Well, the other competing factor Notes had back in the day was Groupwise. If you were a Novell Netware shop, odds were good in the late 1990s you ran Groupwise as your email/calendaring application because of the Netware integration.
Migrating and interoperating betweeen MS/Novell was kind of practical, so it was a pretty logical migration path when Novell started to spiral in the early 2000s and people started wanting a general purpose operating system capable of running more than just file sharing. Plus Microsoft introduced Active Directory which though inferior to Novell NDS was a more or less workable alternative with a similar paradigm.
I never saw a Novell shop that migrated to Lotus Notes. The Notes shops I have run into the last 20 years were almost always old school IBM shops with at least one AS/400, and at least a couple were like full stack IBM with IBM wintel servers, Thinkpads, and desktops.
I remember thinking Exchange 2000 was a decent improvement over Groupwise.
Is that because you can't because it would eat up too much of your income? Or is it that you easily could, but won't because off some missing utility value to you?
I see so many of these "I won't spend $x on a phone" posts and I'm never sure if people are just thrifty or if they're dressing up lack of disposable income as thrift or some kind of insight into lack of utility.
That's the extreme side effect of business culture, the "gotcha entrepeneurism".
If it works well, you might get rewarded or at least not punished to the extent we like what we got.
If it goes poorly, we'll punish the shit out of you for not getting all the approvals we wanted. We'll also punish you for not showing enough initiative.
Basically, take risks and we will blame you if you fail but provide no guidance on what we want as an outcome.
It's all buried in that 73 page privacy addendum they mailed you. By not cancelling your accounts (including paying off any loans held in full), you agree to the change in privacy terms.
You may also opt out if you reply in writing within 72 business hours. All replies must be on 8.12" x 11.73" paper, in a type size between 11.1 and 11.9 points and notarized.
It's not the 80s anymore. Useful systems are complex, have many layers, and tend to grow new layers over time.
While I agree with this generally, it's more descriptive than proscriptive.
*Most* deployed computer systems don't end up scaling to millions of users across the globe, yet in a one-ring-to-rule-them-all kind of way, vendors insist on shipping products with all the baked-in complexity for large scale deployments. A bunch of features and automation interfaces suitable for large deployments that just don't make sense at small and medium scale deployments yet become nearly mandatory because the vendor wants them to be to appeal to the small number of giant deployments.
One example from every day life is VMware. We have this argument at work about whether there's a need to deploy vCenter for single or even dual hosts without shared storage. Nearly all the necessary VM management can be done without vCenter, but it does add some useful features. But if you add it, now you've added a large layer of management complexity that needs additional care and feeding and another point of failure. And that's just one complexity that can be layered in. You can also get into vSAN, NSX, and the whole suite of vRealize components.
Another is Exchange Server. Over time, it's gained all these PowerShell interfaces useful for large-scale deployments and automation, but the basic internal mail server use cases don't really need them. They've also turned into a rationale for dumbing down what had been a decent management GUI and pushing a bunch of tasks into much more complex CLI steps. Part of this I think is a deliberate attempt to create obfuscation that pushes some organizations into perpetual cloud services, but part of it is definitely this "need" for every software component to have global scalability.
My sense this trend toward deep complexity as a mandatory component of computer systems is ultimately going to lead to problems of systemic failure. They're going to be too big and too complex for all but a tiny group of experts who have devoted themselves to them. I don't think it will be long-term sustainable.
I think you're understating what kind of complexity there is "coding" in the common platforms used by many businesses.
I could totally see a simple, BASIC-like programming language for Excel that let you perform simple tasks against a worksheet, pre-defining every cell as a variable and every row and column as an array.
But what do we actually get? The complexity of Office Macros and/or Visual Basic, which is not really very approachable in the time available to many professionals.
Of course, nearly every company I've worked for past a certain size winds up with some non-programmer who winds up making a spreadsheet with a shit-ton of macros or VB that winds up being totally incomprehensible. Usually it ends up being some key part of the workflow and I've seen large-scale projects come to a halt because some infrastructure change voids internal constants in that spaghetti code.
I think obedience is doing what you're told, discipline is doing it on your own without being told again.
I've never been in the military but I've worked with a couple of guys who have and they all carry a certain amount of military discipline with them, even the ones that say they hated the military.
Now maybe it's worthless self-discipline, but nearly all of them were *extremely* tidy. Personal work spaces kept fucking spotless, and whenever they dealt with some cabling or something else that would be easy to keep on the slightly chaotic side they all were completely OCD about organization.
They were all extremely neat in their personal presentation, too. IT has a lot of fucking slobs, but these guys were totally neat -- shirts tucked in, shoes shined, etc.
Oddly, all of them deny it was because of the military but I think they get it drilled into their head so much it's part of their identity.
If I had a criticism of them its that they're prone to low initiative on problems, preferring to report conditions and await instructions. American business culture mostly isn't like that, though, and their trained-in desire to await orders vs. committing on their own accord seems to be the only real drawback.
I'm not convinced you can "test" it at all. Every time I read about a "UBI Test" I wonder if it's actually an attempt to undermine UBI as a concept since it's bound to fail and be used to discredit UBI in the future.
I'd argue that some of the most important benefits of a UBI scheme are network effects that don't kick in unless the program is actually universal and available to everyone.
I don't favor a system that cuts a check to everyone unconditionally, I'm more inclined to favor a system with a progressive negative income tax. Zero work results in a negative income tax or BI payment, with the tax rate rising into positive territory once earned income rises above some threshold higher than their BI income. So if BI is $20k, you can work at a job that pays $10k but only pay something like $2k (these are made up numbers just for examples). This provides all the income incentives for even marginal work without stripping away so much UBI income that there's no incentive to work.
Where I think the network effect kicks in is that lower-wage employers now have a major coercive incentive to improve the working conditions and pay for low wage employment which I think is a major disincentive to work even under our existing "poverty" system of coercive work. It shifts the balance of power away from employers.
If jobs themselves are more appealing, more people will want to work, especially if they have the financial incentive that adding work meaningfully improves their income.
I think this winds up improving work even further up the income ladder where you might make enough that taxation nullifies UBI payments, as people with more established lifestyles may see UBI + low wage work as more appealing than 50+ hour jobs for "good" wages. Employers will have to improve those working conditions, too, or find that employees aren't interested in those jobs, either.
I think the dynamic is probably different -- more like the world seems a lot more unhinged than it used to be, and so many states now allow concealed carry. To me that alone explains most gun demand. And the unhinged part isn't an NRA conspiracy, it's the output of the mainstream media. If anyone is to blame for tricking people, it's the media.
The only way I buy into this concept further is that there's just more gun makers and diversity of firearms to choose from. The gun industry was fairly stunted until maybe 20 years ago, dominated by S&W, Colt, Ruger and a small handful of European makers. Now there's just more gun makers, making a broader variety of guns.
And you're right about customization, with gun makers basically working nearly off "open source" designs like the 1911 and AR pattern guns, customization has become huge with many variations on those two base designs and tons of accessories that weren't available.
I still get can't to this as a conspiracy to trick people into buying guns. Decent guns are $500-ish, who is feeling like they're compelled to spend that kind of money?
The "gun manufacturing lobby" is such a tired line of BS. I don't even know what it means, nobody is being forced to buy a gun and you can't have gun rights without guns which means gun manufacturing. Gun manufacturing and gun ownership have a lot of interests aligned, it's entirely sensible that the NRA supports gun owners and gun makers.
I don't understand the hype about 3D printed guns. Real guns are easier to get and actually work. You still need ammo. Plus improvised guns have been around for a long time -- zip guns -- the only thing novel about this is the "3D" part.
Plus isn't 3D printing still not quite ready for prime time unless you're a pretty serious hobbyist? Not unaffordable, but putzy and technically challenging to produce good output.
I think about that, what if the the US really is an authoritarian police state?
If it is, why doesn't it feel like that all the time? I mean, how do you explain how easy it is to get a gun, go places, bitch about the government, etc?
Am I just a lucky member of the police state's favored class? Were there people like me in East Germany or wherever who never really worried about losing their privileges, etc? I mean, I worry we're becoming more like a police state, but not that we really are in one now, but that's just my perception more than some scientific measure of the police state-ness of the US.
But does make me think about the role of perception, and if a police state is "done well" does that mean most people can't tell? Is that how it always is?
No, I think the courts have done the right thing -- the treaties were signed with the terms they had, and they should be honored.
That being said, the policy outcomes aren't great. The concept of sovereignty is dubious beyond the states and it seems really muddled to start talking about a legal entity that is somehow parallel to state level sovereignty but without the clarity and legal force of constitutional statehood.
I think it's a surprising and short sighted deficit in the Constitution itself that the relationship and status of native tribes wasn't spelled out. I'm sure it has a lot to do with the weird limbo of overseas territories like Puerto Rico, too. There should have been some mechanism spelled out for dealing with the acquisition of territories with established nations or a least defining what it means to be a sovereign entity totally within the boundaries of state.
For what it's worth, the local University sometimes makes sovereign immunity claims since their charter pre-dates the granting of statehood status.
It's still kind of half-assed, though, because they're not full states. Natives vote in statewide elections, are represented in congress by the representatives of their states and so on.
I don't think there was ever any original intent to make them sovereign peers of the states. I think that result is a combination of bad faith treaties (offers made that were never expected to be delivered or enforced) and modern-era litigation enforcement of those treaties.
It boils down to natives getting what they were promised in the treaties, but it winds up being a big contradictory mess, with some kind of retrograde sovereignty that winds up being ripe for abuses, either by non-natives against natives, by natives against natives, some collusive version of non-native and natives against "the rules" (like this patent situation), and even occasionally by natives against non-natives.
I worked with a guy who had worked for a major native casino vendor. He said they literally required cash payment every two weeks from the tribe due to the legal ambiguity of being able to collect against the tribe due to sovereignty issues. I had a tribal member rear-end my car. She had no insurance, and moved back onto the reservation. My insurance carrier told me I was SoL because of her tribal status. She was untouchable legally.
It's made worse because the sovereign rights come through different treaties and aren't uniform. I don't know how you get there, but really there ought to be some kind of reckoning that normalizes tribal sovereignty through some rational process vs. a shitload of court cases.
I'm always curious why contemporary Russia wants to be so adversarial with the United States. It made sense with the Soviet Union given the ideological nature of the Soviet Union and Communism, but makes much less sense with a basically capitalist economy and the dismantling of the Party ideological machine.
India and Brazil have more people and comparable GDPs to Russia, yet they don't have the kind of adversarial relationship with the US Russia does. Sure, there are disagreements and diplomatic conflict, but not "plotting-to-destabilize" levels of conflict.
It's not even like the Russians are operating from a position of parity with the US. A vastly smaller and weaker economy, a much less capable and weaker military force, not to mention an entire laundry list of internal problems.
From a rational perspective, you would think that the Russians would want to be allies given some level of European-ish cultural overlap, the value of US trade and investment, and the relative benefits of security cooperation, especially given Russia's exposure to the Middle East and various central Asian nations of a dubious nature.
I know there are some shop-worn explanations about Russia's "need for security", Putin's need for an enemy to justify a strong-man state and so on, but these somehow seem trite or incomplete.
I'm all in for packaging regulations that eliminate hard/dubious recycling. There's way too much packaging and way too much stupid choices that create more packaging -- like shiny plastic surfaces that come with a square yard of cling wrap on top to keep them shiny.
Presort is a lost cause beyond 2, maybe 3 categories total. I can't help but think it's just transferring the cost savings from manufacturers to consumers. They get to save fractions of a cent on packaging, consumers pay the cost of sorting a zillion different materials.
I keep wondering why MicroCenter doesn't open another store in town.
One a month I have to go by there to pick up something for a project and the fucking line is like 30 people deep, 30 minutes after opening. You don't even wanna go in there on the weekend.
Their shelves are kind of a mess, but they have a little bit of everything.
I thought the AWS/VMware partnership was one of the paths for getting into the corporate data center, finally make the mythical integration of Vmware and AWS easy. VMware brings in Dell which brings in some reasonable competition for a lot of Cisco stuff.
"We reminded Amazon of the contract language that prohibits them from selling competitive hardware devices or face immediate loss of support and revocation of all software licenses."
I'd wager "ocean conversation" could be an altruistic version of yachting.
Managing a long-endurance ocean research vessel and coordinating their research sounds like a great way to fill all of your time plus more, not to mention a lot of social contact even at sea.
I think the bigger problem for people who retire is that they seldom have the resources to plunge into a hobby immersive enough to fill their time. Too many people count on creativity or something else to stretch their limited resources and fill in their time.
I think the biggest risk with allowing too much ambiguity in product naming is that it will be exploited by food marketing to sell lower quality, higher-margin imitation products as the real thing.
You can even see this now where the product in question basically is the real thing, but is bulked out with lower quality ingredients. The first example I can think of is pesto -- real pesto is basically olive oil and basil, but prepared pesto is often bulked out with fats other than olive oil.
I see no reason why stricter labeling isn't really to the benefit of consumers since the most likely outcome is exploitation of consumer ignorance for profit.
I have read this as well, mostly as a critique of the huge size of the top 5 companies as innovation killers.
The startups don't even *bother* with new ideas, they mostly look for ways to attack vulnerable niches in the large tech companies and hope to get just enough momentum that they get bought out.
I don't know how you fix this without some kind of new anti-trust theories and laws that prevent tech companies from basically buying out competition.
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Well, the other competing factor Notes had back in the day was Groupwise. If you were a Novell Netware shop, odds were good in the late 1990s you ran Groupwise as your email/calendaring application because of the Netware integration.
Migrating and interoperating betweeen MS/Novell was kind of practical, so it was a pretty logical migration path when Novell started to spiral in the early 2000s and people started wanting a general purpose operating system capable of running more than just file sharing. Plus Microsoft introduced Active Directory which though inferior to Novell NDS was a more or less workable alternative with a similar paradigm.
I never saw a Novell shop that migrated to Lotus Notes. The Notes shops I have run into the last 20 years were almost always old school IBM shops with at least one AS/400, and at least a couple were like full stack IBM with IBM wintel servers, Thinkpads, and desktops.
I remember thinking Exchange 2000 was a decent improvement over Groupwise.
Is that because you can't because it would eat up too much of your income? Or is it that you easily could, but won't because off some missing utility value to you?
I see so many of these "I won't spend $x on a phone" posts and I'm never sure if people are just thrifty or if they're dressing up lack of disposable income as thrift or some kind of insight into lack of utility.
Will cell phone towers feature sockets for 4/0 cable so I can plug in my audiophile phone and get the best possible call quality?
That's the extreme side effect of business culture, the "gotcha entrepeneurism".
If it works well, you might get rewarded or at least not punished to the extent we like what we got.
If it goes poorly, we'll punish the shit out of you for not getting all the approvals we wanted. We'll also punish you for not showing enough initiative.
Basically, take risks and we will blame you if you fail but provide no guidance on what we want as an outcome.
It's all buried in that 73 page privacy addendum they mailed you. By not cancelling your accounts (including paying off any loans held in full), you agree to the change in privacy terms.
You may also opt out if you reply in writing within 72 business hours. All replies must be on 8.12" x 11.73" paper, in a type size between 11.1 and 11.9 points and notarized.
It's not the 80s anymore. Useful systems are complex, have many layers, and tend to grow new layers over time.
While I agree with this generally, it's more descriptive than proscriptive.
*Most* deployed computer systems don't end up scaling to millions of users across the globe, yet in a one-ring-to-rule-them-all kind of way, vendors insist on shipping products with all the baked-in complexity for large scale deployments. A bunch of features and automation interfaces suitable for large deployments that just don't make sense at small and medium scale deployments yet become nearly mandatory because the vendor wants them to be to appeal to the small number of giant deployments.
One example from every day life is VMware. We have this argument at work about whether there's a need to deploy vCenter for single or even dual hosts without shared storage. Nearly all the necessary VM management can be done without vCenter, but it does add some useful features. But if you add it, now you've added a large layer of management complexity that needs additional care and feeding and another point of failure. And that's just one complexity that can be layered in. You can also get into vSAN, NSX, and the whole suite of vRealize components.
Another is Exchange Server. Over time, it's gained all these PowerShell interfaces useful for large-scale deployments and automation, but the basic internal mail server use cases don't really need them. They've also turned into a rationale for dumbing down what had been a decent management GUI and pushing a bunch of tasks into much more complex CLI steps. Part of this I think is a deliberate attempt to create obfuscation that pushes some organizations into perpetual cloud services, but part of it is definitely this "need" for every software component to have global scalability.
My sense this trend toward deep complexity as a mandatory component of computer systems is ultimately going to lead to problems of systemic failure. They're going to be too big and too complex for all but a tiny group of experts who have devoted themselves to them. I don't think it will be long-term sustainable.
I think you're understating what kind of complexity there is "coding" in the common platforms used by many businesses.
I could totally see a simple, BASIC-like programming language for Excel that let you perform simple tasks against a worksheet, pre-defining every cell as a variable and every row and column as an array.
But what do we actually get? The complexity of Office Macros and/or Visual Basic, which is not really very approachable in the time available to many professionals.
Of course, nearly every company I've worked for past a certain size winds up with some non-programmer who winds up making a spreadsheet with a shit-ton of macros or VB that winds up being totally incomprehensible. Usually it ends up being some key part of the workflow and I've seen large-scale projects come to a halt because some infrastructure change voids internal constants in that spaghetti code.
I think obedience is doing what you're told, discipline is doing it on your own without being told again.
I've never been in the military but I've worked with a couple of guys who have and they all carry a certain amount of military discipline with them, even the ones that say they hated the military.
Now maybe it's worthless self-discipline, but nearly all of them were *extremely* tidy. Personal work spaces kept fucking spotless, and whenever they dealt with some cabling or something else that would be easy to keep on the slightly chaotic side they all were completely OCD about organization.
They were all extremely neat in their personal presentation, too. IT has a lot of fucking slobs, but these guys were totally neat -- shirts tucked in, shoes shined, etc.
Oddly, all of them deny it was because of the military but I think they get it drilled into their head so much it's part of their identity.
If I had a criticism of them its that they're prone to low initiative on problems, preferring to report conditions and await instructions. American business culture mostly isn't like that, though, and their trained-in desire to await orders vs. committing on their own accord seems to be the only real drawback.
I'm not convinced you can "test" it at all. Every time I read about a "UBI Test" I wonder if it's actually an attempt to undermine UBI as a concept since it's bound to fail and be used to discredit UBI in the future.
I'd argue that some of the most important benefits of a UBI scheme are network effects that don't kick in unless the program is actually universal and available to everyone.
I don't favor a system that cuts a check to everyone unconditionally, I'm more inclined to favor a system with a progressive negative income tax. Zero work results in a negative income tax or BI payment, with the tax rate rising into positive territory once earned income rises above some threshold higher than their BI income. So if BI is $20k, you can work at a job that pays $10k but only pay something like $2k (these are made up numbers just for examples). This provides all the income incentives for even marginal work without stripping away so much UBI income that there's no incentive to work.
Where I think the network effect kicks in is that lower-wage employers now have a major coercive incentive to improve the working conditions and pay for low wage employment which I think is a major disincentive to work even under our existing "poverty" system of coercive work. It shifts the balance of power away from employers.
If jobs themselves are more appealing, more people will want to work, especially if they have the financial incentive that adding work meaningfully improves their income.
I think this winds up improving work even further up the income ladder where you might make enough that taxation nullifies UBI payments, as people with more established lifestyles may see UBI + low wage work as more appealing than 50+ hour jobs for "good" wages. Employers will have to improve those working conditions, too, or find that employees aren't interested in those jobs, either.
It would be kind of funny if Amazon dropped them as a customer but Oracle actually got more money out of AWS anyway so it didn't matter.
"Tricking people into buying guns"?
I think the dynamic is probably different -- more like the world seems a lot more unhinged than it used to be, and so many states now allow concealed carry. To me that alone explains most gun demand. And the unhinged part isn't an NRA conspiracy, it's the output of the mainstream media. If anyone is to blame for tricking people, it's the media.
The only way I buy into this concept further is that there's just more gun makers and diversity of firearms to choose from. The gun industry was fairly stunted until maybe 20 years ago, dominated by S&W, Colt, Ruger and a small handful of European makers. Now there's just more gun makers, making a broader variety of guns.
And you're right about customization, with gun makers basically working nearly off "open source" designs like the 1911 and AR pattern guns, customization has become huge with many variations on those two base designs and tons of accessories that weren't available.
I still get can't to this as a conspiracy to trick people into buying guns. Decent guns are $500-ish, who is feeling like they're compelled to spend that kind of money?
The "gun manufacturing lobby" is such a tired line of BS. I don't even know what it means, nobody is being forced to buy a gun and you can't have gun rights without guns which means gun manufacturing. Gun manufacturing and gun ownership have a lot of interests aligned, it's entirely sensible that the NRA supports gun owners and gun makers.
I don't understand the hype about 3D printed guns. Real guns are easier to get and actually work. You still need ammo. Plus improvised guns have been around for a long time -- zip guns -- the only thing novel about this is the "3D" part.
Plus isn't 3D printing still not quite ready for prime time unless you're a pretty serious hobbyist? Not unaffordable, but putzy and technically challenging to produce good output.
I'm more worried about pipe bombs than 3d guns.
I think about that, what if the the US really is an authoritarian police state?
If it is, why doesn't it feel like that all the time? I mean, how do you explain how easy it is to get a gun, go places, bitch about the government, etc?
Am I just a lucky member of the police state's favored class? Were there people like me in East Germany or wherever who never really worried about losing their privileges, etc? I mean, I worry we're becoming more like a police state, but not that we really are in one now, but that's just my perception more than some scientific measure of the police state-ness of the US.
But does make me think about the role of perception, and if a police state is "done well" does that mean most people can't tell? Is that how it always is?
No, I think the courts have done the right thing -- the treaties were signed with the terms they had, and they should be honored.
That being said, the policy outcomes aren't great. The concept of sovereignty is dubious beyond the states and it seems really muddled to start talking about a legal entity that is somehow parallel to state level sovereignty but without the clarity and legal force of constitutional statehood.
I think it's a surprising and short sighted deficit in the Constitution itself that the relationship and status of native tribes wasn't spelled out. I'm sure it has a lot to do with the weird limbo of overseas territories like Puerto Rico, too. There should have been some mechanism spelled out for dealing with the acquisition of territories with established nations or a least defining what it means to be a sovereign entity totally within the boundaries of state.
For what it's worth, the local University sometimes makes sovereign immunity claims since their charter pre-dates the granting of statehood status.
It's still kind of half-assed, though, because they're not full states. Natives vote in statewide elections, are represented in congress by the representatives of their states and so on.
I don't think there was ever any original intent to make them sovereign peers of the states. I think that result is a combination of bad faith treaties (offers made that were never expected to be delivered or enforced) and modern-era litigation enforcement of those treaties.
It boils down to natives getting what they were promised in the treaties, but it winds up being a big contradictory mess, with some kind of retrograde sovereignty that winds up being ripe for abuses, either by non-natives against natives, by natives against natives, some collusive version of non-native and natives against "the rules" (like this patent situation), and even occasionally by natives against non-natives.
I worked with a guy who had worked for a major native casino vendor. He said they literally required cash payment every two weeks from the tribe due to the legal ambiguity of being able to collect against the tribe due to sovereignty issues. I had a tribal member rear-end my car. She had no insurance, and moved back onto the reservation. My insurance carrier told me I was SoL because of her tribal status. She was untouchable legally.
It's made worse because the sovereign rights come through different treaties and aren't uniform. I don't know how you get there, but really there ought to be some kind of reckoning that normalizes tribal sovereignty through some rational process vs. a shitload of court cases.
I'm just openly as offensive as I can possibly be. I find mixing race, class and nationality based insults together can really rile them up.
I'm always curious why contemporary Russia wants to be so adversarial with the United States. It made sense with the Soviet Union given the ideological nature of the Soviet Union and Communism, but makes much less sense with a basically capitalist economy and the dismantling of the Party ideological machine.
India and Brazil have more people and comparable GDPs to Russia, yet they don't have the kind of adversarial relationship with the US Russia does. Sure, there are disagreements and diplomatic conflict, but not "plotting-to-destabilize" levels of conflict.
It's not even like the Russians are operating from a position of parity with the US. A vastly smaller and weaker economy, a much less capable and weaker military force, not to mention an entire laundry list of internal problems.
From a rational perspective, you would think that the Russians would want to be allies given some level of European-ish cultural overlap, the value of US trade and investment, and the relative benefits of security cooperation, especially given Russia's exposure to the Middle East and various central Asian nations of a dubious nature.
I know there are some shop-worn explanations about Russia's "need for security", Putin's need for an enemy to justify a strong-man state and so on, but these somehow seem trite or incomplete.
I'm all in for packaging regulations that eliminate hard/dubious recycling. There's way too much packaging and way too much stupid choices that create more packaging -- like shiny plastic surfaces that come with a square yard of cling wrap on top to keep them shiny.
Presort is a lost cause beyond 2, maybe 3 categories total. I can't help but think it's just transferring the cost savings from manufacturers to consumers. They get to save fractions of a cent on packaging, consumers pay the cost of sorting a zillion different materials.
I keep wondering why MicroCenter doesn't open another store in town.
One a month I have to go by there to pick up something for a project and the fucking line is like 30 people deep, 30 minutes after opening. You don't even wanna go in there on the weekend.
Their shelves are kind of a mess, but they have a little bit of everything.
I thought the AWS/VMware partnership was one of the paths for getting into the corporate data center, finally make the mythical integration of Vmware and AWS easy. VMware brings in Dell which brings in some reasonable competition for a lot of Cisco stuff.
"We reminded Amazon of the contract language that prohibits them from selling competitive hardware devices or face immediate loss of support and revocation of all software licenses."
I'd wager "ocean conversation" could be an altruistic version of yachting.
Managing a long-endurance ocean research vessel and coordinating their research sounds like a great way to fill all of your time plus more, not to mention a lot of social contact even at sea.
I think the bigger problem for people who retire is that they seldom have the resources to plunge into a hobby immersive enough to fill their time. Too many people count on creativity or something else to stretch their limited resources and fill in their time.
I think the biggest risk with allowing too much ambiguity in product naming is that it will be exploited by food marketing to sell lower quality, higher-margin imitation products as the real thing.
You can even see this now where the product in question basically is the real thing, but is bulked out with lower quality ingredients. The first example I can think of is pesto -- real pesto is basically olive oil and basil, but prepared pesto is often bulked out with fats other than olive oil.
I see no reason why stricter labeling isn't really to the benefit of consumers since the most likely outcome is exploitation of consumer ignorance for profit.
I have read this as well, mostly as a critique of the huge size of the top 5 companies as innovation killers.
The startups don't even *bother* with new ideas, they mostly look for ways to attack vulnerable niches in the large tech companies and hope to get just enough momentum that they get bought out.
I don't know how you fix this without some kind of new anti-trust theories and laws that prevent tech companies from basically buying out competition.
Was also hoping for a Roomba with a paintbrush.