makes price comparisons hard.

Right. Sums it up. Online or otherwise, two local stores or otherwise.

You can check things like technology, spring count, spring gauge, coil counts, meterials, dimensions, etc but at the end of the day your right... you still just don't know if what you are getting online is the same as the bed your lay on at the store.

And even if the specs seem to line up, it may or may not be the same thing.The building materials (fabric quality), general construction / craftsmanship, and QA still may not be the same. Whether you care or not is a separate question.

It may be just as comfortable and just as good in every way. Or the online version may have cheaped out some other place you didn't think to look, perhaps they skipped a QA step so you may or may not get a good unit, or even worse... maybe your getting the stuff that didn't quite meet the store brand's standards. So they slap a different model number and off-name brand badge on it and unload it somewhere else.

I used to recall it said that generic film and fuji film were made in the same plant and were the same thing. Technically they were or at least could be the same some of the time. But the QA and acceptance standards on the stuff that got sent out with the fuji brand conformed to markedly higher standards.

So upshot was the off brand stuff was just as good, except when it wasn't.

So online pricing being lower vs shops is not completely a scam, nor is it 'just mattresses'... nearly all furniture is like this.

Get a real job.

An assertion 'Whether people "may" not want to own them' as a logical argument is all but meaningless. If even a handful of people on the face of the earth sees a self driving car and decides based on that not to own one, then the proposition is true. But that is CLEARLY not the argument the author is making. He is arguing with respect to a much much larger class of people.

The presumed argument per the slashdot article is that given self driving cars then as a society was are going to largely move away from owning them. Not everyone, of course, but a large number of us, precisely because they are self driving.

"Whether people "may" not want to own them has no bearing on whether you would."

Quite. But 'whether or not *I* would own a car' was just an introduction to the argument, introducing the very large class of people, for whom, like myself, self-driving cars is simply neither here nor there in the decision to own one.

The economy is not a zero-sum game. This is not a race to the bottom. As low cost-of-living places get more and more jobs, their standard of living rises and costs go up accordingly.

It may not be a race to the bottom, but it sure appears to be a race to somewhere much closer to the Third World mean than the First World one.

The majority of people are going to take the least expensive option. If companies form to operate massive fleets of self driving cars that can reach you In a timely fashion and charge fees below the cost of owning a car, owning a car will suddenly become a luxury.

Precisely. Its cost driven. The fact of whether or not a car is self driving really isn't part of the equation one way or the other. Admittedly self driving cars DO allow potentially for the cost of using a fleet subscription to drop since its easier to get the cars to and from where you want them inexpensively -- they can now potentially drive themselves -- at least that's the dream.

And see that just it... we're much closer to self driving cars with at least a human in the backseat taking a nap "just in case" then we are to self driving cars, that shuttle about completely empty -- because if ANYTHING happens ... say a road closure and police are directing traffic, we're still miles away from self driving cars beign able to cope with that. So if it needs to pull over, wake the driver up, and say... "Hey buddy you need to drive a minute" that's fine... but that kills the "car shows up to pick me up and then then goes back to the depot after it drops me off" scenario.

This conversation reminds of one here about HDTV years ago when they were hitting the market. Most of the comments were along the lines of "my tube TV is great, those new fangled overpriced HD sets will never catch on".

I think you are mis remembering. Nobody thought HDTV wasn't going to go gangbusters. There was TONS of HDTV content available just begging for TVs to catch up. DVDs were 720p for years before the average person had an HDTV to get the most out of them. Sports networks were starting to do 720p. When 42" HDTVs dropped under 3K the writing for tube TVs was on the wall.

We shit all over 3DTV and were right about it. We're not convinced 4K is going to be a must have anytime soon. (due to relatively low gain in visuals and tv viewing distances, and the dearth of 4k content. Long term sure we'll get there... but there's no real urgency for it.

But HDTV? We all knew that was going to go big the minute it was affordable.

Nothing anyone said ever even hinted at anything that would contradict that

ORLY?

http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

"In a Self-Driving Future, We May Not Even Want To Own Cars"

This entire thread is in THAT context. The original responder was addressing THAT claim. Please re-read the thread top to bottom.

That you go there shows you are looking for a fight. Why?

Lol, because "Someone on the internet was wrong!" ;-)

Maybe there is no Sears near you.
Maybe they are out of stock.
Maybe their service sucks.
etc..

Maybe. But then why should Wards price match for you?

You clearly can't or won't go to Sears, so if you want a mattress you'll pay Ward's asking price.

Only by those who have no fucking idea what they're talking about.

I also suspect moderation has slowed down. I suspect more generally long-term members with good karma and mod points have been coming here less due to the content and the beta site.

Unlike other countries, US property is respected enough to not need legions of gated communities.

This is your problem. You created a society where everything is so tied up in private property that, in the end, you have a few rich people who live like feudal lords, answerable to no one, and the rest of society live like serfs. And, you outsourced human reproduction to foreign countries so you could put your women to work like serfs too. Now it's all coming home to roost, and you're on a one way ticket to collapse.

Couldn't happen to a nicer group of people though!

"We've come to take your liver..."

To be fair, South Africa is now the rape capital of the world.

Which is not to say that a system of racial oppression was to thank for keeping rape down, but rather to point out that strict policing can be associated with safer streets.

As some others have said in more colorful ways, being a good cop means doing everything you can under the law to get bad cops off the street. Bad cops doesn't just mean those taking bribes, planting evidence, etc. Bad cops includes police officers who unnecessarily approach situations with undue aggression and who unnecessarily escalate situations. I understand that much of an officer's interactions are either with people who aren't at their best or are with people who are just pain rotten to the core, but if that drives them into a pattern of cynicism and aggression not warranted by the situation, they can either self-report and get behind a desk and get counseling until their head gets back to a better place or they're bad cops.

I'm a law-abiding citizen. Minus some exceeding the posted speed limit here and there, I'm not causing trouble. I also happen to work late quite a bit, which has led to numerous interactions with the police. Nearly all of those have been completely reasonable where everyone was decent and the situation was handled without any issue (usually just a "why are you here at [late time]?" followed up with a reasonable explanation, maybe running plates, in and out in 3 minutes kind of thing). In a very small number of cases, I was met by an adrenaline-pumped idiot who was very obviously itching to rip me out of the car and beat the Hell out of me. I've been berated and goaded by a cop who was doing everything he could to escalate the situation to where he could take stronger action. As I said, it's a very tiny number of issues out of all the times I've had contact with officers and I've always kept my cool and been in the right to the point where it didn't turn into anything. But all it would take is one of those adrenaline-pumped alpha assholes deciding I looked at him wrong and but for a camera recording the incident, he could very easily write up the report such that I was the aggressor and was threatening toward him and resisted arrest, thereby justifying any injuries. With that report and the word of the sworn officer, I end up with a criminal record and losing everything I've earned in life.

And that's why it doesn't matter if there are 99 good cops for every one bad cop. Because that one bad cop can ruin so many peoples' lives. We as citizens are second-class when we file a report or step into a court room trying to stop a bad cop doing bad stuff. What's really needed are for all those cops who are decent people to start standing up against the ones who aren't, start calling them on their bullshit, start reporting them at work, and start testifying on behalf of people who are wronged by them. I understand that that hyper-aggressive adrenaline junky alpha asshole is great to have by your side when you're under fire, but you have a duty and a responsibility to either see that he gets right in the head or see that he finds a new profession where he doesn't have any legal authority. The more you protect assholes like that, the more of them you'll find around you and the more the citizens in your community will distrust and even hate the police.

I support the good cops out there trying to help good and decent people and do the right thing. As for the bad cops out for a thrill? Well at the very very least, I want them off the streets and getting help. Stop protecting them. Stop protecting people who protect them.