What this will do is put independent sellers and entrepreneurs out of business. The largest companies, like Amazon and Wal-Mart, with the infrastructure to cope, won't miss a beat. Everyone else... won't be able to comply. eBay will fall farther behind, if not collapse entirely, because they don't sell anything themselves and aren't configured to be in the business of selling anything themselves.

This is bad for consumers and bad for the economy. And it will lead to large firms with regulatory capture dominating e-commerce. It's one more step in the centralization of the 'net as a deeply controlled profit source for a handful of megacorporations.

I'll believe this when I see it. I think it's far more likely that in 20 years the relative peace and prosperity that we see today will have broken down somewhat into less functional economies, societies, public infrastructure systems, etc. and that a small global overclass will live in relative comfort still tended to mostly by humans while the bulk of the populations around the globe continue more or less on the path that they are now.

I can see universal basic incomes happening eventually, but not in 20 years, more like 150 after a great deal of turmoil and a certain amount of reconstruction.

Kurzweil seems always to think that every Big Thing is just around the corner. If we survive long enough, I have no doubt that there will be Big Things, but society just doesn't change in 10-20 years. The names change (the Soviet Union collapses, computational machines become computers become phones) but the substance is evolving much more slowly. It's still evolving, but punctuated revolutions in the basic circumstances of life every 10-20 years like Kurzweil seems to predict just don't really happen.

Even the vaunted "smartphone revolution" hasn't changed all that much at the day-to-day level. We still drive cars, put out the trash in the morning, do the dishes, complain about veterinary bills, and bemoan the state of politics, more or less as was the case 50 years ago. Some of the details have changed, but humanity is not radically different, despite (sadly) all the hand-wringing.

Bringing 7 billion people along spread across an entire planet does not lend itself to rapid change unless the change is natural and catastrophic (i.e. beyond our control).

I own two Macbook Pros for mobile work, but for desktop work I rely on a self-built that runs MacOS and actually has the hardware that I need in it. Too bad Apple won't sell me one, I'd buy it instead and not have to worry about dealing with the vagaries and annoyances of maintaining my own white box hardware.

I don't know about cryptocurrency, though.

What I do know is that I felt very proud to not take the full cost of attendance out as loans when I was doing my degree. I thought (and the "adults" told me) that I was very smart to minimize my borrowing.

I know two separate people who took out the full cost of attendance loan (max they could get) every semester they were in school, and used that money as down payments on their first rental buildings. Years later, they both now have small real estate empires, the loans are paid off, and one retired in his '30s, all started by student loans. Both leveraged their student loan debt into investments that paid off.

Meanwhile, I was under the debt thumb for years and years and am still working for a salary 50+ hours a week. Someone was smart, and it wasn't me (despite what the older generation applauded me for).

On the other hand, I'm not sure that cryptocurrency is quite the same deal. Seems like it would be smarter to invest and rent-seek as the people that I know did.

apart from a stint as a kid when I was learning to tell time.

Smart watches sold me on the idea of "watches" but not on the idea of "smart."

with a first-generation Sony smartwatch: https://www.theverge.com/2012/...
and then a Basis tracker: http://www.bestfitnesstrackerr...
and then a Pebble: https://www.pebble.com/
and then a Moto 360: https://www.motorola.com.au/pr...

My inner gadget freak kept wanting to be wowed, but I kept not being wowed, so I kept trying other models. By the time friends started to get Apple watches, I had already transitioned to wearing traditional analog mechanical watches instead. I played with their Apple watches a bit, but it was the same basic stuff as the ones I'd tried, maybe with more spit and shine.

So smart watches got me into wristwatches... but not in the end into smart watches.

I've always been a tech early adopter, so I was expecting to eventually be seduced into the upgrade cycle or wanting the latest-and-greatest, but instead I realized that what I liked most were things like having the time on my wrist, the designs of the faces, customizing the strap/bracelet, and generally wearing them as an apparel item. What I liked least?

- Having to pair with my phone
- Having to deal with apps and taps that were cumbersome and ultimately just poorly duplicated what was on my phone
- Having to charge the watch over and over and over again
- Starting to envy the idea of having *really* timeless and personal thing on my wrist, rather than tossing out/upgrading in a year or two

Basically, I hated all the "smart" parts. And on top of that, I got a taste for the sense of the really personal nature of something that you wear on your body all the time, and suddenly didn't like the idea that this thing that was literally a part of me all the time was disposable and just a temporary relationship. For a phone, okay. For something that you touch nonstop, that becomes a part of you, it was a step too far into the bionic man world.

I have no desire to own a smart watch any longer. But I now have over 30 automatic mechanical wristwatches with lovely dials and lume, domed sapphire crystals, hefty bracelets with sold end links, and classic looks. And I am learning how to service and repair them (I recently serviced my first Slava 2427 movement) and my young son has expressed a lot of interest in them, so someday I can leave them to him and he will still be able to tell the time with them while identifying them with childhood memories and with me—something that would not be the case with a transient smart watch.

and they walk around for a few minutes with a distant look on their faces and then ask to leave, it is a shitty toy store.

I have no idea if they had a science kit in the back somewhere, or the microscope we got at Target on a top shelf somewhere (no doubt it would have cost at least double what we paid at Target) but the fact is, I have two young kids and on the couple of occasions we've gone there (once to spend a bundle of grandparent-given birthday money), both kids were, like *so meh*.

If you're a toy store and kids don't want to be there, you have a serious problem.

There are a couple of local independent toy stores, on the other hand, that they absolutely LOVE. You have to fight to get them to leave. We only shop these maybe a couple of times a year the prices are still high to me for what you get compared to online, BUT they have a very different selection of toys from brands that I don't remember on Saturday morning cartoons, not to mention very engaging displays, both of which the kids are fascinated by—it all generates that same "wow!" look that tells you the kids are fascinated. And I'd say that 35% of what the local independents stock isn't easily available online. From said local toy stores in the last year we bough a big dragon kite, a set of fairly difficult 3-D cast metal puzzles, a large bow and arrow set with foam-tipped arrows that actually has very real-life action and shoots arrows about 100 yards, a strategy game called Rubber Road that they really like, a Bloxels set, and a cool card game called Evolution that the kids are willing to play for hours and that actually does a reasonable job of illustrating the concept of natural selection in a very basic, reductive way (it's supposed to be for 12 and older, and it cost $40 ugh, but they love it anyway even though they're both under 10).

We never sighted stuff even remotely like this at our local Toys'R'Us stores. Instead, the board game aisle features about 50 variations on Monoply which of course we already have because there are eleventy billion sets already being passed down in families out there, a few ill-conceived highly branded board games that appear to be more about representing the characters to keep the kids interested in the TV property and drive ad revenue, plus a bunch of "gross out" games—plastic toilets that spray water in your face, random catapults that fling slime at the players (for which they're happy to sell extra slime on the side), etc. No strategy. Barely any rules. And the "toy" aisles are labeled with big signs: Disney. Marvel. Hasbro. Mattel. Crayola. etc. It's all organized by what appear to be brand-sponsorships, yet each aisle seems to have essentially the same stuff, just with different faces and costumes and paint jobs and packaging slapped on them. Bubble-packs of action figures hung on hooks. Below them, their "vehicles," "weapons," or "transport animals" in boxes. Supporting or minor characters toward either end of the aisle, major "characters" from the film/cartoon/etc. in the middle. All overcolored and overpriced and boring as sin.

To make matters worse, it's all $30-$50 for these cheap little hunks of plastic that really don't stimulate the imagination at all, or up to $hundreds for variations on the concept of "play house" (or castle or fortress or whatever) for said hunks of plastic. I mean, this stuff is just random brightly colored shit without much replay value or learning value, is not inspiring in the least, and would cost $3 at a Chinese import bric-a-brac store if not for the brand stamped on it and the overdone bubble packaging and loud labels IN ALL CAPS WITH EXCLAMATION MARKS! The Crayola aisle at least has creativity stuff, but the local Wal-Mart stocks the same crayon box sizes for $0.99 (for sixteen crayons) to $5.99 (for sixty-four) vs. starting at $3.49 for sixteen crayons. Who is going to pay $3.49 for a box of sixteen crayons? Or $7.99 for a 100-sheet sketch pad of not particularly high quality paper? WTF?! Particularly when the exact same items, the exact same brand, are a fraction of the price two parking lots away?

Not only that, but they don't have any of these things out on display for kids to actually touch. It's all bubble-packed or boxed, then hung up vertically in a such a way that 70% of inventory is above eye-level for a kid. The eyes just glazed over.

Seriously, if you take multiple kids under 10 years old into a dedicated toy store with massive square footage and a pile of money in the *kids' pockets* and then they drag you back out of the store 15 minutes later of their own accord asking to go to the Michael's next door instead—and as a parent, you're actually rather pleased with them for not wanting anything that any of you saw there—you have a serious problem with the way you're running a toy business.

Kids. Toys. What could be easier? AFAICT, it's no wonder Toys'R'Us is going out of business.

Their toys are mindless un-fun corporate shit.

My kids are always bored there. We've found much more fun toys at Target, not to mention Amazon.com, whatever you think of both companies. We bought a potato-driven clock and a home-terrarium kit on Amazon.com for under $10 each that the kids enjoyed. They get TinkerCrate which they also enjoy, and I consider it expensive at $29 a crate. But walk into a Toys'R'Us and all you can get is 8" plastic action figures in garish colors for $49.99 each.

Toys'R'Us should be called AMillionFlashyBrandedOverpricedActionFigures'R'Us.

At least near us, the two stores had no science kits, no craft stuff, no learning toys to speak of, no building toys to speak of, no creative toys of any kind. The best section were bikes and skateboards in the back. The rest is literally wall-to-wall action figures from cartoons that my kids have never heard of because cartoons are so twenty years ago and we don't have TV. They are much more interested in apps than in TV.

Toys'R'Us is selling toys from decades ago—thousands of them, all the same, and for 4x what they ought to cost.

The service is excellent. Google's uptime has been flawless, the original install appointments went smoothly and were kept, the equipment is high quality, and the gigabit service does actually deliver a full gigabit of bandwidth up *and* down in tests. And all for $70/month, which includes 1TB online storage via Google Drive.

Just as cool, you can simply log into fiber.google.com and downgrade to 100mbps ($50/mo.) or 5mbps (free) at will. You can upgrade and downgrade, click, click, click, and it will pro-rate costs for you automatically. Basically, it's a flawless service in every way.

One of the things that I'm convinced hurt Google in this area is that there was already entrenched competition from the usual suspects in national broadband brands.

For decades, it had been 5mbps-10mbps down and a fifth of that upstream as the maximum service tier at every major provider. And for that you paid $50-$70 monthly. As soon as Google Fiber deployed, suddenly *every provider* offered Gigabit for less than $100/mo. plus value adds and promos. I mean, it took weeks max, once Google Fiber started scheduling installations. Just like that. And a lot of people stuck with the devil they already know, particularly if they were already getting TV and/or landline service through them, and particularly if Google had install times a week or two out but their current provider could bump them up within a day or two.

Google broke the market wide open here, but at the same time ended up with scraps in the end. Most of the people that I know stuck with their previous provider and ended up with gigabit speeds anyway at or near their previous subscription cost once Google entered the local market. I worry that if Google were to pull out of the market for some reason, suddenly "market realities" would reduce the offerings of the other providers once again to $70/mo. for 5mbps, as it had previously been.

So I hope Google stays.

sites that use this show a dialog that uses local store and enables you to opt in.

"Once you've read, say, your first five articles, fade in a modal that says "You seem to like what we're providing here. We need funds to operate—journalism isn't cheap, traditional subscription models are dying, and we need funds to operate. To continue to read, you need to select one of these options:

[ ] Mine Monero for us as you read (preferred)
[ ] See ads as you read (more obtrusive)

Save Preference and Read On >"

Then, after that, if you don't opt in to either one and you visit, you just see this modal each time you visit instead of articles. No opt-in, no articles.

That way, consumption of the work is funded, but consumers are given an opt-in choice that is unobtrusive and saved once, then remembered so that they don't have to bother with it, and you get your choice between ads and mining.

But it should be opt-in, not silent default. The silent default of ads that don't pay the bills (so that you need to click fifty times to read the equivalent of ten paragraphs) is the problem with the entire web right now, and it's killing the web.

Bigger problem: you can't see what other people share. FB has "monetized" themselves out of the business by selling all the space in the feed to advertisers and never showing you anything from the people that you're trying to stay connected to.

It used to be a good tool for keeping up with everyone in your circle and what they're up to in a kind of rapid, quick-check way. Now if you want to see your friends' or family's updates, you have to go to each person's timeline individually, one at a time. Otherwise, they're essentially invisible to you. So you just call them instead, since it amounts to the same thing as checking and scrolling through every individual profile one by one.

Meanwhile, your feed is a whole bunch of bullshit clickbait from advertisers that have paid to insert themselves into the feeds of everyone of your age and your gender in your country.

And on the very rare occasion that you do happen to see a promoted item on your feed that you're interested in, generally the the app updates the feed just as you're about to tap on it, and *poof* it's gone. And there's no way in heaven or hell to go back and find it ever again, it's just gone. It's literally a platform for carefully obscuring from you anything you want to see and putting in front of you and endless list of things you couldn't care less about.

That's not what anyone was promised when they signed up, or what led to Facebook's growth.

Basically as soon as they decided to monetize the feed aggressively, the result was predictable and lots of people predicted it. "Great, so now we're going to see a lot of ads that we don't give a shit about, disguised as 'updates' from organizations and pages we don't care about, and everything we do care about will be hidden."

Yup. Exactly what happened.

wristwatches... But I no longer have the two smartwatches that I bought. Instead, I have a handful of wristwatches, any one of which I wear on a given day, without fail. The smartwatches themselves are long gone to eBay.

The smartwatches were a pain to use and did nothing well, had a hit-and-miss UI that only sometimes felt even partially usable, and they had to keep coming off and on for charging, which meant that I'd routinely forget to wear them for the day (I tried two in succession). I really liked having the time and date on my wrist, though, and once I tried an old fashioned self-winding mechanical analog wristwatch, I loved having this little machine on my wrist that did its job *perfectly* and without intervention and was scheduled to do so for the next 15-20 years until needing, in very quaint fashion, to be "lubed" with highly refined dino oil by a mechanical specialist.

So I've ended up with several pieces of 19th century technology (which is really just miniaturized 16th century technology) that do the job rather well and also are visually fascinating and aesthetically pleasing to look at as they do it. They're maintenance-free, water resistant to 200 meters, really impervious to most any hazard, and when I change them I only take them off for a few seconds to swap, rather than having to leave them off for hours, so I rarely forget to wear one. It does happen, but far less often than it did with the smartwatches.

And as a bonus, telling time now Just Works—there's no need to wake them up (which often required actual "steps" on the smartwatches, despite advertising to the obvious), they just show the time all the time. Even if I'm, day, driving and need to leave my hand on the wheel, I can just glance at an angle and read the time easily. They don't require me to move my arm from the steering wheel and/or do actual stuff to read them.

As a bonus, a reasonable quality mechanical wristwatch from Seiko or Orient costs 1/3 to 1/2 what a smartwatch does, so for the same price you can have several traditional wristwatches that will last many years and offer a variety of styles and appearances and provide redundancy in the case that one should fail... Without the further requirement of periodic "upgrades."

So smartwatches convinced me to wear a watch. Just not, in the end, a smartwatch.

One is seven years old and one is six years old.

That's the thing. They last a lot longer than PCs used to for their intended use. There's no reason to replace one if it's still working well.

What is a "snap"? Has the distro-packaging problem finally been solved?

is that servicing them isn't nearly as hard as I'd always assumed. I've just picked it up in the last year. Anyone who builds their own PCs or can code should have no trouble, they're actually not all that complicated—just *small*.

As it turns out, the key is the right tools. And these days, they're easy to get your hands on thanks to e-commerce. The guts of mechanical watches had always seemed intractable to me, but then I went out on a limb and bought an illuminated set of head-worn magnifying lenses. It only cost about $20. Suddenly, everything became clear and easy!

A good set of brass tweezers (another $10, don't buy the junk for doing eyebrows at the drugstore), a good set of jeweler's screwdrivers (real ones, which go down to 0.2mm width flat blades) for another $20, a case-back tool for $3-4 to get them open... The most expensive things are the lubricating oils, but even then you're buying in small quantities (because you're literally using pinhead dabs) so again less than a $50 investment.

It turns out parts are the easiest things to come by, there are sellers by the bucket on Etsy selling mechanical movements in untested condition, like 20 complete movements for $5-10 of for some common consumer models. They market them as "steampunk" decor for art projects, but they're just piles and piles of complete watch movements. You buy a bucket of 'em and you have parts coming out your ears.

Then, you just follow your nose. And if you get stuck, there are YouTube teardown videos for just about every common movement. And there are dozens of timegrapher apps for smartphones now to help you to regulate them—start the app, put the mic by the open-back watch, and it will tell you how close you are to perfect time as you adjust the level. It's all actually shockingly easy, I think anyone with tech skills can pick it up in just a few months of practice.

It's a lot like computers used to be in the '80s. A list of standard parts that are pretty recognizable (every moment has one of these, one of these, one of these, one of these...), specs that are easy to find for mix/match, and a basic set of not-all-that-special-or-expensive tools.

In a world of more and more devices that are trying to be your "everything" device, and that are more and more locked down, unserviceable, and undocumented, with shorter and shorter times between charges, it's really refreshing to own and work on devices that are simple, straightforward, perform one job and perform it well, run on their own for decades, can be understood and maintained indefinitely, and that are amenable to at-home customizing, hacking, and optimization (regulating, cleaning, polishing, servicing, etc.)

I've found in mechanical wristwatches the same fun that we used to be able to have with 8-bit computers in the '80s. Only better, because these don't need wall power, make great gifts, and can be left to future generations while still retaining much of their original functionality without any learning curve for the user.

Plus, they look great. I still can't get over all these people walking around with little blank screens on their wrists. Better to have steel and chrome and paint and colors.