OMG, in one corner we have our Fearless Leader crying about not giving homeowners more cake, and then in this corner we have Mr. South Lake who despises permits chiming in about permiting… Are we in Bizarro world, today? It is not because it is Columbus Day, right?
Just a warning. My neighbor having to do it on a deck in Tahoe.
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I have to give you a hard time, Sir. One shouldn’t be able to stay in a jacuzzi all day without a worry in the world…
That is funny. Just had a tenant call wanting her hot tub after she left it when I evicted her in May. I will have her call you after she talks to my lawyer.
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There’s light rain. I removed the drywall in the spot where it leaks, so it goes straight to the concrete floor of the garage. It’s not damaging anything.
Oooh, by the way, are you putting in one of those new fancy garage door openers that are positioned by the door (so you save that middle ceiling space from a traditional garage door openers)? This…
No. I’m only replacing the roof at this point. I just want it water proof. I’m also adding gutters, so the runoff doesn’t just run down the side of the house.
Ok, so downspouts that go above or below ground?
They’ll probably we above ground. My drive way is sloped so it’ll run to the ditch pretty effectively.
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Is your garage large enough to turn it into a loft or man cave? I am thinking about doing something like that when we move in. A loft would be a cool idea. Can’t be too expensive right?
I could do a loft if I did the fancy garage door. I actually plan to turn it into a gym, since all the nearby gyms suck. I want to get the roof fixed, so I can take advantage of black Friday sales.
If it matters or not, that jackshaft garage door opener for residential use is actually fairly reasonable at 400-500 bucks.
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I might do it later on just to get more space/height for gym stuff. This isn’t the bay area, so I have way more home space and yard space than I need 
I’ve been using the van pool to commute which is 100% subsidized by work. It’s been pretty good. I have no clue why the bay area doesn’t have something similar. The county buys and maintains the van, then it charges $600/mo for use of the van. A lot of employers cover the cost, since it works off the Orca public transit card. Since work pays, our book keeper just divides the $600 evenly vs. tracking how many times each person rides per month. It was easy to join. They have a website which lets you enter your home and work address and shows van pools with openings that are nearby.
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Amazon Lands $1 Billion in Cloud Deals With SAP, Symantec
AWS signs up existing customers to new five-year contracts for computing power, storage
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That city would be completely screwed without Amazon. No one else was going to step in and create jobs there after the other employers left.
It’s interesting reading the complaints about the jobs. What do they think working on an assembly line in a factory is like? You literally can’t leave the line while it’s running, and you do the same task every day. You have to wait for another person to come take your spot for a bathroom break. Most days there’s so much absenteeism that there’s no relief people for bathroom breaks, so they stop the line for 30 mins in the morning, 30 mins for lunch, and 30 mins in the afternoon. If you need a break outside of that time, you’re out of luck.
It seems that overall people want high pay for very easy work. I worked fast food in high school. That’s literally one of the easiest jobs I’ve had. People talk about how difficult and stressful it is. Good luck to people who want high pay for easy work.
How much time off do people think is normal?
It’s odd they think unionizing would solve the issues, then all the union employers went out of business.
“Amazon now has 342 facilities, including fulfillment centers, Prime hubs, and sortation centers, in the United States, up from 18 in 2007, according to MWPVL International, a supply-chain and logistics consulting firm”
That’s the moat. All those facilities help optimize last mile delivery cost and time to customers. It’d cost tens of billions to build a competing network.
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A friend lives in a gated community where ups, FedEx and the post office has access. Amazon delivery drivers don’t. Friend gets photos of her package delivered. It was thrown over the fence to the parking garage.
The delivery drivers seem to change frequently. I’m not happy where they leave packages. For some reason they like to drop them behind my neighbors shrubs. It’s a stupid thing to automatically look behind her shrubs. Especially since her watering schedule is early morning. My front door is relatively seculed and I have the RING doorbell that records the various shenanigans delivery drivers do. Sometimes I think they play the adult version of ding dong ditch.
“Worldwide, Amazon says it captures only 1 percent of retail sales – leaving plenty of room for growth.“
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Found this on hn, thought it was interesting.
Amazon has to roughly triple in size in retail to pass Walmart, with zero growth on Walmart’s side.
In retail sales, I would guess Amazon could catch up to Walmart in 10 to 12 years if everything goes well for Amazon, assuming Walmart holds steady (which impressively they have so far). Walmart did finally grow for the first time in years in 2017, jumping from $485b in sales to $500b (they were stuck in the $482b-$485b range for three fiscal years).
Walmart has perhaps ~$450b in strictly retail sales globally. Amazon should be at something like $160b to $180b this year (in retail, including Whole Foods). Walmart’s US retail sales were 270% larger than Amazon US for 2017. One of the not often discussed data points, is that Amazon’s traditional online retail sales are no longer growing very quickly. That big retail growth slowdown has been hidden by the success of AWS and more recently advertising. I’d bet on their online sales growth being a slugfest going forward, with their online growth rate dropping to near single digits within a few years.
There’s actually a very plausible scenario where Amazon never passes Walmart in retail. That premise is that it’s between very difficult and impossible for Amazon’s online sales to match what Walmart’s epic physical store position makes possible in terms of retail sales volume. It’s not a popular media premise though, the Amazon-crushes-all story is what sells. Perhaps Amazon will divert a lot more resources toward expanding physically going forward to counter that (at least they seem bent on that, maybe they’ve figured out that online retail sales will never match offline sales in the US).
Amazon so far has been mostly eating other retailers, and perhaps robbing Walmart of some growth it would otherwise have picked up. As Amazon pursues its next $100b in retail sales growth, is it possible for that to not detract from Walmart’s $500b in sales? It’s difficult to picture Amazon getting as big as Walmart in retail, without killing Walmart. If that does happen - they both survive intact - the rest of retail will be a complete wasteland of destruction (there’s not enough growth in the US economy to accomodate two mainstream retailers the size of Walmart anytime soon, without a lot of other retail getting killed in the process).
That HN poster is dead wrong.
Amazon’s retail number counts only the stuff Amazon sources and sells itself. If you have done any shopping on Amazon in recent years, you will notice most of the stuff on Amazon.com is sold by 3rd party sellers. For those sales, Amazon only counts the fees it charges the sellers, which is much lower than the gross sale receipt for 1st party sales, but at much fatter margin.
Amazon never broke out how much business 3rd party sellers are doing as it only reports the fees it charges. I have seen estimates pinning that at least as big as 1st party sales and very likely higher. So Amazon retail size is actually more than 2x reported.
Amazon’s FBA division is actually much more dominating than AWS as it has zero competitor at scale. Amazon is an online retail platform, Walmart is just a retailer.
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