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I really want Walmart to succeed in online delivery because I don't want Amazon to gobble everything.

Recently, I was shopping for a media entertainment cabinet. Its for our upstairs media room, so I wasn't super concerned about it being "nice furniture". I went and checked at our local Walmart and found a piece that would work. Instead of trying to load the 180lb piece into my car by myself, I thought "I'll just order online and have it delivered to my door and take it upstairs in pieces"

When it was delivered I was out and when I returned I discovered they sent me the wrong item (desk instead of media center). Went online to start the return process and the only option given was "return to your local store".

Luckily the desk was only 90lbs, but still it was a chore to load this in a car, drive to walmart, then at walmart there's no flat handtrucks or dollys, so had to wrestle into regular cart to bring to service desk.

They processed the return quickly and had the right media center in stock, but now I was back to square one: How to load a 190lb piece in my car using a standard shopping cart?

By Amazon being a 100% online store, they were forced to develop sane and customer friendly approaches to handling these types of issues. Because Walmart has never had to deal with these things, they are very lacking in handling these edge cases.

I still plan to use Walmart online, but will be very cognizant of what I'm ordering given their return process.

I think this is conflating factual and rational. They are not mutually inclusive.

Although its a book on economics, Von Mesis's "Human Action" premise is that all human activity is necessarily 'rational' from the viewpoint of the actor. Moreover, the goal of "human activity" in general is to bring about a higher state of happiness. Even the refusal to perform an action, is in effect an 'action' who's goal is to increase happiness compared to the alternative.

A person who is convinced they are being hunted by aliens, so wraps their head in aluminum foil is behaving completely rational from their view (by increasing their happiness of not being tortured)...whether or not this is factual is a different issue.

Totally agree that it will be a hardship. However the following things are all true: (a) There is a chance that "carbon taxes" will lead to just as much practical hardship on the poor, (b) There is no guarantee that these carbon taxes will work, (c) There is no guarantee that the poles will even melt.

The layers of uncertainty are piled so high, that a rational response is "wait and see". I do recognize however this approach is negative to grant funding, so these 'scientist' lapse into apocalyptic fire-and-brimstone talk to rouse the faithful.

+2.5C increase will render earth uninhabitable? Or will it upset insurance coverage of high dollar coast lines?

Can elaborate more on the practical benefits of encrypted memory? Presumably this is mainly good for multi-user systems? On the average single-user system it seems that if you can already read memory there are 1000 other possible exploits that are cheaper / easier to perform (ie. keylog, screen capture, etc).

Because the vast majority of the earths history has been without ice on the poles. Obviously this will force changes on humans no doubt.

However, trying to shoehorn this natural fact into a political / carbon-credit trading scheme is deeply cynical that is apparent to most >100 IQ people.

Define "immigration". One of the problems that smart, educated, intern-level immigrants have is they are getting caught in the crossfire of millions of uneducated day-laborers streaming over the border.

We should have increased immigration on a merit-based system (obviously college students would be a strong merit).

You can bet the big-tech companies are the ones suggesting what a great idea this is to government officials (ie. Regulatory Capture).

It wouldn't surprise me that if in 10 years we all will need to have a minimal social presence to do routine things like travel.

>conflate socioeconomic factors with race

Not sure what you mean. Please elaborate your thoughts...

> and be unconstitutional

Guess what else is unconstitutional?

Surely you must realize that the practical way forward with gun control is to slowly increase restriction over time?

Jumping directly into an outright ban / constitutional amendment situation is a waste of effort.

Having said that, shouldn't these increasing gun restrictions seek to reduce gun deaths by their maximum ability? For instance, I would imagine you support restricting drunk people from driving as a sensible way to reduce car-related deaths? Therefore why would you be against targeting specific groups who produce a majority of the gun-related deaths?

Would you support a targeted form of gun control? For instance, if statistically it could be shown that 13% of the population were responsible for >50% of all gun crimes, wouldn't it make sense to focus on removing access to guns on that group first?

I would imagine that in the future video encoders will start to automatically include a cryptographic signature every X frames, which then players will become aware of and show an indicator for "original / modified" content.

A hypothetical:

You are driving your car and see that the pickup truck in front of you has an empty cardboard box in it (you can tell its empty by the way its floating around in bed of truck). Suddenly a gust of win picks up the box and it lands directly in front of your car. Its not very big, about 12 inches tall. Do you: (a) Slam on breaks? (b) Roll over it?

Now what will the "AI" in your car do?

Self-driving cars are not coming anytime soon. They are a whole slew of problems that you can intuit solutions to fairly easily, that are still beyond the ability of current tech.

No one ever talks about eBay anymore....but when are we going to collectively realize that they are the best of the "big tech" companies?

They've stayed remarkable true to their mission, haven't entered politics (ironic given previous CEO), and continued to offer a good service.

Since the commingling of inventory is now so prevalent at Amazon, I find myself using eBay more and more.

But doesn't FB use the existence of said profiles as a lure for advertisers? (eg. Your ad could reach any of our 1B members...)

Seems like a class-action lawsuit in the making.

This probably has a large amount of 'survivorship bias' embedded in it (no pun intended).

People who are frantic, time-critical, but not immediate life-threatening situations probably grab their bag (ie. the landing gear on plane has failed, but plane has stopped on runway intact and not on fire).

This probably differs significantly if the plane was ripped in half, or people were choking from thick toxic smoke. Those people probably don't even think about grabbing their bag because they are in active severe pain / dying.

Point is, people are making a rational decision that "This is a dangerous situation and I need to get out of here, but I will probably survive", therefore they take their stuff with them.

>The recent Nest development of them closing their API is a clear example of the difference, if it was a Free Software based API I would have the ability to run my own Nest API server.

What changes in GPL / FSF licensing would enforce the changes that you want to achieve?

>"Open Source" community has given to commercial companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Oracle

What are some examples of these 'compromises'. From what I have seen, all these companies publish source code and abide by copyright law for any open-source code they use in their products.

Or are you simply against the principle of for-profit companies making money from open-source?

>then the worse that will happen

But that's not the "worse that will happen". Go tell a starving 3rd world family that their $300 per month salary will now only buy $200 because you decided its a "risk worth taking".

>We have evidence that we are seeing a rise in temperatures

For the majority of the earths history, the poles have had no ice on them. Their current existence is a holdover from our last ice-age.

Wouldn't it be rational to conclude that earth's temperatures are meandering back to its natural state?

>layering years of patches over top actually generates more stable, more secure code

Well, I think your definition of 'stable' is different than what RHEL/Debian customers think. Stable isn't seen as "doesn't have bugs", its "works predictably". Which is a subtle but meaningful difference.

See here: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/corporate-lia...

"When a corporation is criminally liable, the responsibility also falls on individuals. The board of directors, officers, and other high-ranking officials will almost always be criminally liable as well (just look at the Enron fiasco). A individual can be held criminally liable for another employee's illegal act under the accomplice liability theory."

This is completely inaccurate. Corporate liability protection only extends to civil financial issues, any real property crimes (ie. fraud, murder, etc) 'pierces the corporate veil' and ultimately are filed against the people who performed it.

>I like Librem, though I am a little concerned here. I prefer if hardware and services comes from different companies

I actually agree 100% with you, however I think at this stage of the market development, its enough to have a 3rd choice who's apps and services are open.

Librem is facing the "Grandmother problem". In order for this concept to actually succeed, it eventually needs regular folks to buy it. Its not enough to tell thousands of grandmothers to "buy our phone hardware and simply download and install any of the dozens of confusing and competing software stacks by following these 20 instructions on github". It needs to be marketed and sold as coherent integrated product, otherwise just buy an old Samsung and root it yourself....

Instead of being a defeatist, why not just invest in a REIT on Etrade and join the party?

Thats an excellent question. The real answer lies in 2 things: (a) Fiat money, and thus (b) Artificially low interest rates.

As long as the money printers, keep printing, and also keep interest rates at 0%, then all sorts of market distortions will continually be produced as the dream of some return is better than the promise of none.

I don't think its mean spirited.

"Dive bars" have always been popular.

A friend of mine in college opened a dive bar, which quickly became very very popular. This was the type of place where you could smell the ammonia from the urinal when you walked in the door. Spending more than an hour in there, and you left smelling like cigarette smoke and stale beer.

When opening his 2nd bar, he made the rookie mistake of "trying to finally do it right". His new bar was walking distance from the original, and had a beautiful wood bar, leather chairs, fancy plate glass windows with frosted lettering, etc (top notch plumbing too).

His 2nd bar never caught on and he eventually had to close.

The importance of "dive's" is that everyone feels comfortable. You feel you can do no wrong. Spill your beer...so what. Whereas if the place it too fancy, everyone becomes too self-aware.

These types of places like BdB aren't about customers "looking down" on the place, its about being in a place thats comfortable and where the average joe doesn't feel looked down upon.

A friend and I were speaking of this recently. The current trend for "all-in-ones" is to have "monitor computers", however practically speaking it would be better to have a "keyboard computer" that you can change every few years and keep the investment in your nice 2k monitor.

I have yet speak to any experienced embedded developer who actually thinks "full autonomy" is remotely possible in the near/mid term. The suggestions that it is possible, seems to come mainly from junior developers and snake-oil salesman.

We don't even have "full autonomous" trains, planes, or trucks yet.

Also, there is a requirement for the hacker to actually publish the results of how they did it. Otherwise, you run the risk of the hacker just walking away with the funds or giving a bogus reason (after they've already spent the wallet).

Therefore, the wallets should be stored GPG encrypted in some published location. After the hacker has successfully penetrated and retrieved the file, they need to publish a "how I did it" document along with the hash of the GPG encrypted wallet.

Once devs have confirmed the vulnerabilities exist, they respond with the passphrase to decrypt the wallet.

Those who really care about the environment, know that reuse and recycling are the best approaches. So, you could buy a 15-yr old Toyota or Hyundai, since that carbon footprint already exist. You shouldn't be needlessly creating more deadly CO2.

Further, in terms of energy density: solar, wind, coal, natural gas all pack far less joules per gram than petroleum.

These are inconvenient truths that unfortunately conflict with the slick marketing messages of your luxury golf cart salesman.