mediaman

82 ms·

781.
by mediaman 16y ago
This reminds me of a quote from Bill Gates, early on in his career, in which he says that Microsoft's business model is "creating variable revenue streams from fixed engineering costs." Although that's true of many software companies, Apple
782.
by mediaman 16y ago
What is the point of checking references only after providing an offer? Is it an offer contingent on references? (Edit: re-reading your post, I see that is the case.) If so, that seems not much of an offer at all. This is an unusual practic
783.
by mediaman 16y ago
The problem is that while 50/50 can work, it rarely does, and it's nearly impossible to tell at the beginning whether it will, unless you have already had such an arrangement with someone and it worked well with them. Sometimes it works w
784.
by mediaman 16y ago
I'm hiring just south of Seattle, WA, at a 113-person green industry manufacturing company, for a technical coordination and system administration position. Must live or be willing to move to the area. The position would be responsible for
785.
by mediaman 16y ago
Your third point is compelling. Psychologically, it diverts attention away from a specific number, and toward a general concept of "goodness", segregated by club. Then, rather then concentrating on getting the next karma point, users try to
786.
by mediaman 16y ago
My experience is that working conditions are very related to quality. For example, a messy factory is both hazardous and a sign of lack of discipline. Labor in China is quickly rising in cost, and poor working conditions are being punished
787.
by mediaman 16y ago
I'm actually in China right now, on a due diligence trip to check out factories. I'm normally based on the West Coast of the US. Visit manufacturers in the US (or other developed countries) to study how they do it. Then, go to China and eva
788.
by mediaman 16y ago
They don't own the land, the federal government does, and leases it out to them to log. They don't have an incentive to replant. Having said that, they do replant, but generally replace old-growth forest with faster-growing, weaker monocult
789.
by mediaman 16y ago
The other cause of deforestation is for paper and lumber. It uses a lot of trees. Visit Washington or Oregon sometime and drive through the mountains; the earth looks scarred.
790.
by mediaman 16y ago
I'm not sure you understand why Lehman went under. It was not because of some mysterious event called lack of confidence that came out of nowhere and drove them to insolvency. Confidence disappeared because the fundamentals of their credit
791.
by mediaman 16y ago
Good catch, fixed.
792.
by mediaman 16y ago
I have seen people become cynical in the face of consistent joblessness despite many applications. It worries me because it could cause permanent negative attitudinal shift with bright people -- the early parts of a career can be very forma
793.
by mediaman 16y ago
Products aren't based on cost. They're based on value. If value is less than cost, they don't sell, and don't get made. What it cost is irrelevant. What the market will bear is what matters. Only when we achieve low barriers to entry and hi
794.
by mediaman 16y ago
There are many businesses for whom vague hand-waving about data mining is supposedly a monetization strategy. Most of them don't work, because people forget that not all data is valuable.
795.
by mediaman 16y ago
DEA's budget is much smaller than total spending on the "War On Drugs" (not sure how that number is calculated; spending against illegal drug manufacturing, distribution and consumption happens at many levels of law enforcement). Their 2009
796.
by mediaman 16y ago
You've got it exactly right. I found data showing that the restaurant/cafe industry (publicly traded ones, anyway) earn gross margins between 25-70%, depending on the company and how they account for COGS versus operating expenses (the real
797.
by mediaman 16y ago
Both of your statements are based on equivalency between marginal cost and average cost. The marginal profit in the service industry is not less than 10%. It would be nearly impossible to pay for all the fixed costs of running a service com
798.
by mediaman 16y ago
Such a formula has so many caveats that it is not terribly useful in revenue estimation, except perhaps to provide a range within an order of magnitude. For example, Starbucks has $60,000 in revenue per employee, while DirecTV has $1.6mm. S
799.
by mediaman 16y ago
The article you linked was not about QA, it was about contract negotiations for one-off projects. I source thousands of tons of material from Chinese factories, and the QA challenge is different. My option is to station Chinese employees (w
800.
by mediaman 16y ago
As these develop, there are huge opportunities for improving transnational trade. For example, I am interested in using this to monitor a Chinese manufacturing facility for QA of product before containers are shipped stateside. That reduces
801.
by mediaman 16y ago
The bizarre part is that most of the store actually is a website (CSS/HTML), and iTunes renders it with Webkit, but it can only be viewed from within iTunes...
802.
by mediaman 16y ago
That price seems very low for an incredible brand franchise and IP rights to Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein, Rage -- only $105mm? An article I picked up on it indicates they had 105 developers at the time of acquisition. I would bet that rumor is
803.
by mediaman 16y ago
An increase in the savings rate has significantly negative effects on GDP growth in the short-term. So, if the US suddenly lived within its means, it would cause/worsen a short-term depression. In the long-run, a bigger capital base can cre
804.
by mediaman 16y ago
I believe you're referring to Jamie Dimon, now of JPMorgan Chase, who canceled a $5bn IBM IT outsourcing contract because he believed that technology was a core competency of a modern bank.
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Tell HN: The Art of Disagreement (HN Guidelines)
2 points by mediaman 16y ago|0 comments
806.
by mediaman 16y ago
Because comments are like chain links: the strength of the best is limited by the worst. (Facetious, obviously; while I disagree with your parent comment because Google has far too little influence in China to effect any change, a response
807.
by mediaman 16y ago
This is the exact argument an economist uses to argue for unregulated immigration. More conventionally, it is also used in support of free trade, even when a foreign country subsidizes their exports: it is functionally identical to producti
808.
by mediaman 16y ago
Many of the postings for 95 and 3.1 appear to be in the field of health care. Perhaps this is an important message to companies attempting to create rapid innovation in the health sector...
809.
by mediaman 16y ago
Please don't listen to your lawyer for sound business advice. They can advise you on legal issues, but they generally will be very conservative when giving general business advice, because they view their job as eliminating risk rather than
810.
by mediaman 16y ago
This is a more complex task, but would you consider engineering an OCR data extractor from image PDFs? I can tell you there are thousands of companies that run into the problem of converting columns of data from paper-only documents or fax

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