I've always wondered why no one has ever successfully tested a hybrid turbine-electric system for large trucks. It would seem as if the ability to burn almost anything would future-proof the system, and since the turbine would charge the batteries, you could run it at a constant speed.
Planet Money on NPR did a nice story about an effort in California to have a "Ready Return" like most countries that was already filled out for you. Episode 760: Tax Hero
That's just great. There's a forest fire or some other emergency, and I need to use my car, but I can't because it decides I've been drinking. Nice. Well, I had it coming.
This is not an advertisement, but you can buy a cheap pair of glasses from Goggles4U or some of the other manufacturers for pretty cheap. Like around $10 cheap with their specials. Buy a couple of pairs of glasses and stash them around where you need them. At $10 you don't care if they get broken or eaten by a puppy.
Fortnite is not the problem, and neither is a dwindling interest in video games.
It's a dwindling interest in paying again and again and again for getting the same video games.
This. I used to be a fairly engaged gamer, though I never purchased anything when it first hit the shelves. That changed when I was given an original Xbox, and I started buying brand new games AAA games that I could be fairly sure would have a nice long shelf life. I was taking my time upgrading my original Xbox to a 360 and then Micro$oft cut off my access to Xbox Live and suddenly my games stopped working. It dawned on me that even though I had been a loyal customer buying games and paying for Xbox Live for years I was apparently worthless if I just wanted to play older games.
After I quit being angry about some of my games being useless (B2:MC), it dawned on me that this was the best thing that could have happened to me. I quit worrying about how long a games servers would work. I quit worrying about whether there would be enough players for a publisher to continue allowing online access. I just . . . quit caring.
I'm now just a casual gamer who plays on the PC. I know Fortnite gets a lot of hate, but it's essentially a fantastic, casual shooter. No amount of money makes the game better or longer or allows a player to get ahead. Its entire eco$y$tem is based on costumes. Another F2P game that works the same way, has long legs, and is fantastic? Team Fortress 2.
Hats (and costumes) are the future. I really wish game developers (for shooters) would spend their time making fantastic, fun to play games, and then sell hats. Apparently there are tons of suckers (i.e., kids) who will spend money on hats so the geezers who only have a few minutes of free time and mortgages and kids' extracurricular expenses can game for 20 minutes now and then without feeling guilty about spending $60 for a new AAA that only rewards both time and money invested in the game. So, hats.
Well, obviously it has a built-in SIM card, so this is really no removable SIM card. In all the years I've owned a cell phone, I've only needed to move the SIM card once, and that was because the provider didn't send a new one with the new phone. I don't think many consumers care one bit about this. Yes, it is a big issue for international travelers who will want to switch cards.
No kids? No significant other carrying too many things? No removable SIM card means not being able to easily replace the phone when it is broken and you just want to pop in the old SIM into a new phone . . . or a refurbished phone. The last several phones in my household that have been replaced were done so without a trip to the carrier's store or a phone call to customer service because of removable SIM cards.
A few years ago, I purchased two phones right after they were released and they were awesome and subsidized. When it came time to replace one of them because of a malfunction--after a couple of good years--I bought . . . the same phone for a fraction of the original price. Now that the replacement phone was dropped, flat, and cracked, and I'm going to replace it with . . . the same phone for a fraction of the original price. Good memory and battery life + affordable price = WIN! It just doesn't make any sense to do anything else. Several years ago, it was "cool" to have the latest and greatest flagship phones, but no one cares anymore.
Apple was first, and it locked in a lot of older folks who had more disposable cash. Meanwhile, my employer bought me a mobile, and it was never an iPhone, so by the time I needed to buy my own, Android was pretty equivalent and MUCH less expensive, so I went with Android. As a huge plus, Android phones can sideload.
On the other hand, I was a super Mac fanboy . . . until its products provided less value--less bang for the buck--than the competition. I'm typing this on the second work/gaming laptop that I've purchased since my last MacBook purchase. Sure, it's Windows, and sure, some things about Windows are annoying, but how much would a MacBook with a fast GPU, expandable RAM, fast SSD, and huge second HDD cost? Oh, wait, you can't buy one, but something ALMOST equivalent is twice as much. Double. 2X. The operating system is not so fantastic, the Foxconn production lines not so much better for Apple than the Foxconn production lines for other manufacturers, to justify this kind of premium.
People know value . . . eventually. Apple used to be rather innovative, and their products, while much more expensive than the competition, were priced according to their value. Now Tim Cook is just wringing out the profit machine. There is no vision at Apple. Cook's a logistics guy, a Wall Street darling, but he's not a leader; he's just in charge. There's a huge difference.
Last year, one of our Motorola phones stopped holding charge all day, so I ordered the same, 3 year old model as a refurbished one for a fraction of the cost of a new one. It's good enough, pretty feature rich and . . . cheap.
Granted, I spend zero time looking for the next cool thing, but I had never heard of this service before, and I probably would have subscribed had I known about it. My kids are too young to watch some of my favorite movies from when I was a child, but so many of the classics that used to be shown on Turner Classic Movies are appropriate for many ages, and those films are not available on Netflix or Amazon. Looking at the comments, the management completely missed an entire category of film buffs. More "old white men" subscribing to the service might have kept it afloat. I bet they had interesting advertising algorithms.
But over time it's gotten easier and easier to just say something like "I feel like some dish that has apples and rice" and boom, within seconds have some recipes to choose from.
This. Especially if you already know how to cook, getting some quick ideas based on ingredients, rather than reading a recipe, is almost too easy, and as a reference guide, it's hard to beat the internet. We have well over 100 cookbooks, but it's to the point where you can just pull up almost ANYTHING online. Need to know how long to smoke a pork shoulder? It's just as easy to do a quick search than to thumb through a barbecue cookbook. Beans in a pressure cooker? Why look it up in a cookbook?
How is this supposed to work anyway? Say Netflix has 3000 films available for streaming today in a particular country. Replacing a third of them would mean needing to find 1000 local films, which would likely require scraping the bottom of the barrel in the case of countries that lack a film scene.
This all makes more sense if you assume that this is motivated as a subsidy forced on an American company as a tax. If you are Netflix and want to operate in France, you have to negotiate for French films, and then you are stuck negotiating with some jerk, smoking a Gauloises, demanding more for the streaming rights of a crummy French "art" film than it is worth. Can't get 30%, then you have to cut your catalog. The French filmmaker will know this and act accordingly. This is just a power/money grab.
All the content is available on the Internet, but that means you have to sift through all the content on the internet.
If you are trying to imply that all the content is available on the internet for free then you are wrong because it's not. The books certainly aren't free on the internet. As crazy as this sounds, some people like to read physical books and they like their children to read physical books, and unless you want to order them online and have them shipped (my small town's last bookstore, Hastings, closed down) your only choice is the very limited selection at the local Walmart or grocery store.
Forbes is a crap magazine, and Steve Forbes is a crap person who wanted people to be able to opt out of Social Security taxes to put their money into health savings accounts. More of the same stupid market fundamentalism about how THE MARKET will solve everything. Well, it didn't. That's why there are libraries. Idiots like Steve Forbes want to get rid of common goods and anything collective, not because they don't work, but because the don't BELIEVE they SHOULD work.
Microsoft tried making this mistake with the X-Box One, and they were so short-sighted that they almost went to market with it, before they realized that by making their console online-only they will deny themselves many thousands of valuable customers.
It's not just customers without internet but also parents who don't want their children online.
. . . Part of the issue is that J.J. Abrams was given the first film and he's never been able to write a story from start to finish which you really need to do if you're making a trilogy. . ..For Star Wars, there were no character arcs planned and . . . J.J. Abrams . . essentially [remade] Episode IV. . ..
It's the fact that he essentially remade Episode IV that doomed the sequels. Doomed. I'm a mild Star Wars nerd, but I left the first sequel so uninspired (because-you know-we'd all seen the movie back when we were kids) that it was watch the other new SW films on Netflix or nothing. J. J. Abrams lost me. Again. He's ruined both Trek and Star Wars. Pretty f-ing impressive. Maybe he's a Sith lord out to ruin a Friday night for everyone. Jerk.
This ruling will never survive. Otherwise, Youtube and all other sites in the business of hosting user content will just block IPs from Europe. Of course, maybe that's the plan.
This makes pretty good business sense because the phones are already practically disposable. Next someone will have a 4-camera phone, and then we'll see 5 cameras.
I bought an Airport out of desperation. My Apple router is almost 10 years old. It has crashed once after lightning caused a power spike that was strong enough to cause the Power suppression unit it is plugged into to clamp the circuit. I have yet to find a single device that failed to connect. I haven't rebooted it since the last security update. I, for one, am sad to see them exit the market leaving it to the 'cheaper alternatives'.
My story is similar. Though I haven't used any of our Macs in years, the Airport Extreme that I parked next to the cable modem has been chugging away for about a decade with no downtime. Same for the Express which we were using to stream ages ago. I only wish my "business class" routers at my office lasted as long.
Maybe the longevity is the problem because they don't need to be replaced. With no Jobs riding everyone, they've gone cheap. We already know the phones don't last, the laptops don't last, and now Apple is killing off one of their rare but not-so-sexy products which actually lasts.
Warehouses used to be a not bad job for someone without much education or skills, at least according to the people I've known that worked in them. Nothing fantastic but not shitty like this is described.
Do you know what you're talking about? More than 20 years ago I worked in a shipping warehouse in college for a company that only hired college students for those jobs. It paid pretty well compared to other crummy jobs available in a student saturated college town, but the conditions were not great and because it was a shipping company it was all about the numbers. The company kept an account at the doc-in-the-box down the street for the injuries which happened ALL THE TIME. Ever loaded a trailer that's been sitting out in the sun in the South for hours when it's 100 degrees outside and 95% humidity?
There really is something called "hard work." It's hard. Some people--like college students--only have to do those jobs for a little while. Some people are stuck in those jobs. I can't imagine waking up everyday and knowing that my college job was the best it was going to be for the rest of my life. These jobs have been pretty tough for a long time.
I get the WSJ print edition, and it delivers on time to my small town. I would subscribe to the NYT, too, if it were available, but it is not. Maybe the problem is not growth, it's saturation in it's existing markets. If the NYT didn't have such limited availability, then maybe it could have some subscriber growth. Does the WSJ make money off of me as a print subscriber? Who knows. But when you get the WSJ in my town--and you can't get the NYT--I'm reminded of how many coastal people and businesses treat middle America as just flyover country.
Henry Ford paid his workers more so he could reduce turnover and get the best workers.
No. He paid his workers more because working on an assembly line, doing the same repetitive task day after day, all day, is mindless, soul sapping work. Turnover for mindless monotony is going to be high no matter the wages.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always wondered why no one has ever successfully tested a hybrid turbine-electric system for large trucks. It would seem as if the ability to burn almost anything would future-proof the system, and since the turbine would charge the batteries, you could run it at a constant speed.
Planet Money on NPR did a nice story about an effort in California to have a "Ready Return" like most countries that was already filled out for you. Episode 760: Tax Hero
That's just great. There's a forest fire or some other emergency, and I need to use my car, but I can't because it decides I've been drinking. Nice. Well, I had it coming.
I'll throw this out there as a fun out of context quote:
"Ar Viltansou and local officials say they will continue to harvest Garfields from the coastline."
Monsters!
The French will eat anything.
This is not an advertisement, but you can buy a cheap pair of glasses from Goggles4U or some of the other manufacturers for pretty cheap. Like around $10 cheap with their specials. Buy a couple of pairs of glasses and stash them around where you need them. At $10 you don't care if they get broken or eaten by a puppy.
Fortnite is not the problem, and neither is a dwindling interest in video games.
It's a dwindling interest in paying again and again and again for getting the same video games.
This. I used to be a fairly engaged gamer, though I never purchased anything when it first hit the shelves. That changed when I was given an original Xbox, and I started buying brand new games AAA games that I could be fairly sure would have a nice long shelf life. I was taking my time upgrading my original Xbox to a 360 and then Micro$oft cut off my access to Xbox Live and suddenly my games stopped working. It dawned on me that even though I had been a loyal customer buying games and paying for Xbox Live for years I was apparently worthless if I just wanted to play older games.
After I quit being angry about some of my games being useless (B2:MC), it dawned on me that this was the best thing that could have happened to me. I quit worrying about how long a games servers would work. I quit worrying about whether there would be enough players for a publisher to continue allowing online access. I just . . . quit caring.
I'm now just a casual gamer who plays on the PC. I know Fortnite gets a lot of hate, but it's essentially a fantastic, casual shooter. No amount of money makes the game better or longer or allows a player to get ahead. Its entire eco$y$tem is based on costumes. Another F2P game that works the same way, has long legs, and is fantastic? Team Fortress 2.
Hats (and costumes) are the future. I really wish game developers (for shooters) would spend their time making fantastic, fun to play games, and then sell hats. Apparently there are tons of suckers (i.e., kids) who will spend money on hats so the geezers who only have a few minutes of free time and mortgages and kids' extracurricular expenses can game for 20 minutes now and then without feeling guilty about spending $60 for a new AAA that only rewards both time and money invested in the game. So, hats.
* No SIM card
Well, obviously it has a built-in SIM card, so this is really no removable SIM card. In all the years I've owned a cell phone, I've only needed to move the SIM card once, and that was because the provider didn't send a new one with the new phone. I don't think many consumers care one bit about this. Yes, it is a big issue for international travelers who will want to switch cards.
No kids? No significant other carrying too many things? No removable SIM card means not being able to easily replace the phone when it is broken and you just want to pop in the old SIM into a new phone . . . or a refurbished phone. The last several phones in my household that have been replaced were done so without a trip to the carrier's store or a phone call to customer service because of removable SIM cards.
A few years ago, I purchased two phones right after they were released and they were awesome and subsidized. When it came time to replace one of them because of a malfunction--after a couple of good years--I bought . . . the same phone for a fraction of the original price. Now that the replacement phone was dropped, flat, and cracked, and I'm going to replace it with . . . the same phone for a fraction of the original price. Good memory and battery life + affordable price = WIN! It just doesn't make any sense to do anything else. Several years ago, it was "cool" to have the latest and greatest flagship phones, but no one cares anymore.
Apple was first, and it locked in a lot of older folks who had more disposable cash. Meanwhile, my employer bought me a mobile, and it was never an iPhone, so by the time I needed to buy my own, Android was pretty equivalent and MUCH less expensive, so I went with Android. As a huge plus, Android phones can sideload.
On the other hand, I was a super Mac fanboy . . . until its products provided less value--less bang for the buck--than the competition. I'm typing this on the second work/gaming laptop that I've purchased since my last MacBook purchase. Sure, it's Windows, and sure, some things about Windows are annoying, but how much would a MacBook with a fast GPU, expandable RAM, fast SSD, and huge second HDD cost? Oh, wait, you can't buy one, but something ALMOST equivalent is twice as much. Double. 2X. The operating system is not so fantastic, the Foxconn production lines not so much better for Apple than the Foxconn production lines for other manufacturers, to justify this kind of premium.
People know value . . . eventually. Apple used to be rather innovative, and their products, while much more expensive than the competition, were priced according to their value. Now Tim Cook is just wringing out the profit machine. There is no vision at Apple. Cook's a logistics guy, a Wall Street darling, but he's not a leader; he's just in charge. There's a huge difference.
Last year, one of our Motorola phones stopped holding charge all day, so I ordered the same, 3 year old model as a refurbished one for a fraction of the cost of a new one. It's good enough, pretty feature rich and . . . cheap.
Granted, I spend zero time looking for the next cool thing, but I had never heard of this service before, and I probably would have subscribed had I known about it. My kids are too young to watch some of my favorite movies from when I was a child, but so many of the classics that used to be shown on Turner Classic Movies are appropriate for many ages, and those films are not available on Netflix or Amazon. Looking at the comments, the management completely missed an entire category of film buffs. More "old white men" subscribing to the service might have kept it afloat. I bet they had interesting advertising algorithms.
Don't tweet. There. That's it. Put down your phone, get some sleep, and don't tweet.
But over time it's gotten easier and easier to just say something like "I feel like some dish that has apples and rice" and boom, within seconds have some recipes to choose from.
This. Especially if you already know how to cook, getting some quick ideas based on ingredients, rather than reading a recipe, is almost too easy, and as a reference guide, it's hard to beat the internet. We have well over 100 cookbooks, but it's to the point where you can just pull up almost ANYTHING online. Need to know how long to smoke a pork shoulder? It's just as easy to do a quick search than to thumb through a barbecue cookbook. Beans in a pressure cooker? Why look it up in a cookbook?
"Courage."
How is this supposed to work anyway? Say Netflix has 3000 films available for streaming today in a particular country. Replacing a third of them would mean needing to find 1000 local films, which would likely require scraping the bottom of the barrel in the case of countries that lack a film scene.
This all makes more sense if you assume that this is motivated as a subsidy forced on an American company as a tax. If you are Netflix and want to operate in France, you have to negotiate for French films, and then you are stuck negotiating with some jerk, smoking a Gauloises, demanding more for the streaming rights of a crummy French "art" film than it is worth. Can't get 30%, then you have to cut your catalog. The French filmmaker will know this and act accordingly. This is just a power/money grab.
All the content is available on the Internet, but that means you have to sift through all the content on the internet.
If you are trying to imply that all the content is available on the internet for free then you are wrong because it's not. The books certainly aren't free on the internet. As crazy as this sounds, some people like to read physical books and they like their children to read physical books, and unless you want to order them online and have them shipped (my small town's last bookstore, Hastings, closed down) your only choice is the very limited selection at the local Walmart or grocery store.
Forbes is a crap magazine, and Steve Forbes is a crap person who wanted people to be able to opt out of Social Security taxes to put their money into health savings accounts. More of the same stupid market fundamentalism about how THE MARKET will solve everything. Well, it didn't. That's why there are libraries. Idiots like Steve Forbes want to get rid of common goods and anything collective, not because they don't work, but because the don't BELIEVE they SHOULD work.
Microsoft tried making this mistake with the X-Box One, and they were so short-sighted that they almost went to market with it, before they realized that by making their console online-only they will deny themselves many thousands of valuable customers.
It's not just customers without internet but also parents who don't want their children online.
. . . Part of the issue is that J.J. Abrams was given the first film and he's never been able to write a story from start to finish which you really need to do if you're making a trilogy. . . .For Star Wars, there were no character arcs planned and . . . J.J. Abrams . . essentially [remade] Episode IV. . . .
It's the fact that he essentially remade Episode IV that doomed the sequels. Doomed. I'm a mild Star Wars nerd, but I left the first sequel so uninspired (because-you know-we'd all seen the movie back when we were kids) that it was watch the other new SW films on Netflix or nothing. J. J. Abrams lost me. Again. He's ruined both Trek and Star Wars. Pretty f-ing impressive. Maybe he's a Sith lord out to ruin a Friday night for everyone. Jerk.
This ruling will never survive. Otherwise, Youtube and all other sites in the business of hosting user content will just block IPs from Europe. Of course, maybe that's the plan.
This makes pretty good business sense because the phones are already practically disposable. Next someone will have a 4-camera phone, and then we'll see 5 cameras.
My story is similar. Though I haven't used any of our Macs in years, the Airport Extreme that I parked next to the cable modem has been chugging away for about a decade with no downtime. Same for the Express which we were using to stream ages ago. I only wish my "business class" routers at my office lasted as long.
Maybe the longevity is the problem because they don't need to be replaced. With no Jobs riding everyone, they've gone cheap. We already know the phones don't last, the laptops don't last, and now Apple is killing off one of their rare but not-so-sexy products which actually lasts.
So, $10/month for unlimited, free 2-day delivery which often includes Sunday delivery along with streaming video is too much for the poster?
Do you know what you're talking about? More than 20 years ago I worked in a shipping warehouse in college for a company that only hired college students for those jobs. It paid pretty well compared to other crummy jobs available in a student saturated college town, but the conditions were not great and because it was a shipping company it was all about the numbers. The company kept an account at the doc-in-the-box down the street for the injuries which happened ALL THE TIME. Ever loaded a trailer that's been sitting out in the sun in the South for hours when it's 100 degrees outside and 95% humidity?
There really is something called "hard work." It's hard. Some people--like college students--only have to do those jobs for a little while. Some people are stuck in those jobs. I can't imagine waking up everyday and knowing that my college job was the best it was going to be for the rest of my life. These jobs have been pretty tough for a long time.
I get the WSJ print edition, and it delivers on time to my small town. I would subscribe to the NYT, too, if it were available, but it is not. Maybe the problem is not growth, it's saturation in it's existing markets. If the NYT didn't have such limited availability, then maybe it could have some subscriber growth. Does the WSJ make money off of me as a print subscriber? Who knows. But when you get the WSJ in my town--and you can't get the NYT--I'm reminded of how many coastal people and businesses treat middle America as just flyover country.
Henry Ford paid his workers more so he could reduce turnover and get the best workers.
No. He paid his workers more because working on an assembly line, doing the same repetitive task day after day, all day, is mindless, soul sapping work. Turnover for mindless monotony is going to be high no matter the wages.