averykrouse

Do you bake your own bread? When you piss in a public bathroom, do you scrub the toilet? When you order that coffee, do you step behind the counter and brew it yourself? When you stay at a hotel, do you take the sheets down to the laundry? When you go to the movies, do you sweep up the popcorn before you leave? When you buy a pair of shoes, do you go to the stockroom and grab a pair to replace it?

Don't hate on people who have a job you don't but you use the services of every day. You don't know how much their feet hurt or their back aches when they leave. You don't know why they have that job instead of yours. You don't know the kind of hell they have to endure to pay for their electricity and water and feed their children.

I've worked harder than I have in my life at jobs where people like you looked down on me and I did it for a pittance because at that time in my life for whatever reason it was the best I could do. Some people who would be perfectly qualified to boss you around don't have the luxury of waiting for that position to come open when their next bill is due. And for every person that would apply for that post, there are a dozen others also applying because a few years ago some jackasses in the tall buildings decided to crash the economy and screw things up for everyone. I know people with Masters degrees working $10 an hour jobs because their applications go on top of the pile with all the other Masters candidates and only one of them is going to get hired.

So yes, no one employs idiots by choice. That mother of four wiping the table after you spill your coke on it is not an idiot. That student trying desperately to hang on and finish his degree while he rings up your late night big gulp is not an idiot. And that woman whose coffee you should rightly be delivering who got laid off when her company's stock tanked for no fault of her own who hands you your latte is not an idiot.

If you aren't going to wash the dish, cook the meal, or clean the floor yourself, don't look down on the person that does.

"We need a better alternative to Uber." Sidecar
"We need a better alternative to GrubHub." Dine In
"We need a better alternative to Slack." Kato
"We need a better alternative to Spotify." Turntable
"We need a better alternative to Reddit." Voat
"We need a better alternative to iTunes." Grooveshark
"We need a better alternative to Facebook." Google Plus

Sure, some of them were around before the "not better" product. Voat and G+ are still alive and kicking (if you consider that alive). But ultimately, almost every attempt to take a market leader down results in failure, especially if you are not providing a substantially better product, an incredibly easy onboarding and transfer, and a solid base of users.

You're asking the Internet to use a completely new protocol based on blockchains and plugins to replace something that comes pre-installed on practically every phone and is accessible in 12 keystrokes from any browser. Even if people don't really need to know the technical stuff behind it, you're asking for a plugin install and a great deal of trust in something that doesn't exist in 2016's internet.

I suppose my question is: why should anyone expect that in two years, you aren't going to be the next line in my list above?

Does it annoy you when customers use the lingo to order their food? I used to eat at WaHo so much I knew the short order by heart:

Triple scrambled light, triple plate scattered light, two bacon out like one.

Quite.

There were a few moments where speakers seemed to break with the GOP rhetoric concerning the LGBTQ community, both Thiel's comment on the bathroom issue and Trump's comment about protecting LGBTQ folks from terrorism (and the "glad to hear you applaud that" line afterwards).

What kind of response did those moments get from your vantage point? LGBTQ politics didn't come up a whole lot but given the hot button nature of the issue, what were you hearing from attendees on the matter?