Plenty of brands, any of them made with decent quality? If so, keep watching that brand for the next few years and watch the cost of production drop as the supplier relationship matures. It's quite obvious how it drops, thinner cloth, thinner more widely spaced stitching, etc.
I work with a group of people who are all "smart enough" to automate most of their work, but they don't do it. Instead, they procrastinate, drag things out, and then when the deadline approaches, it's "too late" to employ automated techniques and they just hand-craft a solution and ship it. Someday, the company will lose out to competitors who do automate their work more effectively, but that will take decades before the competition can both manufacture a better, cheaper product and shift the customer base to start buying it instead of ours (10-20 year replacement cycle, strong brand loyalty, low price sensitivity in the market, etc.)
They only sprout in pairs with Walgreens. It's a tossup which one pops first, but once the first one has waited until the traffic analysis is certain enough to fund a loan it is virtually certain to demonstrate from parking lot traffic studies that a 2nd drug store in the same location could also be profitable.
In Florida, the small towns about an hour away from the coast are the particular victims of this. They've got a WalMart, a couple of grocery stores, a couple of drug stores, a Dollar General or two, and everything in the WalMart is priced to compete with CVS or Walgreens.
Drive an hour into the "big town" on the coast and then WalMart is priced to compete with Target, et.al. - but according to the IRS, that 100 mile round trip costs you $55, so you'd better need a lot of stuff if you're going to be making the trip to save money.
So, yeah, most HF tools are absolute garbage, but that $3 pneumatic cutoff wheel? Jeez, when have you ever found better value for money? The air-fittings cost more than the tool, and luckily I have some lubricant I can use from other pneumatic tools - I bought the cutoff wheel because it was so damn cheap and I already had all the fittings, compressor, etc. About a year later, I wanted to cut off about 100 nail tips inside an attic to make it a safer play space for the kids and that wheel just ate them like nothing and is still spinning.
I do somewhat regret the $200 chinese trailer kit I bought there - on one side of the value analysis, it did the job at hand, and did it well, at the lowest possible price. On the other hand, now 8 years later, I've got an ugly, peeled-paint, rusting thing that I should just throw away, but the damn thing still works, so I have to look at it and be constantly reminded of the $300 I saved compared to another trailer I might have bought for the same job that would look better sitting outside the garage now. I suppose when the metric wheel bearings give out I will finally ditch it, but like so many other cheap tools, it just keeps on doing the job - improbably long for the price paid.
F- yeah, WalMart shoppers perpetuate it, but not traveling 40 miles to the next town to shop because WalMart drove all the local competition out of business, oh, wait, they did that in the next town too....
It's completely irrational when the same underwear you bought in 2001 for $3.88 lasted 5 years, but the similar (only offered option) underwear you bought in 2006 for $2.88 only lasts for 1 year.
WalMart drives their suppliers to do this, mercilessly, and there's often a huge gap between the WalMart underwear and the "next best" option for $12.50 a pair that also only lasts 5 years.
At what point does this race to the bottom on prices result in nothing but garbage products?
I think that point came somewhere in the 1990s.
Today, I go to WalMart to buy disposables, like diapers, sun-screen, branded anti-freeze and motor oil - things that alternate suppliers have jacked up to 2.5x the cost for the same commodity. It's remarkable how much other crap they sell, and how little of it we ever buy.
Price alone driving all decisions has been WalMart's creed for decades, and it really does make visible terrible impacts on product quality as products "mature" in their WalMart distribution cycle.
What's a shame is that so many other retailers follow them - buying from the same suppliers, getting the same cheaped-out products and just selling them in a slightly better smelling store for a few cents more. I really wish that competing retailers like Target would push their suppliers for increased quality at the same or very similar pricing instead of decreased prices with no respect to product quality.
Something else to remember about WalMart (besides the horror of the bathroom, should you need it), is that they have the "lowest price guarantee - in your neighborhood." If you drive 15 miles to another WalMart where there are competitive retailers in the city, you can find prices varying by as much as +50% in the WalMart "conveniently located" in the town where they've driven all their competition out of business, especially on smaller $3-5 items, $2.99 in the city, $4.99 in the country for the exact same item that is available for $3.15 from Target in the city and only available for $6.99 from CVS in the country.
People come out hard against one form of energy production or another, the truth is that they all have their costs, and the ones that appear better today mostly do so because they haven't been rolled out big like coal, so they haven't been fully analyzed for all the external costs.
Yes, some are better than others, and I put solar high on the "good" list, probably followed by wind, but they will both start to lose their appeal as they scale up - I don't think to a point as bad as coal was in the 1960s, but they will not look as attractive as they do now while they're new and cool.
As coal declines and wind power ramps up, those numbers will trade places.
I'm not saying don't build wind turbines because they're going to wipe out the migratory species, I am saying that if you stand under a turbine in an area where birds are flying near the blades, you'll see birds that were killed by it lying on the ground.
Over time, we'll cull the species that can't avoid the blades and deaths will decline - a similar thing happened with pigeons that stood on the tracks of the Miami metro-mover.
it was the fact that the test this time was run it was done so without meeting the initial test parameters...
And the political appointees at the plant overrode the engineers on the project because the lead on the project was one of the sons of an appointee (shades of the Challenger disaster).
One of the engineer's sons is a Slashdotter and has written frequently about how that went down. "Shocker" that it's not in the official Soviet record, but it's a far more believable story.
And, in the "told you so" vein, they wouldn't have been in such a risk taking mood if they hadn't been under pressure from the Cold war to do more with less.
On the plus side, everyone learned a lot from Chernobyl. Including that the "radioactive wasteland" that a meltdown was supposed to produce was an imaginary problem...
Yeah, instead it produces a radioactive exclusion zone, where even on its fringes only old people can live without substantially increasing their cancer risk. And cancer rates already doubled during the industrial revolution, without the lifespan increasing sufficiently to account for the difference. And we learned fuck-all.
Also... the exclusion zone is better for wildlife than "normal" forest preserves where humans can still enter. Not saying it's "good" for wildlife per-se, but it's better for wildlife than co-existence pressure from H. sapiens.
Bullshit. Letting a commercial company produce a reactor vulnerable to meltdown, allowing it to irradiate a populated region for hundreds of years, and then let the company declare itself bankrupt after that event is hardly cheap or cost effective.
Fukushima is the first such example of such a disaster in a western economy. Chernobyl was a failure induced by the USSR's response to cold war pressures - they knew how to build safer reactors, but they chose to live dangerously and operate more less expensive reactors instead. In the west, we can afford to build safer reactors, but instead, politically, we have chosen to grandfather the existing ones past their original design lives and block construction of newer, safer designs - that finally came home to roost in Fukushima - somewhat ironic for the country that also suffered the only atomic strikes during wartime.
Fukushima is a horror story, and a tremendously costly event, but Three Mile Island+Chernobyl+Fukushima+every other nuclear accident, ever, are not even close to as costly as the cumulative damage of coal power to-date. Strip-mines to feed coal power plants consume far more land than radiation exclusion zones, and the out of control coal mine fires are even less eco-friendly than the radiation exclusion zones.
Kill birds, dam rivers, gobble up real-estate and cover it with semi-toxic panels for solar, spew sulfur and mercury into the air, all forms of electricity production have their prices.
When the ash pile collapses into the nearby stream and poisons everything downstream for miles? Generally, the power company gets bailout help from the local government and zero liability for damages. Whether that's backed by an official law, or just common practice between utilities and government, it's what's happened again and again for coal and other power generation plants that poison their local environment, both subtly with incompletely scrubbed stack emissions, and dramatically with things like fly-ash avalanches.
Nuclear is as expensive as we make it, just like wind, solar, and gas benefit from subsidies and lax regulations, nuclear is suffering from (perhaps justified) regulatory costs and lack of substantial subsidies.
It was the de-facto video delivery standard. BBC, security cameras, YouTube (for a while), everything played on Flash and most things only played on Flash for a while.
I'd go for DRM, simple and straight up, as the primary sinker of the Flash ship.
Those ridiculously frequent "security updates" were almost entirely managing DRM holes, and it would seem they were managing the holes in whack-a-mole style without even attempting to design a more secure DRM solution. As a user, the update frequency killed my enthusiasm for Flash - if I could install it once and forget it, fine - I'll use it when a website says it needs it, but if I'm constantly having to install updates just to browse the web, no thanks.
As a content provider, having to constantly evaluate the stream of Flash updates, determine which one broke our app for our users and which update version we need to tell them to use (and compatibility would fade in and out across the updates, you couldn't just go "old", you'd have one feature that died in versions 275 through 313, and another that only worked in 306 through 392, then you come up with a third compatibility problem that breaks functionality from 317 onward, so you've got to tell your users to use 314 through 316, if they want to access all the features they are paying for.
Flash was not a good partner in the value delivery stream.
I bet that salesman also got himself a 5% commission ($0.75) for spending 10 minutes typing in that order for me. The whole thing is poorly executed, and they definitely didn't clear profit on me for a $15 tool, even though they probably sourced the tool for ~$2 including shipping. Those 3 people who served me were standing around not doing anything else for most of their day and their retail location is in a high-rent shopping mall. What's worse is that they haven't implemented a direct-ship online business model, when you order online, they use the retail locations as distribution points. Compare the efficiency of that to shipping from a warehouse near the UPS Louisville, KY air-hub.
The Sears online shopping experience is laughably bad. I got online, found the tool I wanted, checked stock - my local Sears had 3 in stock, so I just drove there. Got there - tool on the shelf, but priced 30% higher than online - nevermind, a salesman took me over to an in-store terminal and placed an online order for me, then I went to the pickup window and waited for 20 minutes while 2 other people processed my $15 order - I honestly think they walked out onto the sales floor and got the very same tool I was going to checkout retail until I saw the price difference. Hand me my bag and six sheets of paperwork and I'm outta there.
Next time I'll know - place the order online because walk-in retail pricing is for suckers, and I can park by the pickup location and my order _might_ be waiting for me. But that still doesn't change the whole stupid machine they have in place to capture online business at online prices and walk-in retail businesses at walk-in retail prices, while burning 40% of their gross income on labor.
We used to spend time up around Crockett, the air was quite a bit easier to breathe than in Houston, at least in the 2004-2005 summers. Paradise it is not, but there's something to be said for clean breathable air.
Slashdot Mirror
It was the sound of Trillions of Trillions of voices screaming out in agony, then suddenly silenced.
Plenty of brands, any of them made with decent quality? If so, keep watching that brand for the next few years and watch the cost of production drop as the supplier relationship matures. It's quite obvious how it drops, thinner cloth, thinner more widely spaced stitching, etc.
I work with a group of people who are all "smart enough" to automate most of their work, but they don't do it. Instead, they procrastinate, drag things out, and then when the deadline approaches, it's "too late" to employ automated techniques and they just hand-craft a solution and ship it. Someday, the company will lose out to competitors who do automate their work more effectively, but that will take decades before the competition can both manufacture a better, cheaper product and shift the customer base to start buying it instead of ours (10-20 year replacement cycle, strong brand loyalty, low price sensitivity in the market, etc.)
They only sprout in pairs with Walgreens. It's a tossup which one pops first, but once the first one has waited until the traffic analysis is certain enough to fund a loan it is virtually certain to demonstrate from parking lot traffic studies that a 2nd drug store in the same location could also be profitable.
In Florida, the small towns about an hour away from the coast are the particular victims of this. They've got a WalMart, a couple of grocery stores, a couple of drug stores, a Dollar General or two, and everything in the WalMart is priced to compete with CVS or Walgreens.
Drive an hour into the "big town" on the coast and then WalMart is priced to compete with Target, et.al. - but according to the IRS, that 100 mile round trip costs you $55, so you'd better need a lot of stuff if you're going to be making the trip to save money.
So, yeah, most HF tools are absolute garbage, but that $3 pneumatic cutoff wheel? Jeez, when have you ever found better value for money? The air-fittings cost more than the tool, and luckily I have some lubricant I can use from other pneumatic tools - I bought the cutoff wheel because it was so damn cheap and I already had all the fittings, compressor, etc. About a year later, I wanted to cut off about 100 nail tips inside an attic to make it a safer play space for the kids and that wheel just ate them like nothing and is still spinning.
I do somewhat regret the $200 chinese trailer kit I bought there - on one side of the value analysis, it did the job at hand, and did it well, at the lowest possible price. On the other hand, now 8 years later, I've got an ugly, peeled-paint, rusting thing that I should just throw away, but the damn thing still works, so I have to look at it and be constantly reminded of the $300 I saved compared to another trailer I might have bought for the same job that would look better sitting outside the garage now. I suppose when the metric wheel bearings give out I will finally ditch it, but like so many other cheap tools, it just keeps on doing the job - improbably long for the price paid.
F- yeah, WalMart shoppers perpetuate it, but not traveling 40 miles to the next town to shop because WalMart drove all the local competition out of business, oh, wait, they did that in the next town too....
It's completely irrational when the same underwear you bought in 2001 for $3.88 lasted 5 years, but the similar (only offered option) underwear you bought in 2006 for $2.88 only lasts for 1 year.
WalMart drives their suppliers to do this, mercilessly, and there's often a huge gap between the WalMart underwear and the "next best" option for $12.50 a pair that also only lasts 5 years.
At what point does this race to the bottom on prices result in nothing but garbage products?
I think that point came somewhere in the 1990s.
Today, I go to WalMart to buy disposables, like diapers, sun-screen, branded anti-freeze and motor oil - things that alternate suppliers have jacked up to 2.5x the cost for the same commodity. It's remarkable how much other crap they sell, and how little of it we ever buy.
Price alone driving all decisions has been WalMart's creed for decades, and it really does make visible terrible impacts on product quality as products "mature" in their WalMart distribution cycle.
What's a shame is that so many other retailers follow them - buying from the same suppliers, getting the same cheaped-out products and just selling them in a slightly better smelling store for a few cents more. I really wish that competing retailers like Target would push their suppliers for increased quality at the same or very similar pricing instead of decreased prices with no respect to product quality.
Something else to remember about WalMart (besides the horror of the bathroom, should you need it), is that they have the "lowest price guarantee - in your neighborhood." If you drive 15 miles to another WalMart where there are competitive retailers in the city, you can find prices varying by as much as +50% in the WalMart "conveniently located" in the town where they've driven all their competition out of business, especially on smaller $3-5 items, $2.99 in the city, $4.99 in the country for the exact same item that is available for $3.15 from Target in the city and only available for $6.99 from CVS in the country.
One can "borrow" a credit card to sign up for the free tier service, theoretically.
People come out hard against one form of energy production or another, the truth is that they all have their costs, and the ones that appear better today mostly do so because they haven't been rolled out big like coal, so they haven't been fully analyzed for all the external costs.
Yes, some are better than others, and I put solar high on the "good" list, probably followed by wind, but they will both start to lose their appeal as they scale up - I don't think to a point as bad as coal was in the 1960s, but they will not look as attractive as they do now while they're new and cool.
Figures don't lie, but liars figure.
As coal declines and wind power ramps up, those numbers will trade places.
I'm not saying don't build wind turbines because they're going to wipe out the migratory species, I am saying that if you stand under a turbine in an area where birds are flying near the blades, you'll see birds that were killed by it lying on the ground.
Over time, we'll cull the species that can't avoid the blades and deaths will decline - a similar thing happened with pigeons that stood on the tracks of the Miami metro-mover.
it was the fact that the test this time was run it was done so without meeting the initial test parameters...
And the political appointees at the plant overrode the engineers on the project because the lead on the project was one of the sons of an appointee (shades of the Challenger disaster).
One of the engineer's sons is a Slashdotter and has written frequently about how that went down. "Shocker" that it's not in the official Soviet record, but it's a far more believable story.
And, in the "told you so" vein, they wouldn't have been in such a risk taking mood if they hadn't been under pressure from the Cold war to do more with less.
On the plus side, everyone learned a lot from Chernobyl. Including that the "radioactive wasteland" that a meltdown was supposed to produce was an imaginary problem...
Yeah, instead it produces a radioactive exclusion zone, where even on its fringes only old people can live without substantially increasing their cancer risk. And cancer rates already doubled during the industrial revolution, without the lifespan increasing sufficiently to account for the difference. And we learned fuck-all.
Also... the exclusion zone is better for wildlife than "normal" forest preserves where humans can still enter. Not saying it's "good" for wildlife per-se, but it's better for wildlife than co-existence pressure from H. sapiens.
Bullshit. Letting a commercial company produce a reactor vulnerable to meltdown, allowing it to irradiate a populated region for hundreds of years, and then let the company declare itself bankrupt after that event is hardly cheap or cost effective.
Fukushima is the first such example of such a disaster in a western economy. Chernobyl was a failure induced by the USSR's response to cold war pressures - they knew how to build safer reactors, but they chose to live dangerously and operate more less expensive reactors instead. In the west, we can afford to build safer reactors, but instead, politically, we have chosen to grandfather the existing ones past their original design lives and block construction of newer, safer designs - that finally came home to roost in Fukushima - somewhat ironic for the country that also suffered the only atomic strikes during wartime.
Fukushima is a horror story, and a tremendously costly event, but Three Mile Island+Chernobyl+Fukushima+every other nuclear accident, ever, are not even close to as costly as the cumulative damage of coal power to-date. Strip-mines to feed coal power plants consume far more land than radiation exclusion zones, and the out of control coal mine fires are even less eco-friendly than the radiation exclusion zones.
Kill birds, dam rivers, gobble up real-estate and cover it with semi-toxic panels for solar, spew sulfur and mercury into the air, all forms of electricity production have their prices.
When the ash pile collapses into the nearby stream and poisons everything downstream for miles? Generally, the power company gets bailout help from the local government and zero liability for damages. Whether that's backed by an official law, or just common practice between utilities and government, it's what's happened again and again for coal and other power generation plants that poison their local environment, both subtly with incompletely scrubbed stack emissions, and dramatically with things like fly-ash avalanches.
Nuclear is as expensive as we make it, just like wind, solar, and gas benefit from subsidies and lax regulations, nuclear is suffering from (perhaps justified) regulatory costs and lack of substantial subsidies.
It was the de-facto video delivery standard. BBC, security cameras, YouTube (for a while), everything played on Flash and most things only played on Flash for a while.
Thank God it's dying.
I'd go for DRM, simple and straight up, as the primary sinker of the Flash ship.
Those ridiculously frequent "security updates" were almost entirely managing DRM holes, and it would seem they were managing the holes in whack-a-mole style without even attempting to design a more secure DRM solution. As a user, the update frequency killed my enthusiasm for Flash - if I could install it once and forget it, fine - I'll use it when a website says it needs it, but if I'm constantly having to install updates just to browse the web, no thanks.
As a content provider, having to constantly evaluate the stream of Flash updates, determine which one broke our app for our users and which update version we need to tell them to use (and compatibility would fade in and out across the updates, you couldn't just go "old", you'd have one feature that died in versions 275 through 313, and another that only worked in 306 through 392, then you come up with a third compatibility problem that breaks functionality from 317 onward, so you've got to tell your users to use 314 through 316, if they want to access all the features they are paying for.
Flash was not a good partner in the value delivery stream.
I bet that salesman also got himself a 5% commission ($0.75) for spending 10 minutes typing in that order for me. The whole thing is poorly executed, and they definitely didn't clear profit on me for a $15 tool, even though they probably sourced the tool for ~$2 including shipping. Those 3 people who served me were standing around not doing anything else for most of their day and their retail location is in a high-rent shopping mall. What's worse is that they haven't implemented a direct-ship online business model, when you order online, they use the retail locations as distribution points. Compare the efficiency of that to shipping from a warehouse near the UPS Louisville, KY air-hub.
Some businesses just want to die.
The Sears online shopping experience is laughably bad. I got online, found the tool I wanted, checked stock - my local Sears had 3 in stock, so I just drove there. Got there - tool on the shelf, but priced 30% higher than online - nevermind, a salesman took me over to an in-store terminal and placed an online order for me, then I went to the pickup window and waited for 20 minutes while 2 other people processed my $15 order - I honestly think they walked out onto the sales floor and got the very same tool I was going to checkout retail until I saw the price difference. Hand me my bag and six sheets of paperwork and I'm outta there.
Next time I'll know - place the order online because walk-in retail pricing is for suckers, and I can park by the pickup location and my order _might_ be waiting for me. But that still doesn't change the whole stupid machine they have in place to capture online business at online prices and walk-in retail businesses at walk-in retail prices, while burning 40% of their gross income on labor.
And they quit carrying TNT. Put dynamite back in the Sears catalog and sales would explode overnight.
We used to spend time up around Crockett, the air was quite a bit easier to breathe than in Houston, at least in the 2004-2005 summers. Paradise it is not, but there's something to be said for clean breathable air.