service quality

Matt Ranney of Uber talks at GOTO Chicago 2016 about what Uber learned from growing past 1,000 production microservices. He covers regrets, sprawl and organizational effects.

An Economics Explained video arguing that the Netherlands shows taxes alone can't reduce wealth inequality. It distinguishes income inequality from wealth inequality and discusses the Gini index.

Jimmy Bogard presents a post-mortem of a real microservices migration that turned into a slow distributed monolith. He covers the modeling, development and production problems and how the team recovered.

Richard Wilkinson presents data showing that societies with larger income gaps do worse on health, lifespan, trust and other measures. He argues the effects track inequality itself rather than average income. It is a 17-minute TED talk.

A QCon talk from Netflix on running a large microservices architecture and building resilience into it. It touches on tooling such as Hystrix and circuit breakers.

An original recording of a Verizon customer service call in which the rep fails to understand the difference between cents and dollars, known as Verizon Math.

A one-minute clip of David Mitchell on a UK panel show explaining why he respects poor customer service in Britain. He argues that people who do their job well should not also be required to be nice.

A short KRAZAM comedy sketch in which engineers explain an absurdly tangled microservices architecture to a manager. It parodies how backend complexity gets justified with jargon.

A short infographic video on the distribution of wealth in America, contrasting what people believe, what they consider ideal, and the actual numbers. It highlights how top-heavy US wealth is.

Michael Bryzek of Flow gives a QCon London 2018 talk on key decisions for building maintainable microservices. It covers infrastructure, continuous deployment, communication, event streaming and language choice.

Nick Hanauer's short TED University talk on economic inequality, which was famously not posted on TED's main site at first. He argues that rich people are not the job creators.

Thomas Sowell speaks at the Hoover Institution about economic and racial inequality and what he considers myths about poverty. He also recounts his early life and brief flirtation with Marxism.

David Heinemeier Hansson explains what he learned about indoor air quality after his new house made his family sick. He covers CO2, VOCs, off-gassing, HVAC and ventilation, and cognitive effects, presented at a Basecamp meetup.

A three-minute Positive Money UK explainer arguing that the commercial banking system, where banks create most money as debt, redistributes income from the bottom 90 percent to the top 10 percent through interest.

An episode of the Norwegian documentary series Brainwash, in which a comedian interviews academics from different sides about gender differences and gender equality. It looks at why more equal societies can still show unequal career choices.

An Al Jazeera investigation into Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, featuring current and former engineers who voice safety concerns. It covers quality control problems at the South Carolina plant and the roots of the battery problems that grounded the plane.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms makes a 76-minute argument that selling video games as a service is a form of consumer fraud. He lays out legal arguments that games are goods, covers ownership and programmed obsolescence, and discusses game preservation.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that tipping should be banned. It covers the history of tipping, its weak link to service quality, and why employers should pay a fair wage.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

Music video for Public Service Broadcasting's "Go!" from the album The Race For Space, built from NASA audio and archival material of Apollo-era voices.

First episode of the Norwegian documentary series Hjernevask, in which Harald Eia interviews researchers on the nature versus nurture debate. It focuses on the gender equality paradox and gender differences in career choice.

A TED talk by entrepreneur Nick Hanauer arguing that decades of 'greed is good' economic theory drove inequality and instability. He proposes an economics built on reciprocity and cooperation.

Videogamedunkey's satirical guide to the fragmented streaming service landscape, ending in a joke about how to watch King Kong.

NYT Opinion video essay arguing that Democrat-controlled states like California, New York and Illinois often fall short of their egalitarian values. It focuses on housing costs, homelessness, regressive taxes and school segregation as drivers of inequality.

Billionaire Nick Hanauer warns fellow wealthy people in a TED talk that growing inequality could lead to social upheaval like pre-revolutionary France. He argues a higher minimum wage would grow the middle class and prosperity.

Technology Connections compares Betamax and VHS picture quality using footage from a 1979 RCA VCR and argues the Beta quality advantage was largely marketing.

A Yes, Prime Minister scene in which Sir Humphrey shows how leading questions can make a poll produce either answer on national service.

Researcher Kamal Meattle describes how an arrangement of three common houseplants placed in specific spots can measurably clean the air in a home or office. It is a short TED talk based on his work in a plant-filled building.

Richard Ankrom's account of his 2001 guerrilla project, in which he painted and installed a missing freeway exit sign on a Pasadena freeway. The sign matched official standards and stayed up for years before being discovered.

A short Guardian clip of historian Rutger Bregman at Davos telling attendees that the real issue is tax avoidance, not philanthropy schemes.

A short clip of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament in 1990 arguing that economic reforms benefited everyone even as the rich-poor gap widened. She says her opponents would rather the poor be poorer if it meant the rich were less rich.

Real Engineering explains how Zipline built a drone delivery network for medical supplies in Rwanda. It covers the fixed-wing drones, catapult launch, parachute drop and the logistics behind the service.

A University of Michigan Medicine demonstration of building a cheap DIY air purifier from a box fan and a HEPA or high-MERV filter using hardware-store parts. It explains why this helps against dust, smoke and viruses and ties it to local air quality readings.

Jason Scott of Archive Team describes how a loose band of volunteers rushes to copy sites like Geocities, Friendster and Yahoo Video before their owners delete them. The talk covers the tactics they use and the argument that this data is history worth saving.

In this 2019 GDC talk, Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott explain how they flooded the app stores with over 1,500 auto-generated slot machine games to find the lowest bar for success. They tour the dark side of the mobile app market.

Lord David Willetts argues at the Royal Institution that the post-war baby boomers gained wealth and security at the expense of younger generations. He draws on his book The Pinch, covering housing, wealth and social policy in the UK.

Comedian Rob Paravonian's 'Pachelbel Rant', a comedy bit showing that the chord progression of Pachelbel's Canon underlies countless pop songs. This is a high-quality 2019 re-post of the 2006 original.

A high-quality recording of President Eisenhower's January 1961 farewell address, including his warning about the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. The uploader marks the key passage at 8:41.

The ADVChina hosts tour a villa neighborhood in southern China that was built only three years earlier and is already empty and deteriorating. They use it to discuss ghost cities, building quality and the real estate bubble.

A short animated explainer that stages a $100 footrace in which contestants start at different distances from the line, depending on the advantages or disadvantages they inherited. It uses the race as a metaphor for how unequal starting points shape outcomes, citing US census income and poverty figures.