That just seems to imply that doctors shouldn't be trained to work stupid-long immune system destroying hours, should be overstaffed (not understaffed) to allow for frequent sick days, etc.
That would be nice but it cannot realistically happen without a single payer government run health care system. Since that is a political impossibility it seems unlikely to happen. Furthermore, low staffing levels are sometimes an economic or functional reality. If you work in a rural area, odds are good there is no backup. Long hours? That's not unusual in a lot of professions including programming. Given the almost limitless need for medical care I don't really see doctors ever working short hours. It's just not a 9-5 sort of profession. Overstaffing will not lower medical costs - quite the opposite. So how do you propose to overstaff AND reduce the already outrageous cost of medical care in the US without going to a government run medical system? That's just not economically realistic.
In other words, double the number of medical schools, reduce the on-call stress that hurts the immune system and reform the residency system.
Doubling the number of medical schools will not necessarily have your desired effect and cannot be done overnight. For one, who is going to teach in them? Basically the only people qualified to teach doctors are other doctors. It would take a generation or two at minimum to double the number of med schools. And how do you do it without lowering standards? I can assure you that the lawyers would LOVE it if standards for doctors were lowered.
As for reforming the residency system, I agree completely there. My wife is a MD and the residency system is a soul crushing hazing ritual from a bygone era that needs reform drastically. The biggest problem with it is that the residents are funded primarily by the government so they are essentially free labor to the hospitals they work in. So the hospitals use them as hard as possible to save money on their own bottom lines. It's a huge profit center which makes it very hard to reform.
Maybe also get rid of the concept that doctors are so much smarter/more honorable than the poluace instead of just having a different skillset.
Just as soon as ambulance chasing lawyers cease to be a thing. Doctors ARE quite frankly held to a standard that you probably are not in your job and I certainly am not in mine. They have to constantly be considering whether they will be sued because most are at some point. My wife has to write all her reports bearing in mind the non-trivial possibility that she may have to defend it in a courtroom. She can even do everything properly with the best standard of care and she still is likely to get sued at some point. Her. Personally. Do you have to worry about that constantly in your job? I'm guessing probably not. Do you have to buy expensive liability coverage? I'm guessing probably not. Doctors ARE held to a higher standard than most other professions. People are extremely unforgiving of mistakes in medicine despite the fact that such mistakes are 100% inevitable because the human body is incredibly complex and we don't understand a lot about it.
Does the inconvenience of one doctor outweigh the inconvenience of 5 patients catching what he's got?
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. And the answer depends on what he's got and what the consequences of him not showing up for work are. There are places where the doctor is the only qualified medical professional around. Should the gunshot victim have to wait a few days for the doctor to get over his bout of the sniffles before he gets help? Should patients in urgent need of care in a rural area have to wait for a week for a doctor to stop coughing when he's the only medical help within reasonable distance? It's not always a simple equation. Sometimes the answer is obvious. Other times not so much.
Bear in mind too that many small practices shut down if the doctor cannot come to work regardless of reason. My wife works in a practice this size. There are about 10 hourly employees that don't get paid if the office cannot open. Fortunately the type of practice they have doesn't deal in emergencies but there are significant economic consequences to more than just the doctor. That means that the illness needs to be of a significant severity before it's reasonable to shut everything down. Doctors work around sick people so unsurprisingly they tend to catch what patients have more often than a typical office worker. Sometimes they have backup (like in a big hospital) and can stay home for a little while to recover. Other times the harm of staying home is greater than the risk of transmitting a minor illness. It's unfortunate but that's the reality of it.
There are countless credible scientific studies that suggest otherwise. They're not even hard to find. Not all processed foods are bad. Some processing techniques like pasteurization are demonstrably beneficial. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that moderation should be exercised in their use.
A raw food diet is a lot likely to be less optimal
It's not about raw foods. It's about what is done to the foods. Processed foods purchased from a store tend to have high amounts of sugar, salt, fat, preservatives, additives and other ingredients to make them more appealing and/or have longer shelf life. Some processing is fine and even necessary. But it's really easy to eat a very poor diet if you aren't careful with processed foods.
If you cook from fresh ingredients, guess what you're still eating processed food.
You are not necessarily however eating preservatives, ingredients of substandard quality, chemicals with unpronounceable names, excessive amounts of sugar, salt, fat and other needless additives.
Yankees first baseman just gave up milk as well and says he's never felt better.
Good for him. That has nothing to do with me or millions of other people. I drink milk daily and I feel great. Times when I've gone without it had no effect on me positive or negative. So what exactly am I to learn from your anecdote?
even if you're not allergic to milk like I am, it's not very good for you after a while
And your evidence for this is what exactly? Unless you have a specific digestion problem with dairy (and many people do) every bit of evidence suggests it is a fine part of a balanced diet. It's on the food pyramid and every dietician I've ever met will tell you dairy is just fine. We're mammals so milk is one of the things that sort of defines us. It's basically the perfect food for a mammal nutrition-wise so long as you can digest it safely.
generally eating gluten free is better for your digestive system
There is no credible scientific study I am aware of that supports this statement. If you wish to assert this you need to provide non-anecdotal evidence, preferably in the form of a double blind study supporting this assertion. I am not aware of any evidence that gluten is measurably harmful to individuals without celiac disease, an allergy or other form of gluten sensitivity. This is a very small portion of the population (somewhere between 0.5% and 1%) that is known to be affected. The best available evidence appears to clearly show that if your aren't part of that population then avoiding gluten is a waste of effort.
if you want to stay young, avoid as many processed foods as you can.
Again you are asserting that "staying young" is linked to avoiding processed foods. While there is evidence to support that processed foods are frequently harmful if consumed regularly over time, you cannot automatically generalize this to link it to biological aging (versus chronological aging) without evidence. There may very well be a link but it is unproven at this time. I understand that it sounds reasonable but lots of things sound reasonable that aren't actually true.
I see it as a win-win; you're able to work in the home environment you are most productive in, and you can use the time you would've been commuting to work a bit longer for the employer
I've worked from home in years gone by. Speaking for myself I'm definitely NOT most productive working from home. Far too easily distracted. I also know several other people who have worked from home and had the same experience. Furthermore people generally do not use the commute time to squeeze in another hour of work in general. Some people can work effectively from home. I would say most are more effective in an office.
Not only that, but you're not adding to road congestion either.
True, though most companies really don't care about that much if at all. They regard that as your problem, not theirs and the marginal decrease of one car from the road is basically negligible.
Skype, etc. make communication with coworkers a snap these days.
It makes it easier but it isn't the same as being in the same building. Furthermore it is MUCH easier to have a quick group meeting in person than through video conferencing. There tends to be a lot of administrative overhead with phones and video. Now that isn't always a bad thing since too many meetings is possibly worse than too few. I've noticed programmers frequently think that a few skype calls is all that is needed to communicate effectively with coworkers and that often is not the case. A distributed team presents some very real challenges to work effectively together.
They were compelling reasons to me. The market obviously judged the player a colossal failure, but I loved mine.
Nothing wrong with that. I've bought some products myself that were a bit off the beaten path. You have to buy what works for you.
The truck I drive right now is probably the slowest selling pickup on the US market but it was excellent value for money and fits my particular needs almost perfectly. I've always been mystified why people aren't more objective about their actual needs versus buying something that is popular but a bad fit for them. For example the Ford F150 is the best selling vehicle in the US but most people that buy them would actually be better served by a different vehicle based on what they actually do with it. People want bad-ass off-road trucks but only something like 5% of drivers ever leave the pavement.
How about on the roofs that don't have gardens on them? Not like we're going to put a garden on every roof. At some point there is really no excuse for not putting solar panels or gardens or something productive on rooftops.
I listen to music on my iPod and I happened to own a dumb phone.
Your choice and that's fine but it puts you firmly in the minority these days.
And while a new phone would be great, not only can I not afford it, the amount of eavesdropping that can be done on a smart phone really makes it a stupid purchase this day & age.
Strange that I have nearly minimum wage employees working for me that somehow manage to afford a smartphone. Maybe you should use some of your time to seek a better job instead of posting here. Anyway it's quaint how you think that not having a smartphone makes you immune to eavesdropping. I think you might have a little of the paranoia. Here's a clue, "dumb" phones are just as easy to track as smartphones.
The convenience of a smartphone, does it really outweigh the negative aspects of having a device that records everything you do?
Once you put away your tinfoil hat the answer is yes.
I loved the brown version. It was beautiful. Whether it was ahead of its time, or behind its time, or just too niche, I don't know. I just know it looked fantastic in person and literally like crap in pictures.
The Zune wasn't a terrible product. It was a terrible value. The iPod rules the market at the time. For Zine to matter it either needed to be substantially better than the iPod or substantially cheaper to get people to care about it. It needed to be a better value proposition. Instead it was roughly comparable for a similar price. If your choice is between two effectively identical products, people are generally going to pick the one that is more popular and better known. People already knew the iPod worked pretty well and it already had the mind share. Microsoft hugely overestimated the value of their brand and provided nothing more than a me-too product with little to set it apart.
As for other compelling reasons: the Zune had better sound quality, better software, and a better screen than the iPod.
I think it's pretty much safe to say that almost nobody agrees with you on this. Even if all those things were technically better like you claim, they weren't enough better that it mattered. The sound from an iPod and the screen quality was more than good enough for all but the pickiest of customers. Zune did not change that. As for the software Zune being "better", I think you'll have a hard to proving that objectively even allowing for the fact that iTunes is widely regarded as rather poor quality. It certainly wasn't better enough to matter and I cannot recall any press proclaiming it to be even the slightest bit revolutionary or superior.
I can't figure out how people use a phone for music; my phone has 16 GB capacity, and I have 105 GB of music
Really? You can't figure that out? My phone as a 128GB capacity and my music library is less than that. No disrespect intended but you have what is basically a cheap phone by today's standards. I never, ever need to sync my phone to change the music on it and honestly I couldn't be bothered even if storage capacity were an issue.
Constantly re-syncing my phone based on what I feel like listening too gets to be very tiring.
So don't. I never have. Buy a phone with a large enough capacity and get on with life.
1970s fashions? I think this got embraced by hipsters early and became very mainstream.
Where is the irony? There are all sorts of resurgences of old fashions all the time. But it isn't obviously ironic. I was alive during the 70s and trust me when I say that they haven't brought back 70s fashions in any meaningful way. Fashions cycle in and out all the time and I've seen stuff from previous decades brought back multiple times. Thin ties were in during the 80s and they are back again now. Happens all the time but it's rarely ironic.
I have a friend who was in the vintage clothing business and he can define where he could buy 1970s fashion clothes in bales by the pound one month and the next he was having to negotiate prices by the item from his suppliers. Not long after that they become unobtainable except as yard sale or Goodwill finds and new iterations of the same fashions were showing up new in department stores.
That's the way fashion works but I'm not seeing the irony here. Throwback fashion is routinely a thing. There's even old jokes about wearing something so long it comes back into fashion.
Hipster bars of the era tended to focus on "vintage" brands like PBR or Rolling Rock and this embrace of older, niche products seem to have something to do with the rise of craft alternatives (well, and quality, too..).
PBR and Rolling Rock are just cheep beers. There may be a bit of irony going on with PBR though I'm not entirely convinced.
Not obviously ironic though a reasonable example if true. The evidence is ambiguous and seems mostly anecdotal. Still I'd need a LOT more evidence to start to buy the notion that ironic embrace of vintage is a meaningful way to cause old products to see a resurgence. Not saying it can't happen but I just don't really see examples of it happening in the real world.
Or the otherwise inexplicable growth of vinyl record sales?
Nothing ironic there that I can see. There are people who earnestly believe that vinyl sounds better and the audiophile crowd is willing to spend absurd amounts of money chasing even the chance of "better sound". Personally I think that the supposed superiority of vinyl wouldn't stand up to double blind testing like so much other nonsense that comes from audiophiles but that is a separate issue.
The Zune as a product was solid. It played MP3's as intended, offered all of the correct features, and the UI wasn't unpleasant. Battery life was good.
That's the problem though. Nobody ever really claimed that Zune was terrible. But there were very few reasons to buy one instead of an iPod. It wasn't better value for money for most people. It didn't have meaningfully better features, didn't cost a lot less, and by the time it came out many people who really wanted an MP3 player were already locked into Apple's ecosystem. Microsoft didn't make a horrible product but being solid isn't good enough when you are that late to the party. You have to be substantially better or substantially cheaper and Zune was neither.
Thinking about this as a larger point, I at least look at a product to fill a need. generally I do a lot more research than most, to find the product that checks all of the boxes without glaring reliability or quality issues. I rarely buy crap, but it's not always popular.
I do the same thing but I do consider whether the popularity of the device or feature will matter in time. For example I could get a cordless drill from a no-name manufacturer but then 5 years later I won't be able to get replacement batteries most likely. Sometimes popularity and the network effects it generates matter as much or more than the more tangible aspects of the product design. Sometimes it doesn't matter but you have to consider whether it will.
I think you have the concept of hipster exactly backwards.
Not really. I'm just querying whether this is a particular subset of the use of the term, particularly with respect to those who intentionally pick products slightly outside the mainstream. If someone bought a Zune in a (lame) attempt to be trendy that would seem to be "hipster" behavior. Buy the unusual product which is likely doomed to failure and look down your nose at people who buy the more mainstream products. More of a social tactic than a demographic.
Usually hipsters seem to cluster around emerging trends and often seem to be influential enough that an ironic embrace of vintage/past products often produces a resurgence of that product.
Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product. I've seen some legitimate attempts to bring back old products or aspects of them but the successful ones are pretty much never ironic.
It's debatable whether hipsters even exist, or whether it's a group that identifies products before they become popular or whether it's a group that's defined as clustering around products that became popular.
I think aspects of what we call "hipsters" exist in society though I think you'll have a hard time finding a canonical example of one. People who are seriously into fashion sort of fit the bill. They're always looking for the next trend to jump on. You can find corollary examples with other products - movies, technology, etc. But I don't think I've ever seen anyone who adopts that worldview for everything they do.
So perhaps then it isn't the design of the software or the hardware, but the overall aesthetic. Both the Air and OSX are "pretty", but lacking in functionality.
OS X is basically a riff on BSD unix underneath. It's roughly as capable as any other version of unix so I'm not sure why you think that. OS X on the Macbook Air is the same as any other Mac. You can argue that you don't like Apple's operating systems and I wouldn't quibble but to say the software lacks functionality is just false.
If you don't like the hardware on the Air, I get that. It's necessarily a design with some tradeoffs that don't work for everyone. When you go as light as possible you have to leave some stuff behind. But that gets back to my point which is that Apple is really a software company. They put the software in a pretty box but (almost) nobody would give a shit if it ran Windows instead of OS X.
There's also an (undeserved) reputation for ease of use to consider, which ties back into the lack of functionality/flexibility.
Disagree that Apple's products haven't earned their reputation for ease of use. I've used Apple products on and off since the early 1980s and I've spent even more time with their competitor's products. As a general rule Apple products tend to be easier to teach to the technologically impaired, require less support and generally work more consistently and with less fuss than the competition. There are exceptions of course but on average it's usually true. That's not to say their products are perfect by any means. But having used, watched and supported others I have to say that the evidence largely points to Apple products being above average in ease of use.
When someone who is not a geek asks me whether to get a mac versus a PC or iPhone versus Android, I usually point them at the Apple product (budget permitting) because it will be less painful for them 95 times out of 100. When I converted my parents over to a Mac and iPad from Windows machines the number of tech support calls I got went from 1-3/month to 1-2/year. Furthermore if you live vaguely close to an Apple store it's a LOT easier to get support for a Mac than for most PCs.
Maybe you do but if so you are a good approximation of the entire user base. I'm not sure I've ever actually even seen a Zune in the wild.
Good battery life, large amount of storage.
That's not exactly a compelling argument to buy one over the competing products. Nobody cared about the Zune because there was nothing special or compelling about it. It was a me-too product introduced several years too late to matter. It's most compelling selling point (and compelling is a stretch) was that it wasn't made by Apple. Since people mostly like Apple better than Microsoft that is an argument without very wide appeal. The only way Zune would have had a chance would have been to be technically WAY better than the iPod and it simply wasn't.
Only downside is that you have to use the stupid zune software.
That's a pretty huge downside considering it's basically abandon-ware at this point.
I'm sure the apple fanbois will be shocked that I don't buy a new mp3 player every year when this one still works fine.
Since standalone mp3 player sales are falling like a rock I doubt the apple fanbois you seem to want to sneer at will be shocked or even care. Basically everyone listens to music on their smartphones now. Why carry two devices when one will do the job just fine?
Is this just another term for hipsters? People who seek out things that everyone else has dismissed for (usually) good reasons.
The no unitaskers "rule" isn't a rule
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When Nerds Do BBQ
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Alton Brown is King Geek Chef and has a rule about unitaskers, single-purpose devices: don't buy them.
While I'm as big a fan of Alton as anyone around here, I'll decide for myself what tools to buy thanks. There is nothing wrong with buying a unitasking device provided it meets a couple of conditions. 1) You actually will use it a meaningful amount and 2) It saves time or results in a better product. There is a lot to be said for having the right tool for the job. Sometimes specialty tools exist for very good reasons.
Let's say someone wanted to go through engineering school using software that would do all kinds of mathematical equations for them, without them having to learn the underlying math and other discrete skills that the software automates for them. You'd frown upon that, right?
If they want to work as an engineer, sure. But if they just are a tinkerer or someone trying to get some stuff done, I don't really care unless safety is involved. I am an engineer and I run a company that makes wire harnesses. A LOT of the products we make were not designed by people with a background in electrical engineering. And that doesn't matter and I don't look down my nose at them for it. As long as what they do works it doesn't matter. If someone can play music beautifully I don't care if they can't read sheet music.
That's kind of how the old-school pitmasters look at rigs like this. It has a purpose, and it has value...but you won't get any respect for using one.
Whether that matters or not depends on how much you care about the opinion of "old-school pitmasters". Personally I don't really care much. I have no ambition to do what they do or do it the way that they do it. I don't compete in BBQ competitions and I don't have anyone to satisfy but myself and my family and friends. I don't own a restaurant either. So if someone wants to use a device to get good results without spending half their life learning esoteric BBQ techniques, who am I to care how they do it?
Well, I agree with a large part of what you're saying, but you aren't factoring in the hardware design.
Sure I am. Other companies sell hardware that is comparably nice and that if you sold a Macbook Air with Windows on it that nobody would pay extra for it compared to equivalent Dell or HP units. There are Android phones that are just as nicely designed as the iPhone or at least near enough as makes no difference. I've seen laptops that are just as nice as the Macbook Air. The nice hardware is really just a form of marketing. Make no mistake, it's very nice and it no doubt contributes measurably to Apple's success but it isn't the core reason why people buy Apple products.
What makes a Mac special is OS X. What makes an iPhone special is iOS. Take those away and you'll see Apple's profit margins evaporate faster than you can say "shareholder lawsuit".
"...officials believe that human error was to blame for the incident, rather than a problem with the robot."
The root cause of all problems like this is human error. If you haven't reached the place where there was a mistake by a human then you haven't gotten to the root of the problem. Might be bad machine design. Might be faulty programming. Might be operator error. Might be disregard or ignorance of safety protocols. Might be some combination of the above or a few things I haven't mentioned. But any failure in a machine made by man ultimately is the fault of a human. Might be an innocent mistake and the failure may not necessitate punishment but it will be human error make no mistake.
Well, enterprises don't want to pay 50% or more for comparable hardware on the basis of aesthetics.
People don't pay more for Apples devices because of the aesthetics - not much anyway. They're nice and all but what people really are paying for is the software. Apple at it's core is a software company. If you put Windows on a Mac or Android on an iPhone (easily done) you'd have no idea if it was made by Apple or Dell unless you looked at the logo. Apple doesn't make their own hardware but they do make their own software and that is what people pay extra for. Their hardware is nice but nothing really special. They just won't sell you their software (usually) unless it is attached to a piece of hardware.
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That just seems to imply that doctors shouldn't be trained to work stupid-long immune system destroying hours, should be overstaffed (not understaffed) to allow for frequent sick days, etc.
That would be nice but it cannot realistically happen without a single payer government run health care system. Since that is a political impossibility it seems unlikely to happen. Furthermore, low staffing levels are sometimes an economic or functional reality. If you work in a rural area, odds are good there is no backup. Long hours? That's not unusual in a lot of professions including programming. Given the almost limitless need for medical care I don't really see doctors ever working short hours. It's just not a 9-5 sort of profession. Overstaffing will not lower medical costs - quite the opposite. So how do you propose to overstaff AND reduce the already outrageous cost of medical care in the US without going to a government run medical system? That's just not economically realistic.
In other words, double the number of medical schools, reduce the on-call stress that hurts the immune system and reform the residency system.
Doubling the number of medical schools will not necessarily have your desired effect and cannot be done overnight. For one, who is going to teach in them? Basically the only people qualified to teach doctors are other doctors. It would take a generation or two at minimum to double the number of med schools. And how do you do it without lowering standards? I can assure you that the lawyers would LOVE it if standards for doctors were lowered.
As for reforming the residency system, I agree completely there. My wife is a MD and the residency system is a soul crushing hazing ritual from a bygone era that needs reform drastically. The biggest problem with it is that the residents are funded primarily by the government so they are essentially free labor to the hospitals they work in. So the hospitals use them as hard as possible to save money on their own bottom lines. It's a huge profit center which makes it very hard to reform.
Maybe also get rid of the concept that doctors are so much smarter/more honorable than the poluace instead of just having a different skillset.
Just as soon as ambulance chasing lawyers cease to be a thing. Doctors ARE quite frankly held to a standard that you probably are not in your job and I certainly am not in mine. They have to constantly be considering whether they will be sued because most are at some point. My wife has to write all her reports bearing in mind the non-trivial possibility that she may have to defend it in a courtroom. She can even do everything properly with the best standard of care and she still is likely to get sued at some point. Her. Personally. Do you have to worry about that constantly in your job? I'm guessing probably not. Do you have to buy expensive liability coverage? I'm guessing probably not. Doctors ARE held to a higher standard than most other professions. People are extremely unforgiving of mistakes in medicine despite the fact that such mistakes are 100% inevitable because the human body is incredibly complex and we don't understand a lot about it.
Does the inconvenience of one doctor outweigh the inconvenience of 5 patients catching what he's got?
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. And the answer depends on what he's got and what the consequences of him not showing up for work are. There are places where the doctor is the only qualified medical professional around. Should the gunshot victim have to wait a few days for the doctor to get over his bout of the sniffles before he gets help? Should patients in urgent need of care in a rural area have to wait for a week for a doctor to stop coughing when he's the only medical help within reasonable distance? It's not always a simple equation. Sometimes the answer is obvious. Other times not so much.
Bear in mind too that many small practices shut down if the doctor cannot come to work regardless of reason. My wife works in a practice this size. There are about 10 hourly employees that don't get paid if the office cannot open. Fortunately the type of practice they have doesn't deal in emergencies but there are significant economic consequences to more than just the doctor. That means that the illness needs to be of a significant severity before it's reasonable to shut everything down. Doctors work around sick people so unsurprisingly they tend to catch what patients have more often than a typical office worker. Sometimes they have backup (like in a big hospital) and can stay home for a little while to recover. Other times the harm of staying home is greater than the risk of transmitting a minor illness. It's unfortunate but that's the reality of it.
I suspect processed foods are not harmful
There are countless credible scientific studies that suggest otherwise. They're not even hard to find. Not all processed foods are bad. Some processing techniques like pasteurization are demonstrably beneficial. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that moderation should be exercised in their use.
A raw food diet is a lot likely to be less optimal
It's not about raw foods. It's about what is done to the foods. Processed foods purchased from a store tend to have high amounts of sugar, salt, fat, preservatives, additives and other ingredients to make them more appealing and/or have longer shelf life. Some processing is fine and even necessary. But it's really easy to eat a very poor diet if you aren't careful with processed foods.
If you cook from fresh ingredients, guess what you're still eating processed food.
You are not necessarily however eating preservatives, ingredients of substandard quality, chemicals with unpronounceable names, excessive amounts of sugar, salt, fat and other needless additives.
Yankees first baseman just gave up milk as well and says he's never felt better.
Good for him. That has nothing to do with me or millions of other people. I drink milk daily and I feel great. Times when I've gone without it had no effect on me positive or negative. So what exactly am I to learn from your anecdote?
even if you're not allergic to milk like I am, it's not very good for you after a while
And your evidence for this is what exactly? Unless you have a specific digestion problem with dairy (and many people do) every bit of evidence suggests it is a fine part of a balanced diet. It's on the food pyramid and every dietician I've ever met will tell you dairy is just fine. We're mammals so milk is one of the things that sort of defines us. It's basically the perfect food for a mammal nutrition-wise so long as you can digest it safely.
Really? Where? Just because canned food is "processed" it does not make it bad for you.
There are countless studies out there regarding the health effects of processed foods. Twenty seconds on Google should answer your question.
And i have never seen a study to support this assertion in any way or form.
Then you haven't looked. You might want to actually study the issue before discussing.
After all bread is processed foods!
[facepalm]
generally eating gluten free is better for your digestive system
There is no credible scientific study I am aware of that supports this statement. If you wish to assert this you need to provide non-anecdotal evidence, preferably in the form of a double blind study supporting this assertion. I am not aware of any evidence that gluten is measurably harmful to individuals without celiac disease, an allergy or other form of gluten sensitivity. This is a very small portion of the population (somewhere between 0.5% and 1%) that is known to be affected. The best available evidence appears to clearly show that if your aren't part of that population then avoiding gluten is a waste of effort.
if you want to stay young, avoid as many processed foods as you can.
Again you are asserting that "staying young" is linked to avoiding processed foods. While there is evidence to support that processed foods are frequently harmful if consumed regularly over time, you cannot automatically generalize this to link it to biological aging (versus chronological aging) without evidence. There may very well be a link but it is unproven at this time. I understand that it sounds reasonable but lots of things sound reasonable that aren't actually true.
I see it as a win-win; you're able to work in the home environment you are most productive in, and you can use the time you would've been commuting to work a bit longer for the employer
I've worked from home in years gone by. Speaking for myself I'm definitely NOT most productive working from home. Far too easily distracted. I also know several other people who have worked from home and had the same experience. Furthermore people generally do not use the commute time to squeeze in another hour of work in general. Some people can work effectively from home. I would say most are more effective in an office.
Not only that, but you're not adding to road congestion either.
True, though most companies really don't care about that much if at all. They regard that as your problem, not theirs and the marginal decrease of one car from the road is basically negligible.
Skype, etc. make communication with coworkers a snap these days.
It makes it easier but it isn't the same as being in the same building. Furthermore it is MUCH easier to have a quick group meeting in person than through video conferencing. There tends to be a lot of administrative overhead with phones and video. Now that isn't always a bad thing since too many meetings is possibly worse than too few. I've noticed programmers frequently think that a few skype calls is all that is needed to communicate effectively with coworkers and that often is not the case. A distributed team presents some very real challenges to work effectively together.
They were compelling reasons to me. The market obviously judged the player a colossal failure, but I loved mine.
Nothing wrong with that. I've bought some products myself that were a bit off the beaten path. You have to buy what works for you.
The truck I drive right now is probably the slowest selling pickup on the US market but it was excellent value for money and fits my particular needs almost perfectly. I've always been mystified why people aren't more objective about their actual needs versus buying something that is popular but a bad fit for them. For example the Ford F150 is the best selling vehicle in the US but most people that buy them would actually be better served by a different vehicle based on what they actually do with it. People want bad-ass off-road trucks but only something like 5% of drivers ever leave the pavement.
Where are we gonna put the solar panels?
How about on the roofs that don't have gardens on them? Not like we're going to put a garden on every roof. At some point there is really no excuse for not putting solar panels or gardens or something productive on rooftops.
I listen to music on my iPod and I happened to own a dumb phone.
Your choice and that's fine but it puts you firmly in the minority these days.
And while a new phone would be great, not only can I not afford it, the amount of eavesdropping that can be done on a smart phone really makes it a stupid purchase this day & age.
Strange that I have nearly minimum wage employees working for me that somehow manage to afford a smartphone. Maybe you should use some of your time to seek a better job instead of posting here. Anyway it's quaint how you think that not having a smartphone makes you immune to eavesdropping. I think you might have a little of the paranoia. Here's a clue, "dumb" phones are just as easy to track as smartphones.
The convenience of a smartphone, does it really outweigh the negative aspects of having a device that records everything you do?
Once you put away your tinfoil hat the answer is yes.
I loved the brown version. It was beautiful. Whether it was ahead of its time, or behind its time, or just too niche, I don't know. I just know it looked fantastic in person and literally like crap in pictures.
The Zune wasn't a terrible product. It was a terrible value. The iPod rules the market at the time. For Zine to matter it either needed to be substantially better than the iPod or substantially cheaper to get people to care about it. It needed to be a better value proposition. Instead it was roughly comparable for a similar price. If your choice is between two effectively identical products, people are generally going to pick the one that is more popular and better known. People already knew the iPod worked pretty well and it already had the mind share. Microsoft hugely overestimated the value of their brand and provided nothing more than a me-too product with little to set it apart.
As for other compelling reasons: the Zune had better sound quality, better software, and a better screen than the iPod.
I think it's pretty much safe to say that almost nobody agrees with you on this. Even if all those things were technically better like you claim, they weren't enough better that it mattered. The sound from an iPod and the screen quality was more than good enough for all but the pickiest of customers. Zune did not change that. As for the software Zune being "better", I think you'll have a hard to proving that objectively even allowing for the fact that iTunes is widely regarded as rather poor quality. It certainly wasn't better enough to matter and I cannot recall any press proclaiming it to be even the slightest bit revolutionary or superior.
I can't figure out how people use a phone for music; my phone has 16 GB capacity, and I have 105 GB of music
Really? You can't figure that out? My phone as a 128GB capacity and my music library is less than that. No disrespect intended but you have what is basically a cheap phone by today's standards. I never, ever need to sync my phone to change the music on it and honestly I couldn't be bothered even if storage capacity were an issue.
Constantly re-syncing my phone based on what I feel like listening too gets to be very tiring.
So don't. I never have. Buy a phone with a large enough capacity and get on with life.
1970s fashions? I think this got embraced by hipsters early and became very mainstream.
Where is the irony? There are all sorts of resurgences of old fashions all the time. But it isn't obviously ironic. I was alive during the 70s and trust me when I say that they haven't brought back 70s fashions in any meaningful way. Fashions cycle in and out all the time and I've seen stuff from previous decades brought back multiple times. Thin ties were in during the 80s and they are back again now. Happens all the time but it's rarely ironic.
I have a friend who was in the vintage clothing business and he can define where he could buy 1970s fashion clothes in bales by the pound one month and the next he was having to negotiate prices by the item from his suppliers. Not long after that they become unobtainable except as yard sale or Goodwill finds and new iterations of the same fashions were showing up new in department stores.
That's the way fashion works but I'm not seeing the irony here. Throwback fashion is routinely a thing. There's even old jokes about wearing something so long it comes back into fashion.
Hipster bars of the era tended to focus on "vintage" brands like PBR or Rolling Rock and this embrace of older, niche products seem to have something to do with the rise of craft alternatives (well, and quality, too..).
PBR and Rolling Rock are just cheep beers. There may be a bit of irony going on with PBR though I'm not entirely convinced.
How about Pabst Blue Ribbon beer?
Not obviously ironic though a reasonable example if true. The evidence is ambiguous and seems mostly anecdotal. Still I'd need a LOT more evidence to start to buy the notion that ironic embrace of vintage is a meaningful way to cause old products to see a resurgence. Not saying it can't happen but I just don't really see examples of it happening in the real world.
Or the otherwise inexplicable growth of vinyl record sales?
Nothing ironic there that I can see. There are people who earnestly believe that vinyl sounds better and the audiophile crowd is willing to spend absurd amounts of money chasing even the chance of "better sound". Personally I think that the supposed superiority of vinyl wouldn't stand up to double blind testing like so much other nonsense that comes from audiophiles but that is a separate issue.
The Zune as a product was solid. It played MP3's as intended, offered all of the correct features, and the UI wasn't unpleasant. Battery life was good.
That's the problem though. Nobody ever really claimed that Zune was terrible. But there were very few reasons to buy one instead of an iPod. It wasn't better value for money for most people. It didn't have meaningfully better features, didn't cost a lot less, and by the time it came out many people who really wanted an MP3 player were already locked into Apple's ecosystem. Microsoft didn't make a horrible product but being solid isn't good enough when you are that late to the party. You have to be substantially better or substantially cheaper and Zune was neither.
Thinking about this as a larger point, I at least look at a product to fill a need. generally I do a lot more research than most, to find the product that checks all of the boxes without glaring reliability or quality issues. I rarely buy crap, but it's not always popular.
I do the same thing but I do consider whether the popularity of the device or feature will matter in time. For example I could get a cordless drill from a no-name manufacturer but then 5 years later I won't be able to get replacement batteries most likely. Sometimes popularity and the network effects it generates matter as much or more than the more tangible aspects of the product design. Sometimes it doesn't matter but you have to consider whether it will.
I think you have the concept of hipster exactly backwards.
Not really. I'm just querying whether this is a particular subset of the use of the term, particularly with respect to those who intentionally pick products slightly outside the mainstream. If someone bought a Zune in a (lame) attempt to be trendy that would seem to be "hipster" behavior. Buy the unusual product which is likely doomed to failure and look down your nose at people who buy the more mainstream products. More of a social tactic than a demographic.
Usually hipsters seem to cluster around emerging trends and often seem to be influential enough that an ironic embrace of vintage/past products often produces a resurgence of that product.
Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product. I've seen some legitimate attempts to bring back old products or aspects of them but the successful ones are pretty much never ironic.
It's debatable whether hipsters even exist, or whether it's a group that identifies products before they become popular or whether it's a group that's defined as clustering around products that became popular.
I think aspects of what we call "hipsters" exist in society though I think you'll have a hard time finding a canonical example of one. People who are seriously into fashion sort of fit the bill. They're always looking for the next trend to jump on. You can find corollary examples with other products - movies, technology, etc. But I don't think I've ever seen anyone who adopts that worldview for everything they do.
So perhaps then it isn't the design of the software or the hardware, but the overall aesthetic. Both the Air and OSX are "pretty", but lacking in functionality.
OS X is basically a riff on BSD unix underneath. It's roughly as capable as any other version of unix so I'm not sure why you think that. OS X on the Macbook Air is the same as any other Mac. You can argue that you don't like Apple's operating systems and I wouldn't quibble but to say the software lacks functionality is just false.
If you don't like the hardware on the Air, I get that. It's necessarily a design with some tradeoffs that don't work for everyone. When you go as light as possible you have to leave some stuff behind. But that gets back to my point which is that Apple is really a software company. They put the software in a pretty box but (almost) nobody would give a shit if it ran Windows instead of OS X.
There's also an (undeserved) reputation for ease of use to consider, which ties back into the lack of functionality/flexibility.
Disagree that Apple's products haven't earned their reputation for ease of use. I've used Apple products on and off since the early 1980s and I've spent even more time with their competitor's products. As a general rule Apple products tend to be easier to teach to the technologically impaired, require less support and generally work more consistently and with less fuss than the competition. There are exceptions of course but on average it's usually true. That's not to say their products are perfect by any means. But having used, watched and supported others I have to say that the evidence largely points to Apple products being above average in ease of use.
When someone who is not a geek asks me whether to get a mac versus a PC or iPhone versus Android, I usually point them at the Apple product (budget permitting) because it will be less painful for them 95 times out of 100. When I converted my parents over to a Mac and iPad from Windows machines the number of tech support calls I got went from 1-3/month to 1-2/year. Furthermore if you live vaguely close to an Apple store it's a LOT easier to get support for a Mac than for most PCs.
If all TV were content on demand, you'd probably see a lot more quality shows and many shows currently on getting canceled.
Judging by the popularity of the Kardashians I very, very, very much doubt that.
My zune still works as well. I use it every day.
Maybe you do but if so you are a good approximation of the entire user base. I'm not sure I've ever actually even seen a Zune in the wild.
Good battery life, large amount of storage.
That's not exactly a compelling argument to buy one over the competing products. Nobody cared about the Zune because there was nothing special or compelling about it. It was a me-too product introduced several years too late to matter. It's most compelling selling point (and compelling is a stretch) was that it wasn't made by Apple. Since people mostly like Apple better than Microsoft that is an argument without very wide appeal. The only way Zune would have had a chance would have been to be technically WAY better than the iPod and it simply wasn't.
Only downside is that you have to use the stupid zune software.
That's a pretty huge downside considering it's basically abandon-ware at this point.
I'm sure the apple fanbois will be shocked that I don't buy a new mp3 player every year when this one still works fine.
Since standalone mp3 player sales are falling like a rock I doubt the apple fanbois you seem to want to sneer at will be shocked or even care. Basically everyone listens to music on their smartphones now. Why carry two devices when one will do the job just fine?
Is this just another term for hipsters? People who seek out things that everyone else has dismissed for (usually) good reasons.
Alton Brown is King Geek Chef and has a rule about unitaskers, single-purpose devices: don't buy them.
While I'm as big a fan of Alton as anyone around here, I'll decide for myself what tools to buy thanks. There is nothing wrong with buying a unitasking device provided it meets a couple of conditions. 1) You actually will use it a meaningful amount and 2) It saves time or results in a better product. There is a lot to be said for having the right tool for the job. Sometimes specialty tools exist for very good reasons.
Let's say someone wanted to go through engineering school using software that would do all kinds of mathematical equations for them, without them having to learn the underlying math and other discrete skills that the software automates for them. You'd frown upon that, right?
If they want to work as an engineer, sure. But if they just are a tinkerer or someone trying to get some stuff done, I don't really care unless safety is involved. I am an engineer and I run a company that makes wire harnesses. A LOT of the products we make were not designed by people with a background in electrical engineering. And that doesn't matter and I don't look down my nose at them for it. As long as what they do works it doesn't matter. If someone can play music beautifully I don't care if they can't read sheet music.
That's kind of how the old-school pitmasters look at rigs like this. It has a purpose, and it has value...but you won't get any respect for using one.
Whether that matters or not depends on how much you care about the opinion of "old-school pitmasters". Personally I don't really care much. I have no ambition to do what they do or do it the way that they do it. I don't compete in BBQ competitions and I don't have anyone to satisfy but myself and my family and friends. I don't own a restaurant either. So if someone wants to use a device to get good results without spending half their life learning esoteric BBQ techniques, who am I to care how they do it?
Well, I agree with a large part of what you're saying, but you aren't factoring in the hardware design.
Sure I am. Other companies sell hardware that is comparably nice and that if you sold a Macbook Air with Windows on it that nobody would pay extra for it compared to equivalent Dell or HP units. There are Android phones that are just as nicely designed as the iPhone or at least near enough as makes no difference. I've seen laptops that are just as nice as the Macbook Air. The nice hardware is really just a form of marketing. Make no mistake, it's very nice and it no doubt contributes measurably to Apple's success but it isn't the core reason why people buy Apple products.
What makes a Mac special is OS X. What makes an iPhone special is iOS. Take those away and you'll see Apple's profit margins evaporate faster than you can say "shareholder lawsuit".
"...officials believe that human error was to blame for the incident, rather than a problem with the robot."
The root cause of all problems like this is human error. If you haven't reached the place where there was a mistake by a human then you haven't gotten to the root of the problem. Might be bad machine design. Might be faulty programming. Might be operator error. Might be disregard or ignorance of safety protocols. Might be some combination of the above or a few things I haven't mentioned. But any failure in a machine made by man ultimately is the fault of a human. Might be an innocent mistake and the failure may not necessitate punishment but it will be human error make no mistake.
Well, enterprises don't want to pay 50% or more for comparable hardware on the basis of aesthetics.
People don't pay more for Apples devices because of the aesthetics - not much anyway. They're nice and all but what people really are paying for is the software. Apple at it's core is a software company. If you put Windows on a Mac or Android on an iPhone (easily done) you'd have no idea if it was made by Apple or Dell unless you looked at the logo. Apple doesn't make their own hardware but they do make their own software and that is what people pay extra for. Their hardware is nice but nothing really special. They just won't sell you their software (usually) unless it is attached to a piece of hardware.
Don't believe me that Apple is a software company? Here's Steve Jobs himself saying so.
Apple does make servers, nobody wants them.
They've made a number of half hearted stabs at making servers over the years but they've never really been serious about it.