The Road To
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: You can actually pay employees too much, the '80s had just as much trash tech as today and the secret history of Wayne's World's "No Stairway."
Google Proves That You Can Actually Pay People Too Much
It does seem odd that Google, the company who pioneered the self-driving car with their retrofitted Honda Prius, is now bleeding talent to competitors. But the reason why a number of veterans of the self-driving car project, now called Waymo, are leaving isn't because they feel undervalued or companies like Uber are offering better benefits.
No, the reason why they're leaving is because Google ending up paying them too much, according to a Bloomberg report.
At the outset of the project in 2010, Google put into place bonus structures that would incentivize employees sticking around through major milestones. Seemingly, Google assumed that five years would be enough time to get their self-driving car to market. It wasn't. By 2015 bonuses were ballooning — in some cases being multiplied 16-fold — which left some project veterans sitting on a pile of cash, and no end in sight. So, like any sane person, they left.
I guess it's a sad fact that even when faced with realizing the future of self-driving cars, money isn't everything.
The '80s Was Filled With 'Revolutionary' Gadgets And Most Of Them Died
You could read Alex Cranz's history of failed '80s technology and assume it's an artifact of that particular time. The '80s were a period of excess! It's when consumer technology finally took off! The waning years of the Cold War finally had everyone pretty jazzed about the future! So, of course things like BetaMovie, PCJr and Macintosh Portable would exist and also fail miserably.
But really, when has there not been a time when we've been flush with groundbreaking technology that has failed incredibly? The Pebble smartwatch, Kickstarter's first major success, sold the only thing of value it owned, its software, to FitBit in December. Android-powered gaming console Ouya, another Kickstarter darling, was supposed to be an open-source antidote to the walled gardens of gaming consoles. It was sold to PC gaming hardware company Razer in 2015. Even Blackberry, a smartphone goliath just a few short years ago, now has a near-zero market share.
I'm not a betting person, but I wouldn't be surprised if we're all having a good laugh at this breathless WIRED profile of secretive VR company Magic Leap before this decade is out.
[Gizmodo]
Led Zeppelin Killed The 'No Stairway' Joke In 'Wayne's World'
You're probably thinking to yourself, "No they didn't, you idiot. I regularly go to music stores and make this joke all the time. No Stairway! Love it!"
Well, GQ's Scott Meslow has some bad news for you. The "No Stairway" scene in "Wayne's World" is not how you remember it. Go ahead and rewatch the scene again. What Wayne plays is definitely not the first few notes of "Stairway to Heaven."
This is not, however, another Shazam situation. In the film release, Wayne does indeed play the first few notes. But Led Zeppelin, now famous for their love of protecting their intellectual property, demanded the production pay some $100,000 for the rights to reuse the handful of notes in foreign, home video and broadcast versions of the film.
So now we're stuck with a joke that will probably be incomprehensible in about a decade or so — once people finally forget about Led Zeppelin.
[GQ]
You Love Keanu Reeves So Much Because He's So Blank
Ask someone to do an impression of Keanu Reeves and they'll inevitably fall back on his (in)famous line from "The Matrix". The one where, after witnessing Morpheus leap from the top of one skyscraper to another — his landing leaving a shattered concrete crater — all Keanu can muster is a sedate "Whoa." It's become a sort of shorthand for his acting style.
But what makes people mock Keanu is also what we love about him, argues Vox's Peter Suderman. That same, stoic, bland hero from "The Matrix" is pretty much the same character in the in the excellent "John Wick" (and the also-excellent "John Wick: Chapter 2") In a way, Keanu's acting in these films is like jazz, where it's the acting he doesn't do that's just as important as the acting he does — leaving the viewer to fill in their own emotions, and inner-monologue.
It's why when we see a picture of Keanu sitting on a bench eating a sandwich, we can't help but project a rainbow of emotions onto him.
[Vox]
Previously on What We Learned This Week
The Darkest Town In America Is In Nevada
Kickstarter Ripoffs Are Extremely Lucrative
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