I play this game at least a couple times a week. It’s an all-time favorite!

What did the government do to cause that?

Please explain. My intuition suggests the opposite. The company’s office is in San Jose. Presumably they have to pay high local market wages to retain workers. If they could hire remote workers willing to accept Peoria lL market wages they could conceivably get the same value of labor at lower cost.

20 years ago companies didn’t demand local workers to staff their call centers to avoid competing with the entire world. They did the opposite, contracting out to the lowest bidders overseas and firing staff in the global north.

This is it. For nearly 15 years money was basically free for tech companies. Banks don’t pay anything, bonds don’t pay anything, the stock market is overheated and investors are still looking for return. So if your tech company was already public you could borrow in the form of bank loans or bonds for dirt cheap and if it was still privately held you can get money from individual and corporate investors.

Now that the free money era is over a lot of companies have had to finally think about making a profit so that they can keep the lights on. This is why there have been tens of thousands laid off in the tech sector in the last year or so.

As far as Reddit goes I have no idea what they’ve been thinking. It seems like they’ve been spending money developing features nobody wants or needs: locally hosted images and video which have to cost a fortune, live chat, and NFTs, to name a few. They’ve got the ~20th most popular website in the world with millions of daily active users and they can’t figure out how to make it profitable?

The API the third party applications used doesn’t serve ads. All they had to do for a bump in revenue is to insert ads and require third party applications to display them or risk losing their API access. Users would grumble but it’s a pretty reasonable ask. The fact that they didn’t do this demonstrates to me that they don’t think the money is in serving ads, they think it’s in data mining and they can only get the data they want from the official app.

Yes, certainly. Beyond just talking about bikes most new urbanists are trying to encourage walkable cities and transit oriented development. Walkable cities, which also tend to also be bikable, are cities designed like they were a hundred years ago, where it’s possible and even encouraged for most people in the area to be able to walk between home, work, dining, entertainment, shopping, and recreation.

Transit oriented development is urban planning that locates the above destinations in proximity to public transit stops. Furthermore public transit is prioritized above car traffic through the use of separate rights of way so that when car traffic backs up the public transit is not delayed.

When you add more lanes to accommodate more car traffic on a road that gets too many cars, you attract more car traffic until that road is just as congested as it was before. But this induced demand works both ways. If you add more walking and bike infrastructure that’s actually usable and feels safe to get from where you are to where you want to go you’re more likely to walk or take a bike. If taking the bus or train is faster, easier, cheaper, etc than driving a car a lot more people will take that transit.

https://youtube.com/@strongtowns

I’m sure it was nothing. It seems fine? What was that noise?