pachrist

Crazy to know that Cleopatra was born closer to the creation of Halo: Combat Evolved than to the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Most standups are bad because they’re not used as a quick collaboration tool, they’re used as a demonstration to prove you’re working, and then the least productive people talk the most because they’re the most desperate to prove they’re working.

Bart Starr was pretty cool. Seems like a nice guy.

I have a cool blog I made for class with lots of techy stuff. Can you check it out and tell me what you think?

http://localhost:8080

I like to frame Mr. Beast in the context of the NFL.

The Super Bowl had 123 million viewers this past year. A 30 second ad slot costs $7 million. This is something we can all wrap our heads around. It’s a big deal, and that’s a lot of people.

Mr. Beast puts out a video about every 2 weeks. Most get more viewers than the Super Bowl. Some almost double. If every video he makes essentially prints him $20 million in ad and sponsor revenue, I wouldn’t be surprised.

That’s why he can give away $1 million in a video.

It’s traditionally explained with two lemonade stands on a long beach. If their product is generally indistinguishable and both want to maximize their number of customers, they will eventually settle on halfway mark of the beach. One gets all the foot traffic from the left, the other from the right, splitting it 50/50.

The same applies to businesses on a map, not just a one dimensional beach. Most consumers don’t really care if it’s a Home Depot or Lowes, or a BP or Exxon. If one of them discovers a gap in the market and places something there, someone else can come along and grab half the market. It’s something Walmart has done in a lot of small towns. They’ll come in and split market 50/50 with a small, local shop knowing that there’s not enough money to turn a profit with splitting the market in half. But they know they the can run a loss for a year or two, the competition will close, and then they’ll have 100% of the market.

It’s a really topical thing in politics. There are more centrist voters than at either extreme end, so politicians tend to fall more in the middle. Politicians like Trump change the landscape though. While an extreme candidate, the Republican party had already been shifting more right for a while, so he only marginally pulled the voter base right, but pulled most Republican politicians right, or pushed them out. Democrats moved to match. It essentially means that far right Republicans have a short stroll to the nearest lemonade stand, but far left Democrats have to trudge a couple miles in the hot summer sun, and they’re deciding it’s not worth it.

I’ve had some luck explaining it by asking folks why multiple gas stations are at the same intersection, or asking why Lowes and Home Depot are always right next to each other.

I hope Madison is doing OK today.

Hurts so bad to get your 1 in 1000000 dream job to get sexually harassed out of it.

The problem with github isn’t really a problem. It’s just accessible enough to borderline tech people who want a one click solution to a problem. They can find it, but using it requires more skill than they have. It’s a code repository, not an app store. The most useful things I find on github aren’t from some massive app developer, they’re from some guy who happened to have the same problem as me. Rather than screaming at that guy for an executable, level up. Learn something.

It’s a FOMO, bigger is better, kind of thing. I think some people came here looking for a replacement, which can’t happen, instead of looking for a community, which can.