I'm certain that I've stayed in an AirBnB or two that had a rule book and chores, but I never read them. I'm a fairly tidy person and generally clean as I go, but I don't go out of my way to clean dishes or take out the trash unless it really needs it. I also don't leave reviews of places I stay, nor do I read the reviews left for me.
I suspect you’re right. I asked my doctor if I should get a blood glucose monitor to track my blood sugar. I am not diabetic. She said “you can, but it’s not going to change the advice about what to do.” Basically, you don’t need a CGM to tell you to eat more whole food
Long distance heavy transport was solved in the US centuries ago using the incredible network of navigable waterways. Unfortunately the Jones Act makes it not as viable as it could be. Dredging is cheap compared to the payoff — shipping by water is 1% the cost of shipping overland.
I have a few of the older ones in this series. They’re nice for letting me experience music without having to have my phone with me. It’s basically stock android, which is fine, I just don’t like having my main Google account on it because that would require me to put a passcode, which breaks the “music device” unitasker use case.
The alleged hardware advances have left the audible range some decades ago, but it’s still fun to read what they do with the components.
I have found the body fat estimator on the Withings mid-tier to be ludicrously off. I’m not convinced these scales offer much more than just the weight number itself, which isn’t very useful after a certain point.
Japan is a totalitarian state where the enforcers are the citizens. This is great for tourists, who are happy to stick out like sore thumbs for the novelty of it and Japanese are all to happy to oblige in limited circumstances. Make no mistake, though, if you are not 100% Japanese, born in Japan, you will never be Japanese. You will never be accepted fully. You will always be excluded or out right discriminated against, and it’s legal.
The US has many flaws, including its most recent speed run into out and out fascism. But it is also the greatest immigrant integrator ever.
I am unsure what Apple's core differentiator is intended to be for this product. "I wanted an Alexa but it wasn't personal enough" perhaps? It just feels like the fad for replacing the family computer with a kitchen appliance came and went.
Chattel slavery is a particular kind of slavery that is especially egregious. One who is interested in the topic will find that there are many kinds of slavery, and that it exists on a spectrum.
“That surveillance capitalism is a logic in action and not a technology is a vital point because surveillance capitalists want us to think that their practices are inevitable expressions of the technologies they employ. For example, in 2009 the public first became aware that Google maintains our search histories indefinitely: data that are available as raw-material supplies are also available to intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. When questioned about these practices, the corporation’s former CEO Eric Schmidt mused, ‘The reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time.’
In truth, search engines do not retain, but surveillance capitalism does. Schmidt’s statement is a classic of misdirection that bewilders the public by conflating commercial imperatives and technological necessity.”
Shoshanna Zuboff, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”
>But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
Sure, but you haven't made the case for why the fear is anyone else's problem. If a person is too scared to be a cop there's an easy fix: stop being a cop. Unfortunately, regular citizens who can't afford to up and move to a country that has civil rights (that is, most of them) don't have the same recourse.
That’s because Baidu sells model access and iFlytek sells integrated products. Also both have released open models, just older ones. They just close their latest ones because they got the reputation they needed out of them and have transitioned to a product. Notice that both of these explain the motivation without resorting to unfalsifiable claims about "economic warfare".
> The reason they release the AI models is economic warfare against US
The story is so much more complicated than that, to the point that this economic warfare theory is basically a meme.
Chinese models are open because they don’t have a choice. “When you trail the frontier, openness maximizes reputation per unit of capability. The moment you lead, you close.” [0]
Amazon says the 2026 Signature Edition cover is more than 70% renewable bio-materials (primarily non-GMO corn, and viscose fibre from Forest Stewardship Council-certified sources) and the remaining content is polyurethane.
Most consumer leather has a pigmented acrylic or polyurethane topcoat and then dyes and fat liquors. Chrome-tanned leather leaves chromium behind when it breaks down, potentially into the toxic hexavalent form. "Biodegradable" has no time limit attached, so it doesn't really say much about the "green-ness" of animal leather. Tanning itself is done to slow down biodegrading.
All of this is orthogonal to the fact that I, personally, as a consumer, do not want to purchase a product made from animals, which is why I'm glad they're not making them out of animals anymore.
Nobody does font rendering like Amazon does. You can run the Kindle app on a Chinese e-reader and it works okay, but I don’t really want an Android tablet.
I picked up the new kindle basic version. It was terribly expensive ($150!) but they go on sale often. I have messed around with many models of ereader and the thing that Amazon and only Amazon gets right is backlight evennness. The basic kindle has a perfect backlight. Kobo was always a lottery.
Thank you for sharing these. I work with many Chinese people, but I am from a working class background. All the Chinese people I work with are of course the smartest and brightest and most fortunate, so it's difficult to get a sense for what working class Chinese people are like.
Apple has several web apps, including tv.apple.com, podcasts.apple.com, maps.apple.com, icloud.com, music.apple.com, apps.apple.com, account.apple.com, card.apple.com, privacy.apple.com, reportaproblem.apple.com.... not to mention business oriented ones too.
I mean sure, but China still has factories in the US. There’s even a movie about it: American Factory (2019). These are the factories I know about: Fuyao Glass (Moraine, OH; IL), Gotion (Manteno, IL), Trina Solar (Wilmer, TX), GE Appliances/Haier (Louisville, KY; also SC, AL, GA, TN, CT), Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube (Wilcox County, AL), Keer Group (Lancaster County, SC), Nanshan America (Lafayette, IN), Smithfield Foods/WH Group, Nexteer, Jinko Solar, JA Solar, Longi, Hounen, Runergy, Boviet….
It looks like they’ve finally switched over to plant based leather. Good to see them move away from animal products in the accessories. Now if they could treat the humans that work for them better we’d really be cooking.