If the customer had to directly pay the actual price for the product, they would hold companies accountable for the price and quality of products and services, pretty much exactly the way they would if they had to directly pay for their health care. As long as someone else has to foot the bill or it is "spread around" through various ways of distancing you from it, the less you give a fuck what the actual prices are.
Exactly what I was thinking. In an age when you can be hassled or even arrested for taking a picture of a landmark, you better believe you risk being arrested for "orchestrating a terrorist plot" and using that camera going through the system to help scope out weak-points. Remember, we're no longer a sane society.
I'd pay $2/mo to get rid of all the "featured" panels on the interface and all the juvenile crap from teenage morons that cater to a massive mouth-breathing audience of children (I keep seeing shit from guys named Fred and Tobuscus and Pewdiepie and other crap all the time). For that matter, dump all the "boobs and brain-dead response videos" crap and I'll definitely pay $2/mo for what's left.
I primarily watch stuff like lectures from Stanford, hardware demos, high end hardware builds being benchmarked, etc. Yet, what do they keep spamming me with? Fucking idiot teenagers spending 20 minutes showing you how to do your makeup or spending ten minutes showing you everything they just bought at the mall (seriously, this is apparently a whole genre of videos now).
How can a company with such a claim to targeted advertising now get this shit right?
You hold the public in too high esteem. The majority of Americans would say "he musta been guilty or they wouldn'ta droned 'em".
People don't want due process anymore. They don't believe in innocence until guilt is proven. They have absolutely no sense of the civil liberty they are rightfully owed other than when it comes to wanting weed to be legalized because "textiles, dude".
Calling reddit an "intellectual forum" suggests you've never had the misfortune of dealing with it. Whenever Slashdot feels like a decayed and festering cesspool, just go have a look at the idiotic drivel over there and you'll realize just how good we still have it here -- even despite the influx of idiotic political bullshit normally found in Disqus comments at the bottom of CBS news articles linked to from Drudge and the addition of all the slashvertisements of the last few years.
And don't forget the FBI doing things like requesting (and who knows what they're doing when they're not politely requesting) to send an email with a payload that would jack the customer's computer (in one case, an anonymous email account that they wanted to infect the owning computer so they could use the webcam/skype/etc to view the identify of the person using it -- and don't forget, doing that would circumvent encryption since you could gather data on the computer pre-encryption).
The concept of privacy is over and people who think you're being monitored "retroactively, down the road" are behind the times. It's real-time and it's across the board (and, as per recent cases apparently, can also be retroactive so you can go back and retrieve information like phone calls in-full that occurred prior to when you had the wire tap to record them).
It really depends on the company and the product in question. It'd be pointless to buy an extended warranty on a $130 printer at Staples, but it'd be a very good idea to get the AppleCare for most Apple products, since they are extremely good about dealing with problems (my laptop developed a severe series of blemishes where the coating on the unibody just completely wore away after the initial coverage, but within the Apple Care coverage -- I sent them photos and had me stop in at the nearest Apple Store for a brand new replacement with absolutely no hassle).
I'd also get an extended warranty for an expensive television. Maybe not the warranty the store is trying to sell you, but you can do your research and find various extended warranty companies (I've found SquareTrade to be fine enough). If you spend $4,000 on a real project display and you can get a three year extended warranty for $200 which includes a free bulb replacement (easily $130+), then that's a pretty good deal.
Most recently, I bought a $400 XBox 360 that developed an issue with reading discs about 80% of the time and made a concerning grinding noise as it spun the disc, trying to read them. Because Microsoft's warranties are so stupidly fucking short, I had to rely on my SquareTrade warranty (which I think was $30 or so?). I filed a claim online, they sent me a customized box and packing materials just for the console and I had it shipped, fixed, and returned to my home in about ten days. That was well fucking worth the $30.
I would generally say "extended warranties are a scam", but as with many things, there are exceptions and you have to know when and where those are. A good rule of thumb is probably to just never buy the extended warranty they're pushing on you at the showroom for *anything*. Period. That's just an upsell to pad their pockets and nothing more. Probably also don't bother getting a warranty on fairly cheap things - the exception being something like an XBox 360 which is not *almost* cheap, but also known to have serious failure rates. I saw it as an investment with an absolute eventual return - and it paid off.
The unfortunate downside is that as we fall to the bottom of the international list of math and science performance by country, this only means that your kids will be the smartest burger flipper of all the burger flippers in this country, while the real math and sciences are handled by what we once considered "third world nations".
That's all new-age dandy and whatever, but does he still not comprehend that these things have nothing to do with Science and therefore don't belong in a science classroom? By his definition, science should be an all-inclusive class that covers everything, including music and television and english literature and numerology and astrology.
I think I speak for most gaming enthusiasts when I say "focus on hardware that will be more robust for a better part of this next generation and the games that will be on it and skip the gimmicks".
No, but that truck can trot around town with a strong sense of self-respect, knowing that everyone else isn't pointing at it and laughing because it's tugging around a tiny trailer on the back of it.:)
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Where is the extra jostling and handling?
Grocery store person picks groceries, puts it on vehicle, delivers it to my house, unpacks it. I go to the store and pick groceries, put it in my vehicle, deliver it to my house, and unpack it.
Seems like the same number of steps and handlings to me. They seem to use reasonable care in transport, also. I mean, if they didn't, all those eggs wouldn't make it to the doorstep in one un-smashed piece, either.
Hey, I'd love that. For most of my life, I always thought it would be fucking awesome if my company provided company-housing on-campus and you could just live, eat, recreate, and work all in the same few blocks.
Yeah, but you're not going to get that stuff at the supermarket, anyway. I'm sure you get a shittier choice when you order groceries than if you picked them out yourself, but when you're talking about the typical supermarket, even the best produce and meat that you could personally pick out within their store is just the tasteless crap meant to survive long trips without damage and look shiny and colorful under a light, instead of tasting good. I simply can not compare meat from a real butcher to the shit they offer in supermarkets or produce from a farmer's market to the shit in a store (holy fuck, growing up on grocery store food, I had no idea how delicious a real fresh pineapple that hasn't been grown to best handle a semi-truck across the country actually tasted).
Of course, it's all like double or triple the price of the shittier stuff in the supermarket, too, so . . . you win some; you use some.
I'm not sure where you live, but I haven't known of a "smaller grocery store" in my life time. It isn't the "small mom and pop grocer" who is offering these delivery services. At least, as far as I know (but as I said, I don't even know where such groceries still exist). It's the biggest chains in the country that are offering these delivery services. We're talking your Albertsons, your Safeways, your Krogers/Ralphs, etc.
As far as I know, the mom and pop grocers have all been pushed out by the chains.
I don't believe this is done in the states. I have never seen the backend of the systems used for online ordering from supermarkets, but they seem very rudimentary (they've only recently seemed to master the art of having a photo of each item in their inventory and usually having it actually be the correct item that it states it is). As far as I can tell, most services in the states simply have a certain range of hours when they deliver (9am to 8pm, for example) and then give you a selection of available two hour windows that you can choose. They then seem to be broken down into about 30m slots (but these are not for you to choose). They might be figuring out the most efficient way to plot the delivery with the trucks they have on-hand making the deliveries they need to make as best they can, but I really don't think they go so far as to shape what delivery slots you can choose outside of a simple "sorry, this slot is booked".
If someone is familiar with the back-ends of these services (Safeway, Albertsons, Kroger, etc) -- I would really love to know if that isn't the case. Of course, grocery delivery has only really picked up in the states in the last three or four years and only in some very heavily populated cities - so there may still be much growth and evolution to undergo before these things are refined.
Of course it is America-centric. In a little city/town or even country that you can walk across during lunch, you're not going to have nearly the same issues as the vast expanses you have in the states, where it can take 20-60 minutes to drive across the city and you have fewer stores at greater distances. There aren't really "corner markets" in the states (except maybe in NYC, where the density of the population sort of makes every block almost a world unto itself).
I also don't see how bicycling or walking to the store many times a week instead of once every week or two (seriously, do you know how much time you're going to be spending if you're going shopping every couple of days?!) is going to make your fruit or other goods fresher. Most Americans don't have much choice but to shop at the nearest local supermarket. Most supermarkets do not carry great produce or meat. Everything is heavily treated by chemicals and modified such that the produce is large, pretty, shiny, handles travel over long distances with minimal damage, and as a result absolutely fucking tasteless. Same pretty much goes for meats and dairy.
If you want actual healthy, delicious, fresh produce and meat, you have to go to something like a farmer's market and a butcher. Usually separate places. Usually even further away and less frequently found than the supermarkets. That means more trips to more separate places and you're not going to do that on foot or by bicycle.
Call it "america-centric" if you like. It *is* america-centric. In case you didn't notice, it's washington.edu. Can you guess where Washington state is?
I mean, seriously, this is almost like when I hear my european friends laugh and ridicule Americans, in general, because they aren't "well traveled". After all, my european friends often lived in places that were an hour or two drive away from about five other countries. Guess what? I can drive about 24-30hrs non-stop in every direction and still not leave this country, because it's enormous.
Yes, it would be fantastic if we all were able to live in small cloistered communities with all of our necessary goods, services, recreational spots, and employment within a six block walk and then we could all have super-gigabit internet to every one of our houses and nobody would have to own a car and we could all live in tiny row-houses and so on. Unfortunately, that is not the case. People - even in heavily populated areas - often live 30-90 minutes away from where they go to work and are a decent drive away from their nearest shitty supermarket and because of their long stressful commutes and long work weeks and long work hours (no siestas or endless bank holidays, here), the last thing they have time for is a daily three mile walk to the supermarket to shop for groceries that they're then going to go home and cook with all that imaginary free time they have available.
I've seen many families who barely even have time to sit down and eat, much less cook an actual real meal, and even much less go shopping every day or two on top of that.
Oh - and the tap water -- pretty shitty in many places. I would presume that's why a lot of people buy bottled water (we all know that bottled water just comes from a local water source in a factory, usually, but at least it is filtered). I don't really know why people don't just filter their water in their home, though. Cheaper and a lot less hassle.
That's probably very awesome in the Netherlands, but in the states someone would either swerve their car into the bike lane and run you over for a laugh or steal/damage your bike the moment you locked it up and went into the supermarket. There are a couple types of hipster bikes that people ride around without too much trouble, but I think this style of bike is just a bit over the line of what people will let you ride around without feeling obligated to harass you for it.
You know what? One's pride is worth a little bit of spent carbon. If the option is burning an extra ton of CO2 versus looking like a prissy dumbass riding a bicycle with a trailer behind it, I say burn the extra ton of CO2. Everyone will understand.
Slashdot Mirror
If the customer had to directly pay the actual price for the product, they would hold companies accountable for the price and quality of products and services, pretty much exactly the way they would if they had to directly pay for their health care. As long as someone else has to foot the bill or it is "spread around" through various ways of distancing you from it, the less you give a fuck what the actual prices are.
Exactly what I was thinking. In an age when you can be hassled or even arrested for taking a picture of a landmark, you better believe you risk being arrested for "orchestrating a terrorist plot" and using that camera going through the system to help scope out weak-points. Remember, we're no longer a sane society.
I'd pay $2/mo to get rid of all the "featured" panels on the interface and all the juvenile crap from teenage morons that cater to a massive mouth-breathing audience of children (I keep seeing shit from guys named Fred and Tobuscus and Pewdiepie and other crap all the time). For that matter, dump all the "boobs and brain-dead response videos" crap and I'll definitely pay $2/mo for what's left.
I primarily watch stuff like lectures from Stanford, hardware demos, high end hardware builds being benchmarked, etc. Yet, what do they keep spamming me with? Fucking idiot teenagers spending 20 minutes showing you how to do your makeup or spending ten minutes showing you everything they just bought at the mall (seriously, this is apparently a whole genre of videos now).
How can a company with such a claim to targeted advertising now get this shit right?
You hold the public in too high esteem. The majority of Americans would say "he musta been guilty or they wouldn'ta droned 'em".
People don't want due process anymore. They don't believe in innocence until guilt is proven. They have absolutely no sense of the civil liberty they are rightfully owed other than when it comes to wanting weed to be legalized because "textiles, dude".
Calling reddit an "intellectual forum" suggests you've never had the misfortune of dealing with it. Whenever Slashdot feels like a decayed and festering cesspool, just go have a look at the idiotic drivel over there and you'll realize just how good we still have it here -- even despite the influx of idiotic political bullshit normally found in Disqus comments at the bottom of CBS news articles linked to from Drudge and the addition of all the slashvertisements of the last few years.
And don't forget the FBI doing things like requesting (and who knows what they're doing when they're not politely requesting) to send an email with a payload that would jack the customer's computer (in one case, an anonymous email account that they wanted to infect the owning computer so they could use the webcam/skype/etc to view the identify of the person using it -- and don't forget, doing that would circumvent encryption since you could gather data on the computer pre-encryption).
http://gawker.com/judge-tells-fbi-they-cannot-use-webcams-to-spy-on-peopl-483855078
The concept of privacy is over and people who think you're being monitored "retroactively, down the road" are behind the times. It's real-time and it's across the board (and, as per recent cases apparently, can also be retroactive so you can go back and retrieve information like phone calls in-full that occurred prior to when you had the wire tap to record them).
It really depends on the company and the product in question. It'd be pointless to buy an extended warranty on a $130 printer at Staples, but it'd be a very good idea to get the AppleCare for most Apple products, since they are extremely good about dealing with problems (my laptop developed a severe series of blemishes where the coating on the unibody just completely wore away after the initial coverage, but within the Apple Care coverage -- I sent them photos and had me stop in at the nearest Apple Store for a brand new replacement with absolutely no hassle).
I'd also get an extended warranty for an expensive television. Maybe not the warranty the store is trying to sell you, but you can do your research and find various extended warranty companies (I've found SquareTrade to be fine enough). If you spend $4,000 on a real project display and you can get a three year extended warranty for $200 which includes a free bulb replacement (easily $130+), then that's a pretty good deal.
Most recently, I bought a $400 XBox 360 that developed an issue with reading discs about 80% of the time and made a concerning grinding noise as it spun the disc, trying to read them. Because Microsoft's warranties are so stupidly fucking short, I had to rely on my SquareTrade warranty (which I think was $30 or so?). I filed a claim online, they sent me a customized box and packing materials just for the console and I had it shipped, fixed, and returned to my home in about ten days. That was well fucking worth the $30.
I would generally say "extended warranties are a scam", but as with many things, there are exceptions and you have to know when and where those are. A good rule of thumb is probably to just never buy the extended warranty they're pushing on you at the showroom for *anything*. Period. That's just an upsell to pad their pockets and nothing more. Probably also don't bother getting a warranty on fairly cheap things - the exception being something like an XBox 360 which is not *almost* cheap, but also known to have serious failure rates. I saw it as an investment with an absolute eventual return - and it paid off.
Wow, you have super shitty luck. I've never had an issue in fifteen years.
You don't have your credit card number memorized?
You don't seem to understand what Science is whatsoever.
The unfortunate downside is that as we fall to the bottom of the international list of math and science performance by country, this only means that your kids will be the smartest burger flipper of all the burger flippers in this country, while the real math and sciences are handled by what we once considered "third world nations".
That's all new-age dandy and whatever, but does he still not comprehend that these things have nothing to do with Science and therefore don't belong in a science classroom? By his definition, science should be an all-inclusive class that covers everything, including music and television and english literature and numerology and astrology.
I think I speak for most gaming enthusiasts when I say "focus on hardware that will be more robust for a better part of this next generation and the games that will be on it and skip the gimmicks".
Yes, but is your bicycle made of fair-trade hemp and wearing a castro hat and a Che tee-shirt and are you puffing down cloves as you peddle?
No, but that truck can trot around town with a strong sense of self-respect, knowing that everyone else isn't pointing at it and laughing because it's tugging around a tiny trailer on the back of it. :)
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Where is the extra jostling and handling?
Grocery store person picks groceries, puts it on vehicle, delivers it to my house, unpacks it.
I go to the store and pick groceries, put it in my vehicle, deliver it to my house, and unpack it.
Seems like the same number of steps and handlings to me. They seem to use reasonable care in transport, also. I mean, if they didn't, all those eggs wouldn't make it to the doorstep in one un-smashed piece, either.
Hey, I'd love that. For most of my life, I always thought it would be fucking awesome if my company provided company-housing on-campus and you could just live, eat, recreate, and work all in the same few blocks.
Yeah, but you're not going to get that stuff at the supermarket, anyway. I'm sure you get a shittier choice when you order groceries than if you picked them out yourself, but when you're talking about the typical supermarket, even the best produce and meat that you could personally pick out within their store is just the tasteless crap meant to survive long trips without damage and look shiny and colorful under a light, instead of tasting good. I simply can not compare meat from a real butcher to the shit they offer in supermarkets or produce from a farmer's market to the shit in a store (holy fuck, growing up on grocery store food, I had no idea how delicious a real fresh pineapple that hasn't been grown to best handle a semi-truck across the country actually tasted).
Of course, it's all like double or triple the price of the shittier stuff in the supermarket, too, so . . . you win some; you use some.
I'm not sure where you live, but I haven't known of a "smaller grocery store" in my life time. It isn't the "small mom and pop grocer" who is offering these delivery services. At least, as far as I know (but as I said, I don't even know where such groceries still exist). It's the biggest chains in the country that are offering these delivery services. We're talking your Albertsons, your Safeways, your Krogers/Ralphs, etc.
As far as I know, the mom and pop grocers have all been pushed out by the chains.
Yes, but can you tell us where you get your hemp sandles, tight lady-jeans, and smug sense of self-satisfaction?
Most people's "local market" isn't so local.
I don't believe this is done in the states. I have never seen the backend of the systems used for online ordering from supermarkets, but they seem very rudimentary (they've only recently seemed to master the art of having a photo of each item in their inventory and usually having it actually be the correct item that it states it is). As far as I can tell, most services in the states simply have a certain range of hours when they deliver (9am to 8pm, for example) and then give you a selection of available two hour windows that you can choose. They then seem to be broken down into about 30m slots (but these are not for you to choose). They might be figuring out the most efficient way to plot the delivery with the trucks they have on-hand making the deliveries they need to make as best they can, but I really don't think they go so far as to shape what delivery slots you can choose outside of a simple "sorry, this slot is booked".
If someone is familiar with the back-ends of these services (Safeway, Albertsons, Kroger, etc) -- I would really love to know if that isn't the case. Of course, grocery delivery has only really picked up in the states in the last three or four years and only in some very heavily populated cities - so there may still be much growth and evolution to undergo before these things are refined.
Of course it is America-centric. In a little city/town or even country that you can walk across during lunch, you're not going to have nearly the same issues as the vast expanses you have in the states, where it can take 20-60 minutes to drive across the city and you have fewer stores at greater distances. There aren't really "corner markets" in the states (except maybe in NYC, where the density of the population sort of makes every block almost a world unto itself).
I also don't see how bicycling or walking to the store many times a week instead of once every week or two (seriously, do you know how much time you're going to be spending if you're going shopping every couple of days?!) is going to make your fruit or other goods fresher. Most Americans don't have much choice but to shop at the nearest local supermarket. Most supermarkets do not carry great produce or meat. Everything is heavily treated by chemicals and modified such that the produce is large, pretty, shiny, handles travel over long distances with minimal damage, and as a result absolutely fucking tasteless. Same pretty much goes for meats and dairy.
If you want actual healthy, delicious, fresh produce and meat, you have to go to something like a farmer's market and a butcher. Usually separate places. Usually even further away and less frequently found than the supermarkets. That means more trips to more separate places and you're not going to do that on foot or by bicycle.
Call it "america-centric" if you like. It *is* america-centric. In case you didn't notice, it's washington.edu. Can you guess where Washington state is?
I mean, seriously, this is almost like when I hear my european friends laugh and ridicule Americans, in general, because they aren't "well traveled". After all, my european friends often lived in places that were an hour or two drive away from about five other countries. Guess what? I can drive about 24-30hrs non-stop in every direction and still not leave this country, because it's enormous.
Yes, it would be fantastic if we all were able to live in small cloistered communities with all of our necessary goods, services, recreational spots, and employment within a six block walk and then we could all have super-gigabit internet to every one of our houses and nobody would have to own a car and we could all live in tiny row-houses and so on. Unfortunately, that is not the case. People - even in heavily populated areas - often live 30-90 minutes away from where they go to work and are a decent drive away from their nearest shitty supermarket and because of their long stressful commutes and long work weeks and long work hours (no siestas or endless bank holidays, here), the last thing they have time for is a daily three mile walk to the supermarket to shop for groceries that they're then going to go home and cook with all that imaginary free time they have available.
I've seen many families who barely even have time to sit down and eat, much less cook an actual real meal, and even much less go shopping every day or two on top of that.
Oh - and the tap water -- pretty shitty in many places. I would presume that's why a lot of people buy bottled water (we all know that bottled water just comes from a local water source in a factory, usually, but at least it is filtered). I don't really know why people don't just filter their water in their home, though. Cheaper and a lot less hassle.
That's probably very awesome in the Netherlands, but in the states someone would either swerve their car into the bike lane and run you over for a laugh or steal/damage your bike the moment you locked it up and went into the supermarket. There are a couple types of hipster bikes that people ride around without too much trouble, but I think this style of bike is just a bit over the line of what people will let you ride around without feeling obligated to harass you for it.
You know what? One's pride is worth a little bit of spent carbon. If the option is burning an extra ton of CO2 versus looking like a prissy dumbass riding a bicycle with a trailer behind it, I say burn the extra ton of CO2. Everyone will understand.