Blog
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Foreign-Born Uber Drivers Recommend their Favorite Home Cuisines (in the Bay Area)
Armenian, Bay Area, Brazilian, Cantonese, Cuisine, Curry Without Worry, Drivers, Ethiopian, Food, Food Trucks, Foreign Born, Immigration, Indian, International Cuisine, Japanese, Korean, Moroccan, Nepalese, Nicaraguan, Oakland, Pakistani, Palestinian, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Recommendations, Restaurants, San Francisco, San Francisco Bay Area, Scandinavian, Tibetan, Turkish, Uber, YemeneseIf you love travel and food, as I do, you would have spent nearly every Uber ride in the last year talking with drivers about where they come from (an overwhelming number of them are immigrants) and, amongst other things, where they go to get a taste of home when they’re away from home. What…
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I rarely gush about a book, but The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein is an exception. I, like the author, was raised in an orthodox “green” environment where everything I’ve ever been taught and every person I’ve ever known has been unequivocal: climate change is dangerous, humans are causing it, and anything but…
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A couple weeks ago, I wrote a blog piece expressing my outrage at the confrontational and militarized nature of the police that faced the Ferguson protestors. That piece had nothing to do with the case itself that sparked those protests, because I preferred not to speculate, saying: “we are always too quick to jump to conclusions about…
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I have been reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and this quote has resonated with me. I’ll leave the carpe diem evocation here. Translation from George Long: Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. Thou must now at last perceive…
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As a follow-up to my self examination in Being a Productive Animal, I’ve taken it upon myself to assemble a list of the activities I do in my free time separated by whether I consider them productive or unproductive. It may seem a simplistic bifurcation, but at the end of the day the productive activities are the ones…
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I have been relatively silent recently regarding ReservationHop. We have been doing a lot of exploration (or in startup lingo, “customer discovery”) as we try to find a good niche for innovation in restaurants that benefits consumers and optimizes some part of the dining experience. Consequently, in the last couple of months, we have built and…
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The idea was simple: why isn’t there a good system for hourly workers (60% of the US workforce) to swap their shifts out via text message? Enter OK Shift, a text message-only based system that allows hourly workers to swap their shifts via text message, and get those swaps approved by managers. The system allows…
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Why is the API model traditionally built around a central entity node connected to many consumer nodes, rather than the other way around? Why is it possible for me to connect with various APIs from cloud services like Twilio and Dropbox but I can’t create an API for myself that allows companies to connect with…
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There’s a word in the English language that’s so taboo that it is only ever referred to by its first initial, and even then it stands in a class by itself alongside other initialed words casually dropped: F-, C-, etc. Unlike these other initialed words, this is the only word that, among most people, can…
brian mayer 