> Used to go there for parts needed on short notice
Which is why they shut down - the addressable market of people having an emergency need for an item from a limited selection of electronics isn't that big, and that's becoming the only market.
It's not your fault that you don't want to pay over the odds for everything when you're not in a rush, and it's not their fault they need to pay commercial rent, utilities, payroll, insurance and all the other overheads.
But the outcome is simply that staffed local physical shops have a lower efficiency ceiling in terms of getting items to customers.
Quite right. "Grok/Alexa, is this true?" being an authority figure makes it so much easier.
Much as everyone drags Trump for repeating the last thing he heard as fact, it's a turbocharged version of something lots of humans do, which is to glom onto the first thing they're told about a thing and get oddly emotional about it when later challenged. (Armchair neuroscience moment: perhaps Trump just has less object permanence so everything always seems new to him!)
Look at the (partly humorous, but partly not) outcry over Pluto being a planet for a big example.
I'm very much not immune to it - it feels distinctly uncomfortable to be told that something you thought to be true for a long time is, in fact, false. Especially when there's an element of "I know better than you" or "not many people know this".
As an example, I remember being told by a teacher that fluorescent lighting was highly efficient (true enough, at the time), but that turning one on used several hours' lighting worth of energy for to the starter. I carried that proudly with me for far too long and told my parents that we shouldn't turn off the garage lighting when we left it for a bit. When someone with enough buttons told me that was bollocks and to think about it, I remember it specifically bring internally quite huffy until I did, and realised that a dinky plastic starter and the tube wouldn't be able to dissipate, say 80Wh (2 hours for a 40W tube) in about a second at a power of over 250kW.¹
It's a silly example, but I think that if you can get a fact planted in a brain early enough, especially before enough critical thinking or experience exist to question it, the time it spends lodged there makes it surprisingly hard and uncomfortable to shift later. Especially if it's something that can't be disproven by simply thinking about it.
Systems that allow that process to be automated are potentially incredibly dangerous. At least mass media manipulation requires actual people to conduct it. Fiddling some weights is almost free in comparison, and you can deliver that output to only certain people, and in private.
1: A less innocent one the actually can have policy effects: a lot of people have also internalised and defend to the death a similar "fact" that the embedded carbon in a wind turbine takes decades or centuries to repay, when if fact it's on the order of a year. But to change this requires either a source so trusted that it can uproot the idea entirely and replace it, or you have to get into the relative carbon costs of steel and fibreglass and copper windings and magnets and the amount of each in a wind turbine and so on and on. Thousands of times more effort than when it was first related to them as a fact.
Pretty much. If Pluto is a planet, then there are potentially thousands of objects that could be discovered over time that would then also be planets, plus updated models over the last century of the gravitational effects of, say, Ceres and Pluto, that showed that neither were capable of "dominating" their orbits for some sense of the word. So we (or the IAU, rather) couldn't maintain "there are nine planets" as a fact either way without grandfathering Pluto into the nine arbitrarily due to some kind of planetaceous vibes.
But the point is that millions of people were suddenly told that their long-held fact "the are nine planets, Pluto is one" was now wrong (per IAU definitions at least). And the reaction for many wasn't "huh, cool, maybe thousands you say?" it was quite vocal outrage. Much of which was humourously played up for laughs and likes, I know, but some people really did seem to take it personally.
The problem is that re-defining definitions brings in chaos and inconsitency in science and publications.
Redefining what a "planet" (science) is or a "line" (mathematics) may be useful but after such a speech act
creates ambiguity for each mention of either term -- namely,
whether the old or new definition was meant.
Additionally, different people use their own personal definition for things, each contradicting with each other.
A better way would be to use concept identifiers made up of the actual words followed by a numeric ID that indicates author and definition version number, and re-definitions would lead to only those being in use from that point in time onwards ("moon-9634", "planet-349", "line-0", "triangle-23").
Versioning is a good thing, and disambiguating words that name different concepts via precise notation is also a good thing where that matters (e.g., in the sciences).
A first approach in that direction is WordNet, but outside of science (people tried to disentangle different senses of the same words and assign unique numbers to each).
I think most people who really cared about it just think it's absurd that everyone has to accept planets being arbitrarily reclassified because a very small group of astronomers says so. Plenty of well-known astronomers thought so as well, and there are obvious problems with the "cleared orbit" clause, which is applied totally arbitrarily. The majority of the IAU did not even vote on the proposal, as it happened after most people had left the conference.
For example:
> Dr Alan Stern, who leads the US space agency's New Horizons mission to Pluto and did not vote in Prague, told BBC News: "It's an awful definition; it's sloppy science and it would never pass peer review - for two reasons." [...] Dr Stern pointed out that Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have also not fully cleared their orbital zones. Earth orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids. Jupiter, meanwhile, is accompanied by 100,000 Trojan asteroids on its orbital path." [...] "I was not allowed to vote because I was not in a room in Prague on Thursday 24th. Of 10,000 astronomers, 4% were in that room - you can't even claim consensus."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5283956.stm
A better insight might be how easy it is to persuade millions of people with a small group of experts and a media campaign that a fact they'd known all their life is "false" and that anyone who disagrees is actually irrational - the Authorities have decided the issue! This is an extremely potent persuasion technique "the elites" use all the time.
The Scientific American version has prettier graphs but this paper [1] goes through various measures for planetary classification. Pluto doesn't fit in with the eight planets.
I mean there's always the a the implied asterisk "per IAU definitions". Pluto hasn't actually changed or vanished. It's no less or more interesting as an object for the change.
It's not irrational to challenge the IAU definition, and there are scads of alternatives (what scientist doesn't love coming up with a new ontology?).
I think, however, it's perhaps a bit irrational to actually be upset by the change because you find it painful to update a simple fact like "there are nine planets" (with no formal mention of what planet means specifically, other than "my DK book told me so when I was 5 and by God, I loved that book") to "there are eight planets, per some group of astronomers, and actually we've increasingly discovered it's complicated what 'planet' even means and the process hasn't stopped yet". In fact, you can keep the old fact too with its own asterisk "for 60 years between Pluto's discovery and the gradual discovery of the Kuiper belt starting in the 90s, Pluto was generally considered a planet due to its then-unique status in the outer solar system, and still is for some people, including some astronomers".
And that's all for the most minor, inconsequential thing you can imagine: what a bunch of dorks call a tiny frozen rock 5 billion kilometres away, that wasn't even noticed until the 30s. It just goes to show the potential sticking power of a fact once learned, especially if you can get it in early and let it sit.
I think what you were missing is that the crux of the problem is that this obscured the fact that a small minority of astronomers at a conference without any scientific consensus, asserted something and you and others uncritically accepted that they had the authority to do so, simply based on media reports of what had occurred. This is a great example of an elite influence campaign, although I doubt it was deliberately coordinated outside of a small community in the IAU. But it’s mainly that which actually upsets people: people they’ve never heard of without authority declaring something arbitrarily true and the sense they are being forced to accept it. It’s not Pluto itself. It’s that a small clique in the IAU ran a successful influence campaign without any social or even scientific consensus and they’re pressured to accept the results.
You can say well it’s just the IAU definition, but again the media in textbook writers were persuaded as you were and deemed this the “correct” definition without any consensus over the meaning of the word being formed prior.
The definition of a planet is not a new problem. It was an obvious issue the minute we discovered that there were rocks, invisible to the naked eye floating in space. It is a common categorization problem with any natural phenomena. You cannot squeeze nature into neat boxes.
Also, you failed to address the fact that the definition is applied entirely arbitrarily. The definition was made with the purpose of excluding Pluto, because people felt that they would have to add more planets and they didn’t want to do that. Therefore, they claimed that Pluto did not meet the criteria, but ignore the fact that other planets also do not meet the criteria. This is just nakedly silly.
> because people felt that they would have to add more planets and they didn’t want to do that
The first exoplanet was detected in 1995, so it seems very unlikely this was the case. We have thousands of detected planets now and are beginning to understand them more than ever.
It is a common categorization problem with any natural phenomena.
Correct, it's called sorites paradox. At the same time when you figure out that Pluto isn't one large object with smaller moons around it, but instead a few larger objects orbiting an external barycenter it stops making sense to treat it like the other planets.
I think the problem is we'd then have to include a high number of other objects further than Pluto and Eris, so it makes more sense to change the definition in a way 'planet' is a bit more exclusive.
Time to bring up a pet peeve of mine: we should change the definition of a moon. It's not right to call a 1km-wide rock orbiting millions of miles from Jupiter a moon.
If the EU cars aren't "safe enough" for the US then sure. Some of it is political silly buggers and protectionism but at the end of the day countries (or unions of countries) can set their own rules.
If the US wants to sell cars to the EU, they can. Plenty of countries export cars to the EU just fine. It's not the EU's fault that American car manufacturers make dangerous vehicles. It's also not American car manufacturer's fault that European cities and roads are often smaller and Europeans have less appetite for road deaths. But it is their fault if they want to export to that market without making any effort to design suitable cars for it. American exporters aren't granted a God-given right to inflict American standards in the rest of the world.
If they don't meet EU safety standards, they are, by definition, legally unsafe for sale in the EU.
Front sightlines are a common example given for larger pickups and SUVs. Pedestrian outcomes in collisions are also given more weight in the EU standards (which is why you can't buy a Cybertruck).
American semi trucks are also generally considered unsafe for that reason plus overall length - nearly all EU and UK HGVs are cabover models.
There's no rule againt US-made vehicles. It's just that many vehicle models that happen to be made and sold in the US don't meet safety requirements in other places.
You can well argue that EU vehicle standards are excessively strict (many EU residents may agree or disagree on various aspects), but coming at it from "very unfair trade, it's a huge deficit, sad!" angle seems more like simping for car manufacturers then reasonable public safety policy tuning.
It isn't. Quite the opposite. It's about a level playing field. There are standards for allowing products to market, some of them are more costly to implement. US car makers want to sell at lower standards than competitors, that's not a level playing field.
The customer has no right to deside on issues that affect _others_. A customer can decide on what affects the customer. If car A is more dangerous for other people than car B, then it's for somebody else than the car customer to decide what should be allowed. A car owner can't decide that "it's fine to drive this car which will kill other people because of its design".
It feels very much like a self-inflicted problem that manufacturers made by lobbying for domestic rules that they knew to be incompatible with foreign markets, followed by inability to innovate sufficiently to supply both markets economically.
I have no sympathy with this plight. They should take responsibility for their past choices. They have agency, they're not victims.
It's not even that you can't see big pickups in the EU, there are plenty of Hiluxen and even Chinese brands like Maxus (SAIC) could figure out how make an EU-compliant vehicle (much as I think even such models are undesirable to share roads with).
It's also not there are no US imports - there are, when the models comply with local regulation.
Honestly, local governments should just grow a pair and say no to this kind of shit.
If the US government wants to give its soldiers perks, they can rent or loan them a local car. Probably cheaper all round than flying/shipping in their financed Dodge RAM anyway.
Then again, American personnel being arseholes to the locals is well established from Okinawa to Croughton so it's probably endorsed as a power thing.
Even Volvo has made the newer XC models have a much more obstructive, flat, high bonnet. I drove one as a rental and it was disconcerting how little you could see. You can't see anything in front of the car, whereas the old style was still a (stupid, IMO) crossover, but the front was basically like a normal car-shaped car with a down-sloped front.
I don't know why anyone who isn't a complete psycho would actually prefer being more limited in forward vision (though I imagine it allowed more space for dual-motor engines).
Honestly if I were the government, I'd require a downward sightline such that you can see, with your own two eyes, a child of a certain height standing against the front bumper. No visibility, no sales, no imports, no excuses. Let the car manufacturers figure out how to build a car that meets it or settle for "only" being able to sell car-shaped estate cars.
Paying $600 plus a subscription for a poo camera is a bit embarrassing in itself.
> promising to track and provide insights on gut health, hydration, and more.
While I'm sure this theoretically could be 100% device side and handled only in encrypted format on the servers, that would be a gigantic pain in the arse (heh). At least, on-device inference is going to be a bit crap (heh) for some time. Since anyone gullible enough to think this was a good buy is probably up to their neck in 419 scams already, telling them "nah yeah it's E2EE, it's fine bro trust us" should cover it.
People who think this though probably aren't numerous and aren't going to be customers anyway (but I'm sure AI Rate My Dump is or will be a YC thing eventually).
Basically there is no universal ID system. You are not required to have a passport or driving licence, which are the usual IDs. There is an optional kind of ID you can use to prove your age if you don't or can't have those. Even if you do have one of these, you don't have to show it to the police if they stop you. The police can ask your name, but unless the police has "reasonable grounds" to search you, you can just walk away.
This is at odds to much of the EU where carrying ID is normal and you can be fined for not having it on you in public.
Proving your identity to a company usually involves a copy of passport and a recent utility bill. Sometimes you need to get a "professional" (doctor, lawyer) to write "I certify this is a valid copy" on it. Financial systems often use your NI number (think SSN) as the ID factor for things like KYC, the NHS uses a separate number. There are several fairly mysterious companies that provide this service to companies who need to know like solicitors (you upload the photos, they authenticte it "somehow", hopefully they look after it, presumably they can be audited I turn out to be a money launderer using a fake document). Getting a passport is a bit of a performance as you have to bootstrap the trust chain by getting someone you know to submit their documents and vouch for your photos.
It also means that, to use a hot-button subject recently, the police have limited practical ways to prove a right to work, unless they have strong intelligence that a particular place is using illegal labour and do a raid. The current tactic seems to be arresting people for illegal e-bikes, where they have reasonable grounds for an arrest and can then get the name and do the immigration checks at that point.
I remember once seeing the UK passport application. It struck me as having utterly byzantine requirements. When I read your post and think about it again, the lack of a universal ID could make it very tricky to get a passport, which is ultimately a national/universal ID.
> However if there's a digital ID system that lets the government instantly know everything about a person, you lose the protection of friction.
"Digital ID" doesn't necessitate that all data is collected into one gigantic store with centralised access. Just that you can use the same attestation of identity to access the various systems. And you can also grant others access to a limited subset of the data.
If the government wanted to they could already have set up some direct access from (say) the passport office to HMRC. It's all digital anyway, backwards as the UK government can be, they're not sending people to pore over paper ledgers in person like in The Jackal.
Some of the system already works like this anyway with the share codes for permission to work for foreigners and proving your driving licence.
Theoretically you would also be able to have an audit log of who asked for attestation for access to which system using that ID. Which you currently don't have when everyone is doing it by passport scans, NI numbers given over the phone and so on.
What it does allow is a creeping over-attestation especially of non-government services where you need to use the ID to do things that were previously anonymous or at least potentially anonymous. But since you currently need to use a driving license or selfie to look at boobies, that's already a thing.
It also, depending on cryptographic implementation, can leak information about attestations directly to the government. For example if I certify my identity at BumTickling.com, the website might only find out that I'm over 18, but the government may then know that BT.com's operator requested attestation of my ID's age field. Whereas currently, BT.com's (probably) shady identity service partner may have my selfie and know I tried to look at BT.com, but the government (probably, maybe they forward these things secretly) doesn't know about it unless they audit that partner.
It also has the possibility to gate access to government services behind app installations which, when done lazily, means not only smartphones are required which is bad enough, but specifically Google and Apple devices.
Trying to use Microsoft Authenticator without Google services is something circular like this:
Log in.
You need to set up MS Authenticator. Get the app then scan this code.
Sigh, download app. Open it.
Add new account. Scan QR code.
You need to install MS Authenticator to continue. Click here to download the app. From inside the app!
Must be what non-computer people feel about things the whole time. It's like some fairy tale where the wizards have lost control of the capricious magic.
The control literally two companies have over whether most modern Western systems work at all is a bit concerning.
Which is why they shut down - the addressable market of people having an emergency need for an item from a limited selection of electronics isn't that big, and that's becoming the only market.
It's not your fault that you don't want to pay over the odds for everything when you're not in a rush, and it's not their fault they need to pay commercial rent, utilities, payroll, insurance and all the other overheads.
But the outcome is simply that staffed local physical shops have a lower efficiency ceiling in terms of getting items to customers.
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