Tag Archives: dumb

Today's Failure

WeWork is today’s silly startup failure

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So, for those who wonder what WeWork is, it’s someone who did a “I’m going to disrupt some old silly business practice and try something new!” business plan, not a bad idea out of the box mind you, if done properly and with a fair amount of luck.

Now, WeWork target was Office Renting, aiming to create fluid short-term rental agreement with smaller businesses and startups, meaning that small companies wouldn’t have to sign long-term rental contracts tieing them down to specific locations and spaces.

WeWork would essentially be a Serviced Office with Millennial nonsense* and short term agreements bolted onto it.

*By this I mean public “shared” spaces were the renters can easily network and what have you not, Google-style, with Pinball machines and ball-pits and dumb shit like that.

This does ignore the single most valuable reason to own real estate: “Long-term fixed rental income”, which is one of the reasons why renting is such good business, solid income for long terms, with nice deposits in case something goes bad.

WeWork also rents out meeting spaces and all that nonsense, but if you just need a meeting space, there are almost certainly a church, a local clubhouse, a school or some such operations that can offer you the same deal, probably at lovely low prices, sure, it doesn’t look fancy and there’s no Pinball machines, but still, frugality is a good thing.

The real issue here, is the fact that WeWork signs long-term renting agreements on their properties and then rents them out short-term, essentially assuming the brunt of the risk themselves.

Combine that with a whole bunch of rental shenanigans, where the now ex-founder and CEO Adam Neumann would buy buildings and then rent them to his own company, have a bunch of his family on the Board, change the companies name and then pay a company he owned for the rights to use the new name.

Also, massive overvaluation of the company have basically caused the whole company to be owned by Softbank of Japan and the founder and his ilk thrown out of the company.

The problem? Greed basically, hell, Neumann sold his stake just before he announced an IPO, so he almost certainly got his payoff, except to see him in a few years with some other “disruption”.

Oh yeah, and the usual sexual harassment accusations, made even more damning when the company changed it’s policy from “Unlimited Beer” to “Four Beers per day Max”, apparently nobody have told them to just not fucking harass people about their tits and/or lack thereof.

Softbank will either keep the company alive in a massively restructured way or liquidated the shit out of it.

Features of Failure

Dasani, Coca-Cola’s bottle water brand, is today’s failure.

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Now obviously, the first failure is a bottled water product in any country with a functional water infrastructure, so most of the western hemisphere is pretty much included there. I could see the point, silly point but point nonetheless, with water drawn from an actual spring, those sometimes have cool shit in them, sometimes actual shit.

Mineral water and bottled water are just silly nonsense outside of areas with unsafe tap water, so okay in Flint, Michigan and Somalia, not in Denmark or Germany.

Why? WHY? WHY? NO!

But on to the actual failure of Dasani.

Dasani was introduced in 2004 in the UK with a degree of success more common to that of anything Chris Grayling has ever done. A total failure, a shambolic mess, omnishambles, disastrous, delightful fun for outside observes, less for everyone actually involved.

Dasani was advertised with the tagline “Pure”, which is at best misleading and at worst outright bloody fraud, the water was sourced from tap water from Sidcup, a neighborhood of London, which was filtered by mean of reverse osmosis and then RE-MINERALIZED.

They literally took perfectly drinkable water, made it undrinkable and then added a bunch of minerals to it, pure as fucking hell indeed.

Obviously, this was found out and Desani didn’t sell anywhere near as well as expected, which confused Chief Publicity Officer of Dasani Mr. Richard May (No relation), seeing as his position was basically that of an Iraqi Minister of Information, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone with half a neuron’s worth of activity upstairs.

It didn’t help when the health authorities found bromate in the fucking thing, turns out the ozone treatment they’d done converted the naturally occurring bromide, into a CARCONOGENIC compound, well done, no wonder it didn’t sell well.

I couldn’t find an example of the 2004 trophy, the fuckers change it every time.

So in 2004, the CocaCola Company won the Ig Noble prize in Chemistry, for doing just this.

They did a re-branding and re-launch in 2012 up to the Olympic Games in London, buying a local company and using Schweppes to hide it.

The lesson? Just drink fucking tap water you arse-clown.  

Features of Failure

One Laptop per Child is unfortunately, today’s failure

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The concept sounds pretty good right? Give a laptop to every child for educational purposes? Great right? Well, yes, yes it is. Most Western nations do that now, my niece got a bloody awful tablet for “school” work.

And that was it, a dirt cheap laptop for every child, simple and straightforward, and also well over a decade to early, sadly.

Today, the cheapest laptop available is priced at just about 95 US$ at time of writing, the last time the OLPC’s laptops were for sale commercially, they cost 399 US$, the use a bizarre screen that apparently can switch between colour and monochrome, which even for the middle 2000s was bloody odd, apparently something about saving power.

Even at the best of times, they couldn’t actually get to 100US$ point, only reaching a little over 200 US$ and I still fail to understand why on Earth everything had to be custom-made, it’s a cheap laptop aimed towards various poor countries and the US, because apparently Detroit now counts as an African nation or something.

Even for the time we’re talking, around 2010 for the last round of deployment, off-the-shelf stuff would have been vastly more efficient and almost certainly cheaper, just slam together a nice straightforward PC laptop and put in a solid though case, IBM would probably have let them license their old ThinkPad design, those things are fucking indestructible.

But no, Yves Behar showed up and created this monstrosity:

IT HAS FUCKING EARS! You dumb fucking arseweasel!

This isn’t smart or wise, a laptop needs to look like it’s purpose, education, this green bag of stupid doesn’t look educational, it looks like a toy, no they should have been grey, boxy and solidly built, nothing less nothing more.

When this was rolled out in Uruguay, the kids just used the TOY-looking device for entertainment purposes, not for educational work, but what do you expect, with the message sent?

I found an old Targa laptop from 1994, damn thing must have spent twenty years in a closet somewhere, and it still worked, sure the CMOS battery was long dead, but you can replace those, so that’s not a big thing.

This is how the One Laptop Per Child should have looked:

Okay, perhaps an Acorn is a bit toooooo outdated.

The thing is, you could probably do it fairly easily today, using off the shelf components you can easily build cheap laptops today, shove them into a though frame and send them off to Africa, no fuss, no Yves Behar.

There, problem solved, get in though with my One Laptop Per Child, so I can yell at you.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Aid_International

http://one.laptop.org/stories

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now

https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-laptop-deals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad

Electronic Entertainment, Games

Hitman’s Elusive Targets are absolutely abhorent

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So, that Hitman game that came out some time ago, it had these little special extra event things, Elusive Targets, adding a new target onto pre-existing maps, giving you another target in a map you’d already be familiar with.

Not a bad idea eh? Now here’s were the alarms should go off, there are also secondary targets on most of the maps in the game, a movie set in an ancient Italian town, murder the star, that kinda stuff, work pretty much like the normal mission on the map, just with slightly different motives.

There are also little extra targets on the maps, adding randomized utterly retarded requirements on the higher levels, like requiring you to carry a gun openly, causing panic all around, great fun.

And by fun, I dentistry school levels of horror.

So, what’s so special about the Elusive Targets? They are single-try, time-limited and one-time events.

What? One-time, time-limited events? Like what Guild Wars 2 did in the early years? The biggest complaint about that game? So big they abandoned it in the second season of the story line? Yes, that’s right dark voices in my head, that’s precisely what it was.

As for the single-try thing, I don’t know, last time I checked, the beacon of “HARDCORE GAMEPLAY” Dark Souls still let you try again and again and again and again and you get the point, but not the Elusive Target in Hitman, they are “special”.

The same way President Trumps tiny hands are “special”.

Now, some progress was made recently, IO Interactive bought the Hitman EVERYTHING back from SquareEnix, the horrible publisher who really just survive off the Final Fantasy games and mindless fans, releasing them from a fate, similar to that of every studio ever owned by EA.

And they decided to allow the Elusive Targets to come back again, so not One-Time events anymore, that’s a GOOD thing, it’s a single player game son, I expect to have the opportunity to try ALL the content, as many fucking times as I damn well please, as a citizen of a Free and Equal country!

Sadly, the two other limitations are still there:

Fuck me sideways
Hitman really is pretty stupid

Yup, I just powered up the game, started the Elusive Event, didn’t read the pop-up completely, died horribly and WAS LOCKED OUT FROM TRYING AGAIN! The hell? Why? Why are you preventing me from playing the game the way I sodding want to? You learn from failure, the only thing I learned from that, was to use a Walk through all the time. Utterly pointless.

Also, someone who failed the first time this event came around, can’t try again.

Because Elusive Targets are “special”.

What a bag of cunts.

Fix this idiocy IO Interactive, give us access to the content we have paid for, even Dark Souls 2 doesn’t prevent me from endless trying to die my way through a barrier, hell, they encourage me to do so.