I think I would likely keep a car at the parking plaza where the bus ends up sitting. Probably one with a pink mustache.

As far as the Google busses, they basically round trip all day, every day, or when they cycle out, they park at shoreline Amphitheater. The drivers definitely do not "hang out" with the busses, which you can verify just by walking down there. Typically they dead-head back up to wherever by catching a ride on one of the less populated intermediate busses. I know at least one of them has a day job at the Great Mall, and only drives the bus to make some extra cash.

Apple is similar to Google with regard to their busses, but they tend to take charters in the mean time to keep busy.

As far as Facebook is concerned... I haven't worked there, like I have at Apple and Google, so yeah, they might be screwing over the bus drivers, but I think they are likely in exactly the same position that the Apple and Google drivers are in.

They only "have to hang around" while they are driving.

Do you honestly believe that the labor/management collaboration is a zero sum game, and that there is no possible win-win scenario, and the only choices are "labor loses" OR "management loses"?

Because if you do, I'd like to know what business you are in so that I can take the margin on a "win-win" to turn one of the "wins" into a "lose", and you will happily just eat it, because you believe that's how things have to be in what is actually, essentially, a positive sum game.

I believe Karmashock's point is that the end date on Teamster labor, unlike the end date on, say, a patent, is *NOT* set.

You would be right, if the company had an extremely long term contract with the Teamsters, and could provide them with work, due to having an extremely long term contract with Yahoo, et. al., but those contracts are generally not on the order of 20 years because the companies contracting their transportation services are not stupid.

Obviously, they should not be ill.

One of their primary complaints is that they are *underworked*, not *overworked*; specifically, they only have work in the morning and evening.

If *the rest of us* don't get to be satisfied, why should *they* get to be satisfied?

Personally, I expected an India closure.

Especially after India "discovered" Nokia "owed" $3.4B in "taxes", as soon as they heard Nokia was being sold to Microsoft.

In related news... Yahoo, Apple, Genentech, eBay and Zynga will decide whether or not they will contract their transportation services from someone other than Compass Transportation Monday.

Welcome to an "at will" state, Teamsters!

Online voting has been performed in both Arizona, U.S., and in Estonia

This type of thing has actually occurred before, disenfranchising both Women and African Americans by preventing them, en masse, from getting to the polls. It's why it's felony voter fraud to do that, in most jurisdictions. Florida is famous for having, in a number of cases, sent busses to pick up African Americans, nominally to take them to vote, but in reality, to take them far away from their registered polling places until the polls closed.

No, but I might accept it as an argument against some governments and government officials...

If voting moves entirely online, it's possible to disenfranchise you and take away your right to vote.

Frankly, I'd rather have the weapons pointed at us.

"Plastics back into their original form..."

Holy crap! Dinosaurs!

Too late.

If it's already been exploited to install other malware, removing the loader for that malware isn't going to get rid of the malware that came in while the door was being held open by Superfish.

Then the year of the Linux desktop would be 3 years away instead of 5 years away.

VCs tend to be impressed by polish.

Typically, if you take an idea to a VC, unless you have some IP tied up, or there is significant work entailed to get to a first mover advantage, they are already thinking about one of their go-to teams that can take your idea and run with it. Frankly, ideas are a dime a dozen, and beyond that, the only thing that matters is an ability to execute, and that means they are not investing in your product, per se, they are investing in your market segment and the team.

Usually, they will prefer their team to the team that you have put together because they are familiar with their team. Their team has a track record, and they have an existing relationship with the teams they typically work with on new projects. It's one of the reasons there are so many serial entrepreneurs, and so few new entrepreneurs that make it past the friends-and-family or angel funding stage of their startup into series A financing.

If you are a new entrepreneur, or someone with a proven technical track record, who has never been on "The VP Gravy Train", unless you are already profitable (and are therefore trying to give away a very large chunk of your company and control of your board of directors, in exchange for capital to bring your venture to scale), you need every advantage going into the meeting that you can lay your grubby little hands on.

Packaging of yourself is therefore almost as important as the content of the presentation itself.

So yeah, they're "impressed by a good looking laptop", if that's part of the overall package impression that convinces them that your team is the right team, and that they won't need to replace you, the founder, with one of their go-to CEOs, or one of their VPs they've been cultivating to take a CEO position at some point in the future, and "Gee, I think it's time we gave Frank a shot at a CEO position; what do you think, other managing partners of this large venture fund?".

If you are a technical person, you will be lucky to last in the C suite much beyond (mostly) losing control of your board of directors, which is going to happen some time between closing Series A and closing Series B. Typically, your series B will be contingent on you losing control to the point that they can replace you at any point their confidence falters, and they decide "It's time to bring in adult supervision".

PS: One of the reasons there are so few women in higher up positions is that the women haven't taken their paydays from being an early employee, and acted as their own angel investor in a new company that has been successful. You kind of have to be a gambling addict to get to that point in the game, so that you are a known quantity. That said, technical companies in the Fortune 500 have done 2X as well asall of the other Fortune 500 companies, in terms of percentages, so tech is about 2X as egalitarian as any other industry in that regard.

Low margin vs. High demand

There's room for both low margin, and there's high demand items in consumer electronics.

When I needed a Windows laptop, before Bootcamp existed so that Windows could run on Apple hardware, I bought a Sony Vaio: it was the most beautiful non-Apple laptop on the market at the time, and when you are going into a VC to pitch your idea to them, you want to dress to impress, and that includes the machine on which you are giving your powerpoint on your business plan.

Vaio's were a high demand item because they had very good esthetics. A lot of other Sony products were higher margin than their competitors as well, because they were aimed at the high esthetic market.

The PlayStation is really a terrible product, comparatively speaking; the XBox is a much better product, based on Microsoft being able to leverage it to get game onto their desktop platforms as well (at some point), and potentially onto Windows Phones, as well (at some point), because the underlying platform technology is Windows on all three.

I think the person writing the article is a gamer who has drank the PlayStation Kool Aid, and wants Sony to concentrate on it, even though Sony is one PSN hack away from losing out on a holiday season, as they did previously. A single product company is just too vulnerable to single point of failure due to externalities.

It's a dumb idea because it would be a bad business decision on their part.

The differential diagnosis: If you are also bleeding from your ears, it was the Kardashians.