I think they presented it wrong for impact. If instead of "killed" and "eliminated" they were saying that the internet made it possible to proceed without a sales team and that cloud computing made it possible to not need a bare metal IT team, it makes a little more sense. That is to say, it's not going to be the most effective way, but it went from impossible to at least viable. Similar to music recording. It used to be you needed competent instrumentalists and access to a commercial recording studio. Now you can do it all at home on a laptop and it is viable, people are successfully doing it. But in large part the most successful music is still done using the same professionals that existed before.
In a similar vein, Instagram was the first platform where I actually took a pause and realized someone had actually figured out how to give me appealing advertising over the internet. I don't use Facebook to know how they differ, it may be practically identical.
My experience is that I use my Instagram account not to interact with my social group but to engage with content I like (primarily art content like sculpture, painting, light/projection, music, etc). It's actually a really pleasant experience and I'm doing my best to protect my groove in the recommendation algorithm. I basically get an effortless feed of art events in my area without me needing to subscribe to a newsletter. And it also engages me with a lot of independent artists selling unique items that I like.
> If you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens
We may have different definitions of "rich" here. I don't think you can call them the most productive citizens. I think most extractive would be the more accurate label.
And the stimulus checks were short lived, not universally distributed, and came in under $1T. The majority of the money spent was on other sources, even if you want to include the boosts to unemployment in the "UBI" category. As others mentioned it's also conflated with other factors like supply chain failures and massive business loan fraud.
The 30 days part is most likely a legal compliance bit to cover their asses if their backing data systems ever take a big dump.
They need to use an asynchronous system to be tracking when your chat becomes "finished" and then likely queue it up to a system looking to propagate deletes. They have to choose some kind of SLA on that and probably went with a common data privacy user data deletion window of 30 days.
Also a lot of things at Trader Joes are just white labeled versions of other products. As in, literally the same product, just inside packaging that says "Trader Joe's <Similar Name to Other Product>"
Many years ago I worked at a candy company.
I tell you more. MOST of "private label" stuff is actually manufactured by the same company as the "name brand", what is more companies routinely manufacture stuff for each other depending on the factory loads, e.g. our plant would manufacture Reese's despite having no relation to the brand and it's a very common practice.
I worked for a cookie company. Sometimes we would just swap the boxes for the name brand in the packaging machine while the line was running. The funny thing is, one box said it had some ingredient in it (it didn't) and the other one didn't.
Also at some point one company asked the cookie company to create a recipe to imitate some other product so they could compete. Except the cookie company was the one making that other product. So they copied themselves, it wasn't too hard...
That sounds like an industry where a few large players have gobbled up everyone else and entrenched themselves, and they're all relatively happy with their market share (i.e. they aren't competing), and are thus happy to help "competitors" because what they want more than anything else is stability, and to keep new entrants from the market that actually might change things.
You know, collusion. Or emergent behavior that's essentially the same (but even that, while not necessarily illegal, is still bad for consumers).
it's not really all that sinister. It's just you have a factory and you have workers and sometimes you need more work for them than your company can provide. Just because you can manufacture items for your competitor does not mean you are colluding.
I'll tell you more, a lot of competitors use the same suppliers, like for example Ford and GM, will use LG for a lot of components. LG then can't share any tech they developed for GM when working with Ford, but it's not like they get a lobotomy.
People who work at Apple use AWS and people at Amazon use MacBooks. It's all complicated, but not sinister.
Similar things happen in the tech world - lots of various products are manufactured by a few; TVs being a really good example. There are only a few panel manufacturers out there.
We went on a factory tour at Cabot Creamery in VT several years ago, and they were packaging an off-label that day. The guide didn't specify what store it was for, but we thought we recognized it. When we went to TJ's the next week, we saw that same exact packaging on the shelves.
Yeah, at a job I worked at before there were two differences between our branded product and the store brand: The packaging/label, and the amount of thickener so that it would have a slightly different texture. Otherwise, same employees making it on the same machines with the same ingredients.
They did always have that one small change in there though, so that it wouldn't be exactly the same. Nothing you'd ever notice as a customer. Just a technicality so that each one could claim their own unique formula.
I think with another type of product it wasn't the thickness but a slight difference in the ratio of the flavorings - more raspberry and less blueberry here, more blueberry and less raspberry there.
I can't reply to the deeper comments, so I'll reply here.
The "store branded" products are also sometimes the exact same stuff, but they pay less (or the premium brands pay a premium) to have "first run" rights. That is, the premium brands are packaged first, right after a cleaning, so you're less likely to have "inclusions" like chunks of tomato goop in your ketchup.
That's not always true. I actually don't know how true it is at all. At least in facilities that I know about, everything was manufactured exactly the same, there was no such thing as "first run after cleaning", as far as I know "first run" premium has more to do with volumes and scheduling (e.g. at a candy factory you'll get priority to get your orders filled before halloween) or if any equipment goes down your orders will always be prioritized
you say it like it's a sort of corporate slut-shaming, but it's not. If you build a factory big enough to make 1/2 the cheese puffs in the world, there's an incentive to make it bigger and make all the cheese puffs in the world. Going from small batch bake/frying to assembly line flow is the 1st step, but once you're over that hurdle, you might as well go big, as long as you can handle the risk of being stuck with the risk of owning the 2nd biggest cheese puff tumbler in the world. That type of cooking is a natural monopoly.
that's the factory, but brands don't come from the factory, they come from the market, and have different reputations, strategies, customers and distribution channels. If you have a giant computer controlled cheese puffery, it's not that big a deal to change the formulation of the cheese, change the logo bags, etc. all on the fly, and it's much cheaper for you to do it than a smaller less sophisticated operation making you more customizable and still the low-cost producer.
did you know that even if you aren't a very big pizzeria or bakery you can order custom-milled flour from King Arthur for your restaurant? Their factory can handle it, and it engenders brand loyalty from fussy chefs.
>did you know that even if you aren't a very big pizzeria or bakery you can order custom-milled flour from King Arthur for your restaurant? Their factory can handle it, and it engenders brand loyalty from fussy chefs.
I didn't. Although I'm not that surprised given I think King Arthur Flour has maybe around 500 employees or so including a cafe, retail shop, and cooking classes and sells a pretty premium product. (Was actually surprised the number is so low. It's also employee-owned.)
> I have no problem with it myself; but the companies/brands certainly do.
actually, the companies don't have a problem with it, the customers do. customers (it's human nature, maslow's hierarchy, etc) cling to their beliefs about themselves and their identification with products that reflect their values. Companies would rather cut costs and sell one-size-fits-all products, but they need to give customers what they want, and different customers want different things.
> Lots of national brands have a "this is not produced in a factory or machine that produces any store brand"
and many people have the need to think that they are "better" than store brands, or more likely on HN, that they "see through" all the marketing, so companies market to you "transparently"... if a brand says "this is not produced X way" and you didn't even mention X, hmmm, do you really think they haven't figured you out?
if you are the cheese puff king, the most expensive thing you can do is not sell everybody exactly what they want, and you probably have redundancy in your manufacturing facilities, so why not segregate which products are on which machines, so long as a market segments aren't too small.
CNBC has a youtube video on the economics of Trader Joe's and the piece that stuck out to me is that they will have essentially a white label option, but have it slightly modified so it is "unique" to them
Ive got family who have worked in food production lines, it's often not the same product, maybe a slightly modified recipe or using different ingredients or ratios.
Was MBS (mortgage backed securities) a typo here? My understanding was SVB had a huge long term treasury position on the books from before interest rate hikes that was in the red against the market. And their second largest tier was direct loans to things like startups that weren't asset backed but instead default to warranties on the companies taking the loans (I'm not close enough to this to really say that more specifically).
> SVB’s mistake was investing in longer-term mortgage securities with more than 10 years to maturity, rather than shorter-maturity Treasuries or mortgage issues maturing in less than five years. This led to an asset/liability mismatch.
They were agency backed cash MBS, which are basically default risk free as defaults come out as prepayments and are pretty liquid. They’re not at all like the subprime credit default swaps on CDOs that were so problematic in their risk ratings.
They had several MBSes on the books, too. Both MBSes and treasuries are long-term fixed-income products. It's not as bad as they used to be in 2008 - they have largely fixed the "gamesmanship" that got everyone in trouble then.
Why does high school have to go first in the morning? When I was in elementary school I would wake up at 5:30-6am naturally and watch TV before school. Come high school and I was constantly not getting enough sleep with the earlier start times and setting my own bed times. I think high school aged children have more need for a later start than elementary school aged children.
I would have to defer to one of my colleagues for most of the details on running data infrastructure on Kubernetes, I’m not that close to that domain. The major ones we run are HBase, Vitess (MySql), Kafka, Elasticsearch, Memcached, and Zookeeper.
As for the call sampling/interception, that did not factor into discovering the high cost buckets in the logging case study. It was mostly relevant to generally describing how we track costs and it ends up being useful in other scenarios. For example it could be used to assess the estimated unit economics of customers subscribed into a specific product tier.
We also have the death star microservice model, so even relatively simple attribution can be helpful when you want to run a query like “for my team which owns 30 applications, tell me the monthly attributed cost grouped by resource” and that will be able to return all the associated database and cloud costs.
