My impression is that the quality of the conversation is unexpectedly better: more self-critical, the suggestions are always critical, the default choices constantly best. I might not have as many harnesses as most people here, so I suspect it’s less obvious but I would expect this to make it far more valuable for people who haven’t invested as much.
After a few basic operations (retrospective look at the flow of recent reviews, product discussions) I would expect this to act like a senior member of the team, while 4.6 was good, but far more likely to be a foot-gun.
Yes, with an actual payment (processed credit card transaction), a signed contract with clear payment terms, or a convincing promise to pay such as a written instruction to send an invoice.
A lot of startups have made the mistake of thinking "customers" are the same as "downloads of a free app" or "people who created an online account" or "people who signed up to be notified of the actual launch."
Accelerators once encouraged this ("you have to show progress to investors on demo day!") but unless you have actual paying customers it's not a real business.
> What do you mean by that? Promise some investment? Commit to something?
Commitment, in any form. Best is a signature on a purchase order.
The Mom Test is a good explanation of why you don't have PMF with the client until you receive a purchase order.
In short, people don't want to tell you things that hurt your feelings, especially if you're a good sales person (good sales people are likeable, you aren't closing if the client doesn't like you).
So you're sitting their with the clients team, and they like you, you made a good impression. No one wants to tell you "Look, it's not what we want, it's best you be on your way". What they'll do instead is:
1. Try to soften the blow with "We like it but we have to get sign-off from $VP first" (blame it on the non-present Big Bad Wolf); you tell them "Can we pull them in now? How about tomorrow?"
2. "Don't have the budget but we'll put it in the upcoming budget in a few months" (Hoping you won't know on their door again in 4 months); You tell them fine, we can sign now for deployment in a few months, before the rates increase you will have in a few months, and you'll throw in a discount as well.
3. "Can it do $X, $Y and $X" (Hoping you'll say "No" and then bugger off); you tell them they can make $X, $Y and $Z part of the signed purchase order.
4. "We have a lot of projects going on now, don't have capacity to manage this" (Hoping, again, you'll bugger off and forget to come back); this is one you don't respond to, you just back off because they don't need your product that badly.
If a business wants what you are selling, you will have a signed purchase order the next day. If you don't get that signed PO, you follow up over the course of maybe a month. After that you spend your limited sales resources on someone else.
Once, I spoke telephonically with an (existing) client in the morning on an upsell, and had their signed purchase order about two hours later. Fair enough, this was an existing client, but the upsell was for a completely new product.
My rule of thumb is "demo once, and record the demo". If higher ups need to see a demo before they okay, they can see the video. If the demo was not to the correct group, the correct group can see the demo (and they'll request another demo if they want one, the existing group won't ask for another demo without new participants).
Look, sales means you do more work than the client, but they still have some work to do, and if they don't do it then they're not committed.
Bad design on their part, another reason not to revisit! If a site breaks my workflow I generally stop using the site, rather than changing my workflow.
Though I'm guessing it would work in the cases being discussed in this article & thread: when you are navigating into a site (such as linkedin) from another, rather than following internal links.
Satellite source would require detailed editing, and there’s very little chance those are fully automated. The entire Middle-East is being blocked, but only Lebanon is being affected.
It could be that they have a provider in Lebanon that was bombed but I’ve never heard of a cartographer with local dependencies like that.
Yeah, that’s the default option for detailed databases like that. Large deletion are either technical issues (and that should affect a lot more than one country) or deliberate edits.
You can very easily verify the claim by following the link. Other than three major cities, there are no agglomeration listed in Lebanon. Other countries have detailed maps.
Is anyone stopping you from doing that? Do you need my permission? If so, granted. I think you should spend whatever effort you want to verify claims if you believe that would be of value.
Some big moneyed interests are trying to split Europe and the US.
The current US administration is definitely not helping, but every ad I see on the Reddit main feed is a blatant attack on the relation, from brand new subreddits, pointing at magazines I’ve never heard about before. I’ve been reporting them, but it keeps coming, from constantly different sources, different names, subreddits, but always the same vague but incredible incredibly provocative titles
I suspect that some social-media-addled senior US officials are being fed the same crap because their reactions to non-existent European reaction are not grounded in reality.
> Some big moneyed interests are trying to split Europe and the US. The current US administration is definitely not helping
Did you listen/read Vance's recent speeches in Hungary? Or read the US policy document put out months back? It goes way beyond merely "not helping" - the US administration is in turns provoking, alienating and separating itself from center/center-left European governments in pursuit of exporting extremist partisan politics in the hopes of getting far-right governments elected across Europe.
European citizens and politicians everywhere can see the actions for what they are. What was that about Greenland and annexing Canada? There's no big-money conspiracy, just a bully administration with no sense of second-and third-order effects.
I’m not saying that Vance is not doing that—God knows that man’s ethics has no floor.
I’m doubtful he paid for ads to make his disdain better known. So I suspect someone else is trying to make that happen beyond what Vance can with his speeches.
> I’m doubtful he paid for ads to make his disdain better known.
They are not separate efforts - the administration is working hand in glove with the said interests that Vance worked for in his VC days, sponsored his Senate campaign, and parachuted him onto the Trump ticket.
He's probably an instrument of those interests as well.
'We'll prop up this crazy narcissistic bully and the suckers are gonna vote for him, mainly because Biden has been a disaster. Then he'll put other idiots in charge, go after the EU and Iran just because and make us piles of cash in the process.'.
Classic case of PR leveraging a real, anecdotic observation on one single result, but completely flipping it to pretend it’s a systematic result, to saw doubt on all scientific findings around microplastic. The same companies behind this last story have done the same thing to slow down regulation to limit the impact of smoking, alcohol, processed foods, oil refinery, global warming, lead pipes…
I wish the millions of people killed by delaying safety legislation for decades knew that pretending to make jokes (what became known as the "stochastic asshole" approach) was also a common tactic taught by those PR firms, to make critics sound like sour-puss.
Do you know what a "useful idiot" is, in the Soviet manipulation tradecraft?
Someone who repeats, jokingly or not, an argument that was placed somewhere deniable. One lab, looking at a small study, published a correction saying their estimates were wrong because they didn’t realize how their gloves accounted for it. Do you know who knew about that? Every intern in every lab ever. This was a minor correction that should never has reached anyone except the 10 readers of their original report.
But, strangely, that story got a wide coverage in the press: the usual “science” publication, the trade press, even widespread media. Why? Because it was presented as a “They are making things up about micro-plastics” piece, and those can go really far. And that kind of coverage doesn’t happen by accident.
So no, I don’t think you did that deliberately. But I know you read about it recently; I know you didn’t check what that original story was that triggered the coverage; I know you found that quaint—and I have no reason to think you deliberately tried to spread misinformation. But, you did. Because the people who want to sow doubt know what they are doing.
Not as long as there are powerful car lobbies and the main source of microplastic will remain car tires.
Instead, you have articles like this trying to tell people to look away from that main source of problem, and blame, say, indoors or food preparation, and skip details like how the homes with the most microplastic in them are… close to the highway.
The amount of damage to tires is proportional to the fourth power of the weight per axel. That means that for the same journey, a bike sheds (3000 kg / 80 kg)ˆ4 so about 20 million times less. Assuming that the rubber is the same—and not that it has proprietary chemistry that may or may not contain carcinogens. Eight orders of magnitude of difference feels relevant.
Almost every train I know use metal wheels. We can look at the few that don’t, but something tells me people who raise that argument don’t want to look at alternative wheel composition, but rather hope to seed doubt and, in private, lobby replace one metro with thousands of cars, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
So, please, don’t come in here with that bullshit.
I never mentioned train wheels at all. Their brake pads are made from things like carbon, ceramic, and resin compounds. These wear down like any brake pads and so cause the same dust pollution. Remember that some trains in the world are over a mile long and have over 1000 wheels.
I dont see anybody claiming that bikes or trains cause anywhere near the same level as cars, but it is important to remember that they still do cause some and so they are not a silver bullet. Solutions still need advancing in order to completely remove these pollutants from human transportation systems.
'Bikes cause it too' is technically true in the way that a dripping tap and a burst dam both cause flooding. The effect of this framing (intentional or not) is to suggest we shouldn't prioritise the thing that causes 99.99% of the problem until we've solved the thing that causes 0.01%. That's not a serious position, you're just protecting your comfort.
Bikes have tyre pollution, and trains have brake pollution. Seems like a pretty simple statement to me.
Interesting that you have moved from arguing the point into semantics now without addressing anything else. You are welcome to remove your downvotes.
People seem to get very upset when others point out that transport like bikes and trains still cause the same pollution as cars. yes it is much less, possibly orders of magnitude so, but they still cause it. Perhaps instead of getting the pitchforks out we could work together to find better wheel and brake solutions for all transpotation methods which dont cause so much toxic dust.
I would prefer to keep on topic and discuss the original points personally, but it seems people keep trying to derail into berating each other, commenting on peoples behavoir and pointing out forum rules. Seems strange to me but I get dragged in all the same.
Is it not factual that trains have brake pads which wear down and cause carcenogenic micro dust? Seems I made that factual point and it was ignored in favour of criticisizing my semantics and stating obvious site rules.
> Seems strange to me but I get dragged in all the same.
Maybe it‘s a you thing?
> Is it not factual that trains have brake pads which wear down and cause carcenogenic micro dust?
Not a point I have contested, but yet another suggestion without any sense of scale, and so far you have refused to address that aspect of five or six replies on the topic. Maybe that’s why you are inviting so much hostility?
> yet another suggestion without any sense of scale
> Maybe that’s why you are inviting so much hostility?
If you are somebody who resorts to hostility just because somebody puts forward an argument without full explanation and rationale, then you have my sympathies.
Looking at your other replies in the thread and what other people are replying to you, it seems that you are either a really hostile person or just having a really bad day. I hope it is the latter for your own sake.
Like others I wish you well and hope that you can find peace without having to engage in mud sliging against anonymous people on the internet.
After a few basic operations (retrospective look at the flow of recent reviews, product discussions) I would expect this to act like a senior member of the team, while 4.6 was good, but far more likely to be a foot-gun.
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