If Peloton collapse, they would stop providing their cloud product and you presumably wouldn't be on the hook to keep paying them, and they might not ask for the bikes back. If you only want the physical equipment, this might work out for you.
Available sick leave is usually shorter, too. Normally 5 days, converted to 10-15 after probation. Usually annual leave is fully made available from the start, though.
I'd argue that having follow a doctrine of agility, communication and cooperation is in itself part of a strategy. It only solves part of the equation, though. Your overall strategy is incoherent if you pair these traits with a long-distance ivory tower goal setting. If you had a process to quickly identify and refine smaller (or sub) objectives you'd use the agility to its potential. Add in some mechanisms to minimise the artifacts of fast-paced agile engineering (e.g. tech debt, bloat), and you have a complete strategy.
There is a relationship, yes, but it’s fairly indirect. More important is simply that the ailments of the US are suffered by the west in general. The UK raised its interest rate this week, by less than the US, but with a feeling that a much larger rise will come in August.
The North Circular is a decent enough road if you don't live by it.
I happen to live just by the South Circular, and it's not really a ring road. You wouldn't use it to circumnavigate London, it's just a joined up set of separate roads (of various sizes) that happen to form a vague semi-circle.
Also on the Eastern side there's only a ferry to connect the North and South Circulars. And that ferry has quite limited operating hours and capacity. It's also very slow.
To avoid the ferry you either need to come West a bit and use the Blackwall Tunnel or go way East and use the outer ring road (M25) crossings at Dartford.
I can understand, because AoE4 campaigns are more like interactive documentaries than fun games. High production value, but quite boring IMO. AoE2 tells history as inaccurate character stories, but they're engaging and memorable. (AoE2 also seems to still have better maintenance than AoE4, even now. There's new campaigns and civs coming soon, and the old campaigns are being reworked with better voice acting and co-op mode. If only they'd stop pulling all the fun out of the main 1v1 online map.)
Even though AoE2 campaigns (and EU3/4 events) are inaccurate retellings, they inspired me to read more about the stories. Carefully considered documentaries never did that.
I mean, if you've actually taken MDMA you'll know exactly why it's problematic. In terms of a user, it has a week long comedown, and diminished effects when you take it again soon (about a month) after.
I can’t speak for Paris, but London is a major sporting destination.
British sports are completely orthogonal to American sports, so it seems a bit disingenuous to say that ‘no one visits London for sport’ from an American perspective. No Brit will go to the US to watch MLS. Americans care less about Soccer, Rugby and Cricket, but much of the rest of the world does.
London-based Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham are the 7th, 8th and 10th most valuable soccer teams worldwide. Chelsea won the champions league last year. All three teams play in Europe (almost) every year.
Wembley Stadium is the publicly funded national soccer stadium, and hosted the recent Euros final. It is a regular host of European club competition finals, including the Champions League.
Lords is the home of cricket. It hosted the World Cup final a few years ago, and is a mandatory stop on international tours. It almost causes diplomatic incidents if a tour of England skips Lords. London also has The Oval, traditional host to the last test of the summer. Accordingly, many famous test series have been won there.
Wimbledon is the most prestigious and historic tennis tournament in the world. It’s staunch traditionalism is polarising online, but it’s perpetually sold out, and ‘ground passes’ (a ticket to all the smaller courts) have queues for days. I’m an annual queue-er, I’ve met people from all continents.
There's a few good things on with the London meetup groups, but honestly, no.
I just haven't met many interesting people on meetup. The good independent events just use word-of-mouth and get more than enough people. It's best for sports, the park I live next to is really just a huge playing field, through meetup I can play football, touch rugby, or do some circuits there.
I still think it's the main place to advertise/host technical meetups though. I can't think of anywhere else. You have to put yourself in the shoes of someone who might come to your event - how will they find you? Are they going to be actively looking for your event, or will you need to reach out?
I'm no huge fan of discord for IRL communities because I like to separate my 'gamer tag' from my real identity, as do most people. I've had this problem lately, I love the discord app but I wish we could make IRL servers with real (or abbreviated, like 'John S.') names. It would be so much easier to manage and mod sports clubs if we could keep comms on it, rather than the email/sms/whatsapp mess we have right now.
I've actually just launched the MVP for a sports club discovery website in the UK. The long term goal is to fix a lot of these issues you have with managing a club as well. You can see more details in my profile, and it would be great to chat about the problems you face. DM if you're interested
Honestly I don't see discovery as the issue, at least for us. The waiting list for tennis clubs in London is... another tennis club. (Seriously, we have 500 members and ~500 people waiting. It's the same people on all the other clubs lists.)
There are problems with a club comms app that, to my knowledge, haven't been solved:
Many sports club members don't have smartphones, and don't like smartphones if they have them. You ask these people for contact details and they point you to the Yellow Pages. Most of these people are just social players, but some are in teams. You cannot win a technology argument with them, but your communication system needs to reliably reach them.
Even people who are comfortable with tech will have a 'yet another app' problem. I would. You need to give me a reason to install an app. I don't want your app because its another place I need to look to see messages, and it's yet more notifications that I might miss. Other people have different reasons. To get over my problem, and everyone elses, your offering needs to be rock solid.
All that said, I still think there's space if well executed and integrated with the rest of the club. For example, it should automatically create a channel for people in a box league. It should be integrated with the booking system, and lights (seriously, turning lights on from the phone would be killer). You should have an account balance, which is used for bookings, lights, and the bar.
If you can do all that, then you have something that doesn't yet exist. You've also achieved everything I could do in a few days with a discord bot and some python scripts.
In general the discovery is mostly for the people looking for a club, rather than the club themselves. I believe there's also huge space for creating new clubs. (e.g. 10 people in a town search for a Netball team but it doesn't exist. Perfect chance to self organise). From the research I've done, tennis tends to be an outlier because the physical clubs tend to be quite large, well known, and have something for everyone. As opposed to football or netball where you just play in a park in an evening and you have no idea of the ability level until you show up.
I completely agree communications is going to be tough. I really don't want to build yet another chat app. There just aren't any drop in solutions though. Especially not with group messaging. The question has to be what your messaging for. If it's just notification messages, that can be solved with e-mail/sms/whatsapp.
I understand the gamer tag fear. To my knowledge, discord now allows for different display names on servers from your single account. I've used this for different servers where I want to use First L. naming or a character name from an mmo.
You can, but the setting is a bit hidden and when you're dealing with GenPop you have to assume they won't read anything, and find anything beyond basic features too complex. I mainly use the setting for sharing my timezone. The nice thing about discord is the server admin can precisely say what a server should look like, so people don't need to find and join channels. It's just there.
Has this ever worked? Surely the administrator would just sell the debt at a discount (for them, not you).