It put sears into the hands (and asscracks) of people for whom Sears would be an aspirational brand. The Sears Catalog was a product, they didn't just send it out for free. You had to buy it. Having it be useful for TP made the sale, at which point it was TP with advertising on it. Whether it was a deliberate marketing strategy or not, it should have been.
The downfall of Sears is a consequence of the migration of commerce from brick-and-mortar to online.
Which is pretty crazy considering they were the original mail order phenomenon. Sears' past is not a brick and mortar past. It was catalog orders and many of its customers never saw a store.
Nope. The original mail order phenomenon was Montgomery Ward, which predates Sears by some thirteen years, but the founder screwed up their lead during WWII. MW faded out just before internet shopping came along, so they never even faced the choice of whether to become an internet retailer. Right before they died I remember going into their store in Capitola, CA and seeing all the really fancy, expensive stuff that nobody was buying — like LaserDisc players, and the 3DO.
What these two companies' stories have in common, besides being early pioneers of mail order, is that they failed due to incompetence. Lampert was able to seize Sears because it was foundering. Montgomery Ward destroyed themselves with poor stock decisions. Instead of carrying what people wanted to buy, they carried what they wanted to sell.
Sears has the same problem, plus so many others. They basically depend on taking advantage of people who don't know any better, mostly old people who have been shopping at Sears for decades. They slap their name on other people's appliances and outdoor equipment, then provide inferior service of every kind on it. When the internet came along and you could not only find out what company actually made the stuff they sold, but what the original model number was, Sears' business model was obsoleted. You can buy the same clothes anywhere, and you can buy everything else somewhere else for less money and with a better experience.
Having untold quantities of prime retail space land and buildings on your books should be a good thing.
Not when the state tax man starts rubbing his hands together. You are better off structuring your business to lease everything. So it becomes a deductible expense. And having the land, building and other taxable assets held by a private entity that can structure them as a loss.
They could have done that without selling the properties off, though. They could have transferred them into some holding company that would have done what you described. Owning their own property was actually a great help to Sears, but they sold that stuff off for short-term gains and it hasn't turned out the way you described.
If they didn't have their own truck fleet, Sears would have gone out of business long ago.
The real problem is that in America you no longer make money by running successful companies. You make money by firing up a startup and waiting for a buyout or by buying up an existing, longstanding company and gutting it like a fish.
This is complete horseshit. You are cherry-picking one high-profile example of someone being a Trump-like dick in the aftermath of an enormous merger in the most turbulent sector in the entire world and painting the entire US economy with the same brush, which is just nonsense. There are 30.2 million small businesses in the US of tremendous diversity which employ 58.9 million people, or 47.5% of ALL workers in the US,
The problem with your analysis is that most small businesses are never going to make much money. Actual great fortunes are based on great crimes, or at least on great swindles. The people who really have the bucks really do tend to get them by destroying the lives of others in one way or another. This is true all across the world, though.
If you need a car battery you should find an interstate shop. Not just a dealer, but a shop. They have reconditioned "econo power" batteries that are something like half price. I have one in each of my cars. At worst, they won't have one that fits, and you can at least buy a battery from someone competent.
Apple has to choice to compete against Netflix it has to separate it's publishing from it's hardware but if it does that it reduces it's opportunity to sell it's hardware with higher profit margins
They already have done. You can rent media from Apple on iTunes.
Instead of having the coal plants pay $10 billion for mercury filters, it would have worked a heck a lot better to make them pay $10 billion for other, more effective, health related programs, Obama's EPA found.
What? In what world would that make sense? Of course you make them clean up their emissions. Of course you don't put a special tax on them and spend it on other health care programs. That would be biased against them. What we want is for the government to stop being biased towards them, and therefore to stop them from polluting. We can find power plants which are already emitting more than permitted as fast as we can pay people to test them, because the fines for excessive emissions are lower than the cost of reducing emissions. They should be higher, not lower.
Chrome's UI has stunk on ice since day one. Now they're angry?
I do hate the trend of mobile apps with crap UI, though. For example, Firefox for mobile would benefit from a preferences dialog that would let me disable pocket, and tell the browser to actually load the URL I called it with instead of showing me quick links (including pocket.) I had never even heard of Pocket before Firefox integrated it over the wishes of the users, who proclaimed that we did not want it. Now I think it's the antichrist, and I hope their HQ falls over and bursts into flames.
We're going to need a new Mozilla foundation, without blackjack and hookers. Because they are apparently spending all their time partying, and none listening to users. We're gonna need a new Phoenix browser.
If you're close enough for iron and copper (not heavy metals) to be a problem for your lungs, then I suggest you get some SPF75 because the UV from that arc flash will be your biggest concern, right after the fact that you probably coped a significant amount of molten copper to your face.
Ah, Slashdot, the site where complete ignorance can get upmods. Copper fumes are toxic, and metals can remain in the air for surprising periods of time when burned. If you're on the other side of a solid wall (or hell, just a good piece of heavy black paper) the arc flash is a non-issue, but the copper in the air is still a problem.
Mind you your concern will be short lived as the natural end a transformer scenario is a boil over. You can rest calmly as your burn alive thinking "at least I did not inhale".
Here on planet earth, we have air. And that air has currents in it, which we often call winds. And those winds can carry toxic elements and compounds to other locations which are not where they were emitted. What color is the sky on your planet?
When we get really clever (and people study more physics, chemistry and biology, rather than politics and law, and get better money for doing so), then we'll have a good shot at thinking our way around the pollutants, and obtaining newer sources of resources that have previously been inaccessible. That's pretty much the story of the rise of humanity.
The story of humanity is that we expand to consume all natural resources, and then our societies fail. More cultures have done this and vanished than are still around. Our Easter Island Heads are iPhones and BMWs.
Ben and Jerry's used capitalism to sell mediocre ice cream to sheep willing to pay a higher price to feel good.
Once upon a time, they made better than average ice cream. Sadly, those days are gone. Now it's pretty crappy ice cream, and lots of the other ingredients are crap, too.
The breakup of Ma Bell was good because they owned technology no one else had.
The technology was well-understood, as it was simple. It was good because they had a monopoly, and consumers suffered predictably.
To suggest that it is "natural" for someone to take from another when they come across useful things, and that to hold on to things that one has accumulated is somehow "unnatural", is to describe a world in which I have no desire to live naturally.
If everyone takes that attitude, then we use natural resources more rapidly than they can be replenished, and pollute faster than pollutants can be cleared from the atmosphere. Then we destroy society, and maybe our species. Caveman behavior doesn't scale.
Have you actually tried buying something from sears.com? It's a pretty bad experience. Their selection sucks, the prices are higher than Amazon's, and it's filled with "affiliate" retailers that basically just drop ship stuff from other retailers.
Does the site actually work these days? It was a total shitshow the last time I tried to use it, but that was many years ago. It's not like they ever have the best price on anything. At the time that Amazon was just rising, Sears' site was basically unusable.
Prodigy was pioneering. I was an active user for years, in fact. That's right... they sold Prodigy. I remember thinking at the time that that was a dumb move.
Prodigy was a typical example of Sears-related technical incompetence. Just as they would later go on to squander the opportunity to dominate web retail with a terrible web site with ridiculous prices, Prodigy was technically inferior for an audience that wanted internet access. Though I believe the service eventually went IP-based, early Prodigy appeared to encapsulate IP in its own protocol... poorly.
Mom and Dad had a grudge against them from the '70's. Apparently they'd purchased a TV there that never worked, and Sears jerked them around about the problem until it went out of Warranty.
We had this with an A/C unit from them just a few years back. The warranty claim was actually approved and being processed when the warranty ran out, and then they deleted everything and told us they didn't have any information on the claim. Luckily, several more hours on the phone yielded a replacement. Unfortunately, it was the middle of a heat wave so we wound up settling for an inferior replacement unit, because that's all they had in. Forty years later, same old shit.
but you used a filler-word, um, in a formal written document.
I think it's lazy, but it's typical conversational style.
With all due respect
People who use this phrase never show any, nor are worthy of any.
With all due respect, you're not Slashdot's arbiter of what is worthy of respect.
[from tfa]
Why give captive schoolchildren more tech crack inside the classroom? And what is this âoepersonalized learningâ mumbo jumbo?
mumbo jumbo
What are all these wires? What the hell's a mouse? How do I windows?
Mumbo jumbo is meaningless or confusing language, with the possible connotation that it is deliberate. "The use of the term "personalized learning" dates back to at least the early 1960s, but there is no widespread agreement on the definition and components of a personal learning environment." It's a meaningless phrase used by con men who are trying to sell equipment to educators. Hence, mumbo jumbo. It's a perfectly cromulent use of the word.
Parents from all parts of the political spectrum understand that âoepersonalized learningâ is Silicon Valley propaganda
So much bias it's like all I have is a right speaker.
I refer you back to the top of this comment.
In short, go back to journalism school.
With all due respect, you are fractally incorrect. The closer one looks at your arguments, the more ways in which they are irrelevant and/or incorrect become apparent.
In long, how about you title opinion pieces accordingly and not pretend they are in any way news.
Again, I refer you back to the top of this comment. The site's FAQ tells you that it is an opinion publication. The opinion pieces were collected together for your convenience, but with all due respect, you failed to internet correctly.
Also, go back to any school you attended and demand a refund, then learn how to write a formal document
This is not an invitation to a recital. This is an opinion piece, and it was written as such. Hope this helps, have a nice day!
But this is NYC we're talking about. Even if it were PCBs, heavy metals, and your tinfoil hat which were vapourised it's probably an improvement over the air there anyway.
PCBs being pretty much the most toxic thing that we have in our cities, I'm guessing not.
If glass "worked fine" companies never would have switched to plastic.
Glass worked better in some ways, but there's more profit in using plastic. But that's only because we don't account for the costs, as usual. Add a cleanup tax to account for the percentage of bottles which aren't recycled, and they'll solve the problem themselves. (Don't charge it for compostable containers.)
Plus, wouldn't any water he was carrying... freeze? And have to be melted anyway?
The food will have contained water. At least, some of it, mostly stuff intended to be consumed early in the journey. Living on all-dehydrated stuff is ghastly.
I'm kind of surprised a school hasn't been hit yet. I would imagine compared to banks and credit unions they would be soft targets security wise.
Can confirm. I worked on one project at a community college where they were sending student data in the clear across the open internet, to a remote classroom site. IIRC, the application literally used telnet. I got paid a little bit to quickly set up ssh tunneling, and then I got paid more again to set up IPSEC later. They had a sysadmin who was supposed to do stuff like that, but he knew jack. I was supposed to get his job, but then he bought a second Harley so The People had to pay him instead of someone competent. Hooray, unions!
The street food vendors are not gone. THey just move to the next sweet spot in the food chain
California has what, 56 counties? Something like that. And in order to do business as a food truck, you have to get re-licensed in each county in which you'd like to do business. If San Francisco makes it too hard to be a food truck vendor, then the owner is going to have to go through all of that rigamarole all over again. There's time, there's money, in many counties the systems are designed to fail food trucks to protect B&M restaurants, and overall it's expensive and time-consuming.
Of course, if you can be outcompeted by a food truck, it's not just because you have more overhead. People will pay more for a more complete experience. It's because your restaurant sucks. However, crotchety old pricks who can't taste anything any more vote more than young hipsters who love tacos. They vote for protectionist laws designed to keep things the way they are. Then they rant about how much they love the free market.
Slashdot Mirror
It put sears into the hands (and asscracks) of people for whom Sears would be an aspirational brand. The Sears Catalog was a product, they didn't just send it out for free. You had to buy it. Having it be useful for TP made the sale, at which point it was TP with advertising on it. Whether it was a deliberate marketing strategy or not, it should have been.
The downfall of Sears is a consequence of the migration of commerce from brick-and-mortar to online.
Which is pretty crazy considering they were the original mail order phenomenon. Sears' past is not a brick and mortar past. It was catalog orders and many of its customers never saw a store.
Nope. The original mail order phenomenon was Montgomery Ward, which predates Sears by some thirteen years, but the founder screwed up their lead during WWII. MW faded out just before internet shopping came along, so they never even faced the choice of whether to become an internet retailer. Right before they died I remember going into their store in Capitola, CA and seeing all the really fancy, expensive stuff that nobody was buying — like LaserDisc players, and the 3DO.
What these two companies' stories have in common, besides being early pioneers of mail order, is that they failed due to incompetence. Lampert was able to seize Sears because it was foundering. Montgomery Ward destroyed themselves with poor stock decisions. Instead of carrying what people wanted to buy, they carried what they wanted to sell.
Sears has the same problem, plus so many others. They basically depend on taking advantage of people who don't know any better, mostly old people who have been shopping at Sears for decades. They slap their name on other people's appliances and outdoor equipment, then provide inferior service of every kind on it. When the internet came along and you could not only find out what company actually made the stuff they sold, but what the original model number was, Sears' business model was obsoleted. You can buy the same clothes anywhere, and you can buy everything else somewhere else for less money and with a better experience.
Having untold quantities of prime retail space land and buildings on your books should be a good thing.
Not when the state tax man starts rubbing his hands together. You are better off structuring your business to lease everything. So it becomes a deductible expense. And having the land, building and other taxable assets held by a private entity that can structure them as a loss.
They could have done that without selling the properties off, though. They could have transferred them into some holding company that would have done what you described. Owning their own property was actually a great help to Sears, but they sold that stuff off for short-term gains and it hasn't turned out the way you described.
If they didn't have their own truck fleet, Sears would have gone out of business long ago.
The real problem is that in America you no longer make money by running successful companies. You make money by firing up a startup and waiting for a buyout or by buying up an existing, longstanding company and gutting it like a fish.
This is complete horseshit. You are cherry-picking one high-profile example of someone being a Trump-like dick in the aftermath of an enormous merger in the most turbulent sector in the entire world and painting the entire US economy with the same brush, which is just nonsense. There are 30.2 million small businesses in the US of tremendous diversity which employ 58.9 million people, or 47.5% of ALL workers in the US,
The problem with your analysis is that most small businesses are never going to make much money. Actual great fortunes are based on great crimes, or at least on great swindles. The people who really have the bucks really do tend to get them by destroying the lives of others in one way or another. This is true all across the world, though.
If you need a car battery you should find an interstate shop. Not just a dealer, but a shop. They have reconditioned "econo power" batteries that are something like half price. I have one in each of my cars. At worst, they won't have one that fits, and you can at least buy a battery from someone competent.
Apple has to choice to compete against Netflix it has to separate it's publishing from it's hardware but if it does that it reduces it's opportunity to sell it's hardware with higher profit margins
They already have done. You can rent media from Apple on iTunes.
Instead of having the coal plants pay $10 billion for mercury filters, it would have worked a heck a lot better to make them pay $10 billion for other, more effective, health related programs, Obama's EPA found.
What? In what world would that make sense? Of course you make them clean up their emissions. Of course you don't put a special tax on them and spend it on other health care programs. That would be biased against them. What we want is for the government to stop being biased towards them, and therefore to stop them from polluting. We can find power plants which are already emitting more than permitted as fast as we can pay people to test them, because the fines for excessive emissions are lower than the cost of reducing emissions. They should be higher, not lower.
Chrome's UI has stunk on ice since day one. Now they're angry?
I do hate the trend of mobile apps with crap UI, though. For example, Firefox for mobile would benefit from a preferences dialog that would let me disable pocket, and tell the browser to actually load the URL I called it with instead of showing me quick links (including pocket.) I had never even heard of Pocket before Firefox integrated it over the wishes of the users, who proclaimed that we did not want it. Now I think it's the antichrist, and I hope their HQ falls over and bursts into flames.
We're going to need a new Mozilla foundation, without blackjack and hookers. Because they are apparently spending all their time partying, and none listening to users. We're gonna need a new Phoenix browser.
If you're close enough for iron and copper (not heavy metals) to be a problem for your lungs, then I suggest you get some SPF75 because the UV from that arc flash will be your biggest concern, right after the fact that you probably coped a significant amount of molten copper to your face.
Ah, Slashdot, the site where complete ignorance can get upmods. Copper fumes are toxic, and metals can remain in the air for surprising periods of time when burned. If you're on the other side of a solid wall (or hell, just a good piece of heavy black paper) the arc flash is a non-issue, but the copper in the air is still a problem.
Mind you your concern will be short lived as the natural end a transformer scenario is a boil over. You can rest calmly as your burn alive thinking "at least I did not inhale".
Here on planet earth, we have air. And that air has currents in it, which we often call winds. And those winds can carry toxic elements and compounds to other locations which are not where they were emitted. What color is the sky on your planet?
When we get really clever (and people study more physics, chemistry and biology, rather than politics and law, and get better money for doing so), then we'll have a good shot at thinking our way around the pollutants, and obtaining newer sources of resources that have previously been inaccessible. That's pretty much the story of the rise of humanity.
The story of humanity is that we expand to consume all natural resources, and then our societies fail. More cultures have done this and vanished than are still around. Our Easter Island Heads are iPhones and BMWs.
Personal computer? I'd love to have one, can you offer one? A PERSONAL computer that I actually own?
How little computer can you survive with? If it's bloody little, then buy one of the FPGA Amigas. A human can reasonably understand that.
Ben and Jerry's used capitalism to sell mediocre ice cream to sheep willing to pay a higher price to feel good.
Once upon a time, they made better than average ice cream. Sadly, those days are gone. Now it's pretty crappy ice cream, and lots of the other ingredients are crap, too.
The breakup of Ma Bell was good because they owned technology no one else had.
The technology was well-understood, as it was simple. It was good because they had a monopoly, and consumers suffered predictably.
To suggest that it is "natural" for someone to take from another when they come across useful things, and that to hold on to things that one has accumulated is somehow "unnatural", is to describe a world in which I have no desire to live naturally.
If everyone takes that attitude, then we use natural resources more rapidly than they can be replenished, and pollute faster than pollutants can be cleared from the atmosphere. Then we destroy society, and maybe our species. Caveman behavior doesn't scale.
Capitalism is harder to debunk and more personal, but it's still the same lie as communism.
Wait, no it isn't. They are literally opposite lies. Capitalism is a lie of meritocracy, while communism is a lie of equality.
Have you actually tried buying something from sears.com? It's a pretty bad experience. Their selection sucks, the prices are higher than Amazon's, and it's filled with "affiliate" retailers that basically just drop ship stuff from other retailers.
Does the site actually work these days? It was a total shitshow the last time I tried to use it, but that was many years ago. It's not like they ever have the best price on anything. At the time that Amazon was just rising, Sears' site was basically unusable.
Prodigy was pioneering. I was an active user for years, in fact. That's right... they sold Prodigy. I remember thinking at the time that that was a dumb move.
Prodigy was a typical example of Sears-related technical incompetence. Just as they would later go on to squander the opportunity to dominate web retail with a terrible web site with ridiculous prices, Prodigy was technically inferior for an audience that wanted internet access. Though I believe the service eventually went IP-based, early Prodigy appeared to encapsulate IP in its own protocol... poorly.
Mom and Dad had a grudge against them from the '70's. Apparently they'd purchased a TV there that never worked, and Sears jerked them around about the problem until it went out of Warranty.
We had this with an A/C unit from them just a few years back. The warranty claim was actually approved and being processed when the warranty ran out, and then they deleted everything and told us they didn't have any information on the claim. Luckily, several more hours on the phone yielded a replacement. Unfortunately, it was the middle of a heat wave so we wound up settling for an inferior replacement unit, because that's all they had in. Forty years later, same old shit.
What? Transformers are made almost entirely out of heavy metals.
Not by any relevant definition of "heavy" eg toxic. There's a lot of iron and copper in these things I assume, but they aren't that horrible.
What? Seriously?
Or did you have some other definition in mind? There's lots to choose from with that term!
Iron and copper can be pretty horrible when inhaled, and too much of either is toxic so they fit your definition anyhow.
Not only did you pen one of the most opinionated pieces of "journalism" ever,
"National Review was founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr. as a magazine of conservative opinion."
but you used a filler-word, um, in a formal written document.
I think it's lazy, but it's typical conversational style.
With all due respect
People who use this phrase never show any, nor are worthy of any.
With all due respect, you're not Slashdot's arbiter of what is worthy of respect.
mumbo jumbo
What are all these wires? What the hell's a mouse? How do I windows?
Mumbo jumbo is meaningless or confusing language, with the possible connotation that it is deliberate. "The use of the term "personalized learning" dates back to at least the early 1960s, but there is no widespread agreement on the definition and components of a personal learning environment." It's a meaningless phrase used by con men who are trying to sell equipment to educators. Hence, mumbo jumbo. It's a perfectly cromulent use of the word.
Parents from all parts of the political spectrum understand that âoepersonalized learningâ is Silicon Valley propaganda
So much bias it's like all I have is a right speaker.
I refer you back to the top of this comment.
In short, go back to journalism school.
With all due respect, you are fractally incorrect. The closer one looks at your arguments, the more ways in which they are irrelevant and/or incorrect become apparent.
In long, how about you title opinion pieces accordingly and not pretend they are in any way news.
Again, I refer you back to the top of this comment. The site's FAQ tells you that it is an opinion publication. The opinion pieces were collected together for your convenience, but with all due respect, you failed to internet correctly.
Also, go back to any school you attended and demand a refund, then learn how to write a formal document
This is not an invitation to a recital. This is an opinion piece, and it was written as such. Hope this helps, have a nice day!
Transformers don't contain heavy metals
What? Transformers are made almost entirely out of heavy metals.
and even old transformers only have trace amounts of PCBs thanks to them being banned in the 70s
Completely false, there are still old transformers with PCBs in them in the USA, and some of them are in the New York power system.
But this is NYC we're talking about. Even if it were PCBs, heavy metals, and your tinfoil hat which were vapourised it's probably an improvement over the air there anyway.
PCBs being pretty much the most toxic thing that we have in our cities, I'm guessing not.
If glass "worked fine" companies never would have switched to plastic.
Glass worked better in some ways, but there's more profit in using plastic. But that's only because we don't account for the costs, as usual. Add a cleanup tax to account for the percentage of bottles which aren't recycled, and they'll solve the problem themselves. (Don't charge it for compostable containers.)
And if worse comes to worst, use aluminum cans! Beverages taste better from those anyhow...
That depends on whether they are lined with plastic, or epoxy...
Plus, wouldn't any water he was carrying... freeze? And have to be melted anyway?
The food will have contained water. At least, some of it, mostly stuff intended to be consumed early in the journey. Living on all-dehydrated stuff is ghastly.
I'm kind of surprised a school hasn't been hit yet. I would imagine compared to banks and credit unions they would be soft targets security wise.
Can confirm. I worked on one project at a community college where they were sending student data in the clear across the open internet, to a remote classroom site. IIRC, the application literally used telnet. I got paid a little bit to quickly set up ssh tunneling, and then I got paid more again to set up IPSEC later. They had a sysadmin who was supposed to do stuff like that, but he knew jack. I was supposed to get his job, but then he bought a second Harley so The People had to pay him instead of someone competent. Hooray, unions!
The street food vendors are not gone. THey just move to the next sweet spot in the food chain
California has what, 56 counties? Something like that. And in order to do business as a food truck, you have to get re-licensed in each county in which you'd like to do business. If San Francisco makes it too hard to be a food truck vendor, then the owner is going to have to go through all of that rigamarole all over again. There's time, there's money, in many counties the systems are designed to fail food trucks to protect B&M restaurants, and overall it's expensive and time-consuming.
Of course, if you can be outcompeted by a food truck, it's not just because you have more overhead. People will pay more for a more complete experience. It's because your restaurant sucks. However, crotchety old pricks who can't taste anything any more vote more than young hipsters who love tacos. They vote for protectionist laws designed to keep things the way they are. Then they rant about how much they love the free market.