I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight.
To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.
Decentralized and expensive. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong blogs but my impression so far is that a lot of subscriptions are around 5-10$ monthly for a single creator. I can get a ton of newspapers (ok not papers, websites) magazines etc for that price or better, and those have way more than one contributor. The video platform Nebula for example has 175 creators for 6$/month.
It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.
The minimum price is enforced by Substack, unfortunately. You can make everything free but you can't charge, say, $1/month. It definitely pushes the platform toward writers who think "I want to make this my full-time job & income". It also definitely suffers from, to a lesser extent, the Medium problem of way too many people thinking it is some kind of get-rich-quick thing. Somehow the Reddit algorithm started showing me the substack reddit, which seemed to mostly be pretty new authors complaining that they aren't making much money from Substack.
That explains a lot. Thank you! What a weird business decision on their part. I would guess the minimum has something to with payment processing overhead, but Patreon handles 1-2$ monthly payments no problem and always has. Strange.
Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.
Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile, depending on location and demand, so Waymo is already almost certainly at the price you claim you'd be taking it.
I think you dramatically underestimate how much it actually costs to operate a car. Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business. Likewise, very few people depreciate their car over just 5 years. Or clean it inside and out every single day.
Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car. Also notice the comments talking about how the per vehicle price is high, how that flows into higher insurance, and all kinds of other things.
Maybe someday there will be a discount AV taxi company using 10 year old beat up Honda Civics that only get cleaned once a month and provide extremely barebones support to pull the costs down to $1/mile. That's a 50% drop in costs from today, so hard to see it coming very quickly. But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!
And note that the IRS per mile rate is $0.70/mile. It's not perfect but it is a decent third party estimate of the true cost of operating a car. Hard to see any taxi company charging anything less than that. So a 10 mile commute every day is still going to cost you $280/month in an AV taxi for the foreseeable future.
You get completely different numbers if you go by overall cost / distance vs taxi pricing models. In the latter, you separate out the flag drop fee (~$10 for Waymo) from the mileage and time process. Here's an experimental Waymo price tracker trying to estimate these numbers:
$2 is a good target for the AV mileage rate. It's actually somewhat high if I put my industry hat on for a second. It's not a good estimate for the number you'll get from doing total_price/distance.
> Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.
Waymo costs are immaterial right now. Their cars are not production cars, and they have spent billions on R&D that they can't even hope to recoup with the current fleet.
That being said, $2 is super-low. The IRS rate for car depreciation write-off is 71 cents per mile.
> But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!
The true cost of a transit ride in NYC or Seattle is around $20-$30 per ride. People don't actually pay that much because it's heavily subsidized.
Once self-driving matures, it'll also be subsidized and it will completely kill off transit. Maaaaaybe excluding subways in some areas.
> Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business.
And on the other hand, each Waymo parking spot is probably a lot cheaper per unit time than 250 square feet inside a house in a residential area. And presumably they need a lot less than 1 parking spot per car.
> Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car.
Doesn't that sound cheap? If a car can average 10 rides per day, that's $16 per ride.
The rest of the world isn't on WhatsApp. What a bizarre claim. Vietnam uses Zalo. Japan uses Line. Korea uses Kakaotalk. China uses WeChat. Iran is Telegram.
And in the US more people are using iMessage than SMS thanks to iPhone's 58% market share.
I don't know about you, but I personally talk with Iranians more on Whatsapp than telegram. I know the Iranian government did ban whatsapp for a while, but its still popular. I remember reading an article on here about a whatsapp leak, and it mentioned that there are over 60 million whatsapp users in Iran. Considering that Iran has a population of around 91 million, that's a huge majority of the country.
Can confirm, my family back in Iran doesn't use Telegram and haven't for quite some time. They're all on WhatsApp. Telegram seemed to be popular in Iran during the Whatsapp ban and it switched back to Whatsapp being dominant it seems. Which is very annoying to me because I loathe Meta and don't use any of their products.
I think Germany has a high amount of users on Signal, it's quite interesting seeing the stats about messaging apps in different countries, it's very fractured internationally while being very consistent inside borders.
I for one fucking hate that most of Sweden uses FB Messenger, it's the clunkiest of them all, and since I don't like using it all I constantly miss important messages from friends from not having the app installed and checking Facebook once in a blue moon :/
This is probably a lot more work than you're willing to put in, but the Facebook Messenger bridge for Matrix has actually been reliable, set'n'forget, and headache-free for me, whenever I have to use it for Marketplace.
I wouldn't otherwise mention it, but this is one of the few sites where "Stand up your own messaging server" isn't a completely insane suggestion.
>it's very fractured internationally while being very consistent inside borders
I think it's caused by the network effect [1].
>I for one fucking hate that most of Sweden uses FB Messenger
I agree. Denmark is the same, everybody uses FB Messenger or, even worse, Snapchat.
And don't even get me started on payment systems: Sweden has Swish, Denmark has MobilePay, Italy has Satispay, etc. It's completely fractured and it's so annyoing when travelling across the EU.
At least there's a new European system called Wero [2], I wonder if it's going to help fixing this situation.
Nobody ever paid $900 for a toilet seat. That was a statistical artifact caused by an accounting method called "equal allocation".
"The equal allocation method calculates prices for large numbers of items in a contract by assigning "support' costs such as indirect labor and overhead equally to each item. Take a contract to provide spare parts for a set of radar tracking monitors. Suppose a monitor has 100 parts and support costs amount to a total of $100,000. Using the equal allocation method each part is assigned $1,000 in such costs, even though one item may be a sophisticated circuit card assembly, which requires the attention of high-salaried engineers and managers, and another item may be a plastic knob. Add $1,000 to the direct cost of the part and you get a billing price. This is what the government is billed, though not what the part is really worth--the circuit card being undervalued, the knob being overvalued. The need for billing prices arises because contractors want to be paid up front for items that are shipped earlier than others."
There's some weird online effect where people assume everyone they talk to on the internet makes essentially the same exact amount of money they do.
I've noticed this most in a forum for a country I used to live in where foreigners would come in and post "What's an affordable hotel/restaurant/bar/travel experience".
Uh, I have no idea what "affordable" means to you!?
Occasionally I read the local subreddit /r/monaco, and see posts like “how much should my weekly food budget be?” with no further information included.
In a place where “normal” genuinely ranges between a couple of euros at McDonald’s and 500+ euros a day in fancy restaurants (easily 1000+ if you drink wine) it always feels like a particularly outrageous question.
There are many places in the world where that’s not a very unreasonable question, but this certainly isn’t it.
"Analysis by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has been tracking the siege using open source images and satellite imagery, found clusters of objects “consistent with the size of human bodies” and “reddish ground discolouration” thought to be either blood or disturbed soil."
The "visible from space" here is clearly dumb click bait from The Telegraph.
Congress are the ones who define what the FDA does. Blame them and the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Congress could easily tell the FDA to do something different.
Blaming people for a problem only helps if you have the power to take away their ability to cause the problem. In this case, the most effective way to keep Congress from causing you health problems by giving you misinformation about supplements would seem to be to get your information from a source that Congress doesn't control, such as ConsumerLab. Hopefully it's a better source than the FDA rather than a worse one; but, if not, maybe you can switch to a better one, or start one yourself.
"Opponents call the amyloid hypothesis zombie science, propped up only by pharmaceutical companies hoping to sell off a few more anti-amyloid me-too drugs before it collapses. Meanwhile, mainstream scientists . . . continue to believe it without really offering any public defense. Scott was so surprised by the size of the gap between official and unofficial opinion that he asked if someone from the orthodox camp would speak out in its favor."
"and only slow progression a relatively small amount."
They don't even do that. they _do_ remove plaques, they _do not_ have any statistically significant effect on MMSE degradation.
plus I only see the comments that point out the entire scientific basis for them was based on faked research.
The way I had it "simply" described was "the plaques are basically dead brain cells, the problem is the brain cells rapidly dieing, not cleaning up the corpses afterwards".
either way, the faked research set dementia research back at least 2 decades and wasted billions of dollars on failed medications with no benefits and horrific side effects (that they tried to cover up).
I always have wondered a bit, do people in other fields have this, too? Like do people expect the CMO at a pharmaceutical company to still be running clinical trials or whatever to, I dunno, maintain their street cred? Or is it just tech companies where people seem to have existential angst about managers doing manager instead of "technical" work?
This is a series B company not an international pharmaceutical conglomerate. Perfectly reasonable for a CTO to participate in engineering work at this stage. I've experienced a few early companies where CTO just did meetings or that didn't have someone within the leadership team who dug into engineering at all and it wasn't pretty...
I've experienced small companies that "scaled" their org and added unnecessary layers of management "because we're going to need it sooner than later." They never needed it. The leaders were out of touch with what was actually happening. Complete dysfunction ensued...
To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.