But I'm in new construction. Built in 2015, so I think I'm good on seismics.

I'm in CA, and even though I'm not on top of an active fault, I'm close enough to be impacted. When the big one gets here, if it's big enough to affect me, then everyone else will be affected. I don't have any reason to expect them to stay solvent if a third of the CA population files for benefits.

I've thought about taking the money I pay for earthquake insurance premiums, and instead putting it on polymarket, betting that an earthquake will happen. If it doesn't, then I'm no worse off than I was paying for insurance. If it does, then polymarket just distributes my "winnings".

Convince me to keep my insurance.

> [Googlers live in a] vicious culture that can fire someone like Justin Poehnelt [...] without a clearly articulated reason

At the end of the day, nobody other than Justin is owed a clearly articulated reason. Not other staff, and certainly not members of the public.

If you were the one fired, would you want HR to announce that you were fired for taking Sundar's special cookies out of the cookie jar labeled "For VIPs ONLY!!!"? That seems like a trifling reason to me, and maybe not justified. But maybe I don't agree with the general population, and maybe that would be held against me in the future.

As the recipient of that information you're welcome to share it. And I haven't seen Justin clearly do so. But I would wager that in most situations it's better that the company stays silent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czp6cXAsHj8

I'm American with a roundabout very close to my house. The inner radius is 10 meters with an island in the middle, and single lanes in all directions. I have witnessed it successfully navigated at well over 100 kph.

Also, it's not a speed thing. I've seen this at another roundabout near my house. There's a school dropoff near it, so in the morning traffic backs up through the roundabout onto one of the entrances. The rules are that traffic in the roundabout has the right of way, so nobody lets anyone from one of the side streets in.

The average inflation over the last 10 years has been just north of 3%. If you have tenants today that are paying $500k/year, in 10 years they should be paying almost $700k/year with 50% occupancy. If you can string the bank along for another loan then your valuation is $28M instead of $20M. As the owner you can effectively take money out in this scenario.

If the bank won't refinance at that rate, then you could lower your rents by a bit in the last year. If you lowered your rates back down to $500k/year then you invite a bunch of new tenants, and now you can show high occupancy again.

As a fellow shy person, I feel the pain when someone basically just tells you to get over it.

Before if I asked a question, the top 3 results would be StackOverflow. I'd click into the first one and find out that the question was subtly different than mine making its answer useless, but it included a lot of similar words. Go back and click into the second one. It's exactly my problem, asked three years ago, no answer. Go back and click into the third one. Same question, but it's been answered. Great. But the accepted answer has a score of -3 and another answer has a score of 5. So which one do I follow? Whoops, it's actually neither of them, because the library has broken both of those workflows.

Now I get my answer right away 90% of the time. And if I don't then I scroll down and I'm not worse off than I was 2 years ago.

At the end a strategic defense computer is asked to play Tic Tac Toe against itself and suddenly "learns" about no-win scenarios. Then it does the same with nuclear launch scenarios, and finds that they're all no-win. It decides that nuclear war "is a strange game", and "the only winning move is not to play".

- Launching is rewarded, keeping the lights on is not

- The hot new teams get far more resources than tried and true ones

You could sum this up in three words as "new is better".

This is why Google Home is getting worse. It worked well enough, but nobody gets promoted for keeping it like that. People get promoted for launching something new on that platform and cherry-picking statistics to show that they had "impact".

This is why everything at the keynote was AI. AI is the new hot dumpster fire that every resource is being poured into. And including AI in every product gives so many people the opportunity to launch new stuff, and demonstrate "impact".

And while I/O is for developers, you'd be foolish if you thought that Wall St. wasn't paying attention. Stock was down $10 for the day before I/O started, but during that keynote it gained $5. It didn't hold it, but clearly the keynote affected the stock price. Sundar knows this.

A number of Google engineers had come over, and they pushed for a way to structure the codebase where you had a ton of tiny build targets. I think a "jumbo" build target would have more than 10 files in it. Under Blaze / Bazel this would have been absolutely fine, but they were still using Gradle for their Android builds, and Gradle does not like that. Doing a build of anything meant Gradle had to initialize tens of thousands of projects. A naive engineer trying to build a single project would have to wait for about an hour for everything to be structured.

There was a big push to move everything to Bazel, and the backend and iOS teams moved over just fine, but there was someone on the Android build team who had come from Gradle, and knew a lot of techniques to cut the build time down. I remember there was a tool you would run that would examine the project structure and set up an ignorelist of projects so that Gradle wouldn't have to load projects you didn't care about.

All of the tricks were a bandaid technique at best, and eventually that engineer left the team, but the damage had been done, and migrating to Bazel was a non-starter.

Remember who uses GameStop. It's certainly not me, and it's probably not you. I'd guess that their core demographic is 14-25 year olds that are cash-strapped. You don't go to a GameStop for the experience, and their prices aren't any better than any other retailer. You go there because you don't have options or for their secondary market. And at that point, $5 in shipping fees matters.

Why would it be edge --> edge and not edge --> central --> edge? For common stuff keep half of it at the edge for local sales. For uncommon stuff or the other half ship it back to central so they can re-ship it quickly and easily. Including something in a shipment is orders of magnitude cheaper than shipping a single item, just in packaging costs and time alone.

They must have items going both directions (to handle overstock, returns, defectives, etc.). I assume those all go in a large box and are shipped together. At that point I'd need to see some actual numbers to agree that it's not pennies.

13.25% isn't zero.

> The barrier to listing [is] the amount of labor it takes to list and price everything

GameStop has a surprising amount of technology around their pawnshop activities. My son traded in his laptop last month and they had him wipe it, enable developer mode, and plug it in to do automated tests and make sure they knew what they were getting. They're already doing the labor to price everything. They're not going to have people type up listings, they'll just automate posting off of their inventory system.

> when you add in shipping costs it approaches the value of buying something new.

They get to skip the shipping costs. You could choose to have them ship the item to a GameStop near you which would cost them pennies. This is an advantage of having stores in every city with a population over 50,000 in the US.

And a huge amount of the stuff that GameStop buys and sells is out of print. Buying new is simply not an option when you're talking about a game that was released 6 years ago only on physical media.

> The way inventory is offloaded in bulk is in bulk pallets sold at auction, where people bid on them and then do all of the grunt work involved in photographing and listing and packing and shipping.

There must be money in the margins here. Otherwise people wouldn't do it. GameStop has all the technological ability to cut out this grunt work.