But the alternative, trading dollars for dollars, is essentially just arbitrage, which tends to disappear from competition. Organic marketing is the only sustainable source of alpha I’ve found in affiliate marketing.

I grew up attending a public elementary school in Sacramento that implemented Open Education. It had many similarities to Montessori— kids received a weekly “contract” with their personalized learning plan and assignments due. If you wanted to do all your math work on Monday, reading on Tuesday, and spend Wednesday through Friday on science, you could (within reason since some things required group lessons). It was an amazing system and I feel extremely fortunate to have experienced it.

That said, now I kind of wonder how much the California open-minded, seeker mentality was responsible for this.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/03/27/520953343/open-sc...

https://www.cs.unibo.it/~ruffino/Letture%20TDPC/K.%20Weick%2...

https://www.kut.org/austin/2022-04-21/advertising-companies-...

Solar and wind deals require far less capital, go up faster, and aren’t subject to the supply risk of natural gas or coal.

Texas also has a lot of clean energy thanks to sun and terrain. The Edwards plateau creates some of the best wind generation opportunities in the US.

Texas also attracts energy heavy industries because it has relatively cheap power. Which we’ve learned partly results from not paying anyone to have excess capacity… which is all fun and games until you have winter storm Yuri roll in and your only option is to “shed load” which btw kills some people.

Another aspect of Texas is that we have demand response contracts whereby certain users get paid simply for the ability to “take” power when required. This is very attractive to bitcoin miners. Prices here go negative from time to time which is pretty wild.

All of this attracts a lot of energy-intensive industries to Texas.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40390230

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

If the data is only shared in an aggregate fashion, I doubt they can do much without a subpoena. And then what? Sue the website? Sorry, no. Section 230.

John Doe suits against anonymous customers?

Nothing requires PriceLevel to retain the PII of users… they can capture the data, validate, and flush the PII. “Sorry, we have no information about the contributor of this data.”

My sense is this will be the primary innovation of this service— how to get this info and keep it useful to end users without very much ability to vet it. Worth the effort.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38097623

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Amazing service. Terrible business model: boil the ocean, premature scale, hire the head of Andersen Consulting as CEO. Every bad, nonsensical decision.

And yet, the core was valid: a lot of people want their groceries delivered. When I went to business school a couple years later, the CMO of H-E-B spoke to my class (later, President) and I asked when they’d offer delivery. His response: “we believe people enjoy the experience of walking the aisles.” Well, Scott, whose parking lot is now 50% curbside pickup? Who spent 9 digits to acquire Favor? You’re welcome, you rich bastard.

It’s a good thing the grocery business had enough margin for error for these people to come around to learn the correct lessons from Webvan.

https://www.wired.com/2009/02/wp-quant/

Except the model was flawed and carried much higher tail risks. Risks that the ratings agencies failed to catch when they gave them AAA ratings in the debt market.