First mention of Hornblower I've ever come across on this forum! Read the whole series as a kiddo/tween in chronological order (still remember how freaking disappointing Hornblower during the crisis was as someone who had no idea it was unfinished..). First few books took a while to get through and I figured I was too young but maybe they just weren't that enthralling!
bought a MyQ - tossed it in the trash after 2 months. Even 2 years ago it was clearly designed as a tie in for Amazon Key, which i do not want.
Bought a Tailwind - it's glorious. No batteries, tons of integrations, the bluetooth+android to open/close automatically is crazy solid (doesn't work with ios sadly, but you can buy a fob).
hmm, I know people brag about books they haven't actually read, but Book #3 of the Atlas Series is not out until January. (kidding, I assume it's a typo)
Not actually on Booktok myself, but if it's pushing people towards R.F. Kuang and Susanna Clark then it's a-ok by me - read the Poppy War series while you wait for The Atlas Complex.
Where did you get these numbers? It's wrong and presents a misleading picture of a 10x implosion in 2008. There were never even close to 31k banks in the USA. It peaked at about 14k back in the '80s and has been going down ever since. It did drop precipitously after the 2008 crises, going from around 7K banks to today around 4500 banks, but this is a very far cry from 31k to 3k.
Overall this is a cool project. Not personally my favorite aesthetic, but super cool work.
I take issue with his characterization of japanese vs. western homes, though. Western homes are typically expected to be renovated over and over and last many many decades. Though the most modern ones may not last you 100, ask any buyer and they'll say they expect it to appreciate in value, be renovated and resold to someone else with no clear end date.
This stereotype is partly due to the efforts of the US advertising industry which worked with the military to rehabilitate Japan's image after WW2, given that the US intended to turn a bitter enemy into an ally.
American ad man transformed the image of a nation-sized race cult into a quaint provincial island of passive nobility.
Yeah, I don't want that part for sure. I could have been clearer, but what I meant is that the idea has been put forward that the people of North Korea have the Juche ideology so deeply ingrained in them that, if the regime were gone (hopefully through peaceful means), the country would struggle to put something better in its place.
Right now, things are pretty bad. People are starving, there are human rights abuses, etc. If you want to change the course of a country, you have to remove the old order and (the part everyone forgets about far too easily) fill the void by somehow creating a new order that is stable and effective. This second part fails really often in history. I think it might be a huge challenge for North Korea if they ever get to that step.
There are plenty of fallacies present in article. Appealing to the stuff that lasted a long time is the bullet-hole/armor meme. Modern Japan has plenty of examples of disposable consumerism. Invoking Blow and Muratori's names doesn't directly lead to "and therefore I will make a computer that does very little". Selling a good with less function as a luxury heirloom is just a common sales tactic.
A beautiful computer, to me, is a saddle to ride on - neither too cheap to respect, nor too expensive to use. That is, it's something akin to a Framework laptop with some nice peripherals and desk accessories, or FPGA recreations of old hardware. The mechanical keyboard market gets this - and it deserves further equivalents in other aspects of I/O, in the circuit designs and software stack.
The weak construction of US homes honestly should depreciate too, it's a cultural lie that we tell ourselves about how something built as cheaply as possible to 1970s codes by suburban land developers with asbestos and aluminum wiring is somehow appreciating versus the land it is sitting on.
I'd totally have torn down and replaced my house if that was something the homebuilding sector optimized for.
I wonder how this trend extends to the cities. You obviously can't build a highrise expecting to knock it down 30 years later. Do they just accept preowned apartments?
Some highrises are advertised as long-lasting, for example with "200 year concrete" and so on.[0] However, I think this is mostly marketing fluff -- if a company thinks they can make more money by tearing down a highrise and building a new one, they will not hesitate to do so, and often do. It seems that historically most highrises don't last longer than ~50 years. With new construction techniques and materials, maybe that will change.
Smaller apartments are even more ephemeral. The official service life for apartments according to the tax code[1] is only 20-40 years, depending on the construction material.
I'm hoping that the pilot shortage will eventually allow me to apply again, with more good history, and get a medical.
I chose helicopters because that part of the industry is not as volatile, and I was making the transition during COVID when the airlines were struggling.
I agree that is it more lucrative that way. But I super disagree with the happiness part. I don't know anyone working at an IT security company, but know many many lawyers and a handful of accountants. 90% of them ditched big law firms/Big 4 accounting firms as soon as their resume was sufficient to do so because the quality of life was terrible. Very very long hours, demanding clients and political atmospheres (As you go up) around bringing in business. By and large the folks that stayed are workaholics who highly valued money and status.
1 good friend of mine, was a super driven lawyer at a huge world-class firm in NYC. She got cancer, and had to take a leave. Fortunately she recovered fully and quit basically the first moment she got back. This isn't one of those 'she left to follow her passion in the arts' cases - she LOVES being a lawyer, but she realized she wasn't living a life. Now she's in-house at a multi-national brewing company.
Anyhow, all that to say - you may be more valued, but it's much easier to be the client!
Yeah it was 1984. Which was almost too much and i don't know nobody internally balked at it simply to refuse being that deeply ironic. Or they thought it was hilarious, which I suppose is a possibility.
Pretty dumb stuff happens at big companies all the time, although this is a rare case of it being both public and hilarious.
This whole book takedown thing is another dumb move that probably happened because someone thought it was a good idea to zealously enforce an exclusivity contract without realizing what would happen -- especially not realizing the possibility that third parties might put books on torrent sites in order to hurt the authors and get their books removed from Kindles.
When big companies do dumb things, people have a tendency to vastly overestimate the amount of thought and intention that went into it. This was probably a dumbass move by some mid-level person who thought they were helping.
There is one single really key difference. Walmart takes responsibility for the products they put in their store. That they are genuine and represented as they are. They squeezed sellers, encouraged moves to china and all of that, but they aren't a marketplace - they are a store. Amazon has abrogated all responsibility in that area and pretended they are the equivalent of the open field on which a flea market is set up.
> Walmart takes responsibility for the products they put in their store.
Amazon also did this for it's physical stores. Walmart does not do this for it's web presence - it has a third party marketplace you need to actively avoid.
I have both Prime and Walmart+ due to credit card benefits, and honestly don't see a huge difference in either experiences. Amazon is more spammy but faster shipping, Walmart less selection and slower but more reliable shipping. Walmart is more curated, but you still need to ignore the third party crap.
Walmart third-party is a dumpster fire. Every single thing I ordered through it here in Canada arrived late or not at all, replacement orders sometimes arrived eventually, products were often damaged (a jug of glasses cleaner was leaking right through a soaked outer shipping box), vendors take zero responsibility, and it took multiple calls/emails/delays to get refunds from Walmart.
I avoid it like the plague. I don't even use their website because it's hard to consistently filter that crap out. And their site wasn't great to start off with in any case. Good riddens.
I think I have to repeat that after each search (at least back when I last used the site). And it usually took many searches to find the product I sought.
Walmart now operates a marketplace (https://marketplace.walmart.com/). However, I am unsure if they take those same validation steps as they do in their physical stores or not.
Came here to make that point. I know that newegg and bestbuy have done the same. And, much like amazon and ebay, I expect pretty much zero verification and Sisyphean dispute processes.
Another really key difference is that Walmart operates retail locations that compete with (more realistically, undercut) smaller local businesses and gut small town America. Let's not paint a rosier picture just because it happened a while ago.
Amazon has killed plenty of small businesses that survived Walmart. Walmart didn’t go after the hobby shop style niche business the way Amazon’s million product warehouse could.
People worked out you can compete with Walmart by having a deeper selection as long as the population density supports it, but it’s not clear what small retail can do to survive Amazon.
On the flip side Amazon created hundreds of thousands of small business, it allowed them access to a global market. The ones that died could have done the same and remained competitive, they were asleep at the wheel instead. I see Walmart as more of a monopolist by going into small towns and selling at a loss. Whereas Amazon was an equalizer allowing anyone to compete in a global marketplace, those that opted not to, got their lunch stolen.
Hardly, the vast majority of physical stores don’t manufacture anything they simply aggregate merchandise from wholesalers and operate a physical location. There is no way to transition that model to Amazon marketplace because they don’t have any way way to differentiate themselves. Attempting that transition would have simply lost them a great deal of money.
There are a mix of ways to profitability operate with Amazon both legitimately or via various kinds of fraud. However, suggesting that transition is often as reasonable as telling a barber to open a veterinary clinic, it’s just a completely different kind of business.
But that’s changing the measurement to fit your argument, most sellers on Amazon aren’t directly manufacturing their goods either, yet still have margin. We are talking about retailers switching how they offer their goods. Rely less on the store front and just ship more stuff, isn’t a major change to business model. Adding a shipping center isn’t hard.
But either way business is dog eat dog and you have evolve to survive. Don’t blame the competition for building a better mousetrap. This is free markets and capitalism operating as intended.
You’re the one suggesting these companies could have made the switch.
I have no problem with capitalism crushing companies, as long as it’s head to head in a free market rather than based on fraud or avoiding regulations. I am simply pointing out Amazon has been a huge net loss for small businesses, which it objectively has.
The fraud is integral to their business model at this point, though.
They deliberately chose a way of storing products that makes them vulnerable to fraud. Fixing that would require storing them differently (which would be more expensive to them).
Likewise, cutting down on unsafe or white label products would increase the quality of the products they sell but adding a vetting process and stricter moderation would significantly increase labor costs per product and if companies at scale want to avoid one thing, it's dynamic labor costs.
They literally can't do better at cleaning up the fraud because there is no market incentive for them to do so and doing so would reduce profits and thus shareholder value. To borrow your line: it's just free markets and capitalism working as intended.
It’s also not in their best interest to let things get out of control. Free markets ebb and flow.
I don’t know of any other platform that has a markedly better vetting process, Walmart, eBay, AliExpress, Wish, etc all have much the same or worse issues with this. But they all seam to be very pro consumer when it comes to returns, none seem to ask any questions.
Maybe it’s not a conspiracy but rather an industry wide problem of playing wack-a-mole with scammers, that every platform is continually dealing with.
I don't think it's that simple. I've heard stories of Amazon doing data analysis on its own marketplace, coming out with competing products for ones it think it can make a profit on, and putting them above the 3rd parties in search results.
That wasn’t invented by Amazon, Many retailers do this. Grocery stores white label. REI is another great example, they run data analysis on what sold the most, what features were searched for most and built their own products.
> Amazon created hundreds of thousands of small business
Based on my experience most of those small businesses are reselling uncertified whitelabel shovelware (especially electronics) from Ali Express. That's a bit like praising cancer for rejuvenating the body by reducing the mean age of all cells.
Of course you could also say it created a lot of businesses via "self-employed" last mile delivery drivers but I think we're all adult enough to acknowledge that the gig economy is a scam to skirt labor laws, not an actual net positive for those working within it.
Pretending small businesses could have kept up with Amazon by "doing the same" is absurd. Small businesses lack the infrastructure to offer one day (or even same day) deliveries and free returns with full refunds. We've reached a point where buyers take these things for granted to the point of balking at shipping costs for goods privately sold on eBay classifieds because they have no idea what delivery companies like UPS or DHL charge.
Even as a marketplace, Amazon cannibalizes its sellers via its "Amazon basics" brand which copies products if they get popular enough and often undercuts their pricing while also benefiting from the Amazon branding.
> Whereas Amazon was an equalizer allowing anyone to compete in a global marketplace, those that opted not to, got their lunch stolen.
Saying "allowed anyone" makes it sound like it was optional, yet that "those that opted not to" died off demonstrates that it wasn't. It's nearly impossible to start a small local retail shop but it's also nearly impossible to be a small retail seller on Amazon. There's a reason white label shovelware dropshipping is so ubiquituous: by creating your own brand to resell white label products you make it harder to compare you to your competitors selling the same garbage and you no longer have to directly compete on price. This is effectively the only kind of business on Amazon marketplace that doesn't directly suffer the race to the bottom.
> This is free markets and capitalism operating as intended.
Yes, that's the problem. Free markets accelerate monopolization by forcing local small businesses to compete globally with international megacorps on those megacorps' terms.
The benefits of small local businesses are externalities to capitalism so they get sanded off eventually. Free global markets just rapidly speed up that process.
I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, nor fair, more pointing out that attacking them for using the levers and dials available To them to return value to shareholders, is short sighted. literally every other company is doing the same, just not as efficiently.
I do agree with your point on Walmart, what is on the shelves at a physical location. However, Walmart's online store is just as bad, if not worst, than Amazon.
