Now days all the box stores pretty much match prices.

Had to buy both a new washer and a new refrigerator this year. Checked out all the stores (and on-line). Lowes, Homedepot, Best-Buy, PC Richards... all had the same models for the exact same price (expect for a couple ultra-expensive models). Right down to the Cent. Including the "On Sale" prices and delivery/install/haul-away charges (except for PC Richards, which had a free delivery deal at the time)

I've done the same for electronics in the past couple years and found the same tenancy. It's clear they must be monitoring each other's websites very closely, or maybe the manufacturers enforce some sort of minimum price limits on them

If Hummer, of all motor vehicle manufacturers, can make their unneeded beast of a phallic symbol into an EV (https://www.gmc.com/electric/hummer-ev) then *any* car manufacture can. And from what I've read, they *are*, or are planning to soon.

"The Cloud" is not a single point of failure unless the implementer of the sites in question choose to make it so. High Availability is a thing, and implementers of important sites need to build things that way. Highly Available would require that the sites have redundancy in multiple regions, so that if one region goes down traffic is routed to a different region that is still up. That is one of the primary reasons companies move their infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud.

The article mentions that, for example, Amazon had 2 out of 26 of it's regions go offline. So, 24/26 regions remained online. Any important sites on Amazon who's owners used High Availability using triple redundancy would not have their site go offline in such a scenario, and most sties which used normal redundancy would also not have gone offline, unless they had the misfortune to pick those 2 regions.

If your site is important enough that it should that being down could cause major issues, then you need to treat it as such and design the architecture with HA in mind.

Most people will be just fine and not care if DoorDash is down for a day (except maybe the DoorDash shareholders), there are plenty of other ways for people to get food. There's a different issue, in that why on earth does your vacuum cleaner, pet dispenser, thermostat, light bulbs, or door locks require a network connection to something on the internet to do their basic, not-internet-related-in-any-way jobs.

I don't think that the rich will ever find themselves in trouble from issues about the poor being unable to afford their products. There are 2 things which prevent that:

1 . The poor have basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, as well as modern necessities such as transportation and communications) that they absolutely *must* meet somehow, sacrificing whatever is required to do so. So there is always a certain amount of some types products that there will always be a market for. The producers of those will just do the balancing act of reducing quality while maximizing price to keep those priced just barely within the realm that poor can just manage to scrape enough of their meager resources to acquire.

2. The other Rich are always in the market for more luxury goods. Producers can switch to selling to other Rich instead of making products for the average Joe. It's technically a "smaller" market (if you go by number of potential buyers), but it's a much much larger market if you go by available dollars. The extremely rich have lots and lots of spare dollars to spend on frivolous luxury goods. The bigger the inequality, the more money the super rich have to spend on more and more expensive luxury goods.

Tax breaks for people with kids are there to keep kids from starving. They are not there to encourage people to have more kids.

People do not check with their tax accountant before they decide to fuck.

I do the same thing. I don't care so much about the star rating (except that I ignore all 5 star ratings...), but I want to read why people gave it a lower rating. Whether it's because the buyer was expecting something different, or was expecting something unreasonable, or were just clueless about how to use the product. "My USB-C cable would not fit in the SATA port" Or if there are a lot of reviews like "stopped working after 2 weeks", or "cheap plastic connector broke" or "does a poor job at [whatever job the thing is for]" or "constant smell of burnt plastic whenever I turn it on"

Not to mention, with half the amazon product pages, they end up with half a dozen different products all thrown together. So, the review for "Metal Can Opener" may not be relevant for the "Garlic Crusher" I'm wanting to buy....

I had something similar happen to me when I failed to give the company a 5 star.

In my case, the primary problem was with the seller. (not shipped by amazon in this case).
The day I ordered, they charged my card, and generated a tracking number with UPS (or USPS, can't recall which it was). However, that tracking number remained at "waiting to receive item from shipperr" for a week and a half, then ups/usps switched it to "undeliverable, item not received" Then the Amazon computer told me I'd get a refund. So, I started shopping around elsewhere, and a couple days later, ordered from elsewhere. Then suddenly the item from Amazon was shipped and on the way. This was a $200 product, and I did not need 2 more of them, so I had to contact the 2nd one and cancel it before they shipped. And I complained about the poor shipping provided by the seller in my review (My view is that they should not generate a tracking number and claim it was shipped until they are actually shipping the product)

In addition to that, the product itself (a SAS controller card) was DOA when it showed up. It could not recognize any disks are attached. I did some research, and realized that the card was probably pulled from some server or disk enclosure that used specialized software that required the cards firmware be disabled. So, after a weekend of agonizing over it, a bios flash, and using a disk-utility allowed me to re-enable it so it would see the disks, and afterwards it worked. So I put a note about that in my review as well, as a warning to other buyers what may be required to get it working (and also potentially saving them from sending it back themselves). Also indicating the card was unlikely to be "new" if it shipped with such a configuration. (I did not expect the card to be new, as these were older server products from a few years ago, but shoppers may have expected it to be)

All in all, I gave them a 3 star review, because of all the troubles they put me though in the whole process. In my world 3 stars is "average".

The seller contacted my directly, offering a refund if I changed my review and removed the complaints. Well, in the first place, I did not believe they would ever refund my money. And secondly, I would have felt dirty if I "sold out" like that. So I left the review as-is, and ignored their dozen follow up vaguely threatening emails urging me to change it. I did, after all, explain in my review that I did finally receive the product, and was able to get it working (after much effort). So I think that was a more-than fair review.

Pure Electrics are great for middle class suburbia, where everyone has a driveway and/or garage to park their car in, conveniently located next to their home's electrical outlets.

Unfortunately, a very large portion of the population rents, or does not own a home with a convenient driveway or garage where they can charge their car up at every night. They instead have to park in parking lots, or on-street parking, from which it is not convenient to plug their car into their home's electrical outlets.

Some day, perhaps, there will be charging stations in every parking space, and every 20 feet on streets where people park (which are reliable, and tamper-proof enough that someone can't unplug your car form the charging station you stuck your credit card into, and plug it into their car instead for a few hours) It is unlikely that anyone alive today will live to see that day.

Meanwhile Hybrids are going to be the only "Electric" options for many people for a long time to come. If even those are pushed out in favor of pure electrics, then a lot renters, and a lot of town-home residents are going to be SOL, and a large barrier-to-entry dropped on top of them making transportation a problem (its common in a lot of towns and cities to have a lot of town-homes which do not have driveways, or limited parking, where everyone relies on on-street parking)

History has shown that when humans come across a new species, we generally either try to eat it, try to kill it off for threatening our crops or livestock, or set out to destroy it's environment in order to strip it clean of natural resources or make new farmland. We better hope aliens are not like us, just in case some ever *do* manage to visit us.

People born in the 1970's had a childhood where they were living with the worst of the traditional, pollution (lead in gasoline and paint, asbestos, toxic waste discharged directly into the water supplies, etc) , so that early exposure may have had a long term effect. On top of that, the we've massively increased the amounts of fertilizers and pesticides being used, so while the rivers may no longer burn as regularly, there are still huge pollution problems in our water supplies. It might be more accurate to say the *types* of pollution have changed. I'm not sure the amount of exposure to chemicals has changed. We've just changed which chemicals we get exposed to, and the source they come from.

I think it would be more accurate to say people born in the 1950's and 1960's saw a peak in life expectancy. They were born late enough to get the advantages of vaccines and other medical and safety improvements, and were at the peak of food quality (food had reached the point of quality food being plentiful year round due to advances in food preservation, including advances in refrigeration and frozen foods.) After 1970s the trend in food started to turn towards cheaper and cheaper ingredients (substitutions and "fillers", and more and more exotic preservatives) and a heavy switch in eating habits towards cheaply made heavily processed foods, rather than fresh ingredients. Plus, we've added chemicals to everything, and cannot avoid ingesting plastic in large amounts, because all our packaging (including food packaging) is made of the stuff which leaches out into the food and bottled water that we drink, and it's leached out into the environment so it's now in our water and food supplies to the point that we eat and drink micro-plastics with every mouthful.

And to top it off, Medical care is getting more and more out of reach for large portions of our population (at least in the USA). Many people can no longer take advantage of those advances in medicine. They simply cannot afford it. That may be the biggest cause of the downturn.

Hell, I can identify my house and car from a photo taken from f'en space. I'm sure the military has orders of magnitude better capabilities.

These grainy/blurry shots just indicate they were looking at something a *long* way away. This was probably something passing down below the horizon, not something going underwater. And frankly, it looks more like an optical illusion to me than an actual object.

So, basically what you are saying is that Bitcoin is all about money laundering for criminals to use.

I would say the problem on the phone is not so much the fault of the app designers, but rather the phone manufacturers who, somehow, are totally unaware that a large portion of their customers tend to hold the phone in their hands when using it, and have instead decided that the "bezel", which is properly defined as "the outside edge you use to hold something", should be completely removed, apparently assuming that users will hold the phone on the back using the suckers of their tentacles. Or something.

Are they going to carry any public traffic?

Or is it limited to google-cloud traffic only?

https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api