You've got to consider the scale of the technology too in comparison to the competence. Blizzard games can be largely simulated just by a spreadsheet and a relatively simple random number generator. Atomic level simulation of a leaf flittering in the wind blows a WOW server away. Let alone an entire universe.
And you can perfectly blend science and religion by combining the Blizzard games spreadsheet with an RNGeezus and you get players who find religion thusly:
"Holy shit! The fucking random loot box gave me another goddamn torn cloth! Bloody hell!"
Sure, leave it alone and asbestos is fine. But here's an example of why it is still an issue.
Local shopping center recently got sold. It has been decrepit for decades despite being in a pretty good location with a massive parking lot. It finally did sell and the new owners want to use the land for something else so they kicked out the few stores still open and began tearing it down.
Ah, but this shopping center was built with asbestos everywhere. That's why nobody wanted to redevelop it for so many years. The buyers have deep pockets and own some land next to it so they had a motivation. Nobody else would have ever touched it and this rotting, decrepit shopping area has been blighting this town for years. It really looked like something out Walking Dead and not only made the town look bad, it also made new stores think twice before wanting to open here. Look at THAT place! This town can't support retail.
We can. We finally got a SuperWalmart recently, which everybody wanted and nobody protested, and it is doing very well. But nobody wanted to open shop in the asbestos mall. The new owners finally threw money at it and the entire shopping center is wrapped up in plastic sheets as an asbestos remediation crew slowly clears the stuff out. It is a huge undertaking, going very slowly and probably costing a lot.
They are having to do this because everybody before them said "ah well, just leave it alone!" which is good and all, but someday somebody has to actually get rid of it. And thus we have a shopping area equal in size to our new SuperWalmart now wrapped up in plastic sheets.
Haier has long had US assembly plants, even before they bought up other brands. I've got a Haier fridge made in the US. It was inexpensive for the features it had. And I mostly like it. It has lasted around 10 years at this point.
But the exterior paint is very prone to rust and the ice maker didn't last more than a few years. Perhaps these are just generic problems.
I'd love to hang my laundry out, but it's very dusty and dirty here and yellow pollen falls from the sky four months a year, and bird crap pretty much all year.
My yard is big and could be used for a garden and grow food. But there resulting produce would be too filthy to eat. No thanks.
Likewise have no interest in hanging out clean clothes and have them come in dirtier and covered in filth and pollen.
Have you been to Europe? The concepts of "deodorant" and "anti perspirant" are new ideas. Smell is rampant. The French tried to cover it with perfumes. But the rest of Europe was like, nah, it stinks fine to us! We don't need deodorants for our armpits! HA!
So mouldy laundry after sitting in a washer for three hours probably sounds like a scent enhancement.
As of last night, there were NO torrents for the Netflix version. That seems to me to be a bad sign. Or the current seeders don't care.
Is torrenting Netflix originals really common? (I ask because I haven't looked on torrent sites for ages.) That's kind of Netflix's thing: "We're only marginally more expensive, and a whole lot more convenient than pirating."
Beats me. I don't torrent any TV shows from Netflix, or TV from anywhere else really. Just an occasional movie.
I don't think it's common. I think that RubberDogBone is use to getting as much fag pr0n as he can on BT and is pissed that there is something else he wants to watch between taking on 6 men at a time and he thought he'd look this up since it was on Slashdot. Sadly he can't find it and doesn't realize this really doesn't happen normally for any media except fag pr0n.
On my prior jobs, I had the ability to work remotely when needed. But I was still expected to show up in an office every work day.
Just started a new job where the company has a large number of people working at home full time who never have to report to an office. It is a very weird experience, mainly because everything is remote, protected by multiple layers of VPNs and VMs and custom applications and so forth. And complicated by the employees who come from all backgrounds and skill. There are grandmothers and teenagers and everything between.
This matters because there are always steps with a new job, like obtaining network credentials, getting setup with HR, accessing the tools we will be using AND since we are all using our own PCs to do this, a whole extra level knowledge about how their PC and internet connection actually work. And a lot of people have no idea about simple things like ALT-Tab to change windows.
One person in the group was exiting the multiple layers of VPN and VM and relogging every time they wanted to swap to another window to look at something else. The company reps did nothing to control this, so the whole group had to wait for stragglers to figure out where to put a login ID and oh wait, here we go again with someone who can't ALT-Tab.
Anyway it turns out this company provides services for a vast array of clients and it's booming. They'll hire almost anyone. Clearly.
For me, this work is a pay cut but it beats nothing and means my commute to work is 15 feet instead of 15 miles of rush hour traffic twice a day. The savings on gas and wear and tear on my car will be tremendous. I am sold on this concept.
No current T-Mobile devices can use this spectrum and there are no towers for it. So wait a few years, buy a new phone, and then it will benefit you. If it is in your area.
They did not SELL it. It belongs to the USA and is licensed to these carriers. If they abuse or misuse or don't use it, it can in theory, be taken away from them.
The F-16 is a fantastic plane. Effective, fast, and cheap as hell. Why we don't have swams of the damn things I don't understand. It can match or beat 90% of the things our opponents fly, and for the remaining 10%, we could continue to use the F/A-18, F-15 and the F-22 and F35s that we have on hand.
If we lack pilots for the F-16, making them autonomous sounds great. They are a cheap platform, $20 million or so each. Which is one quarter to one sixth as much as an F-35. At six-to-one costs, flood the damn skies with the things. Even if the enemy shoots some down, overwhelm them in numbers and let the F-35s make easy kills.
Just keep the sharp end aimed over thataway, thanks
There is a bit more to it than loading cars on a railcar and hauling people that way for even an hour or two.
They will get restless. They will need to pee. They will need something to do since sitting in a sealed railcar underground with no windows is going to be very boring.
And some idiot will start their car engine to do something and end up gassing a lot of people. So they can't be allowed to just sit in their cars with the keys ready to go. It will have to be like Amtrak's Autotrains, where the automobiles are put on special autoracks and the end of the train, and railroad porters do the parking and start end and drive the cars off at the destination. Meanwhile the passengers go to a regular rail car to ride, use the bathroom, etc.
The thing is, the car loading and unloading process will add significant time to the trip. It takes at least an hour at each end for Amtrak to load and unload cars, and that's in a boring railyard with regular air to breathe and no need to do airlocks. Plenty of Youtube videos show the process.
So at some point, all the hassle of loading and unloading automobiles begins to burn up the time saved taking your car via train. It would have to be longer trips. 480 miles is enough. That's 8 hours driving, at ideal speeds. I've done road trips like that where 8 hours took closer to 12 with all the stops to pee and eat and nap.
There have LONG been internet ports into and out of BBS.
The first board I ever dialed into ran TBBS and had integrated FTP and Lynx browsing and some other things. I got my first @ email there too.
By the time 1995 came around, I was running my own Maximus board with nodes on Fidonet and a couple others. Had two phone lines, did co-sysop duties on two other Maximus boards, and generally had a lot of fun tinkering with Max, Binkleyterm, Squish, and my favorite mail editor of all time, tim-ed. Ah I miss that.
And of course I had door games like LORD and the usual Bluewave mail door.
By 2000, I was out of it but other guys had ported their boards onto the net. Anybody with a telnet client could just connect as if it was via dialup.
So putting BBSs on the net was done a long time ago. All the major board software brands could do it. Still can for all I know.
They COULD work 60-hour weeks and live off Mountain Dew and sleep under their desks like good little drone employees and accept low salaries in lieu of how it looks on a resume, but the older, experienced workers know that lifestyle is bullshit and won't do it.
So the companies don't want them.
I'm an older tech worker trying to find a job, and even when I bury my experience and try for entry level stuff, they imply they pretty much want people who will marry the job, eat, sleep, and live for work, and not ask for much compensation. And I can't do that. I don't WANT to do that. I already know it does nothing but burn out people, whereupon the company just replaces them with new ones. It does nothing for the individual.
The last job I actually nailed and got right away was working in a McDonalds. They just wanted workers, not drones.
The thing is, everybody has their own view of what is evil and what is not.
For some folks, evil has a very high bar, like blowing up a planet. And everything else below that is fair game.
I know people who think it would be fine to rob banks and the only thing stopping them is the idea of getting caught. Not that the concept is inherently wrong, or evil. To them, the act of stealing is not a problem. It's not evil.
So Google could easily come to the conclusion that doing whatever they wanted to do with this guy was just business and not evil. It's bullshit but there is nobody to tell Google this isn't right. The government isn't going to care about a man who is not a minority or other protected class. And Google can self-justify by saying it wasn't evil because heck, no government agency is even looking at it. Surely they'd say something if they were concerned.
Feel bad for these people but nobody ever promised them anything. Hollywood has always been extremely fickle about what it would support and when, and those tastes change all the time. Things go in and out of favor and writers have to cope with that, including periods of starving. OH WELL.
Now, how the audience consumes content and who, exactly, is making it, is changing. We no longer need TV networks to fund content so they can sell ads against it -and THAT is the only reason TV networks bother with shows anyway, to sell ads.
Without TV networks, the content that is funded and produced IS going to be different. The customer is different. If you paint houses and your customers decided they want blue houses and no longer want yellow houses, you as a painter don't get to stomp your feet and demand that people want yellow houses. You paint blue houses or you starve. Pick.
Anyway, the writers are running a huge risk: as the whole distribution model has changed, we may eventually see the writing model change too. Do we really need union writers or could they find freelancers to do it? Of course they could. And with the script to screen path being more streamlined than ever, the union writers are in a precarious position. The client sitting at home won't care who wrote it as long as it is good.
Walmart 2-day shipping is a lie. There. That is the difference.
When you order from Amazon with a two-day delivery, you can reasonably expect Amazon will hit that goal, pretty much all the time. It's extremely dependable.
When you do an equivalent order from Walmart, well... they may not even ship it for two days, and it may ship ground from halfway across the country, and may show up for in-store pickup in five or seven days.
I ordered a TV with two-day delivery a couple summers ago, so not during Christmas or any rush period. Silly me, I assumed two-day meant two-day. In reality, they shipped it via Fedex Ground from over 1000 miles away, and it took five whole days, not two, and then I had to stand in line in the store for 45 minutes behind people doing returns and buying Western Union and money orders, just to claim my item, which they initially could not find. Mind you, it was a 40" TV so not small or anything. It turned out they had been using my TV box to prop open the door to the pick-up area.
More recently, I tried to order a smartphone for in-store pick-up. It was supposed to be at the store and I could just walk in and get it, but I did pick-up just to save time. Paid for it online before the store opened for the day and waited for the email to come pick it up. Never got the email. So I called them. And well, they never bothered to go fulfil the online orders that morning and the stock they had, including the one I had already paid for, got sold when the doors opened and regular customers came in. And now they were out of stock and sucks to be me. Nobody in the store gave a shit. Online is a whole other department and nobody in the store felt any responsibility to do anything for them. At best, they worried only about their own store stuff, not online orders, so nobody even cared that they had failed to secure an item that had been paid for. Oh well.
This happens so often, the online side instantly refunded the money the moment I asked. That's the only thing that actually happened as promised. Refunds.
tl;dr Walmart has grand goals to be like Amazon but they drop the ball in making it happen. Their ads promise what they can't deliver, so no, it's not equivalent at all.
Walmart is notorious for squeezing vendors to provide goods for a lower price, or more product for the same price.
This is why you can walk down almost any aisle in Walmart, if you can find one which has actually been stocked, and see what seems like every third product sporting "BONUS! NOW 30% MORE FREE!" stickers and packaging. This is not being done because the vendor is thrilled to give away 30% more for free, but because Walmart has threatened them to either provide a better value in terms of more product for the same price OR pay Walmart to carry the product OR provide some sort of deal on making a private label version of something Walmart needs, OR if none of those work, Walmart will evict them from the shelves.
If you are a vendor who derives a huge percentage of sales from Walmart, you have to think hard whether it makes sense to throw away all those sales or do as Walmart demands and come up with a bonus package or provide some other service Walmart wants.
In most cases, Walmart demands sales results from everybody. If you are taking up shelf space, and even if your company paid for it, you better sell product, or Walmart WILL kick you. They may also demand that jobbers be sent in to do stocking, but this mainly happens to soft drink and snack chips. In my area, Utz bought shelf space but the stuff didn't sell and they didn't want to do "Bonus! 90MILLION OUNCES FREE!" bullshit and eventually Walmart kicked them out.
Which kind of sucks since the stores are supplied by 1099 contractor route salespeople who can't offer better deals to Walmart because those decisions are made at a much higher level, and then they get kicked out and lose what sales they were making there.
If the terminal is at the center, then it means car traffic will have to go under the runways. Runway underpasses have to be built to cope with truck bombs and they usually will not allow cars to sit under there, as they might if terminal traffic got backed up.
This would never work for human-piloted planes. It's tricky enough trying to land on a straight runway. What you are doing is not so much landing as stopping flying at just the right second to meet the runway. Doing that on a curve is a much bigger level of complexity.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got to consider the scale of the technology too in comparison to the competence. Blizzard games can be largely simulated just by a spreadsheet and a relatively simple random number generator. Atomic level simulation of a leaf flittering in the wind blows a WOW server away. Let alone an entire universe.
And you can perfectly blend science and religion by combining the Blizzard games spreadsheet with an RNGeezus and you get players who find religion thusly:
"Holy shit! The fucking random loot box gave me another goddamn torn cloth! Bloody hell!"
This works very well for Korean MMOs.
Sure, leave it alone and asbestos is fine. But here's an example of why it is still an issue.
Local shopping center recently got sold. It has been decrepit for decades despite being in a pretty good location with a massive parking lot. It finally did sell and the new owners want to use the land for something else so they kicked out the few stores still open and began tearing it down.
Ah, but this shopping center was built with asbestos everywhere. That's why nobody wanted to redevelop it for so many years. The buyers have deep pockets and own some land next to it so they had a motivation. Nobody else would have ever touched it and this rotting, decrepit shopping area has been blighting this town for years. It really looked like something out Walking Dead and not only made the town look bad, it also made new stores think twice before wanting to open here. Look at THAT place! This town can't support retail.
We can. We finally got a SuperWalmart recently, which everybody wanted and nobody protested, and it is doing very well. But nobody wanted to open shop in the asbestos mall. The new owners finally threw money at it and the entire shopping center is wrapped up in plastic sheets as an asbestos remediation crew slowly clears the stuff out. It is a huge undertaking, going very slowly and probably costing a lot.
They are having to do this because everybody before them said "ah well, just leave it alone!" which is good and all, but someday somebody has to actually get rid of it. And thus we have a shopping area equal in size to our new SuperWalmart now wrapped up in plastic sheets.
Sol has prior art going back a long, long time.
Haier has long had US assembly plants, even before they bought up other brands. I've got a Haier fridge made in the US. It was inexpensive for the features it had. And I mostly like it. It has lasted around 10 years at this point.
But the exterior paint is very prone to rust and the ice maker didn't last more than a few years. Perhaps these are just generic problems.
I'd love to hang my laundry out, but it's very dusty and dirty here and yellow pollen falls from the sky four months a year, and bird crap pretty much all year.
My yard is big and could be used for a garden and grow food. But there resulting produce would be too filthy to eat. No thanks.
Likewise have no interest in hanging out clean clothes and have them come in dirtier and covered in filth and pollen.
Have you been to Europe? The concepts of "deodorant" and "anti perspirant" are new ideas. Smell is rampant. The French tried to cover it with perfumes. But the rest of Europe was like, nah, it stinks fine to us! We don't need deodorants for our armpits! HA!
So mouldy laundry after sitting in a washer for three hours probably sounds like a scent enhancement.
As of last night, there were NO torrents for the Netflix version. That seems to me to be a bad sign. Or the current seeders don't care.
Is torrenting Netflix originals really common? (I ask because I haven't looked on torrent sites for ages.) That's kind of Netflix's thing: "We're only marginally more expensive, and a whole lot more convenient than pirating."
Beats me. I don't torrent any TV shows from Netflix, or TV from anywhere else really. Just an occasional movie.
I don't think it's common. I think that RubberDogBone is use to getting as much fag pr0n as he can on BT and is pissed that there is something else he wants to watch between taking on 6 men at a time and he thought he'd look this up since it was on Slashdot. Sadly he can't find it and doesn't realize this really doesn't happen normally for any media except fag pr0n.
You are so wrong. But it made me laugh. Thanks.
As of last night, there were NO torrents for the Netflix version. That seems to me to be a bad sign. Or the current seeders don't care.
On my prior jobs, I had the ability to work remotely when needed. But I was still expected to show up in an office every work day.
Just started a new job where the company has a large number of people working at home full time who never have to report to an office. It is a very weird experience, mainly because everything is remote, protected by multiple layers of VPNs and VMs and custom applications and so forth. And complicated by the employees who come from all backgrounds and skill. There are grandmothers and teenagers and everything between.
This matters because there are always steps with a new job, like obtaining network credentials, getting setup with HR, accessing the tools we will be using AND since we are all using our own PCs to do this, a whole extra level knowledge about how their PC and internet connection actually work. And a lot of people have no idea about simple things like ALT-Tab to change windows.
One person in the group was exiting the multiple layers of VPN and VM and relogging every time they wanted to swap to another window to look at something else. The company reps did nothing to control this, so the whole group had to wait for stragglers to figure out where to put a login ID and oh wait, here we go again with someone who can't ALT-Tab.
Anyway it turns out this company provides services for a vast array of clients and it's booming. They'll hire almost anyone. Clearly.
For me, this work is a pay cut but it beats nothing and means my commute to work is 15 feet instead of 15 miles of rush hour traffic twice a day. The savings on gas and wear and tear on my car will be tremendous. I am sold on this concept.
No current T-Mobile devices can use this spectrum and there are no towers for it. So wait a few years, buy a new phone, and then it will benefit you. If it is in your area.
They did not SELL it. It belongs to the USA and is licensed to these carriers. If they abuse or misuse or don't use it, it can in theory, be taken away from them.
The F-16 is a fantastic plane. Effective, fast, and cheap as hell. Why we don't have swams of the damn things I don't understand. It can match or beat 90% of the things our opponents fly, and for the remaining 10%, we could continue to use the F/A-18, F-15 and the F-22 and F35s that we have on hand.
If we lack pilots for the F-16, making them autonomous sounds great. They are a cheap platform, $20 million or so each. Which is one quarter to one sixth as much as an F-35. At six-to-one costs, flood the damn skies with the things. Even if the enemy shoots some down, overwhelm them in numbers and let the F-35s make easy kills.
Just keep the sharp end aimed over thataway, thanks
There is a bit more to it than loading cars on a railcar and hauling people that way for even an hour or two.
They will get restless. They will need to pee. They will need something to do since sitting in a sealed railcar underground with no windows is going to be very boring.
And some idiot will start their car engine to do something and end up gassing a lot of people. So they can't be allowed to just sit in their cars with the keys ready to go. It will have to be like Amtrak's Autotrains, where the automobiles are put on special autoracks and the end of the train, and railroad porters do the parking and start end and drive the cars off at the destination. Meanwhile the passengers go to a regular rail car to ride, use the bathroom, etc.
The thing is, the car loading and unloading process will add significant time to the trip. It takes at least an hour at each end for Amtrak to load and unload cars, and that's in a boring railyard with regular air to breathe and no need to do airlocks. Plenty of Youtube videos show the process.
So at some point, all the hassle of loading and unloading automobiles begins to burn up the time saved taking your car via train. It would have to be longer trips. 480 miles is enough. That's 8 hours driving, at ideal speeds. I've done road trips like that where 8 hours took closer to 12 with all the stops to pee and eat and nap.
There have LONG been internet ports into and out of BBS.
The first board I ever dialed into ran TBBS and had integrated FTP and Lynx browsing and some other things. I got my first @ email there too.
By the time 1995 came around, I was running my own Maximus board with nodes on Fidonet and a couple others. Had two phone lines, did co-sysop duties on two other Maximus boards, and generally had a lot of fun tinkering with Max, Binkleyterm, Squish, and my favorite mail editor of all time, tim-ed. Ah I miss that.
And of course I had door games like LORD and the usual Bluewave mail door.
By 2000, I was out of it but other guys had ported their boards onto the net. Anybody with a telnet client could just connect as if it was via dialup.
So putting BBSs on the net was done a long time ago. All the major board software brands could do it. Still can for all I know.
They COULD work 60-hour weeks and live off Mountain Dew and sleep under their desks like good little drone employees and accept low salaries in lieu of how it looks on a resume, but the older, experienced workers know that lifestyle is bullshit and won't do it.
So the companies don't want them.
I'm an older tech worker trying to find a job, and even when I bury my experience and try for entry level stuff, they imply they pretty much want people who will marry the job, eat, sleep, and live for work, and not ask for much compensation. And I can't do that. I don't WANT to do that. I already know it does nothing but burn out people, whereupon the company just replaces them with new ones. It does nothing for the individual.
The last job I actually nailed and got right away was working in a McDonalds. They just wanted workers, not drones.
The thing is, everybody has their own view of what is evil and what is not.
For some folks, evil has a very high bar, like blowing up a planet. And everything else below that is fair game.
I know people who think it would be fine to rob banks and the only thing stopping them is the idea of getting caught. Not that the concept is inherently wrong, or evil. To them, the act of stealing is not a problem. It's not evil.
So Google could easily come to the conclusion that doing whatever they wanted to do with this guy was just business and not evil. It's bullshit but there is nobody to tell Google this isn't right. The government isn't going to care about a man who is not a minority or other protected class. And Google can self-justify by saying it wasn't evil because heck, no government agency is even looking at it. Surely they'd say something if they were concerned.
How it happened (probably)
Hapless Consultant: I've got to come up with a new name for this pig.
Hapless Consultant: FUCK. MY. LIFE.
Hapless Consultant: Hey wait a minute.... no can't use FUCK but how about Curse. No... OATH! Yeah! Makin ma bonusess checksess
Hapless Consultant: Now what other bullshit can I come up with before Wheel of Fortune comes on?
Gannett renaming itself Tegna is a pretty shitty one.
Fucking Tegna. Some consultant made a bonus coming up with that. And somebody else got promoted for coming up with Oath.
OAF would be a better name. As in, you'd have to be an OAF to go there.
Seriously, Oath? OATH? FUCK! How much did they pay the consultant who came up with this? And was it the same moron who came up with Tegna?
Feel bad for these people but nobody ever promised them anything. Hollywood has always been extremely fickle about what it would support and when, and those tastes change all the time. Things go in and out of favor and writers have to cope with that, including periods of starving. OH WELL.
Now, how the audience consumes content and who, exactly, is making it, is changing. We no longer need TV networks to fund content so they can sell ads against it -and THAT is the only reason TV networks bother with shows anyway, to sell ads.
Without TV networks, the content that is funded and produced IS going to be different. The customer is different. If you paint houses and your customers decided they want blue houses and no longer want yellow houses, you as a painter don't get to stomp your feet and demand that people want yellow houses. You paint blue houses or you starve. Pick.
Anyway, the writers are running a huge risk: as the whole distribution model has changed, we may eventually see the writing model change too. Do we really need union writers or could they find freelancers to do it? Of course they could. And with the script to screen path being more streamlined than ever, the union writers are in a precarious position. The client sitting at home won't care who wrote it as long as it is good.
Walmart 2-day shipping is a lie. There. That is the difference.
When you order from Amazon with a two-day delivery, you can reasonably expect Amazon will hit that goal, pretty much all the time. It's extremely dependable.
When you do an equivalent order from Walmart, well... they may not even ship it for two days, and it may ship ground from halfway across the country, and may show up for in-store pickup in five or seven days.
I ordered a TV with two-day delivery a couple summers ago, so not during Christmas or any rush period. Silly me, I assumed two-day meant two-day. In reality, they shipped it via Fedex Ground from over 1000 miles away, and it took five whole days, not two, and then I had to stand in line in the store for 45 minutes behind people doing returns and buying Western Union and money orders, just to claim my item, which they initially could not find. Mind you, it was a 40" TV so not small or anything. It turned out they had been using my TV box to prop open the door to the pick-up area.
More recently, I tried to order a smartphone for in-store pick-up. It was supposed to be at the store and I could just walk in and get it, but I did pick-up just to save time. Paid for it online before the store opened for the day and waited for the email to come pick it up. Never got the email. So I called them. And well, they never bothered to go fulfil the online orders that morning and the stock they had, including the one I had already paid for, got sold when the doors opened and regular customers came in. And now they were out of stock and sucks to be me. Nobody in the store gave a shit. Online is a whole other department and nobody in the store felt any responsibility to do anything for them. At best, they worried only about their own store stuff, not online orders, so nobody even cared that they had failed to secure an item that had been paid for. Oh well.
This happens so often, the online side instantly refunded the money the moment I asked. That's the only thing that actually happened as promised. Refunds.
tl;dr Walmart has grand goals to be like Amazon but they drop the ball in making it happen. Their ads promise what they can't deliver, so no, it's not equivalent
at all.
Walmart is notorious for squeezing vendors to provide goods for a lower price, or more product for the same price.
This is why you can walk down almost any aisle in Walmart, if you can find one which has actually been stocked, and see what seems like every third product sporting "BONUS! NOW 30% MORE FREE!" stickers and packaging. This is not being done because the vendor is thrilled to give away 30% more for free, but because Walmart has threatened them to either provide a better value in terms of more product for the same price OR pay Walmart to carry the product OR provide some sort of deal on making a private label version of something Walmart needs, OR if none of those work, Walmart will evict them from the shelves.
If you are a vendor who derives a huge percentage of sales from Walmart, you have to think hard whether it makes sense to throw away all those sales or do as Walmart demands and come up with a bonus package or provide some other service Walmart wants.
In most cases, Walmart demands sales results from everybody. If you are taking up shelf space, and even if your company paid for it, you better sell product, or Walmart WILL kick you. They may also demand that jobbers be sent in to do stocking, but this mainly happens to soft drink and snack chips. In my area, Utz bought shelf space but the stuff didn't sell and they didn't want to do "Bonus! 90MILLION OUNCES FREE!" bullshit and eventually Walmart kicked them out.
Which kind of sucks since the stores are supplied by 1099 contractor route salespeople who can't offer better deals to Walmart because those decisions are made at a much higher level, and then they get kicked out and lose what sales they were making there.
If the terminal is at the center, then it means car traffic will have to go under the runways. Runway underpasses have to be built to cope with truck bombs and they usually will not allow cars to sit under there, as they might if terminal traffic got backed up.
This would never work for human-piloted planes. It's tricky enough trying to land on a straight runway. What you are doing is not so much landing as stopping flying at just the right second to meet the runway. Doing that on a curve is a much bigger level of complexity.