For valuable goods I've started filming myself opening boxes so that I have proof for law enforcement, credit card companies, or the vendor if I need to demonstrate that I did not receive what I ordered. Someone may try to contest it, but at least it gives me something.

I ordered two HDMI cables recently that were fulfilled by Amazon. In the Amazon-branded box that arrived were 16 clear bags, each of which contained a 10-pack of 6" ethernet cables. Being that 160x 6" ethernet cables was not what I ordered, I initiated a return, Amazon immediately shipped the HDMI cables, and all seemed well. It didn't appear to be fraud, just a case of Amazon slapping the wrong label on someone else's box or packing mine with the wrong items.

Then a few weeks later I was charged again for the price of another HDMI cable on the grounds that I only returned one. I didn't even know what to do with that idea, and for the $8 it cost me I couldn't be bothered to get on the line with their customer support in an effort to explain the non-existence of a cable they expected me to return.

Exactly right. A friend of mine is a plant pathologist who heads a research lab at Texas A&M, and he has all sorts of interesting stories (he likes to joke that by the time he gets called in, it's already too late).

For instance, many fruit trees require a certain number of chilling hours to produce their maximum yield. A few years back, some "clever" peach farmers* thought they could increase production by enclosing their trees to protect them from the cold (other varieties of peach require more protection from the cold, so their confusion was understandable), only to find that their yields dropped by as much as 90% in some cases. They were fine again by the next year once they took my friend's advice to open the enclosures for a sufficient amount of time during cold nights.

Unfortunately, this foreshadows the bigger issue that people are failing to grok: the business of farming can be more fragile than the plants themselves. A plant may still be perfectly capable of producing fruit in a given area, but farming that plant will become financially unsustainable as yields drop. Just as those "clever" farmers would've gone out of business if they hadn't corrected the behavior that resulted in a 90% decline, so too will farmers be out of business or forced to move north in a few years if their yields drop as temperatures continue to climb.

* Quick aside: Texas peaches are obviously not as well known as Georgia peaches, but can oftentimes be quite a bit tastier than Georgia's. Depends on the crop. We've gotten some good steering from our local farmer's market.

How is it being used? I can't seem to find numbers that break it down, at least not in a quick search. Obviously construction, but what sort? Because you're exactly right, but how we cut use will depend on where and how it's being used.

I hear a lot of hand-wringing about concrete use in single family slab-on-grade foundations and people suggesting replacements such as ground screws, but when you get down to it, a slab foundation is only a few car lengths long, a few street lanes wide, and will last decades longer than a road, so I doubt they're a large contributor (though every bit helps, of course). If I had to guess, I'd guess that most concrete is going to infrastructure, rather than residential or commercial construction. Infrastructure projects like dams, highway overpasses, and even just basic concrete roads are—I would assume—some of the largest consumers of concrete, and I'm not sure how you get around that.

I suspect there won't be any single solution to the issue. The closest thing to a magic bullet will be any change to the production process itself that can reduce emissions, such as eliminating or reducing the use of the materials (e.g. clinker) that contribute most significantly to emissions. That's already something that the industry has committed to do globally. Another part of it will come down to finding alternatives on a case-by-case basis (e.g. ground screws in place of slabs, asphalt/tarmac in places and situations where it can be used instead of concrete). Part of it will involve clever solutions that reduce the usage within existing solutions (e.g. overpasses that need less concrete). And part of it could also come down to formulating mixes that include carbon capturing materials, which is an area that has seen some advances in the last few years.

Even so, it'd be great if there was a magic bullet here.

Sure, with caveats. From the AAS: https://eclipse.aas.org/eye-sa...

1st of April was 2 days ago, was there an editing delay? In any case, there is only 1 Matrix movie, it was released in 1999 and I went to watch it in the theater 7 times. I have heard rumors about sequels but only that, they don't exist, whatever exists is not the Matrix, to make a movie like that one needs balls...

Yeah, because it is. You don’t need to take my word on it. You can verify this yourself. If you’re unable to decrypt any packets using the technique I laid out, you”ll know it didn’t accept a different CA. But it does, hence why the contents of those packets have been disclosed.

Your username may be "ACForever", but you must be new here if you aren't yet aware that there are pedants on this site.

I refuted an objectively incorrect claim. Nothing more said, nothing more intended, so for you to label me as "stupid and gullible" in response to me providing a factually accurate correction to an objectively false claim made by the previous poster, the only conclusion I can reach is that you either suffer from poor reading comprehension or you are so steeped in your tribalistic thinking that you projected it onto a post that deliberately didn't take a side in your petty fight.

Anyone who wrongly mistakes a pedantic post for someone taking a side is saying more about their own tribalism than the point they were hoping to make.

Sure there is. It’s a device you control, on your network. You simply tell the device to trust a CA you set up, serve up a fake cert, MitM yourself, and then read the unencrypted packets. You can even do it in realtime if you use something more powerful than a Pi. This isn’t rocket science and there are plenty of tools to help researchers do this sort of thing. You can even find people who strip ads out of encrypted packets going between the YouTube app on an Apple TV and Google’s servers as a fun, personal project.

Stop spreading FUD.

I wanted a weekend driver and got myself a 2014 Boxster, no way in hell that would have been an automatic, that car is for fun and has nothing to do with any 'retro' crap. I wouldn't be caught dead driving an EV though.

How did you get modded Insightful? Texas generates more than twice the wind power of the next closest state in the US and is second only to California when it comes to solar generation. And of course the oil and gas industry is hedging their bets. They see the writing on the wall, just like everyone else, which is why they’re all rebranding as “energy” companies and pivoting into new sectors. And while they’ve certainly sabotaged things in the past, the market is out of their hands at this point: if they don’t supply the clean energy, someone else will and they’ll be bankrupt, so they’re along for the ride at this point.

And you do realize that Texas has some of the largest concentrations of technically competent people in the nation, right? I mean, NASA and SpaceX ring a bell? Did none of your SV friends mention thoughts about moving to Austin yet? Texas isn’t supporting four of the top ten most populous cities in the nation with a promise of jobs in oil fields. In fact, even the oil and gas industry is getting more technically competent as a whole: Petroleum Engineering jobs aren’t dipping much or at all, but the number of jobs for extracting oil and gas in the US have dropped by nearly half in the last decade.

That’s basically what happened, but it still resulted in prices going up due to the MFN clause. Amazon switched to an agency model and took a smaller cut, but consumers continued seeing the same prices at both stores, regardless of Amazon’s cut vs. Apple’s cut, so prices rose to ensure profitability at the store that took the largest cut: Apple’s. And publishers benefitted from increased profits at Amazon.

I have no idea what you’re referring to. Everything I’m talking about involves increased prices. No one outcompeted anyone else by lowering prices, which, as you suggest, would be fine. An MFN clause may sound like it’ll ensure lower prices, but what it actually does when paired with an agency model is ensure that other’s prices are raised to match yours, preventing them from competing on price/cut/fees.

Agreed, but if you look at the historical price data, that shift only began once the settlements and rulings against Apple started coming out. Prior to that, prices climbed steeply when Apple entered the market, which was used as evidence against Apple at trial.

Not so! The Apple eBooks case from a decade ago is a great example of this.

Apple's agreement with the publishers had two important conditions:
1. An agency model that allowed publishers to set their own prices while Apple took a percentage cut.
2. A Most Favored Nation (MFN) clause that ensured Apple's store would always have the cheapest price for any given book.

The combination of those two factors ensured that prices would go up industry-wide because Amazon, who wasn't part of this, was still operating on a wholesale model. Trying to match/beat Amazon's price in Apple's store—a requirement of the MFN clause—wasn't tenable, so the only alternative publishers had was to raise their prices with Amazon to match the prices they had at Apple's store.

Even though none of the publishers sat in a room together or made agreements with each other to raise prices across the industry, they were all aware that the others were entering this same agreement with Apple and understood the effect these conditions would have on the industry. They knew that their collective actions were going to result in prices going up, hence why they all settled out of court as soon as regulators came after them for colluding. Only Apple tried to fight it out, and they lost.

I'm reminded of a cooperate card game called Hanabi in which players can't see their own cards. They are instead only permitted to provide limited hints about the cards others are holding. Those other players then read between the lines to understand the logical implications of the hints that have been given. In much the same way, algorithms of this sort can be recognized by others and, once discovered, amount to an implicit, open invitation to engage in price fixing. Whether or not that's "collusion", I actually don't have a stance (I may argue that you can collude without ever meeting each other, but that doesn't mean Inecessarily think that's what happened here), but I think it's fair to say that this sort of algorithm should be illegal, due to its very nature.

Collusion isn't a synonym of "cooperation" that has a negative connotation. It means something entirely different that is in no way applicable to the activities of (lawful) unions.

As a general rule, you have the freedom to do pretty much anything you want to do with other people (see: Freedom of Association), so whether you want to work together with fellow employees at a business to outcompete others in the market, work together with fellow volunteers to feed the hungry, or work together with fellow union members to engage in collective bargaining, it isn't collusion. Where cooperation crosses into collusion is when entities work together to do something that they're not allowed to do. Price fixing is one such example, since there are laws specifically prohibiting the activity.

Now, you might be tempted to argue that collective bargaining is no different than price fixing, so it should be illegal, but that argument fails to account for the imbalance of power. A business is itself a collection of people, so when a non-union employee asks for a raise they're fighting against the collective bargaining power of the entire organization without any help. Allowing them to unionize simply levels the playing field. But if you think that unions give their members an unfair advantage, do you have suggestions for how we should remove the advantage businesses have when they're bargaining with individuals?

Again, the fact that people cooperate in the pursuit of a proper and lawful end is not, by definition, collusion.

I run a number of companies, I am not under illusion that my companies are here forever, however I also am against government bailing out my companies should they fail. They should be then restructured or shut down, whatever. I haven't worked for someone permanently since 2000, so I don't understand this idea that there shouldn't be unemployment or emoyment should be at 100% and I am against government setting that up as well, as it means unnecessary money spent on jobs that shouldn't exist. Yes, I am against government bailing out anyone, I am against government taxing work, income of any kind, preventing businesses from making their own decisions What exactly do you think a government drone knows about running any business, mine or yours or whatever business? However they can bail it out and create amazing amounts of waste dojng it.