PorterDuff

An Android phone should fix that problem.

I've been using startpage lately and seem to prefer it to DDG, but they both can give inferior search.

At the risk of being repetitious, I think what I'd like is a completely private search engine that uses only a self-curated list of websites. A year or two of googling and using the good results from that would probably fix me for some time. As usual, switch to google if the results aren't good.

Getting rid of the cruft would be a nice thing.

I think that Google should build company housing at their main facilities, give their people somewhere to live, and watch them 24/7 like lab rats.

You could accomplish an interesting experiment plus deal with the problem of giving new hires a place to live.

That's true. I remember seeing that kind of thing on it's back, basically feelers in the air that could manipulate items, a really long time ago.

It couldn't have been that many years after Drexler's book got published.

Yes, but I mean not weighing things at all.

All fruit/vegetables/meat are sold by the item or in fixed price bags and packages.

Do they have scales?

One thing I've admired about Grocery Outlet is the lack of them.

I wonder when that all started? With Apollo maybe?

A friend of mine was working in Colorado and involved in that whole deal, it did't sound super pretty.

Hang on, here you go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Garbage_Project

That's an interesting article.

I remember that years ago a project at the University of Arizona was doing archaeological work on landfills. It turned out that surprising amount of the non-degrading material found once you dug down a bit was telephone books.

By 'revenge' I'm referring to revenge by society by putting people in an unpleasant situation for a term.

I thought that I sort of implied that in the root post, although I expect that there's more to it than your example.

It's easy these days to get arrested for minor deviltries (way easier than when I was a lad) so the police have that in their pocket.

So, you pick out the groups who are statistically most likely to commit real crimes, pick them up for any old thing, and warehouse them until they are more old and tired.

Like I said, it's not fair, but it appears to work to some extent.

That's brilliant.

There'll be a boom market for Adversity Coaches.

Well, why yes.

I'd be open to any other high resolution suggestions for that era.

What tune? I'm just giving a theory of why things have evolved the way they have.

They may have a sense of community, it just might be one that is harmful to your own.

My own theory is that prison has been set up to remove potential criminals from the street, chosen via a demographic of education/ethnicity/wealth/gender/aggressiveness, during their prime years of being a nuisance. The results don't have to be particularly fair.

There's no real intention of transformation or revenge, just a form of quarantine.

Looking at a chart of incarceration rate over time and murder rate over time, this last a better indicator of crime than most, you can make a case that the big ramp up in jailing somewhat matches the peak and fall of murders. It's tough to find causalities in anything, but I rather like that one.

I'd like to talk to a real expert in the shapes on tracking the copying over time.

Years and years ago I remember watching typefaces get hand traced and then edited on in-house software running on a Tektronix storage tube.

It's a big company, but the average person is only exposed to their power tools.

So what percentage of their tools are made in China now? How much of their manufacturing generally?

I rather like this idea in the sense that it tells you a lot about your own codebase. There is a lot of stuff out there that only makes sense to the author.

As a serious question, why do you think that dissimilar groups product faster or higher quality work? How far can you take that concept? Should they even speak the same language?

Evidently you can't even read the manifesto (which involves possession of course. Dunno if you get in trouble for reading it over someone's shoulder).

https://qz.com/1579660/new-zealands-manifesto-ban-explained-...

According to that article, having a copy is worth 10 years in the pokey.

"...is that it can be used NOW by real governments." "They are just like casinos. Just look at twitter."

Two good, but arguably separate points. I'd say that the internet generally (besides the .0001% of it that is of bonafide intellectual content) has gone down the same road as slot machine design and they're getting better at it.

The main point (and threat) of agreements like this is that they set up a legal framework and the physical ability to control what people see from a central switch. Combine that with the ever-improving ability to both addict people to pictures on screens and to nudge them in a desired direction, it's really all about power.

I suppose in the final analysis it's all just takes the place of state sponsored religions.

While ageism is real, I like your spirit and somewhat agree.

Probably the hardest part of looking for and getting a FTE gig is starting over clearing a space for yourself I think. It's tough to switch from being the local expert to just another FNG.

Personally (like anyone cares, but this is the internet after all) I'd like to find a really interesting job and I don't give a rip about the money. I suppose there's always open source, but working for free violates all kinds of my internal makeup.

I always have thought that a surfeit of choice would have driven prices down, but maybe my movin' picture watching needs are different than most consumers (basically 100% amateur youtube at this point).

I think that one of the great ironies of on-demand media is just how much stuff is locked up by rights holders and is unavailable. The Disneys and Netflixes of the world make remarkably small catalogs available. You should see some of the libraries that tv stations have sitting on the shelf.

Maybe it's just that a serious change in format and/or delivery always loses 90% of the previous material. It's funny how few LPs made it to CD.

I'd love to know what knobs are turned at those companies to alter results, it's something of a trade secret I guess.

Just to see for myself, I picked a search that should churn up a guy that they might find irritating and did 10 seconds of anecdotal research.

Search was 'vox day blog'.

Google, Yandex, Startpage return his blog as the first entry (perhaps after an ad). Goduckgo it was the sixth entry. Bing, it never showed up. I got bored after the first dozen pages.

What exactly does this prove? Not being a web/seach engine guy I don't know.

What I'd like to find is a search engine for which I could build a great big list of curated sites with zero results from others. I tend to look up the same things a lot and after a year or two of additions it might be a really nice thing to have.

I can't think of why this would be unique to farmers, perhaps aside from a push towards autopilot systems.

Mining equipment, road building, all of that hyper-specialized stuff for slicing and dicing trees, I would think they all have this issue. Perhaps it's the greater prevalence of owner-operators.

I've probably bought the newest car I ever will (which is now 15 years old), so it would be nice to steer clear of the dealer-only craziness and the inevitable spying on you that new vehicles are going to accrue. I can just imagine how ticked I'd be if the tech juggernaut was messing with my income in a bad way.

Smart dudes have wrestled over those problems for years. I think the strongest case for dropshipping would be new cars. The dealerships have presented a problem for people for years, but they are politically well connected.

It's a lot easier for a manufacturer to send a boxcar of toilet paper to a warehouse (Amazon or otherwise) than to mail the case to you. Lacking Amazon or Safeway, they'd probably just recreate a similar system in the form of a co-op.

In any case, I don't doubt they've gamed and spreadsheeted the bejeepers out of dropshipping, returnable containers, standardized containers, third party (USPS) vs. self shipping vs. drones, etc.

I should go back and read some older books on the wondrous future of automation. The idea always was, of course, that machines would do the boring part of a job. What people actually bring to the picnic is a subset of a job that is hard to do with a computer and/or machine manipulation, so you end up with deskilling of supermarket cashiers or bank teller gigs.

It always seemed to me that you could wipe out far more jobs than Amazon is likely to by simply removing the need to weigh items in grocery stores (like our local discount market). Generally, supersizing retail and the underlying supply chain has changed matters far more than laying off some warehouse employees.

I suppose that outsourcing has already 'automated' scads of US jobs in any case. The interesting automation will hit people who type for a living. Dunno how it will all it turn out, but I've got my comfy chair and a cocktail waiting.

That's kind of my take on it. I started wondering why we need so many specialty soaps and decided you could use it for showering, shampoo, shaving. It probably would make a bad toothpaste though.

Exactly. After years of getting highest-end company-supplied desktops, one of my holy missions is to reduce the cost of home computing. Typing on my eBay Chromebook, desktop box is a $35 i5 Optiplex running Qubes. There's better things to spend your money on.

It's worth considering how the entire supply chain used to work.

In days of yore, soft drink bottling plants were in every small town. They were locally owned, were good citizens and local suppliers of jobs, sponsored sports teams.

Distributors used to pick up bottles sorted for their bottlers and then put them in a great big bottle yard for further hand sorting (don't ask me how I know).

Beer, while they mostly used brown bottles (Miller for one excepted), also was much more locally sourced although not as locally.

In the meantime, there was huge consolidation in beer manufacturing, huge consolidation in distribution (with the inevitable forced closure of family-owned businesses, not dissimilar to car dealerships), similar consolidation in soft drink manufacture. The whole underlying network changed in the interest of efficiency/profit maximization for the corporate motherships.

tl;dr You simply can't just declare reuse of bottles and be done with it. There's a whole ecosystem.