Earw0rm

33 ms·

451.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
The wholesalers I'm thinking of are the "cash and carry" warehouse variety - Makro, Booker and so on. I don't mean Costco haven't put thought into what they're doing, but there is no attempt to create a percept
452.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Yep, and they trade on reputation, thinking that will let them off on other factors. We have a store here, John Lewis, whose tech department sells lots of Macs and high-end TVs. So when they got in some 17 inch HP android tablets, I figured
453.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Not exactly - part of the department store experience is the relative expertise of staff in each department. And the sales pitch is one of high value, you might even say beauty or care. Costco/Walmart are, from a European perspective,
454.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
(for @jstanley - I'm stating why opposition to ULEZ mostly lines up with conservative and right-wing political positions - from their point of view, the "wrong people" benefit. I don't agree with them but that's how
455.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
It most benefits poor (and likely minority ethnic) people living in inner London, and the built-up bits of outer London that look like inner - Hounslow, Croydon, Enfield etc. And the biggest disbenefit is to people who identify as poor or h
456.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Left/right politics, high/low income and high/low status don't map neatly onto London's demography, and haven't since Tony Blair, New Labour and "champagne socialism". Outer and anti-ULEZ right-wing a
457.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Or just.. use it less, and pay the appropriate fee when they do. £10 a couple of times a week seems a pretty good deal if you're used to getting place by overground train & bus.
458.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
So London house prices will crash because it's not affordable to live there? Sounds unlikely tbh, but might not be a bad thing if it did.
459.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
It's not highly unpopular. The mayor who instigated it won the election by a clear and increased margin. What it is , is very unpopular with a smallish minority of people, many of whom live outside London, and most of whom were contrib
460.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
How is walking to school or cleaner air caused by gentrification? If anything it's the other way around - cleaner air making it more desirable to live downtown, leading to higher prices?
461.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
The switch to "platforms for everyone" was basically the triumph of platforms over protocols. And that mostly happened because, as software got more capable/powerful, and the median user less-so, there was a shift in the rela
462.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Presumably the partners are brought in en masse via some third party brokerage/aggregator service. It's not like a news site is selecting and managing 1500 different partners individually.
463.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Targeting, yes; retargeting, no. So much user time is spent, for example, on a few big sites which have enough data within their own siloes (based on users' behaviour and topics of interest), they can target pretty well without relying
464.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Because Chrome (Google) and a large chunk of the web media publishing ecosystem are hooked on this crap. It's a hundred billion dollar business. And yes, it's mostly selling garbage, but that's hardly unique in 21st century c
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by Earw0rm 2y ago
How do you manage login sessions without? If you're a site that has even basic analytics reporting requirements, how do you do any of that without? "Don't do these things" is a decent option for sole traders, microbusine
466.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
If it communicates intent (or even just allows the observer to predict future behaviour - if we're not willing to ascribe "intent" to a robot), it doesn't matter whether it's a plausible soul or not. At that point w
467.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Nice if you can convince people that 1) putting yourself into time-poverty to earn more money is not the right thing to do, and 2) fragile fruits should be available mostly when they're in season somewhere within a few hundred km of yo
468.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
On the diabetes point specifically. Having drugs to treat it is good. But a food system and built environment that causes a big chunk of the population to develop T2D in middle-age, and sees the solution as "take a pill to make it go a
469.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Sinclair C5 vs modern e-scooters and other lightweight e-mobility is another good example. Same fundamental design approach, but needed another 25 years of improvement in battery and motor tech. IIRC the first electric car was proposed in t
470.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Noise, energy profile, safety profile, level of automation. If they solve those well enough, it means a lot of the operational restrictions that make helicopters very limited in scope (few landing sites, insanely high operating costs due
471.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
I'd say the same about microprocessors. They haven't changed _that_ much now in about 15 years. You could put a Core2 Quad on the same playfield as the latest and greatest Zen or Intel "14th Gen" - they're recognisa
472.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
There's something in this. Startup hackers in the 80s through to mid aughts were, on the one hand, playing _for real_, but on stakes that weren't absurdly high. They were all-in, but while on the one hand they didn't have an
473.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
It's become less capital-light over time - look at the games industry for example, AAA titles cost as much as a Hollywood movie. It's about a eightfold increase in real dollars per decade - and that's despite having a lot of
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by Earw0rm 2y ago
I'll give you 1998 (although it really started to pick up momentum a couple of years earlier - that was just the point on the exponential curve where it began to get noticed). And I'll give you 2008, although while it's partl
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by Earw0rm 2y ago
Very much this.
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by Earw0rm 2y ago
And in general nobody will stop you doing stuff to yourself. The problem comes when these things are advertised or otherwise promoted. Ideas don't exist in a vacuum, they can become cultural parasites for all sorts of reasons, and even
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by Earw0rm 2y ago
The hazard here is in the nature of scams and how they propagate. Let's suppose in the base case - experimental treatments are largely suppressed and difficult to access - the odds are 10:1. That's a 10% chance of significantly pr
478.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Yes and no. For terrorism purposes, the primary (more or less the same as a "Hiroshima"-level "A"-bomb) would surely more than suffice. I'm sort of struggling to think why anyone other than a nation state (looking t
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by Earw0rm 2y ago
This. Pupil size correlates with stimulation level, which in turn correlates with attention and performance. And it's not a simple one-way street - drugs of course have an effect (caffeine, for a start) - but psychological factors also
480.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Genetic inheritance is different to the social construct of race ("black","white" etc). Bloodline is best avoided as a concept where humans are concerned, because the human gene pool was and is highly mobile. "Racia

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