Hollywood Agent says: We will represent you but you got to do a few things. Like stay in touch, we're paid on commission, so we need to reach you when we need to reach you. .. take all the vacations you want, but when you are available to work, be reachable this way. And if you don't like our agency, continue with Agent Lyft.

Top Hollywood agents will kick you out if you refuse to work, they are paid on commission. Plus, with Agent Uber you can "clock out for vacation" any time, every 30 minutes if you like. And you can always continue with Agent Lyft if you are unhappy with Agent Uber.

Or quit acting altogether, it is optional.

Exactly, Uber is the agent, takes a cut for their connections and so forth. Perfect.

Nope. Acting agent has an exclusive % contract, the actor agrees to it expressly. A good agent offers lots of benefits and perks, spends lots of dough to keep the Tom Cruises on board, maybe 6 figures per year if necessary in limos, dinners, trips, and goodies. They could let Tom pay all that, but it's good for business as an agent.

There is more than one UBER -- other big agent in town is Lyft.
And give it time, if business is good, just like in early Hollywood other agents will appear -- as they have already done in China and India.
Uber actors make direct contact with customers like the movie actors.
Actors have exclusive contracts with their acting agent whereas Uber agent is more lenient, non-exclusive, can also work for Lyft.
Good actor has a large amount of work available, just like a productive Uber actor. Uber filters out and rejects customers too, just like a smart agent.

So the agent says. "if you turn down a certain % of the potential work I get for you, at some point I am dropping you and working with another actor because I am paid on commission."

And you can just go get another agent, Lyft for example.

The agent lines up work options, the actor decides to take it or not.

- Actor pays her own expenses
- Actor works whenever she chooses (or not)
- Actor gives a percentage of her earnings to the agent for successful gigs.

Is the agent her employer?

How does the ST fantasy economy distribute private property? How did Picard family get to keep a vast tract of French wine country and a country home? Do they keep it by meritocracy? Can Riker earn it away from him by being a better captain?

How come it is not shared, since there are not many of them?

The analogy is the actor's agent and the actor. "Find me some work, but I reserve the right not to take the part."

And yes! The watchers ARE training to be PHBs.

There will be a channel to watch people watching other people code. I mean, just look at them, the way they watch the coder with such intensity!

I'm waiting for the release of the Evil SaaS model

I was actually thinking of the potential of FB's networking hardware initiative, though you make a good point about this storage angle.

An interesting question is at what point does it become viable for FB to follow Amazon's model to scale its own system as a business unit...

As in, when will FB conclude that it again needs to widen its revenue stream portfolio, and it therefore makes sense to offer its own version of AWS?

Any predictions on FBWS?

And there's the FB hardware development division, a business unit that so far has also remained in-house but has its own revenue potential. I think people tend to underestimate MZ's ambitions to leverage the FB core to create a broad spectrum business. (following Google's leverage of search revenue to devour the advertising business, etc., and Amazon's leveraging of book sales to devour retailing and then logistics, etc.)

Some of us get by with building data storage from a record player and a Jackson 5 album on 33 1/3 you insensitive clod!