If this is supposedly for the purposes of safety, as they state, then why would it make any sense to exempt "nonprofit" or government agencies? It's an operational cost, for the purposes of safety. FIN.

Don't be duplicitous.

I keep saying this.

Wait until the lawyers get involved after the first rash of poorly conceived executions. They'll get filthy rich, and then technical people will called in to clean up the mess.

Many companies will be lost and many golden parachutes given. It'll sour folks on AI for years.

The government will continue to use them, though.

The show "Chuck" gave people who worked in that business the air of being special secret service types. That was already long after Best Buy stopped being a useful store and was predatory, so the kind of person who works there tends to be a bit delusional and predatory.

(Perfect intersection with the reddit demographic, tbh.)

Yep. A device that indicates it's got a tracker to nearby thieves is 100% useless: they will find and remove or disable the tracker and keep the device. Likewise, to inhibit kidnapping.

I can't conceive a single use this has other than "I'm forgetful and don't know where my keys are". It's just not useful for what most people will want to use it for.

You can get the mechanisms necessary to track someone's vehicle for as little as about $25 and $5/month - and this has been true for a long time. From that, you can figure out where someone lives and works. If you know who they are and the building they live in, the rest is easy.

Crippling the #1 functionality you'd use the device for "for safety" is like selling guns that only shoot foam bullets.

"Going Sleeper"? I don't get it. If you were laid off, why wouldn't you say so? You're under no obligation to a retailer you no longer work for, least of all to use some kind of coded language.

It's not just packaging, of course - it's also the materials used to produce things.

So-called environmentalists seem to want it both ways. Plastics were touted as an inexpensive alternative to paper, and in many cases metal. They do fulfill that role: we're wasting a lot less metal on small, cheap parts previously made of things like pewter, tin, zinc, nickel, etc. because plastic is not only cheaper, but frequently mechanically better: more durability, lubricity, etc.

The same for packaging: it weighs a lot less to use bubbles of air (styrofoam, or the manufactured bubbles) than wadded up paper.

But it's a tradeoff, you've got to accept one or the other, or a combination of both. It's totally reasonable - now that we're aware of the problem of microplastics - to scale back the use of plastic and revert to renewable, compostable, reusable packaging materials. We've also advanced technology enough that we should be able to figure out a new, better way to use paper-based products (or hemp!) and reduce the overall amount of plastics used in general, things like (maybe):

- hot-extruded plastic-hemp-fiber lattices for packaging padding
- origami paper packaging
- a return of reusable shipping packages (eg. perhaps standard sized thin-clad aluminum boxes that can be reused).

There are tradeoffs for all of these, like in fuel use. That poses a logistics opportunity, which would of course cost a lot of money to innovate and progress. And that's OK: people need to stop having a fatalist, minimalist mindset and start thinking grandly again. Bridges crossing rivers instead of barges would have never happened if people simply tried to make more efficient barges. That's the mindset we've fallen into - making better barges - instead of trying to think of the next step of progress.

I don't know why they haven't converted over 100% to a paper-based packaging regime, honestly.

Paper-based envelopes, boxes, and packaging material (eg. usually just rolls of inexpensive paper that get wadded up) seems like a pretty reasonable way to ship things at a very moderate weight gain over plastic padded bags. (My wife has stopped using Amazon for a number of purchases due to repeatedly receiving liquids like hair conditioner in plastic bags, resulting in them getting consistently damaged in shipping due to crushing, anyway. You'd think they'd figure that one out...)

If you want to have your packaging material have more rigid volume (like the plastic air bags) and thus less weight, it makes sense to me to invest in the technology/machines to make oragami paper package filler - cheaply "knit" paper based void filler with more rigidity and less mass than simply wadding paper up. This seems like something easy to achieve and a fun project for a couple fluid dynamics mathematicians and structural engineers - well within the financial capabilities of a company like Amazon.

I don't think they understand how this works.
It's going to be an eternal game of whack-a-mole.
Good luck, though.

LK

Why do you think it's fictional? Or are you simply being reactionary, and haven't fully evaluated the topic?

Cloud seeding has been a thing since the late 1950s. It is a common practice, and has caused a number of flooding disasters from miscalculation of effect, in both China and the US. It is a "well accepted" practice and numerous US states have state programs to do so (North Dakota being one that's more prominent about it, doing it regularly to help maintain crop moisture levels). There is now significantly elevated levels of aluminum in accumulated snowcaps from the practice, and identifying the planes doing it (officially or illicitly) from flight data has become a pastime for many.

You can't tell me you've not noticed planes flying overhead and, instead of leaving a contrail which rapidly dissipates, it leaves a trail which slowly disperses, eventually becoming a smog of hazy, unnatural grey cloud cover? It usually happens on clear days when the weather is anticipated to be pleasant for several days, by the weather forecasters.

Maybe you live in an urban area and don't go outdoors often. It's quite evident elsewhere.

Yep.

Internet is going to start to suck due to this, and costs will go up for the consumer, largely across the board. Media distribution will become more expensive for eg. netflix, and you'll have record profits for carriers. No, your local broadband connectivity will not improve as a result.

I'd have really expected better, less short sighted thinking from technical people. It's like they don't realize that every government agenda is labeled the exact opposite of what they do.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act - resulting in people getting served takedown notices for their own content from large copyright holders, just because.
The Patriot Act - clearly bombing other countries for corporate profit and feeling up grandma at the airport helps with freedom.
Affordable Care Act - is your healthcare more affordable now than 10 years ago? It's almost twice the price, with half the service? Hmm
No Child Left Behind Act - You mean to say kids are even more likely to be illiterate now than before? I wonder why...
The Equality Act - which gives highly politicized, sectarian preferential treatment to preferred minority groups?

You could keep going. Net Neutrality is the same line of deception. Folks here on slashdot used to be smarter about this, and the last time this was heavily discussed on here, they were (rightfully) opposed.

Guess this is a shallow wading pool, now.

Nope. There are just as many games this year, as last year, and the year before - even more, really, because games don't expire and they keep making them.

I suspect it has more to do with a worsening economy, and people strapped for time as they grind for the extra money to make rent.

Wait, that actually works? Goddamn. That's one of the last things i'd have expected. Thanks! lol

The batteries failing in November the first year we moved in, causing the furnace to stop running, indicated that this isn't true.

And yet, it should have been possible, if not relatively easy. There are standard protocols for these technologies which are used in buildings - houses and corporate buildings, industrial installations - which run IoT type wired and wireless technologies for decades without anyone touching them for updates.

A sensor dies, you replace it and code it/wire it back into the system.

My household thermostat, which I use as a dumb thermometer, is actually IoT capable (Z-Wave), but I just use it as a dumb device. It uses a pair of AAs once a year. I don't need to update the firmware to change the temperature, and should (in theory) be able to use it interchangeably with any z-wave controller. But the vendors - Amazon, Google, Samsung, etc. - have been extremely shit with properly supporting things, and drop support frequently for devices.

Motion detecting lights, security cameras, etc. have been a mainstay for decades in high scale houses. It's not hard ,you don't need magic to keep them working - you just provide them with power and replace stuff when it breaks. The same -should- have been possible with the IoT craze, as that was what was promised.

To be fair, if you're getting into 'home automation' after Nest came to market, you're not really an early adopter. There've been home automation standards for decades at this point, over every communication medium you can think of. This is hardly something "new".

The expectation was that Google and Amazon, being big multinational tech companies, would be able to build a cohesive ecosystem and put the resources behind the idea to make it maintainable over the long term - you know, on the scale you typically support household applies on (certainly years, and probably around a decade between 'refreshes'). Whole-house speakers, environmental zone control, etc. have all been a thing for a very long time (I bought a house a while back with whole house speakers - good speakers - from the 80s a couple years ago; everything was there to easily upgrade). The promise was: do all of what could be done with a budget, but do it cheaper with better connectivity technology, and make it cheaper.

There's no "early adopter" here, it's clearly a vertical integration of existing technology simply needing better support and usability.

And they’ll could have done it well. There are companies which are doing this reasonably well for subsets of the domain. There are a LOT of open source projects related to keeping this equipment running, and there've been projects (eg. like MisterHouse going back decades at this point) for years that did the job reasonably well, albeit with a very long geeky learning curve.

And yet, these companies have put a very small amount of effort towards any of what people expected and instead focused merely on monetizing and monopolizing the existing market, cutting off competitors, and making things LESS operable. They wanted to create a walled garden similar to what Apple's been able to foster with their products, but didn't understand the market. They didn't make any of it better - they've only made it worse.

There's a justified reason to be upset, IMO.