> “Choosing a physician is more complicated than choosing a good restaurant, and patients owe it to themselves to use the best available resources when making this important decision.”
And what are those resources?
I'm actually looking for a new PCP in NYC and there are hundreds or thousands of options. It feels like my best course of action is to just pick one at random.
Tldr: publisher pushed back release in favor of nook support. targeted wrong audience. Wasn't expecting the competition (millions of apps). Forced to make games he wasn't really interested in. Spent $200k and made $7k and decided to try again.
I would like to add it really does suck. It's definitely a passion but as an art form not all artists make money. Being able to wrap our passion for making games into a company is sort of like forming a band. If it falls apart your likely not going to remain friends.
Yes, I think the reason I didn't include skill levels was because at some point I saw a post talking about the uselessness that comes with some of that. It may have been a bit extreme but what does PHP [Ninja] or Ruby [Tadpole] really indicate?
Although [Beginner] is pretty different from [Expert] no matter what, the expectation of a beginner or expert may vary widely from person to person.
It's a good way to position yourself for the kind of work you'll get, no matter how it's interpreted. If you write that you're a beginner Ruby programmer, and then after getting hired you're asked to write an entire application in Ruby by yourself, you can say in a defensible way, "That's fine, but I'll need constant help and code reviews and it's going to take a long time as I get up to speed."
If you got any pushback at that point you could ask them why they tasked the beginner with this project, when you clearly claimed you were not an expert.
The other levels can be played similarly. An intermediate person could be assigned to some project and be expected to perform mostly independently, but if there were any non-idiomatic code or poor optimizations, they could just shrug it off as a learning opportunity. "I'm no expert" you can say.
Setting aside small towns, I find it a bit alarming how many huge cities I know nothing about, places like Tianjin, Dhaka, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, and Yangon. (Of course if everyone but me is familiar with these cities, I'm sure you'll let me know...) My theory is that the "culturally important" cities that everyone knows (Moscow, Cairo, London, etc.) lags by decades behind the actual growth of cities. Of course, renaming places like Rangoon to Yangon also doesn't help.
What jumped at me was the fact that list seems significantly inaccurate/unrepresentative. For example, Delhi which has a population of 11 million according to its wikipedia article is missing entirely from the list (It would be between 10 and 14 rank as it stands now). The article is controversial due to conflicts in the definition of the boundaries of a city, but by any definition, Delhi should definitely be up there.
Being in Asia, I'm more familiar with those cities than the ones to the west. The renaming often just corrects bad names picked by Europeans (e.g. Tienstin vs. Tianjin, though everyone still uses Bangalore when I was there last).
i've lived my whole life in california so monterey, ca. is what popped into my head. wikipedia confirms it's about 28k population. the peninsula area has more though.
after poking around on google maps, most historical towns are quite large now (roanoke, va and plymouth, ma are at least double that size).
bangor, maine is right around 30k. i bet most have at least heard of that town.
most of the famous little towns in the south like savannah, tuscaloosa, galveston are 50-120k+ population. key west is 25k though. with tourists in town i'm guessing it's right near 30k. there's also some really small towns by it that are probably not counted in the city population.
i think you'd be hard pressed to find a more famous 30k population town than key west. i'm willing to bet nearly every adult in the US has heard of the place, and has a pretty good idea in their head what it looks/feels like in terms of population.
(This is not a well known place, but one of its schools was in "Saved by the Bell" so there's a tenuous pop culture link.
Wikipedia has several lists of US cities and, being polite, they tend to obscurity at the latter half of the lists. And those are places with over 100,000 people. My town - Cheltenham UK - has about 100,000 people.
So, how do you give an idea of how big a town for 35,000 people is? Number of high schools? Number of Starbucks? The article lists one church. A UK equivalent might list twelve pubs.
(my niece fibbed to me and said it was in "Greece" - something I believed for years. She also told me "oh yeah Deerhoof, they all went to my school" which is also totally untrue.)
My understanding of this is you set up a monthly allowance with them and they save your surplus for the months where you don't make as much.
This doesn't seem like solving a problem, rather they are creating an illusion of solving a problem. Essentially they are parenting. Which some people might need. But what a better solution might be is to teach people to create a savings account and budget themselves. And not surprisingly there are plenty of apps that do just that.
They also will provide interest free loans if the user hasn't yet built up enough savings. So, in that sense, it is also a bit of an insurance program.
The loans are interest free, but given that they have an undisclosed mechanism of calculating your allowance ("Even Salary"), it should be fairly trivial for them to assure that they are almost never going to be using anything other than the customers own deferred income to pay it.
>>But what a better solution might be is to teach people to create a savings account and budget themselves.
You will be surprised how bad people are at this. In fact this app aims to do what a person must be doing naturally. And don't ever think that this is a problem only with the poor. This is an issue faced by many people. Failure to understand how money loses value(Inflation) and how it multiplies(Investments) lie at the core of why people get into financial issues. Ideally speaking you can get rich if you understand how investments work on long periods of time even on moderate salary. A lot of people do it. Unfortunately such people routinely branded as being miser, or frugal or worse; these days the cool kids call them as 'people who don't enjoy life'.
Every body can benefit from learning how to save and invest. Especially salaried large company folks.
I don't understand why that is so difficult. I'm here in the US for a short term work assignment and getting a checking/savings account was the best experience I've had so far. All I had to do was to walk into a bank with valid identification and they had it done within 30 minutes. And the best part of it, they explained me how checking and savings accounts work. All I do these days is allocate myself a budget at the start of the month and put that in the checking account. That basically now becomes my threshold of spending per month. Plus I see food is really not that expensive in the US if you cook at home. Buy a good pair of shoes, good jeans and you are all set. Though I agree rent rates are atrocious in the Bay Area. But with sharing rooms with a friend I was able to tame that part of expenses too.
It just can't get more easier than this.
Allocate budgets, save the rest. Learn to invest and bootstrap your way out of your problems.
The problem is that high schools don't teach people how to live on a budget and save money.
When people file for bankruptcy, they are given a three hour video course on the Internet and have to take a quiz to learn how to budget their money and save for emergencies. This sort of thing needs to be taught in public schools for free as part of the math classes or something that teaches life skills.
The app that 'solves' this problem costs $158 year to be a member, and holds surplus money to give it on bad weeks when they don't earn as much to have enough money to live on.
This needs to start long before high school (much of a person's personality, including how they view money, is already locked in by that point).
Personally I believe elementary is the place to start education about essential life skills, which include dealing with money (budgeting, saving and investing). And that education should continue throughout until high school graduation.
Perhaps add in critical thinking, study skills, social skills, people skills, as well as anger and stress management to elementary schools to help out later on in life?
Absolutely (still amazed study skills aren't a continuing topic throughout education). Maybe it's just my memory, but really don't remember receiving much of any life skills after pre-school/kindergarten. I know we learn much of it practically, but that leaves a lot of room for uncorrected errors that become bad habits.
> My understanding of this is you set up a monthly allowance with them and they save your surplus for the months where you don't make as much.
No, they calculate what they call an "average" of your income over a period of time (though it is expressly not any of the usual mathematical averages and they don't disclose how they calculate it) and they retain your surplus above that "average" in better months pay you the difference to reach back to your "average" in months that are below.
> This doesn't seem like solving a problem, rather they are creating an illusion of solving a problem.
I'm concerned about what Even's actual business model might be. It's hard to imagine that it doesn't involve somehow skimming a portion of the salaries they manage. Even if it's a tiny percentage, it seems like it would be an incredibly difficult tightrope walk to keep the portion "fair" and not veer off into taking advantage of the very people the app is purported to aid.
I think a "start again" button might be nice - since the most critical choice is the first square, undoing a square at a time can seem a bit lacking by the time you hit level 30 :)
Seems a bit sluggish.
Took me a little while to understand you touch only the earth squares, not the roads and houses, maybe that could be clearer in the tutorial (or maybe it's just me)
The video on the app store - might be better to include some footage of the tutorial, it didn't make much sense to me before I understood how the game worked.
Anyway, I spent an hour or so with it, so I guess it has some sort of appeal.. Good luck!
Does anyone know what it actually costs a carrier to have you on roaming data? For example is AT&T being charged extra by the Canadian carrier for the data you use?
I'm looking at their headphones right now and shipping seems to be a huge problem. $20 for the headphones but ~$15 to ship to the US. Are any of their products sold in the US with cheaper shipping?
