Noos

And there are very few actual electrics on the road. I don't think it will be sustainable at all at scale. The time to charge simply is too long for any form of quick charging to exist widespread, and quick charging won't really work with an existing gas station model. They wont be able to service too many cars to make money on incidental purchases.

Not really sure, we have our needs met for now, but most people having EVS would be a huge constraint drain on the power. I honestly feel what will happen instead is just that cars become too expensive to drive period, with only a relatively few owning private vehicles. A lot of people are surviving on 20 year old cars mostly.

..yeah, that's why we are all talking about Mastodon and Diaspora right now, because there was a massive hole they rushed in to fill. Funny how even on HN people have completely forgotten about the former; I haven't seen it on the feed here in weeks.

Youtube is untenable, lol. Hey everyone, the Ipod was untenable! Everyone is moving to Microsoft Zune! Ninja is going to livestream on Mixer, that will teach Twitch!

This is like the Death of Wal-mart or something, people constantly proclaim it but it keeps chugging along.

They were moving out before those rent increases. The problem is the kind of boutique retail people seem to want in cities isn't profitable; even the older midsized or speciality chains got edged out by national ones. This is kind of like wondering what happened to all those computer places back in the 80s and 90s that would build you custom PCs.

And HN did its part to kill it too. Can't have music shops when you destroy physical music as a concept; can't have bookstores when no one wants to buy books. Movie sales and rentals? Internet. Electronics? Online category killers. Second hand stores? Ebay.

The rent jacking up is an issue too, but even if it were lower, you still wont get businesses. There's been a big change in retail overall due to the hyperefficiency of the internet; the kind of stores that existed pre-net can't compete.

I don't think facebook is going to lose much sleep over that site going; it looks painfully low-rent, and when your grand "to hell with facebook" post gets all of 45 comments in 12 days, I'd worry less about moral posturing and more about getting new users.

And honestly, the anti facebook hate gets old. You all are just using it as a scapegoat to avoid thinking about what your own companies are doing or the changes you can make; its a ritual in this place now to have fashion-hate on certain things, and it gets really tiring. There is no way you can avoid negative interactions on the web if you have any real presence at scale, and complex systems are always going to have unintended effects that won't be seen till later and only can be mitigated up to a point.

The constant longing for a small scale web with large scale benefits simply isn't feasible.

I dislike these kind of books, since they are designed to overcomplicate things by appealing to the mids and upper-mids needs to follow authority, defer to expertise, and use checklists and systems to try and remove any unpleasantness from interactions. "This common thing is really important! Because of science! Here is a study! Here are the health benefits! Let's also tie this into reducing climate change! I have used my big brain to give you a blueprint of how things should go! It's all good, because someone on the book jacket is wearing a lab coat!"

I honestly await titles like "The Lost Art of Petting a Kitten," and "Outdoors; the Secret Benefits of Putting Your Laundry Outside to Dry."

I'd also suggest the authors to follow the nifty trend of profanity in the titles of these self-help books. "I Don't Give a Fuck: The Vital Art of Talking to Strangers" and "Badass: The Power of Strangers" might help sales among certain demographics.

One weird trick for techies nonsense. "I just showed up everyday and built this company, so can you!" All of what, 500 words of content, too.

Have you grown up like this? I have. It's a lot more alienating than you think. In my case it was a religious upbringing with little outside cultural influences, and it does make it hard to interact and socialize with others.

You don't have shared experiences or languages. There's usually only a small amount of children who share what you experienced, and you don't always understand when they are joking, or how to deal with situations, or even what they are saying. And many times the kids you do know are weird or worse than those your parents think they are protecting you from.

This is ridiculous:

>>But these factors are not sufficient to explain the trend. The chains’ owners have done little to maintain order in the stores, which tend to be thinly staffed and exist in a state of physical disarray.

This is virtually every retail store out there. Go into a non-supercenter Walmart in the average town. Retail never has enough staff and never has enough time or payroll to clean.

This too: Several years ago, noticing the rise in calls to the dollar stores, the department provided training sessions for Family >>Dollar managers in how to practice what police call “crime prevention through environmental design.” Officers showed them how less trash outside and less clutter inside and fewer big ads in the windows, which block the view of responding police officers, would make their stores safer.

This has zero to do with the kind of crime that is happening to them; it's all about being often the only retailers even close to a high crime area.

Or this:

>>Residents often sent her photos of dangerously cluttered aisles, and she asked fire marshals to issue warnings. “The more and more ubiquitous they’ve gotten, they’ve gotten less and less caring,” she said. “I came to see them as glorified check-cashing and payday lenders for the way they prey off the poor but don’t really care about the poor.”

...this is moronic. They do nothing of the sort, they sell goods at decent prices to underserved areas. That they are getting hit with crime is more about how shitty the average underserved area is than their policies or procedures; they do nothing that other retail doesn't do.

It's a really bad piece, and i agree its trying to blame the victim.

...what did they even lose by this? What's the point of right wing watch when more or less the entire news culture constantly puts focus on right wing conspiracies to debunk them, to the point of probably giving them more visibility than they rightly should get.

If anything they could probably point out and say "hey, we are balanced!" in the same way reddit could by banning chapotraphouse after thedonald, but people who are on that site still know which way the wind blows.

It wasn't Amazon's fault; Toy stores had been declining well before it, with companies like KB toys going defunct in 2009. In general what was happening was that it was much harder for retail speciality stores and small chains to compete with Wal-mart and other megastores, and the market seemed to collapse.

A tremendous amount of retail just died in the 2000s, with only a few survivors. Either folding, or being bought out and merging with other companies that folded.

...sure, like Carob was a foregone conclusion to replace chocolate:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-c...

As someone who actually had to eat Tiger's Milk bars as a kid, good luck at it.

> I think we also see some of this in Christian stuff. I feel like Christians like Isaiah 11:6's "the lion will lie down with the lamb" (yes, I know that technically that's not quite the animals in the text, but it is how I often hear it said by English-language Christians). I think the idea that predators might not be predators in some world-to-come isn't something that has to be creatively reinterpreted.

There's sort of a verse that deals with it. The context is in eating meat sacrificed to idols, aka immoral meat. It's not clear on what that means, where it's eating meat in a ceremonial service or buying meat in the marketplace that was resold donations to a pagan temple. Romans 14: 1-9

>>Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. One person's faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them. Who are you to judge someone else's servant?

>>To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand. One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. 6 Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. 7 For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.

I'm not Christian any more, but generally the spirit is more "your brother needs to be vegan, don't convert him or argue with him and do your best to strengthen his faith." Each person must do what he feels God has commanded him to do in his own way.

The new heaven and new earth is a radically different experience. Its not just lion laying down with lamb, its that "we shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, and be like the angels" which Jesus said in answer to people disbelieving in a ressurection. It's a total break from humanity in a sense, and trying to emulate it has led to a lot of cults engaging in self-destructive behavior.

It's not partisan in the sense of right or left, the "starving kids in china" was pretty much the same thing on the right. Jellyby was definitely a moral conservative, and victorianism is surprisingly bi-partian. Usually its the fashions of the rich, if anything. HN in particular is unaware of how they imitate it, with the sudden rediscovery of Stoicism and Aurelius a bit much.

I don't agree that easting meat is an atrocity. I think it devalues words to use them like that. I think a lot of veganism is the same reaction to the existence of suffering a lot of religions have had or deal with; it's a form of going to the desert as a monk or mystic to escape the contradictions of the world. That is up to everyone, but the difference here is the monks want to make the entire world the desert now.

Why people take SF authors seriously about the future is beyond me. It's just people wishing for things. Part of the reason I stopped reading it is that it was so apparent that people used "the future" as a synonym for "Narnia" to tell their own stories or moral fables, and yet dated themselves tremendously and guessed wrong. They were more dishonest because they tried to make plausible magic, kings, and wizards instead of just realizing what they were asking for pretty much required it.

The culture has about as much chance of coming into existence as the fact that we discover unicorns. So why should we take him seriously?

It's always fun with these kinds of posts, because people never think what their total progressive future will be like. No cars, no pets, eating bugs for protein, taxed to shit to provide a social safety net, forced to clump up in cities for efficiency. Probably a lot more than that. Being an eco-serf.

It won't be accepted. If anything it probably will be treated like veganism, which is mostly moral grandstanding. People who consume boutique products to show their virtue. A lot of us simply don't lose sleep over the suffering of factory animals, in the same way we didn't lose sleep over the starving kids in china our mothers used to berate us about when we didn't finish our vegetables. That doesn't mean we constantly try to make things like a hellscape, but you can try and treat everyone morally and not get in a tizzy over "someone is being oppressed somewhere! See! Our moral guardians of the media are showing us!" The idea of telescopic philanthropy and being a Mrs Jellyby needs to be remembered.

If it got to the point where it was mandated, we'd probably be in some form of dystopia where everything was in the pursuit of either survival (animals no longer exist or are possible to eat) or sort of a planned world where our governing or elite classes mandate their virtue on everyone, and it would lead to a lot more lifestyle changing that not eating meat. I think the latter is fairly likely, China for example seems to be doing pretty well at a basic form of that.

The article sort of conflates two different models. Dollar Tree is actual "everything in the store is a dollar" while Dollar General and Family General are mostly small retail stores that sell things at a variety of prices. They round prices to the dollar, but otherwise are traditional retail that just locates in unusual locations.

Five Below is another "dollar store" in that blend, focusing mostly on goods for young adults and teens. Originally everything was below $5, up to and including some video games and electronics like computer accessories or even drones.

It isn't too new of a niche, closeout retailers have often existed and its not uncommon with small businesses; ocean state job lot in the NE kind of exists with this model. I think what is unique is the small retail store model; dollar generals are as big as a walgreens or CVS, but stock a pretty full assortment of goods for the size. They are pretty impressive for being micro-super walmarts in a sense.

Dollar tree's are interesting because you can actually find books and dvd/blu-ray there. It's sort of a commentary on how tough it must be to be a creative when I can buy remnant books from A list authors sometimes; I've seen Jonathan Franzen, John Scalzi, Bill Mckibben, And Rod Dreher books end up in the dollar bin. There's also a staggering amount of generic animated dvds in the pixar/disney mode.

except that the reason why the whole Basic Income thing started was due to automation's possible effect on the job market. As I understood it, it's more about a future where there simply aren't enough jobs on the low end to work, or the economics would make them like Mechanical Turk; impossible to actually live on.

There won't be jobs for a lot of people to work to add to it.

That doesn't change the principle though; the actual workers need to do 40 hours or even more; it just means there are less of them.

And really, people need to be wary with automation. What people don't realize is that relying on it utterly paralyzes you when it goes down, because its a higher order fault than most staff need to handle.

If the AI telephone support breaks during an update, you've just sidelined your entire operation. If you only have a few checkout employees, and your POS service needs to connect to the internet, and it goes down, you have virtually no one to reply to it.

By reducing headcount you really run the risk of what were tolerant faults becoming critical. My own job has been running on a skeleton crew, and thank god one of us hasn't become sick or left yet. Eventually relying on automation and minimum staffing may bite you hard. A lot of retail stores would be up the creek if the store manager up and quit or was sick for multiple weeks.

I don't think it's true though. A lot of jobs you simply can't reduce the hours no matter how advanced you are without corresponding loss in service. There's also serious staffing issues in many blue collar jobs which simply won't be able to be filled by enforcing them to work less hours; there isn't a huge supply of people wanting to do menial labor to pop up to work part time and pick up the slack.

Retail and factory work already has low wages and high turnover, forcing them to try and make up a 20% loss in staffing hours is probably not going to happen over just cutting operating hours and shifting to models designed to work with less staff; retail stores for example may just be open 20% less or be constantly understaffed and understocked.

Or eventually a lot of them just close and the bigger ones absorb the surplus workers to keep full hours.

yeah, well he gave money to him rather. My mistake. About the same difference imo, contributions are limited to the point that at best you can say its a vote +1.

Reading about Trump on this, he seems to flipflop more than be hateful or anything; in one breath he supports same sex marriage, in another he restricts certain federal aspects like gender dysphoric individuals being allowed in the military. The actual content of what he did for LGBT seems to be a minor negative mostly surrounding limiting federal power over employment; he refused to put up any fight against same sex marriage and there's a lot of "well it could LEAD to this" going on.

I don't think this is a cancellable offense. I think if you are going to sanction someone for voting, it has to be real and clear danger of present harm, not "they are republicans, you know they hate us."

Like, if that's the case, why not just sanction everyone who voted for him?

Nah, the echo chambers are tightening into dominant and submissive; it seems like people are because they are reacting to patently extreme behavior, but in reality modern culture is very much a leftist dominant narrative with a submissive conservative boogeyman narrative.

The issue to me is more that the extremes are so extreme as to be unworkable; you have people being unironic nazis, monarchists, and marxist-communists, so anything else will seem sane and balanced. But it's definitely not being out of an echo chamber.

Not really. Like a recent cancel attempt was Scott Cawthon, creator of the game series Five Nights at Freddy's. His crime? Voting for trump.

No really, that's it. His games weren't political, and while he was open about who he was, he pretty much seemed to be inoffensive in practice. But since his fanbase has a lot of LGBT, they felt betrayed because he did so, and as far as i know he was definitely not trolling them or being any form of negative person apart from supporting people they disliked.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivenightsatfreddys/comments/nybyo1...

I can understand not wanting to support legit offensive personalities, but increasingly it will be used as a weapon to enforce proper thought.

You can't really get used to siccing the tiger of cancel culture on people, because it gets really tempting to sic it on anyone. Homophobia for example is a useful concept to make people think about why they disagree with legalizing gay marriage, or their attitudes about alternative sexualities. But it also can and has been used as a club to silence enemies or any disagreement whatsoever.

You have to keep things civil and restrained because once unrestrained, like the tiger, it can be used on and go after anyone.

and someone can successfully complete high end raids in world of warcraft despite being a paraplegic. Doesn't mean everyone should be able to do so or its too easy to raid. Don't view outliers and your own experience as standard; high achievers do this way too often and end up discounting the real difficulty and struggles in accomplishing such a thing.

Yeah, one of my fears is we simply have too many people and too few jobs in this kind of economy. The lower birth rates are a gaia consciousness response to overpopulation in this respect

not really, there's only so many tradesmen an area can support, and only union members get any real standard of living. Plus, there's the whole "destroying your body" thing; it's not computer scientists behind the opioid crisis, for example. Its drudgery, extremely hard work, and with a side order of ill health for the rest of your life.

it doesn't work this way. My experiences/watching is that the men at 40 live with their parents or relatives, take care of them some, and stay single for the rest of their lives in a pretty low standard of living. Essentially those men are the new spinsters, and definitely do not have decent jobs or kids.

Not everyone can do "something." A lot of jobs aren't meaningful or even necessary, and given the increased tendency to require 4 year degrees on top of internships, connections, and more for many jobs makes it harder to obtain them.

Also, a lot of jobs that would employee these men are disappearing. Retail in particular is the employer of last resort, but physical shops are slowly dwindling in numbers. People are a lot more aware of how bad the military is to be in, too; there is much less glamour around it culturally.