An important thing to consider is not just average return, but risk factors, and worst case scenarios.
If you buy a home instead of investing, you've got a locked in, controlled rate for your housing expenses. (Yes, there's some variability with property tax and insurance). In difficult times, you can still plan very carefully around your housing costs and wait for better times.
If you rent and invest, your housing costs can be highly variable and uncontrollable over time. Your investments may not cover increases in housing costs.
A critical factor is that housing is more or less a _required_ cost of existence - just like feeding oneself. It is not something where one can necessarily "invest in other areas" instead. There are extreme cases (living out of an RV or in a tent on the side of the road), but for the most part those extremes are not representative of how someone wants to live. One can only downsize so much, and downsizing your housing investment comes with very real changes to quality of life (storage space, commute time, access to grocery stores, etc).
And are you considering the risk factors and worst case scenarios when it comes to housing?
Housing is not as liquid, and prices can also go down as well as up. Often there are large transaction costs associated with buying/selling property.
What if an event happens that is not covered by insurance? Subsistence, large-scale repairs required etc. Changes in housing regulations c.f. the fallout from Grenfell in the UK.
There are risks in both, and risks from housing can also be large. The leverage offered by banks works in your favour in good times but can work against you in bad.
Here's a few dozen use cases based on my own use of smart home devices:
- Hands are full or dirty while cooking. Voice activation is more convenient. True for not just timers, but every other aspect - music playing, controlling home devices like lights, watching something on YouTube, etc.
- The above also applies to any case where my hands can't readily access my phone, such as wanting to listen/change music when showering.
- As the other commenter said, sometimes the timer needs to be "room-specific" rather than on my phone (which stays with me)
- The device has a decent speaker, so makes a convenient Spotify device. The voice activation is sufficient, though I can also control the device via Spotify on my phone if there's occasional blips.
- Combined with smart light switches, I have convenient control over various aspects of lighting in my home
- Combined with Chromecast / Google TV, it provides voice activated access to pause/play/change what I'm watching.
- Basic internet queries, such as how long it will take to drive somewhere or when a certain place will close, work well also.
None of these use cases _individually_ is so amazing I'd spend $100+, but the combined total value is great for me.
Alexa is also very convenient for kids queueing up music or asking quick animal/etc questions that I couldn't answer (what sound does x make, how many teeth does a y have, etc). In both cases, I'd prefer they do this briefly by voice rather than sit down with a phone or tablet and get distracted on screen by millions of songs or the rest of the internet.
But yes, even just setting timers while washing dishes or hands covered in flour is worth it. My retired parents have a kitchen timer stuck on the side of the fridge and still use Alexa for cooking timers. There is literally no interruption to your flow.
Smart speakers just don't solve a problem. Period.
- Don't need to control home devices or watch shit while you're cooking. If I really want to queue up a video I just do that before I start cooking.
- Don't need music while showering, who cares, showering takes 5 minutes
- Again just like "oh it's for music"
- Yes I like controlling smart lights but I can just hold the power button on my phone and tell it what to do instead of bothering with a speaker in every room
- I just put the remote nearby? or use the remote on the phone? What's so hard about pausing TV with a phone/TV remote?
- Basic internet queries, a.k.a., the smartphone I always have on me
This sounds like the dudes who said the iPod was pointless because they already had MP3s on their computer, or wondering why they bought Macs instead of PCs. Other people are allowed to have different priorities than you, and it’s okay for products to find a niche which isn’t universal – very few things have smartphone levels of ubiquity.
It’s generally quite useful to react to other people persistently buying something you don’t feel the need for by learning what they value. For example, smart speakers are quite popular with parents who either have their hands full (literally), don’t want the distraction of a screen, or want something for the gap measured in years where a kid can talk but does not have a personal computer. That’s certainly not universal, but if you think about similar contexts or needs you might come up with some good product ideas which could be worthwhile even if they never ship in the billions of units.
Convenience isn't bad, it's just that minimal convenience is oversold.
If I'm in a bath I can use my phone. A regular bluetooth speaker is sufficient. There is no need for a voice assistant.
A long shower is not relaxing, that's the opposite. It's not relaxing to stand in the same place for a long time. I can't even hear the music that well in the shower through the speaker, there is water in my ears.
Someone on HN recently compared AI to a really buggy GPS.
People will still use it, since it mindlessly gets you on the road and looks like it knows what it is doing, which makes it the path of least resistance - and that will beat out better results for most people most of the time.
The same applies to Alexa and ilk - if you have it than it is easier to use than to do things any other way. Even if there are all sorts of mess ups on the way, it still will become the default action of anyone who tries it.
As they say - "Even a bolt of lightning will follow the path of least resistance, and it's not combating laziness or lack of focus"
Don't ever dismiss the power of inertia [or whatever this is called]. A listening AI agent that can perform tasks takes advantage of inertia.
I acknowledge that other people have other preferences, but my criticism mainly relates to the way assistant and smart speaker companies have sunk so much money into a product that has limited utility and helps people in such a mild way.
People are willing to spend <$100 on a smart speaker and then never pay again. Meanwhile, Amazon is trying to make providing a free cloud service make sense by bundling it into Prime in hopes of being able to raise the cost of Prime as much as possible.
So I acknowledge that some people prefer this, but I think it's dumb enough that if I was a hypothetical investor back when these technologies were new I would not have gone anywhere near them.
Nope. Don’t backpedal. You’re going after people who say they like having smart speakers, not the companies that try to sell them. “OMG if I can't control my music in the shower I'll literally melt.” This is very clearly not directed at Amazon.
I was additionally referring to my previous comment in the thread, which was not just about the users of smart speakers but the functions they perform. My overall opinion is that smart speakers have limited value. I was pointing out how everything you might prefer to do on them has an existing or easy alternative or just isn’t much of a solution.
I acknowledge that people are allowed to have their own preferences but I still think they’re a dumb preference and I’m exercising my preference to dunk on that preference just like I’ll prefer to criticize anyone who says the Jeep Grand Cherokee is a good purchase.
The companies on top provide end user customer support, varied pricing models ("unlimited" data vs pay by the GB, etc), and so on. It allows the common carrier to focus solely on the network hardware.
They also sometimes own the machines in the field closets. So, anyone can rent 1U + a bunch of fiber endpoints for the same price. What you do with the slots is up to you. If there's a problem with the power or actual fiber optics, the common carrier fixes it. (Like a colo, sort of.)
- Doing 1 hour of effort to save 5% on your $20 lunch is foolhardy for most people. $1/hr is well below US minimum wage.
- Doing 1 hour of effort to save 5% on your $50k car is wise. $2500/hr is well above what most people are making at work.
It's not about whether the $2500 affects my ability to buy the car. It's about whether the time it takes me to save that 5% ends up being worthwhile to me given the actual amount saved.
The question is really "given the person-hours it takes to apply the savings, and the real value of the savings, is the savings worth the person-hours spent?"
If you can get the exact same result for less cost (time and money), why not? Things like enjoyment don't factor in since they can't be directly converted into money.
Nine times out of ten, I've got more valuable problems to solve than a theoretical future change of our vendor/stack for telemetry. I'll gladly borrow from my future self's time if it means I can focus on something more important right now.
I did our migration from StatsD to OTEL because our third party StatsD service was getting flaky. The first person from OPs to get to me pushed OTEL. The rest were fine with Prometheus and it was late in the process before they realized what had happened. I believe if we had gone straight to Prometheus I would have been done in half the time and solved half the problems I had to solve anyway for OTEL. If someone had to replace it again in the future I fully believe it would have taken cumulatively as much time to go StatsD->Prometheus->OTEL as it took to go StatsD->OTEL, especially when you consider that OTEL is not quite baked.
Meanwhile functionality to retain and recruit new customers sat in the backlog.
Edit to add: also regarding the perf issues I saw: do you really want to pay for an extra server or half a server in your cluster just in case some day comes? These decisions were much fuzzier when you ordered hardware once every two years and just had to live with the capacity you got.
The article contradicts your exhibit A: "Additionally, women, who naturally produce much less testosterone, reported an increase in sex drive, when given testosterone supplements."
Fraud prevention is listed as an example of a "legitimate interest."
So no, by my layman's interpretation, they would not have been bound by GDPR to notify the user of cookies or other fingerprinting used solely for anti-cheat. They'd run into trouble if they use that same ID for marketing/advertising without consent, though.
They're perhaps not required to gather explicit opt-in consent, but my understanding is that they'd be required to disclose what information they collect/store.
The same rules apply to the steam ID and IP address.
As far as I'm aware, you can get away with disclosing the fact that you are tracking "unique identifiers for the purpose of anti-cheating" in the terms and conditions, without explicitly explaining the technical details that it's a cookie.
Also, this is a server covering the Australia/New Zealand region, so it doesn't have to worry about GDPR compliance.
If GDPR were entirely toothless then they wouldn't have shown you the consent form but they would've just served the cookies regardless. The GDPR is not about reducing the cookies served, it's about letting people opt out.
Unfortunately it is lacking some teeth because normally opting out of all cookies should be as easy and straightforward as opting in to all cookies, but I've seen quite a few forms that hide 'reject all' behind a 'more info' button type of thing. Maybe I could file a complaint about that, I should look into it.
Why pay for the game when you can go to an onion site that will sell you hundreds of compromised accounts that own the game for a fraction of the price?
At that time CS:GO would cost around $3 during various Steam sales and it was possible to buy a huge amount of gift copies that could be stored in your Steam inventory. So one "legit" account would buy lots of copies and then "gift" them to new accounts that would go on a cheating spree.
Charging money and banning at the payment provider level can be quite effective. It isn't a perfect answer but it cuts out gigantic chunks of the problem space.
I'll take a ~99% cheat-free experience over not having any improvement at all.
Agreed, but in this particular case the blog writer was running private servers, rather than being Valve. They had no control over payment processing etc.
That's fair. There will always be cheaters like this. However, anecdotally, after CS or any other game I've played that went free-to-play, cheaters became a much much larger problem: from seeing one every now and again, to at least one in nearly every match.
I don't know how NYT has been handling cancellations in other states, but California has required companies to allow cancellations in the same form as sign ups for a few years (Sign up online requires the ability to cancel online too).
What makes you say that? In my experience, the spam button works fantastically. There is a gym of some kind that has me on their mailing list, refuses to honor unsubscribe, and sends me probably 2-6 emails a month. They've been doing this for years, but Google correctly gets every single one into spam because I marked one (several?) as spam years ago.
Most, if not all, political junk email also ends up in my spam folder after judicious use of the spam button a few years ago.
If you buy a home instead of investing, you've got a locked in, controlled rate for your housing expenses. (Yes, there's some variability with property tax and insurance). In difficult times, you can still plan very carefully around your housing costs and wait for better times.
If you rent and invest, your housing costs can be highly variable and uncontrollable over time. Your investments may not cover increases in housing costs.
A critical factor is that housing is more or less a _required_ cost of existence - just like feeding oneself. It is not something where one can necessarily "invest in other areas" instead. There are extreme cases (living out of an RV or in a tent on the side of the road), but for the most part those extremes are not representative of how someone wants to live. One can only downsize so much, and downsizing your housing investment comes with very real changes to quality of life (storage space, commute time, access to grocery stores, etc).