My employer offers tuition reimbursement so they paid for most of my Master's. The process wasn't to onerous, I had to get my department VP to sign a form and I had to take "job related" classes, pay for them upfront and then get reimbursed when the grade came in. So I used my credit card, paid a little interest and did night school. At the rate of one class a semester it took a few years to get through, but the "sacrifice" was a couple of nights a week of not watching TV and playing video games. Honestly, compared to an undergrad degree where I had 18-20 hours a semester it was not hard -- work doesn't assign homework and projects outside of business hours, and I only had to contend with having a baby around for the last semester -- I was married, but no kids. So it was some effort but not a lot of effort to get my Master's, and effectively no money out of pocket. I probably ended up paying about $400.
Who was attending my classes? Keep in mind these were night school classes geared toward working professionals. Maybe some where here on H1B but these were people like me with full time jobs, most young and newly married, some with young kids at home. We had effectively zero full time students. The classes were overwhelmingly attended by other Indian and Chinese working professionals, with a few US-born people sprinkled in. Their attitude was pretty much the mirror of mine -- my employer will pay thousands out of their pocket to pay for my education, so why not spend a couple nights a week here? It's better than doing nothing, and I get something that is a great add to my resume. My other US-born friends and colleagues were in awe of my "effort". "YOU WENT AND FOUND THE VP AND GOT HIM TO SIGN YOUR FORM?" (yes, I checked his Outlook calendar and dropped by when I knew he was present), "HOW DID YOU FIND THE TIME!?!?!" (One night a week and some time on the weekend is not a huge time commitment)
QA/QE/whatever you care to call it is critical when doing anything important. They provide an independent analysis that the job was done right. Not only in code, but in pretty much any industry. Creators fall in love with whatever they are creating, and think it's perfect. QA should provide a more objective view.
Just this week, I was editing some code. I'd tested it and my tests were fine. Send it for review, one reviewer says "why did you change this". Turns out, I'd changed something in an area I didn't mean to. It would have been caught when it went into production, but then a giant flaw would have made it into production.
So this new Xbox has updated graphics, updates on RAM, processor, GPU. But it also will play all XBox One games (aka "full backwards compatability"). If Microsoft hadn't done this, people would have been whining about the XBox being "out of date" and "old" and "not powerful enough". So they update it, don't dick over people who bought XBox one games, and it's an "existential crisis"? I have an Xbox One, it's a fine machine. Whenever my 360 dies (which is mostly a video streaming machine at this point), I'll replace it with whatever's on the market.
My gen 1 Volt was made in the USA (Detroit), and the CR reviews/ratings/reliability data suggest it's a very reliable and well-made car. I've had no problems with it so far. I know not every GM product has been stellar, but we also had a number of GM cars and trucks in the 70's, 80's and 90's and they never had significant issues. We also owned Japanese and European models, which were generally reliable but did require service as they aged.
As time goes on, "average" reliability continues to improve across all brands. CR explains this quite clearly in their yearly auto issues. ICE's, as complex as they are, now go 100K+ miles without requiring any major service. Contrast that to, say, the 70's where you might have valve jobs, carburetor rebuilds, spark plug wire replacement, and a bunch of other stuff I'm likely forgetting to make a car of "average" reliability. In terms of the Model 3, it's a new model, at production levels Tesla has never seen before, with new tech, new parts, etc. Even automakers who are venerated quality leaders like Toyota and Honda see a dip in first-year models of a significant redesign. The first Model 3s are likely to have teething problems as they spend some time in the real world, you can only test so much. This doesn't mean it's a crappy car, it happens with every new model from any manufacturer. It also happens with phones, software of all types (games, open source projects, commercial software, operating systems), new houses, new office buildings, etc.
Running joke from my buddy that works at a defense contractor is that if you can do your job, the network isn't secure enough. It's amazing the hoops he has to jump through to perform functions and obtain permission to perform functions that are actually enumerated in his job. Oh, and of course, they are told to just assume the network is compromised, anyway. There are good security reasons for a some of the restrictions, of course -- but there's no denying that having a very locked down network requires significant investment on the IT side as well as slowing down the jobs of the people actually trying to use the network.
Well, good thing I work in an office with work colleagues I've known for nearly two decades, I video/phone conference with colleagues in other countries I've known nearly as long, I live with my wife and kids, I play games with friends, attend events in my community, am a member of a community sailing association and have a landline telephone to call my mom and siblings. None of those things needs a smartphone.
My phone sat on a table being charged from Friday till Monday morning. I didn't die, I didn't miss anything of importance, and I actually got more done. My wife and I are considering having a phone cutoff of 8PM where we turned them off entirely. I'm also considering leaving my phone in my car during the workday because honestly, it's more of a distraction than something that helps me get work done. I have a desk phone, and my co-workers and important family members know the number, or they could always just call the front desk and get transferred if they really need to find me.
I've also dropped off a lot of social media platforms, too. They consume inordinate amounts of time, take away time I can concentrate on other things, seem to develop into interruption machines one way or another, and have low-quality content and experience. Reading a book, learning a new programming language, woodworking, exercising, playing a game with my kids, sailing/kayaking, riding my bike, snowshoeing, hiking, learning to cook a new dish (from a dead tree cookbook), visiting my library, participating in a community event, taking a photo walk, chatting with a neighbor or mowing my lawn are all examples of richer life experiences than are provided by social media, and none of them require a smartphone. True, there are ways in which a smartphone could augment some of those experiences, but it's by no means a requirement to enjoy them.
I have no quarrel that a smartphone is an amazing device. It quite literally puts the Internet in your hand, plus calendar, email, you can call people, there are useful apps, etc. It's a transformative technology versus the way things were done before and it's very convenient. What I'm getting at is that it's important to realize that it's not necessary to one's existence, despite the millions being spent on advertising to convince us otherwise. I guess I'm at a point in my life when I feel comfortable in telling "society" to go fuck itself while I enjoy some time away from my phone. I'll come back and use my phone again, but on my terms. I'm the master of the phone, not the other way around.
I was born in the 70's. I somehow made it all the way till the late 90's before I got a mobile phone, and even then it was more for convenience and by no means a necessity. I went to a smartphone later when I got a 3GS used.
I used the phone plenty before it was mobile. Calling friends, family, customer support, scheduling appointments, colleagues, etc. My desk phone at work or home phone were used for communication daily, multiple times. I even worked a customer support desk a while so I used a phone as a tool to generate income. But none of these phones were smartphones.
In terms of emergency services, you could generally count on being able to find a pay phone, or in the era where cell phones were becoming more popular, you could flag someone down or someone would stop. Or if you were home you had a land line. There was also some self-reliance. If you got a flat, you changed it yourself, it wasn't an "emergency", it was just something that happened and the reason you kept a spare. If your car up and died, and you couldn't revive it you would find a phone somehow and call AAA , a friend/family member to get you or bring tools, etc. You didn't need a smartphone, you cold get by with either a regular mobile phone, finding someone with a phone, pay phone, or asking to use a land line. People were generally OK with letting a stranger make a call if they were in obvious distress. If they didn't quite trust you they would ask for the number and dial it for you, since long distance charges were a thing. Or you could always call collect.
Needs are things like water, food, shelter and clothing.
This "need" for a smartphone is more accurately described as Fear Of Missing Out. And, like the monster under the bed that little kids are afraid of, is entirely manufactured in your own mind. Humans survived for millions of years without the "need" for a smartphone at all times. It's probably healthier to leave the thing at home from time to time and enjoy a walk outside, a good book, and being out of touch.
If you go into a chain restaurant, the food items are clearly labeled with their calorie count. If you get food in a grocery store, the foods have a label whose content is regulated to let you know the nutritional information, including the calorie count. These measures were enforced to let people know what they are eating, so that people could see the numbers and adjust accordingly. These numbers aren't political, they are simply the facts. If you want to have a Big Mac, go right ahead. I guess if you get triggered because you are overweight, you don't go in chain restaurants. That probably likely works out better.
But adding an indicator that shows where you can burn some calories by walking (or biking?) as an alternative to driving is offensive? Give me a break. I've used this tool to find a way to get some extra walking in, just to see how the time works out. Having a calorie count would just be icing on the cupcake.
Definitely agree with you there, although it doesn't necessarily need to be all STEM. I had more class and extracurricular options as a kid in the 80's than my kids have today. Shop classes are a distant memory, anything art related (choir, band, orchestra) is withering on the vine, and in many places honors or AP level classes are nonexistent. Sports fees, club fees, lab fees -- it's ridiculous. Every one of these things can be useful to some kid in some way. It doesn't need to be STEM all the time, there are plenty of other jobs that companies need people to do that aren't coding and still are an important part of making a company successful.
My town has 9 schools (1 pre-K, 4 elementary, 2 middle, 1 high school). The tab to run the district for a year is ~$65M. This works out to about $11k/student, which is pretty near the national average for school expenditures. There are about 50 million students in public schools in the US. So $200M/50M = $4/student. For a classroom of 25 kids, that's $100. Maybe you can pick up an Arduino kit. For a district that spends $11K/yr on a student, $4 is a rounding error. If this was $2B that would be $40/student, which for a classroom would be $1000, which could actually be used for technology initiatives -- buying equipment, IT staff to manage the equipment, teaching materials, hiring teachers and the like.
Reed Hastings has been quoted on a number of occasions saying exactly that. "There's a reason we didn't call the company 'DVD-by-Mail.com.'" They also nearly screwed it up entirely with the whole "Qwickster" debacle, which Hastings also discussed. There's also more than a little cherry picking going on here. Picking a few "winners" and then extrapolating that because they didn't seek "disruption" as part of their business plan makes this kind of a puff piece. Not to mention the egregious use of other stupid buzzwords like "paradigm shift" in the description. I'd also like to believe the reason the Bodega folks got in hot water what that it was pretty easy to see that they were going down the Jucero path by over-engineering and hyping what amounts a vending machine -- a technology that's been with us a really long time, and that can already do pretty much everything they were promising.
Source for dvd-by-mail: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/1...
Source of Qwickster debacle: http://deadline.com/2014/05/re...
I live in a northern US state, grew up in southern US. Very well aware of this.
See my disclaimer 4. I am no proponent of the US healthcare "system" as it stands today, and for many of the reasons you mention. It's also likely a tremendous drag on entrepreneurship and productivity, and we pay for too much for "the best healthcare system in the world" (sarcasm).
See item 1 in this response. Current state has rigorous gun laws, other states I grew up in didn't.
Reminds me of earlier US administrations. I've heard Canada described as "The US implemented correctly".
Trying to ATTRACT talent, well that might be a different matter. I doubt Travel is a big deal, Canada is BIG. I live about 2000 km away from my family for example. There are plenty of families that are spread across the country.
To clarify my point about travel, it was specifically for the point of attracting talent and either having family visit you or you visit family. When I was a kid, traveling to Canada from the US was really easy -- you showed a US driver's license and the polite Canadian border guard waved you through and told you to enjoy your trip. Nowadays to consider Canadian travel you need passports ($110/adult, $80/kid), so for my family of four, that's spending $380 just to be able to cross the border. Right now we live driving distance from all family, moving more than driving distance away and adding in border crossing hassles is another thing that can turn people off from moving, especially if you are trying to hire people with experience -- those people tend more towards the "married with children" end of things than you might find with people out of college, for example. At the stage I'm at in my life there's a lot more things holding me in place, but at the same time I bring a pile of experience and know-how with me.
I know for some people, this is no big deal and they move all around the country, but for my family it's a definite barrier to entry for moving anywhere. I suspect there are people who fall all around the spectrum of how far they would move from their parents, and of course there are plenty of people who want to get as far away from their in-laws as possible. So maybe Canada should have a slogan that says "your in-laws will never want to visit":)
I already don't like the length of nights here in Massachusetts. Anywhere more north is going to have more seasonal variation... I want less. I grew up in the southern US, I really do miss the sunlight, and I certainly could do with less cold -- so Canada has little appeal to me outside of an vacation place to see something new. I'd love to visit Iceland, Scotland, Scandanavia, etc but I don't want to live there. I do seem to recall that the majority of the Canadian population lives within 100 miles of the US border, so I know it's not that different. Also, New Brunswick is in the "correct" time zone of Atlantic time... the same one Massachusetts (and all the New England states) should really be in, instead of Eastern time.
Yep -- it can be hard enough to make a realistic COL comparisons within the US, trying to compare US vs. Canada adds even another layer of complexity since you add in the respective Federal levels, too. As someone who lives in the northern US, if I was going to go through the hassle of changing jobs AND moving I would agree with you on picking a warmer climate. I'm not going to uproot myself, my family and my career to move somewhere else cold unless I absolutely had to or the opportunity was truly unique. Might as well stay put where we already have things figured out.
Some time ago, I went to up to Montreal for a business trip. Talking with the engineers there, they told me that Canadian salaries are largely the same dollar (number) amount as US firms pay, but their tax burden is far higher, with federal, provincial and VAT taxes taking away a good deal of that salary, plus then the cost of things like gasoline were considerably higher, making the cost of living greater. That can't help. There's also the issue of the climate. Given a choice between working in a warmer climate (California or Texas), working in the Great Frozen North is a really hard sell. There are also other issues like travel hassles to visit family, crossing international borders and so on. I've also been to Toronto a number of times for vacation and I've enjoyed it, but I always went in the warmer months. Toronto reminded me a lot of a cleaner and more polite version of NYC and I enjoyed my vacation, but I've never been there in winter time. People say the lake "helps" but I can still imagine the winter nights being dark and full of Horton's. I can't stand the darkness of winter here in Massachusetts, and geometry tells me it's far worse in Canada. So Canadian firms need to come up with means of sweetening the pot to attract talent, one knob being paying more.
Disclaimer list: 1) anecdotal, employer could have been stingy, employee could have been a poor performer 2) a big metro area, as they are expensive in the US, too 3) years ago, when the US dollar was stronger vs. CAD 4) comparing COL across countries is hard, as I pay more out of my paycheck for health insurance in the US than a Canadian does, who pays it in taxes.
Yes, but they don't offer a wide variety of snacks, earbuds, charging cables, bottles of wine, juice, milk, cereal, power bars and other such things for free at the desk. You either had to hit up the minibar, hotel restaurant, walk to a store, etc. Also, the razors and toothbrushes tend to be of the world's cheapest variety. Maybe they offer full tubes of toothpase, decent toothbrushes and better razors for sale.
What I was getting at was that whatever company is offering this to the hotel and office market already has a lot of the issues figured out. Expanding their business to other "supervised" locations like health clubs or certain apartment buildings is a "one step away" kind of thing. The article specifically mentions this type of environment. Traditional vending machines and even these automated kiosks already have figured out billing, suppliers, stocking, inventory control, supply, contracts, legal, hiring, payroll and the umpteen other tiny details that actually make a thing like this work. Same for a company that runs vending machines -- maybe they haven't thought of this kind of thing but they can just as easily approach a property manager and ask to put up a vending machine with non-perishables instead of candy or chips, and given that modern vending machines can handle phone payments, they could put in higher priced items. I've seen airport vending machines selling pricey Bose headsets and iPods, so figuring out how to securely vend something more than $2 is already well figured out
Sure, existing solutions lacking that "OMG DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION" thing, but honestly, this space is largely figured out one way or another. Also, the FC article mentions that people use convenient stores for milk... but this doesn't address that, while there are plenty of vending machines that allow not only cold drinks but also frozen things like ice cream. We have had ice cream in a vending machine onsite for a very long time
I do concur that this will not take the place of the "corner bodega", either. We don't have those where I live, but their moral equivalent is likely the corner drug store or gas station, both of which have far more selection and/or some other reason people stop by -- to get gas or pick up prescriptions. Those reasons to stop aren't going away anytime soon. EVs aren't that prevalent yet, and usually people want to get a prescription really quickly or combine it with other things, like grocery shopping
Slashdot Mirror
My employer offers tuition reimbursement so they paid for most of my Master's. The process wasn't to onerous, I had to get my department VP to sign a form and I had to take "job related" classes, pay for them upfront and then get reimbursed when the grade came in. So I used my credit card, paid a little interest and did night school. At the rate of one class a semester it took a few years to get through, but the "sacrifice" was a couple of nights a week of not watching TV and playing video games. Honestly, compared to an undergrad degree where I had 18-20 hours a semester it was not hard -- work doesn't assign homework and projects outside of business hours, and I only had to contend with having a baby around for the last semester -- I was married, but no kids. So it was some effort but not a lot of effort to get my Master's, and effectively no money out of pocket. I probably ended up paying about $400.
Who was attending my classes? Keep in mind these were night school classes geared toward working professionals. Maybe some where here on H1B but these were people like me with full time jobs, most young and newly married, some with young kids at home. We had effectively zero full time students. The classes were overwhelmingly attended by other Indian and Chinese working professionals, with a few US-born people sprinkled in. Their attitude was pretty much the mirror of mine -- my employer will pay thousands out of their pocket to pay for my education, so why not spend a couple nights a week here? It's better than doing nothing, and I get something that is a great add to my resume. My other US-born friends and colleagues were in awe of my "effort". "YOU WENT AND FOUND THE VP AND GOT HIM TO SIGN YOUR FORM?" (yes, I checked his Outlook calendar and dropped by when I knew he was present), "HOW DID YOU FIND THE TIME!?!?!" (One night a week and some time on the weekend is not a huge time commitment)
QA/QE/whatever you care to call it is critical when doing anything important. They provide an independent analysis that the job was done right. Not only in code, but in pretty much any industry. Creators fall in love with whatever they are creating, and think it's perfect. QA should provide a more objective view. Just this week, I was editing some code. I'd tested it and my tests were fine. Send it for review, one reviewer says "why did you change this". Turns out, I'd changed something in an area I didn't mean to. It would have been caught when it went into production, but then a giant flaw would have made it into production.
Why replace something that works? My power rates are pretty low, the 360 plays dvds, my kids probably waste more electric
So this new Xbox has updated graphics, updates on RAM, processor, GPU. But it also will play all XBox One games (aka "full backwards compatability"). If Microsoft hadn't done this, people would have been whining about the XBox being "out of date" and "old" and "not powerful enough". So they update it, don't dick over people who bought XBox one games, and it's an "existential crisis"? I have an Xbox One, it's a fine machine. Whenever my 360 dies (which is mostly a video streaming machine at this point), I'll replace it with whatever's on the market.
Apple has the largest market capitalization of any company. If that's inept, I'd certainly like to be more inept.
My gen 1 Volt was made in the USA (Detroit), and the CR reviews/ratings/reliability data suggest it's a very reliable and well-made car. I've had no problems with it so far. I know not every GM product has been stellar, but we also had a number of GM cars and trucks in the 70's, 80's and 90's and they never had significant issues. We also owned Japanese and European models, which were generally reliable but did require service as they aged.
As time goes on, "average" reliability continues to improve across all brands. CR explains this quite clearly in their yearly auto issues. ICE's, as complex as they are, now go 100K+ miles without requiring any major service. Contrast that to, say, the 70's where you might have valve jobs, carburetor rebuilds, spark plug wire replacement, and a bunch of other stuff I'm likely forgetting to make a car of "average" reliability. In terms of the Model 3, it's a new model, at production levels Tesla has never seen before, with new tech, new parts, etc. Even automakers who are venerated quality leaders like Toyota and Honda see a dip in first-year models of a significant redesign. The first Model 3s are likely to have teething problems as they spend some time in the real world, you can only test so much. This doesn't mean it's a crappy car, it happens with every new model from any manufacturer. It also happens with phones, software of all types (games, open source projects, commercial software, operating systems), new houses, new office buildings, etc.
Running joke from my buddy that works at a defense contractor is that if you can do your job, the network isn't secure enough. It's amazing the hoops he has to jump through to perform functions and obtain permission to perform functions that are actually enumerated in his job. Oh, and of course, they are told to just assume the network is compromised, anyway. There are good security reasons for a some of the restrictions, of course -- but there's no denying that having a very locked down network requires significant investment on the IT side as well as slowing down the jobs of the people actually trying to use the network.
Progress? Will the sound drivers work? Wifi?
Quote from the article : "a way Alexa can reduce the need to have your smartphone on your at all times" That's why I singled out the smartphone.
Well, good thing I work in an office with work colleagues I've known for nearly two decades, I video/phone conference with colleagues in other countries I've known nearly as long, I live with my wife and kids, I play games with friends, attend events in my community, am a member of a community sailing association and have a landline telephone to call my mom and siblings. None of those things needs a smartphone.
My phone sat on a table being charged from Friday till Monday morning. I didn't die, I didn't miss anything of importance, and I actually got more done. My wife and I are considering having a phone cutoff of 8PM where we turned them off entirely. I'm also considering leaving my phone in my car during the workday because honestly, it's more of a distraction than something that helps me get work done. I have a desk phone, and my co-workers and important family members know the number, or they could always just call the front desk and get transferred if they really need to find me.
I've also dropped off a lot of social media platforms, too. They consume inordinate amounts of time, take away time I can concentrate on other things, seem to develop into interruption machines one way or another, and have low-quality content and experience. Reading a book, learning a new programming language, woodworking, exercising, playing a game with my kids, sailing/kayaking, riding my bike, snowshoeing, hiking, learning to cook a new dish (from a dead tree cookbook), visiting my library, participating in a community event, taking a photo walk, chatting with a neighbor or mowing my lawn are all examples of richer life experiences than are provided by social media, and none of them require a smartphone. True, there are ways in which a smartphone could augment some of those experiences, but it's by no means a requirement to enjoy them.
I have no quarrel that a smartphone is an amazing device. It quite literally puts the Internet in your hand, plus calendar, email, you can call people, there are useful apps, etc. It's a transformative technology versus the way things were done before and it's very convenient. What I'm getting at is that it's important to realize that it's not necessary to one's existence, despite the millions being spent on advertising to convince us otherwise. I guess I'm at a point in my life when I feel comfortable in telling "society" to go fuck itself while I enjoy some time away from my phone. I'll come back and use my phone again, but on my terms. I'm the master of the phone, not the other way around.
I was born in the 70's. I somehow made it all the way till the late 90's before I got a mobile phone, and even then it was more for convenience and by no means a necessity. I went to a smartphone later when I got a 3GS used.
I used the phone plenty before it was mobile. Calling friends, family, customer support, scheduling appointments, colleagues, etc. My desk phone at work or home phone were used for communication daily, multiple times. I even worked a customer support desk a while so I used a phone as a tool to generate income. But none of these phones were smartphones.
In terms of emergency services, you could generally count on being able to find a pay phone, or in the era where cell phones were becoming more popular, you could flag someone down or someone would stop. Or if you were home you had a land line. There was also some self-reliance. If you got a flat, you changed it yourself, it wasn't an "emergency", it was just something that happened and the reason you kept a spare. If your car up and died, and you couldn't revive it you would find a phone somehow and call AAA , a friend/family member to get you or bring tools, etc. You didn't need a smartphone, you cold get by with either a regular mobile phone, finding someone with a phone, pay phone, or asking to use a land line. People were generally OK with letting a stranger make a call if they were in obvious distress. If they didn't quite trust you they would ask for the number and dial it for you, since long distance charges were a thing. Or you could always call collect.
Needs are things like water, food, shelter and clothing.
This "need" for a smartphone is more accurately described as Fear Of Missing Out. And, like the monster under the bed that little kids are afraid of, is entirely manufactured in your own mind. Humans survived for millions of years without the "need" for a smartphone at all times. It's probably healthier to leave the thing at home from time to time and enjoy a walk outside, a good book, and being out of touch.
If you go into a chain restaurant, the food items are clearly labeled with their calorie count. If you get food in a grocery store, the foods have a label whose content is regulated to let you know the nutritional information, including the calorie count. These measures were enforced to let people know what they are eating, so that people could see the numbers and adjust accordingly. These numbers aren't political, they are simply the facts. If you want to have a Big Mac, go right ahead. I guess if you get triggered because you are overweight, you don't go in chain restaurants. That probably likely works out better.
But adding an indicator that shows where you can burn some calories by walking (or biking?) as an alternative to driving is offensive? Give me a break. I've used this tool to find a way to get some extra walking in, just to see how the time works out. Having a calorie count would just be icing on the cupcake.
Definitely agree with you there, although it doesn't necessarily need to be all STEM. I had more class and extracurricular options as a kid in the 80's than my kids have today. Shop classes are a distant memory, anything art related (choir, band, orchestra) is withering on the vine, and in many places honors or AP level classes are nonexistent. Sports fees, club fees, lab fees -- it's ridiculous. Every one of these things can be useful to some kid in some way. It doesn't need to be STEM all the time, there are plenty of other jobs that companies need people to do that aren't coding and still are an important part of making a company successful.
My town has 9 schools (1 pre-K, 4 elementary, 2 middle, 1 high school). The tab to run the district for a year is ~$65M. This works out to about $11k/student, which is pretty near the national average for school expenditures. There are about 50 million students in public schools in the US. So $200M/50M = $4/student. For a classroom of 25 kids, that's $100. Maybe you can pick up an Arduino kit. For a district that spends $11K/yr on a student, $4 is a rounding error. If this was $2B that would be $40/student, which for a classroom would be $1000, which could actually be used for technology initiatives -- buying equipment, IT staff to manage the equipment, teaching materials, hiring teachers and the like.
Reed Hastings has been quoted on a number of occasions saying exactly that. "There's a reason we didn't call the company 'DVD-by-Mail.com.'" They also nearly screwed it up entirely with the whole "Qwickster" debacle, which Hastings also discussed. There's also more than a little cherry picking going on here. Picking a few "winners" and then extrapolating that because they didn't seek "disruption" as part of their business plan makes this kind of a puff piece. Not to mention the egregious use of other stupid buzzwords like "paradigm shift" in the description. I'd also like to believe the reason the Bodega folks got in hot water what that it was pretty easy to see that they were going down the Jucero path by over-engineering and hyping what amounts a vending machine -- a technology that's been with us a really long time, and that can already do pretty much everything they were promising. Source for dvd-by-mail: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/1... Source of Qwickster debacle: http://deadline.com/2014/05/re...
Trying to ATTRACT talent, well that might be a different matter. I doubt Travel is a big deal, Canada is BIG. I live about 2000 km away from my family for example. There are plenty of families that are spread across the country.
To clarify my point about travel, it was specifically for the point of attracting talent and either having family visit you or you visit family. When I was a kid, traveling to Canada from the US was really easy -- you showed a US driver's license and the polite Canadian border guard waved you through and told you to enjoy your trip. Nowadays to consider Canadian travel you need passports ($110/adult, $80/kid), so for my family of four, that's spending $380 just to be able to cross the border. Right now we live driving distance from all family, moving more than driving distance away and adding in border crossing hassles is another thing that can turn people off from moving, especially if you are trying to hire people with experience -- those people tend more towards the "married with children" end of things than you might find with people out of college, for example. At the stage I'm at in my life there's a lot more things holding me in place, but at the same time I bring a pile of experience and know-how with me.
I know for some people, this is no big deal and they move all around the country, but for my family it's a definite barrier to entry for moving anywhere. I suspect there are people who fall all around the spectrum of how far they would move from their parents, and of course there are plenty of people who want to get as far away from their in-laws as possible. So maybe Canada should have a slogan that says "your in-laws will never want to visit" :)
I already don't like the length of nights here in Massachusetts. Anywhere more north is going to have more seasonal variation ... I want less. I grew up in the southern US, I really do miss the sunlight, and I certainly could do with less cold -- so Canada has little appeal to me outside of an vacation place to see something new. I'd love to visit Iceland, Scotland, Scandanavia, etc but I don't want to live there. I do seem to recall that the majority of the Canadian population lives within 100 miles of the US border, so I know it's not that different. Also, New Brunswick is in the "correct" time zone of Atlantic time ... the same one Massachusetts (and all the New England states) should really be in, instead of Eastern time.
Yep -- it can be hard enough to make a realistic COL comparisons within the US, trying to compare US vs. Canada adds even another layer of complexity since you add in the respective Federal levels, too. As someone who lives in the northern US, if I was going to go through the hassle of changing jobs AND moving I would agree with you on picking a warmer climate. I'm not going to uproot myself, my family and my career to move somewhere else cold unless I absolutely had to or the opportunity was truly unique. Might as well stay put where we already have things figured out.
Some time ago, I went to up to Montreal for a business trip. Talking with the engineers there, they told me that Canadian salaries are largely the same dollar (number) amount as US firms pay, but their tax burden is far higher, with federal, provincial and VAT taxes taking away a good deal of that salary, plus then the cost of things like gasoline were considerably higher, making the cost of living greater. That can't help. There's also the issue of the climate. Given a choice between working in a warmer climate (California or Texas), working in the Great Frozen North is a really hard sell. There are also other issues like travel hassles to visit family, crossing international borders and so on. I've also been to Toronto a number of times for vacation and I've enjoyed it, but I always went in the warmer months. Toronto reminded me a lot of a cleaner and more polite version of NYC and I enjoyed my vacation, but I've never been there in winter time. People say the lake "helps" but I can still imagine the winter nights being dark and full of Horton's. I can't stand the darkness of winter here in Massachusetts, and geometry tells me it's far worse in Canada. So Canadian firms need to come up with means of sweetening the pot to attract talent, one knob being paying more.
Disclaimer list: 1) anecdotal, employer could have been stingy, employee could have been a poor performer 2) a big metro area, as they are expensive in the US, too 3) years ago, when the US dollar was stronger vs. CAD 4) comparing COL across countries is hard, as I pay more out of my paycheck for health insurance in the US than a Canadian does, who pays it in taxes.
Yes, but they don't offer a wide variety of snacks, earbuds, charging cables, bottles of wine, juice, milk, cereal, power bars and other such things for free at the desk. You either had to hit up the minibar, hotel restaurant, walk to a store, etc. Also, the razors and toothbrushes tend to be of the world's cheapest variety. Maybe they offer full tubes of toothpase, decent toothbrushes and better razors for sale.
What I was getting at was that whatever company is offering this to the hotel and office market already has a lot of the issues figured out. Expanding their business to other "supervised" locations like health clubs or certain apartment buildings is a "one step away" kind of thing. The article specifically mentions this type of environment. Traditional vending machines and even these automated kiosks already have figured out billing, suppliers, stocking, inventory control, supply, contracts, legal, hiring, payroll and the umpteen other tiny details that actually make a thing like this work. Same for a company that runs vending machines -- maybe they haven't thought of this kind of thing but they can just as easily approach a property manager and ask to put up a vending machine with non-perishables instead of candy or chips, and given that modern vending machines can handle phone payments, they could put in higher priced items. I've seen airport vending machines selling pricey Bose headsets and iPods, so figuring out how to securely vend something more than $2 is already well figured out
Sure, existing solutions lacking that "OMG DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION" thing, but honestly, this space is largely figured out one way or another. Also, the FC article mentions that people use convenient stores for milk ... but this doesn't address that, while there are plenty of vending machines that allow not only cold drinks but also frozen things like ice cream. We have had ice cream in a vending machine onsite for a very long time
I do concur that this will not take the place of the "corner bodega", either. We don't have those where I live, but their moral equivalent is likely the corner drug store or gas station, both of which have far more selection and/or some other reason people stop by -- to get gas or pick up prescriptions. Those reasons to stop aren't going away anytime soon. EVs aren't that prevalent yet, and usually people want to get a prescription really quickly or combine it with other things, like grocery shopping