So what is the purpose of this expenditure of presumably vast amounts of money to set up shell companies that legally separate individuals from activities while still allowing the individuals to exert full control? Is it just a tax shelter? Is it to limit legal liability when one of these firms does something hugely illegal? Corporate does not spend money without a reason.
Whole foods have been lowering prices for a while, and building more in house products to compete with places like Traders Joe, which has the one of the biggest conglomerate in world behind it.
This has lead to significant quality and customer service issues, which has in turn lead to people not seeing the point of spending money on products.
They have always had quite a bit of leeway on products. They tend to have very good values on staples whole grain, eggs, honey, but charge a lot more on the junk food that people want. This is why so many people it is outlandishly expensive. Likewise, they tend to sell highly selective meat which is also really expensive. Likely most of the savings in that basket was on meat.
If amazon is going to integrate Whole Foods with Amazon fresh, they do not need to match anyones prices, they just need to make it cheap enough so that it is an attractive delivery option, as they do with Prime Now.
On the other hand, if the get rid of the staple products that so many still go to Whole Food to buy, then they are going to lose a lot of customers. This happened back in the late 90's when they started adding more candy to the lineup and got rid of more traditional healthy products.
Whole Foods strategy of late has been to get customers drunk on wine and sell lots of high markup prepared foods. Obviously that has not worked out so well.
It is also that the US military runs on bribes and money laundering. There is never enough money, they always need more money, because there is aways some US officers, some US administrator, some US contractor that is taking 10% off the top.
With electronic payments that are 100% auditable this revenue stream disappears. I assume that these e-payment contractors chose to take a bribe to fail rather than a bullet.
I would say that the problem is that so many in education and government have succeeded with no real hard skills, so they believe that the ability to fill in circles on a sheet of paper is sufficient to predict success. For years, for instance, the inability to fill out circles on the SAT was used as I was put in f reason to deny a person an education.
In the late 70's I was put in front of a teletype and told to learn basic. In the 80's I was put in front of a terminal and told to learn Fortran. Then I was allowed to program an Apple, and a embedded CP/M machine. When I got a job during college it was working with MS Excel and Office, a job no on could have specifically trained me for because these products did not exists before I started using them in my very well paid job.
It is possible that all the kids can be coal miners and politicians, and that we can increase taxes enough for the few people with real skilled to pay or subsidize their salaries. In that case all we need to do in education is teach them to pass a test so we can pat ourselves on the back for being so clever as to create a unform work force.
It is also possible, that like me, they will be doing jobs that did not exist. It is possible that like me they will be expected to do work with technology that is less than a decade old. It could be that if we ignored the luddites that just want to protect the jobs for stupid people, we would be free to teach critical thinking and real skills.
Many years ago, when I was first programming on an Windows NT environment, not realizing how the incompetent developers of Windows were, I infected the entire office by opening an email. I also, many years ago, destroyed a window installation by downloading a media player. Fortunately it was on a machine that was easily reformatted and restored.
Phishing is not new. I get several emails, for Fedex, for my employer, for various social networks, trying to get me to click and give passwords. For young people, the mistake should have made before they entered the work force. For older people the mistake should have already been made.
When someone sends thousands of dollars to a Nigerian prince, we no longer blame the prince, anymore than we blame the con artists that gets a man to send $500 for a plane ticket.
A big problem is that some mobile platforms do not display in plain text, some won't even give the email address used.
A bigger problem is that due to the need to commercialize the web, it has become standard to push HTML emails, and standard for most email clients to automatically render the HTML. Before this, creating an effective phasing email was harder. It was harder to hide URLs. This is like banks adding interstitials to their log in process. It is good to advertise to a captive audience, it is beyond stupid to add a security vulnerability to what is suppose to be a secure process. At the least all secure emails should be plain text.
I agree developers should not be so dumb as to click phishing emails. That some would really does speak to the incompetence of the people writing these plugins. On the other hand most people are not as paranoid as those of us who have been doing this for years and have taken our jobs seriously.
I do think that all the fault lies with the developers. I have had the one time pad turned on for my forward facing google account. I never click trust this computer. I have it set up to receive emails, but not to send emails. It could be that Google should force third factor sign ins, but as they clearly care more about ease of use than even the basic level of modernsecurity, that will not happen.
It took 30 minutes to break into the safe using brute force. The advantage is that one can get into the safe without anyone knowing. On the other hand, safes rated for 30 minutes tend to be high end, soil there is not another faster way in, then this is a pretty good safe.
But yes, most businesses I know tend to hide important documents in plain sight. Safes are mostly to discourage causal theft and protection from fire.
Right now web sites are too intrusive, even dangerous. Many of the things that are good for desktop, such a drop downs or rollovers that are huge ware of real estate, are not god for mobile.
I don't know what are the implications of mobile. I do know that google will adopt any technology that allows it to monotize end users because it is an ad agency and that is what ad agencies do. OTOH, Apple charges for services, so the end users matter so things like wasting time and security matter.
We j ow in the web we will not have options, as we can't even turn off auto play.
This is clearly another slashvertisement from those who want to pressure apple into aceepting intrusive technology.
$20,000 surface hub. Should have been profitable. Sales were enourmous. Hundres(s) of jobs lost. Likely went to china.
Lack of Manufacturing in the US has more to do with workers wanting 8 hour days, lots of time off, and high pay. Nothing wrong with that, just hard to compete when they can get cushy office jobs at the same pay. Immigrants can do it, as they do with meat packing, but when hire immigrants here when you can hire them cheaper at home? Which is why Trump makes so much stuff in Mexico.
No one should be using flash anymore. It is criminal. It was criminal in 2000, except for certain targeted applications. I remember when Google has a brief affair with it for the stock charts. I thought that was a creative use. Otherwise it was primarily for encapsulating p0rn, which even the p0rn industry left long ago.
There are some non profits who have created some good actual applications using flash. Unfortunately, many of these do not have the funding to rewrite in a modern frameworks.
Sonic boom, as other have mentioned, is only a third the problem. A quieter sonic boom, and quieter aircraft, will allow the aircraft to arrive and depart from more locations. In the US the Concorde only flew in to placed like New York, and later Dallas, where they could reach the sea quickly and cross the sound barrier there.
A second problem was passenger capacity, which impacted ticket price. The Concorde only carries 100 people, while an Airbus carries over 800. If both cost the same to operate, you have a order of magnitude price increase. Because of the ticket price, the Concorde was only commercially viable in a very limited sense, kind of in the way that commercial LEO will be viable for the foreseeable future.
The third problem is fuel consumption. This is going to be what limits the commercial availability, because fuel is not really getting cheaper. There are designs that reduce fuel consumption, but the NASA design does not appear to be one of them. These designs actively and aggressively reshapes the air surfaces, and some of them are biplane like. Significantly managing the shape of the wing has been around my entire life, but I have seen no commercial aircraft that has implemented the technology.
When I look at the maps, it is hard for me to match what it does to the layout of the home. I tend to be a visual person, so I usually can map these kind of things to reality.
Also, I tend to move the robot to different parts of the house, so there would have to be some significant processing before anyone could use the data to generate an accurate map.
That said, there is a evidently a camera on the iRobot, so depending on the data is collected, there may be more than just a map. When I bought it i did not know about the camera. I guess we all need to look at keeping the robot limited to a LAN. If there is a world connection, then we may be looking at at another IoT security risk that most of us have not though about.
Stories from people who don't know how to use thier stuff making/. Increasingly annoying to use. Used to be/. was for nerds. Now it is for people who think they are rebeks because the have an Andriod instead of an iPhone.
Ir this could just be clickbait for the failing Wired magazine.
In any case, turn off all notifications by default, then turn on the ones that make sense to you. On iPhone you can specifically decide how and when to be notified. For example in mail only your favorited. I am sure the same is True for android.
The summary appears to be mostly false, at least by what I have seen and what the linked articles says.
"Mission Control at Johnson Space Center is a wreck " is highly misleading. I don't think there has been unlimited access to the area since I was a kid. Last time I went there you had to pay Space Center Houston a fee and take a lame tour. The kickstarter money, according to the linked article, will be spent acquiring equipment and furniture so they can"accurately portraying how the area looked the moment the moon landing took place on July 20, 1969." While this is a fine goal, I really doubt that they are going to do any net good. Tearing out fragile equipment that no one understand anymore and replacing it with even more fragile equipment that someone got off eBay, claiming that it is original. Seems like someone is obsessed with period instruments.
I am really concerned with a bunch of unskilled amateurs tearing apart mission control. It is part of my life and part of the gulf coast legacy. Sure, if there is damage and existing items need to stabilized or restored go for it. But if we are going to recreate something to make it better tourist trap, that it a problem.
I think that the priority will be tourist over historical integrity. The area has been really pushing for tourist dollars, heavily advertising i the boardwalk and expanding amenities. It is embarrassing to admit, but Space Center Houston is crap, and one reason is that it does prioritize aesthetics over the science. This is fine for the audience, little kids, but now they want to destroy mission control. Restore, yes. Try to return it to a the way it looked on a certain day? Madness. Like all engineering pursuit, Mission Control was always a work in progress, and pretending you can retcon it for tourist dollars is delusional.
I guess I differentiate a a developing countries, which encompasses most to the world that is not western Europe and North America, from the much less developed countries, which is limited to the African continent and the middle east. In the later case there are few if any services provided, so thing like trash pickup of course do not exist. However, the fact that trash is everywhere does not necessarily mean that they residents have money to waste on disposable good. It simply means that the few disposable good that are around end up in the street.
Everything we do is based on the idea that it is cheaper to throw stuff away than to reuse. Go to less developed countries and you don't see plastic bottles and plastic bags and food being thrown away like it worthless. You don't see 50 gallon garbage cans being emptied every week. You see a small truck collecting the trash of an entire neighborhood.
We have our expensive lifestyle, part of which is extreme safety. We have rules on how steep a ramp can be, no matter how expensive that makes construction. Every cafe must have a public toilet, no matter how expensive that makes the cafe, No one is going to make hand pulled taffy without wearing gloves.
The first time a pharmacists gives expired drugs to a parent for their child, and the child does not improve, of in the worst case dies, even if the death has nothing to do with the drug, we are going to see a multimillion lawsuit. Hell, we live in country where a child watch something on TV, then does it, and we see a multimillion dollar lawsuit.
So you know, maybe we can sell the drug at half price to medicare patients, but who is going to volunteer their parent as the one to take the expired drug over the non-expired drug?
It was an error in judgement on the part of HTC, not a technical error.
Today only Apple and Samsung and Google and MS trailing far behind, off computer consumer sales. This means that other firms have to be creative in monetizing the product.
This is no different from years back when only Apple and MS made money off PC sales. Most people who bought a MS loaded PC never really knew what they were going to get. OEM were trying to meet a price point, so you might have a fast CPU with a FSB so slow that the CPU spent most of the time idle. More than likely your computer would be so full of what we now call adware that unless you paid someone to clean it the computer was largely unusable.
You can't blame a company who loses US$100 million a quarter for trying everything it can to stay afloat. You can only blame them for using Android.
This brings up a important issue. The USPS exists to subsidize costs so that service to and from rural areas are not exponentially greater than service to dense urban areas. For a long time this facilitated communication.
The costs can be significantly differently. On the final mile delivery alone, while a dense urban setting might cost $60 a year per recipient in carrier salary, a city neighborhood twice that. a suburban recipient twice that again, and for a rural recipient might be twice that again.
To balance costs sometime measures are taken. For a city house mail is delivered to the door. For our rural property we installed mailboxes on the main road, along with a lockbox to receive packages. Until we installed the lockbox packages would be delivered. However, a first class letter would be delivered in nearly the same to all addresses for the same fee, even though the cost of a rural dress was significantly greater.
The problem we had at the rural address is that UPS would not make deliveries everyday. Usually they would wait until the had several packages, and then send a truck out. It would presumably still be very expensive for them to service the rural property.
I suspect that Amazon uses the most efficient service for the delivery. I get packages delivered from every major service, including the Amazon branded trucks. Likely without the USPS there are some addresses that would not get rapid delivery. Amazon is not going to pay astronomical fees to deliver to every customer.
It is interesting how the WSj claims to be about business, then conveniently forgets basic principles, or hopes that the readers are too dumb to have known them in the first place. Like the fact that there are standard fees for package delivery, the whole operation is based on subsidy for certain customers, even business customers. That in any operation, sine customers got a huge discount simply because the covered so many fixed costs, and were easy to service. While you do not want to be dependent on such customers, you are grateful for the easier money.
Amazon is simply a better operation than many, and the WSJ should be ashamed of itself for pushing socialist crap about 'equality' instead of the virtues of the free market. Amazon is not succeeding because the USPS is distorting the market. Amazon is succeeding because competitors like Jet.com think that customers have time to waste with 'gamification'.
Hits don't matter, subscribers do. So does a show generate interest the keeps people subscribing to the service. Not only keep subscribing, but do the shows generate new subscribers. Do the people who sign up for the free month continue as paid subscribers.
This latter, I suspect, is the reason show gets canceled. If the subscribers are putting their subscriptions on hiatus after binge watching, those subscribers are of no value. This is not like HBO who also gets carriage fees. Netflix is subscriber funded.
My only issue with this is that Netflix may not be very honest with the numbers. I dislike almost every movie Adam Sandler has made, but I did watch 10 minutes of the Netflix movie just to see how horrible it was. I often will give 10 minutes to anything, even the Croods. That meant that for months Adam Sandler was being recommended in my home screen. Was I one of the viewers that made the movie a hit? I hope not. I hope that it takes more than 10 minutes of watching for a show to count.
One should not conflate reading and writing. It is one on the greatest pedagogy mistakes of the 20th century. It was believed that students reading literature would produce good writers. This is true to the extent that watching professional basketball helps you play soccer. Any science teacher will also tell you the amount of time wasted teaching students who have only been taught literature to write a straightforward lab result.
In any case, scratching marks on a cave wall or piece of stone or skin is not an indication that there was much reading going on, any more than seeing numbers indicates that people are doing math. For one thing we need a standardized language, which in english is widely regarded to not have happened until Shakespeare. In China, there has in fact been published writing for 10,000 years, but again the question is who widespread was reading.
The first widely read novel in the west is taken to be Don Quixote, which is not 5,000 years old. At the turn of the 20th century, we were barely at 50% literacy rate world wide. Most literature before that was in the oral tradition. There was neither cheap publishing or marginally literate population.
Furthermore, anecdotal evidence is meaningless. I read Lucy, the paleontology book, in middle school. I was coding in elementary school. I could read Java long before i knew how to write in it. And all this has nothing to do with the price of tea in China.
Code is very compact, with deep meaning on every line, just like poetry. Now, when I started to code the language was context free, you always knew what a command did, so in that it was not like poetry. However, now languages with overloading are more context dependent, so the analogy is more apt. You re definitely not paid by the word as the way pulp novel writers were.
Whole foods has perhaps US$4 billion a year in sales. Amazon has been steadily growing and has perhaps US$130 billion a year in sales. Walmart also has US$130 a year in sale.
On the other hand Aldi and Trader Joe's bring in about half that world wide. It seems to me that we still need to be concerned about Wal Mart and their domination. Amazon is about the only venture that is going provide any real competition to Wal Mart, with discounted Amazon Prime to low income families, and the promise of affordable fresh vegetables and fruit through the Amazon Fresh program. In my town a family making three trips a month on the bus pays for the fresh membership.
I think the government may now be prioritizing east coast conservative corporate interests over the interests of voters, in the same way they prioritize legacy coal over the health interests of inner cities where the coal is burned.
Slashdot Mirror
So what is the purpose of this expenditure of presumably vast amounts of money to set up shell companies that legally separate individuals from activities while still allowing the individuals to exert full control? Is it just a tax shelter? Is it to limit legal liability when one of these firms does something hugely illegal? Corporate does not spend money without a reason.
At these prices, $43 for water, I doubt the will get many sales.
This has lead to significant quality and customer service issues, which has in turn lead to people not seeing the point of spending money on products.
They have always had quite a bit of leeway on products. They tend to have very good values on staples whole grain, eggs, honey, but charge a lot more on the junk food that people want. This is why so many people it is outlandishly expensive. Likewise, they tend to sell highly selective meat which is also really expensive. Likely most of the savings in that basket was on meat.
If amazon is going to integrate Whole Foods with Amazon fresh, they do not need to match anyones prices, they just need to make it cheap enough so that it is an attractive delivery option, as they do with Prime Now.
On the other hand, if the get rid of the staple products that so many still go to Whole Food to buy, then they are going to lose a lot of customers. This happened back in the late 90's when they started adding more candy to the lineup and got rid of more traditional healthy products.
Whole Foods strategy of late has been to get customers drunk on wine and sell lots of high markup prepared foods. Obviously that has not worked out so well.
It is also that the US military runs on bribes and money laundering. There is never enough money, they always need more money, because there is aways some US officers, some US administrator, some US contractor that is taking 10% off the top. With electronic payments that are 100% auditable this revenue stream disappears. I assume that these e-payment contractors chose to take a bribe to fail rather than a bullet.
In the late 70's I was put in front of a teletype and told to learn basic. In the 80's I was put in front of a terminal and told to learn Fortran. Then I was allowed to program an Apple, and a embedded CP/M machine. When I got a job during college it was working with MS Excel and Office, a job no on could have specifically trained me for because these products did not exists before I started using them in my very well paid job.
It is possible that all the kids can be coal miners and politicians, and that we can increase taxes enough for the few people with real skilled to pay or subsidize their salaries. In that case all we need to do in education is teach them to pass a test so we can pat ourselves on the back for being so clever as to create a unform work force.
It is also possible, that like me, they will be doing jobs that did not exist. It is possible that like me they will be expected to do work with technology that is less than a decade old. It could be that if we ignored the luddites that just want to protect the jobs for stupid people, we would be free to teach critical thinking and real skills.
The lack of scatter plot options basically has made it useless to me. I generally like the applications, but google has stopped regular updates.
Phishing is not new. I get several emails, for Fedex, for my employer, for various social networks, trying to get me to click and give passwords. For young people, the mistake should have made before they entered the work force. For older people the mistake should have already been made.
When someone sends thousands of dollars to a Nigerian prince, we no longer blame the prince, anymore than we blame the con artists that gets a man to send $500 for a plane ticket.
A bigger problem is that due to the need to commercialize the web, it has become standard to push HTML emails, and standard for most email clients to automatically render the HTML. Before this, creating an effective phasing email was harder. It was harder to hide URLs. This is like banks adding interstitials to their log in process. It is good to advertise to a captive audience, it is beyond stupid to add a security vulnerability to what is suppose to be a secure process. At the least all secure emails should be plain text.
I agree developers should not be so dumb as to click phishing emails. That some would really does speak to the incompetence of the people writing these plugins. On the other hand most people are not as paranoid as those of us who have been doing this for years and have taken our jobs seriously.
I do think that all the fault lies with the developers. I have had the one time pad turned on for my forward facing google account. I never click trust this computer. I have it set up to receive emails, but not to send emails. It could be that Google should force third factor sign ins, but as they clearly care more about ease of use than even the basic level of modernsecurity, that will not happen.
It took 30 minutes to break into the safe using brute force. The advantage is that one can get into the safe without anyone knowing. On the other hand, safes rated for 30 minutes tend to be high end, soil there is not another faster way in, then this is a pretty good safe. But yes, most businesses I know tend to hide important documents in plain sight. Safes are mostly to discourage causal theft and protection from fire.
I don't know what are the implications of mobile. I do know that google will adopt any technology that allows it to monotize end users because it is an ad agency and that is what ad agencies do. OTOH, Apple charges for services, so the end users matter so things like wasting time and security matter.
We j ow in the web we will not have options, as we can't even turn off auto play.
This is clearly another slashvertisement from those who want to pressure apple into aceepting intrusive technology.
Lack of Manufacturing in the US has more to do with workers wanting 8 hour days, lots of time off, and high pay. Nothing wrong with that, just hard to compete when they can get cushy office jobs at the same pay. Immigrants can do it, as they do with meat packing, but when hire immigrants here when you can hire them cheaper at home? Which is why Trump makes so much stuff in Mexico.
There are some non profits who have created some good actual applications using flash. Unfortunately, many of these do not have the funding to rewrite in a modern frameworks.
A second problem was passenger capacity, which impacted ticket price. The Concorde only carries 100 people, while an Airbus carries over 800. If both cost the same to operate, you have a order of magnitude price increase. Because of the ticket price, the Concorde was only commercially viable in a very limited sense, kind of in the way that commercial LEO will be viable for the foreseeable future.
The third problem is fuel consumption. This is going to be what limits the commercial availability, because fuel is not really getting cheaper. There are designs that reduce fuel consumption, but the NASA design does not appear to be one of them. These designs actively and aggressively reshapes the air surfaces, and some of them are biplane like. Significantly managing the shape of the wing has been around my entire life, but I have seen no commercial aircraft that has implemented the technology.
Also, I tend to move the robot to different parts of the house, so there would have to be some significant processing before anyone could use the data to generate an accurate map.
That said, there is a evidently a camera on the iRobot, so depending on the data is collected, there may be more than just a map. When I bought it i did not know about the camera. I guess we all need to look at keeping the robot limited to a LAN. If there is a world connection, then we may be looking at at another IoT security risk that most of us have not though about.
Ir this could just be clickbait for the failing Wired magazine.
In any case, turn off all notifications by default, then turn on the ones that make sense to you. On iPhone you can specifically decide how and when to be notified. For example in mail only your favorited. I am sure the same is True for android.
"Mission Control at Johnson Space Center is a wreck " is highly misleading. I don't think there has been unlimited access to the area since I was a kid. Last time I went there you had to pay Space Center Houston a fee and take a lame tour. The kickstarter money, according to the linked article, will be spent acquiring equipment and furniture so they can"accurately portraying how the area looked the moment the moon landing took place on July 20, 1969." While this is a fine goal, I really doubt that they are going to do any net good. Tearing out fragile equipment that no one understand anymore and replacing it with even more fragile equipment that someone got off eBay, claiming that it is original. Seems like someone is obsessed with period instruments.
I am really concerned with a bunch of unskilled amateurs tearing apart mission control. It is part of my life and part of the gulf coast legacy. Sure, if there is damage and existing items need to stabilized or restored go for it. But if we are going to recreate something to make it better tourist trap, that it a problem.
I think that the priority will be tourist over historical integrity. The area has been really pushing for tourist dollars, heavily advertising i the boardwalk and expanding amenities. It is embarrassing to admit, but Space Center Houston is crap, and one reason is that it does prioritize aesthetics over the science. This is fine for the audience, little kids, but now they want to destroy mission control. Restore, yes. Try to return it to a the way it looked on a certain day? Madness. Like all engineering pursuit, Mission Control was always a work in progress, and pretending you can retcon it for tourist dollars is delusional.
I guess I differentiate a a developing countries, which encompasses most to the world that is not western Europe and North America, from the much less developed countries, which is limited to the African continent and the middle east. In the later case there are few if any services provided, so thing like trash pickup of course do not exist. However, the fact that trash is everywhere does not necessarily mean that they residents have money to waste on disposable good. It simply means that the few disposable good that are around end up in the street.
We have our expensive lifestyle, part of which is extreme safety. We have rules on how steep a ramp can be, no matter how expensive that makes construction. Every cafe must have a public toilet, no matter how expensive that makes the cafe, No one is going to make hand pulled taffy without wearing gloves.
The first time a pharmacists gives expired drugs to a parent for their child, and the child does not improve, of in the worst case dies, even if the death has nothing to do with the drug, we are going to see a multimillion lawsuit. Hell, we live in country where a child watch something on TV, then does it, and we see a multimillion dollar lawsuit.
So you know, maybe we can sell the drug at half price to medicare patients, but who is going to volunteer their parent as the one to take the expired drug over the non-expired drug?
If the promise was humans who would do anything for arbitrary internet user for free, that is another issue.
Today only Apple and Samsung and Google and MS trailing far behind, off computer consumer sales. This means that other firms have to be creative in monetizing the product.
This is no different from years back when only Apple and MS made money off PC sales. Most people who bought a MS loaded PC never really knew what they were going to get. OEM were trying to meet a price point, so you might have a fast CPU with a FSB so slow that the CPU spent most of the time idle. More than likely your computer would be so full of what we now call adware that unless you paid someone to clean it the computer was largely unusable.
You can't blame a company who loses US$100 million a quarter for trying everything it can to stay afloat. You can only blame them for using Android.
The costs can be significantly differently. On the final mile delivery alone, while a dense urban setting might cost $60 a year per recipient in carrier salary, a city neighborhood twice that. a suburban recipient twice that again, and for a rural recipient might be twice that again.
To balance costs sometime measures are taken. For a city house mail is delivered to the door. For our rural property we installed mailboxes on the main road, along with a lockbox to receive packages. Until we installed the lockbox packages would be delivered. However, a first class letter would be delivered in nearly the same to all addresses for the same fee, even though the cost of a rural dress was significantly greater.
The problem we had at the rural address is that UPS would not make deliveries everyday. Usually they would wait until the had several packages, and then send a truck out. It would presumably still be very expensive for them to service the rural property.
I suspect that Amazon uses the most efficient service for the delivery. I get packages delivered from every major service, including the Amazon branded trucks. Likely without the USPS there are some addresses that would not get rapid delivery. Amazon is not going to pay astronomical fees to deliver to every customer.
It is interesting how the WSj claims to be about business, then conveniently forgets basic principles, or hopes that the readers are too dumb to have known them in the first place. Like the fact that there are standard fees for package delivery, the whole operation is based on subsidy for certain customers, even business customers. That in any operation, sine customers got a huge discount simply because the covered so many fixed costs, and were easy to service. While you do not want to be dependent on such customers, you are grateful for the easier money.
Amazon is simply a better operation than many, and the WSJ should be ashamed of itself for pushing socialist crap about 'equality' instead of the virtues of the free market. Amazon is not succeeding because the USPS is distorting the market. Amazon is succeeding because competitors like Jet.com think that customers have time to waste with 'gamification'.
This latter, I suspect, is the reason show gets canceled. If the subscribers are putting their subscriptions on hiatus after binge watching, those subscribers are of no value. This is not like HBO who also gets carriage fees. Netflix is subscriber funded.
My only issue with this is that Netflix may not be very honest with the numbers. I dislike almost every movie Adam Sandler has made, but I did watch 10 minutes of the Netflix movie just to see how horrible it was. I often will give 10 minutes to anything, even the Croods. That meant that for months Adam Sandler was being recommended in my home screen. Was I one of the viewers that made the movie a hit? I hope not. I hope that it takes more than 10 minutes of watching for a show to count.
In any case, scratching marks on a cave wall or piece of stone or skin is not an indication that there was much reading going on, any more than seeing numbers indicates that people are doing math. For one thing we need a standardized language, which in english is widely regarded to not have happened until Shakespeare. In China, there has in fact been published writing for 10,000 years, but again the question is who widespread was reading.
The first widely read novel in the west is taken to be Don Quixote, which is not 5,000 years old. At the turn of the 20th century, we were barely at 50% literacy rate world wide. Most literature before that was in the oral tradition. There was neither cheap publishing or marginally literate population.
Furthermore, anecdotal evidence is meaningless. I read Lucy, the paleontology book, in middle school. I was coding in elementary school. I could read Java long before i knew how to write in it. And all this has nothing to do with the price of tea in China.
Code is very compact, with deep meaning on every line, just like poetry. Now, when I started to code the language was context free, you always knew what a command did, so in that it was not like poetry. However, now languages with overloading are more context dependent, so the analogy is more apt. You re definitely not paid by the word as the way pulp novel writers were.
On the other hand Aldi and Trader Joe's bring in about half that world wide. It seems to me that we still need to be concerned about Wal Mart and their domination. Amazon is about the only venture that is going provide any real competition to Wal Mart, with discounted Amazon Prime to low income families, and the promise of affordable fresh vegetables and fruit through the Amazon Fresh program. In my town a family making three trips a month on the bus pays for the fresh membership.
I think the government may now be prioritizing east coast conservative corporate interests over the interests of voters, in the same way they prioritize legacy coal over the health interests of inner cities where the coal is burned.