There are people at YouTube/Google/Alphabet who care but at the end of the day we get what the invisible hand gives us. Market forces have not yielded a well-curated educational video experience on YouTube.

Also as an SF resident with no realistic alternative to Comcast cable, I'd appreciate a provider who didn't try to sneak price increases onto my bill a couple of times a year.

In a healthy market I wouldn't expect big margins for sellers, but honestly if someone's making insane profits by selling me a product or service that's excellent and better than my non-empty set of alternatives I'm not going to complain.

In the U.S. I can see a midlevel the same day by paying $200 for an annual membership in a mass-affluent pseudoconcierge practice plus $800ish for the appointment+labs, the $800 may be partly or entirely covered by insurance depending on how the conversation goes with the "provider". I have to wait several months if I want to see a real doctor outside of an emergency room. 6 months is about right for seeing a specialist with a preexisting relationship, might need a little more lead time for an initial consultation.

In one company, the hourly customer service folks who sat adjacent to our patch of the cube farm (that's right, no noise isolation between the call center and the software development team) complained about engineers arriving half an hour after customer service shift start, so we salaried engineers were instructed to be at work by 8am or whatever. In another company, the hourly people were not allowed in the executive barbershop, the executive dining room, or the executive washroom and had to park in the surface lot instead of the garage. Actually, garage access was denied even to most software engineers but whatever.

I'm sure it's generally true that "MVPs" get exempted to varying degrees. My point is that the policies themselves are fairly capricious in the first place and the identification of MVPs is unreliable too. Performance management for managers is probably more difficult even than performance management for software engineers and my experience makes me highly skeptical about the whole prospect of professional management.

I heard about the self-flying helicopter at CMU and robots playing soccer, but really finishing the science and engineering to have computers mundanely outperforming humans at safe city driving is remarkable. Except of course to current industry observers & wall street analysts, who are asking "will this ML mumbo jumbo ever amount to anything practical? Or is lane keeping with human vigilance and alarm-setting the pinnacle?"

That's why they've done winter testing in Tahoe (since 2017) and Buffalo NY (last winter).

This seems kinda nuts, why would we incentivize electricity consumption? I guess there is some infra cost to connect customers to the grid but how can that be worth 8--18% of the cost of the kwh?