The painting and the love affair are interesting, but, as a landlord, I found myself wondering: How does an apartment remain untouched for 70 years? How was the rent paid without interruption? How were rent increases handled (or did the rent remain constant for 70 years?)? How did the landlord not have to access the apartment when the other parts of the building/infrastructure were renovated/upgraded over the decades? Also, Pigalle was/is a bit of a rough neighborhood, so why wasn't there a break-in over those 70 years?
The people who get their coffee to go and the ones who sit at the tables are different segments (although there is some overlap).
Also, the sitting customers can be segmented as well: most of them will sit down for 15-30 minutes and leave, but there are some who will stay longer. It would be difficult for someway staying 4 hours to spend as much as 8 people staying 30 minutes each, so that's why djt talks about the need to turn over tables.
I 100% agree with you. I was questioning jmduke's assertion that 4 hour sit down customers are more lucrative. As I see it, they are the least lucrative customer.
Good to hear there's a HN meetup in Toronto! Any idea why it's set up as a private group? All the other HN meetup groups I checked on this page are public.
I think that if the content is relevant then there's nothing wrong with self-promotion. I looked at the comment history and he linked to tldr in 7/10 of his last comments over the last week. That doesn't seem excessively repetitive, although a disclosure might be appropriate.
I've found MT results quality to be a problem. 95% of the workers are great, but you do have occasions where you get a bot completing the task or someone being deliberately careless in the hope that the HIT will get automatically approved. To combat that, I give the task to different workers until 3 answers match and that works well. It's worthwhile once you've automated, but that's worthwhile only if you've got a fairly large number of tasks.
There's an interesting book called After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre that does a good job of going through how these confusions over language arise. I haven't read it for years, but I liked how it explained how and why the language of philosophy has changed over the centuries.
I've been a landlord in Ontario for 10 years and had a sublet request a few months ago. In Ontario, there are 2 stages: a tenant has to make a general request to sublet, and then a specific one. They can break the lease if the landlord refuses at either stage, but otherwise they have to provide a legitimate replacement tenant (as opposed to putting a random person forward as a pretext to break the lease) or stay until the lease ends.
Of course you could just stop paying rent and your tenancy will be terminated much faster and you won't have to go through the hassle of finding someone to sublet.
Edit: The above applies in the case of legitimate sublet request - a two week AirBNB guest wouldn't count.
I had an hour-long chat with a guy from Canada's Federal Economic Development Agency who I met at a startup event and still keep in touch with. I suggested to him that they should copy the Startup Chile program to get entrepreneurs into Canada and create some buzz. He politely insisted that Canada's current programs are innovative and adequate. I know this is just one anecdotal data point, but it fits the cliche of the don't-rock-the-boat/cover-your-ass government employee and I wasn't too surprised. I wonder how Chile was able to overcome government inertia and get their program off the ground?
My understanding is that this comment is stating that there is a trend towards products having more or less identical functional features, but at different price points and that they will only be distinguished from each other by marketing. I would argue this has always been the case, from the day people first started trading goods instead of making everything for themselves. Whenever there are competing, nearly-identical goods in the marketplace, someone invents ways to distinguish them based on pricing, logos, fatuous claims, etc., but that happened a long time ago.
An interesting thing about FMCG companies and profitability:
BigCo selling a bar of soap for $4 has a similar contribution margin to GenericCo selling a bar of soap for $1. Why? BigCo has larger overheads (i.e., they have to promote and advertise, do consumer research, etc.). In fact, BigCos don't make much profit from categories like soap and laundry powder, but they need them to cover overheads.
Can you give us some examples of who has done this and how they avoided getting caught on Mechanical Turk? I've had legitimate HITs removed for apparently violating policy recently, so in my experience AWS is fairly vigilant in looking out for HITs that attempt to juice SEO or promote.
I guess it could work if you abstracted it enough so that it's not apparent to the worker, but it wouldn't be trivial to execute. Using VAs on Odesk might work better.
