's pretty standardized.
>But this wasn't the case in later Rome and Europe, not even in the Inquisition era
I'm skeptical that throughout the history of Christianity, everyone took the "parable" interpretation of the bible (rather than taking most or all of it seriously). Are you claiming that the... inquisitors (?) weren't killing based on a literal lack of belief in god, but rather were killing because people weren't morally up to snuff? I'd love to be educated here, theology and the history thereof are well out of my wheel house.
Personally, it seems reasonable that "Jesus" was a Joseph Smith type of con man who managed to spin yarns and somehow create a following.
There is no such thing as "the parable interpretation" of the bible and "the literal interpretation" of the bible.
Here is a passage from a truly fascinating Christian author from the 2nd century. He starts by saying "we shall be told that these are fictions, no better than fables, like the rest of the strange stories about Jesus." (funny how arguments against Christianity haven't changed for 2000 years)
Origen's reply is this:
Our answer is that to reconstruct almost any historical scene, even if true, so as to give a vivid impression of what actually occurred, is exceedingly difficult, and sometimes impossible. Suppose some one to assert that there never was a Trojan war, mainly on the ground that the impossible story of a certain Achilles being the son of a sea goddess Thetis and a man Peleus is mixed up with it; or that Sarpedon was the son of Zeus, or Ascalaphus and Ialmenus sons of Ares; or that Aeneas was Aphrodite's son: how could we dispose of such an objection? Should we not be very hard pressed to explain the strange blending of a fiction with the universal |74 belief that there was war between Greeks and Trojans at Troy? Or let us suppose some one to doubt the story of Oedipus and Jocaste, and of their sons Eteocles and Polynices, because that a sort of half-woman, the Sphinx, is mixed up with the story; how should we clear up the difficulty? Well, the prudent reader of the narratives, who wishes to guard against deception, will use his own judgment as to what he will allow to be historical, and what he will regard as figurative; he will try to discover what the writers meant by inventing such stories; and to some things he will refuse his assent on the ground that they were recorded to gratify certain persons. And this we have premised, having in view the history of Jesus as a whole contained in the Gospels; for we do not invite intelligent readers to a bare unreasoning faith, but we wish to show that future readers will have to exercise prudence, and make careful inquiry, and, so to speak, penetrate the very heart of the writers, if the exact purport of every passage is to be discovered. -- Philokalia of Origen CHAP. XV. 15
>Are you claiming that the... inquisitors (?) weren't killing based on a literal lack of belief in god, but rather were killing because people weren't morally up to snuff?
"Tech Bros" have a stereotype of thinking they can do everything themselves. Sometimes they should maybe step back and acknowledge that someone's profession is a bit more than what they can pick up in the course of reading blogs for a few weeks.
Now, it's understandable that there's plenty of bad real estate agents -- finding a good one can be difficult. And I'm not saying that the industry is perfect, there's certainly room for improvement. I just think that it's unfair to say they don't have value.