mhardcastle

If the goal is providing entertainment, why not just adjust the payout to be 0 profit?

One has to wonder if the fixed costs of some kind of electricity -> fuel production will ever get cheap enough to solve this problem. If it would pay, it would be great for there to be a factory on stand-by to make, e.g., hydrogen or ethanol using the extra energy.

I've been thinking a bit about this lately.

I've read estimates of ~30 million Bison before European settlement, ~35 million pronghorn, and ~3 trillion oysters in beds on the east coast, in addition to all of the other natural abundance. It's amazing to think of what nature provides - supplemented with chicken and pork, it seems those wild populations would be relatively close sustaining modern levels of meat-eating on their own.

Edited to add some math. TL:DR is that bison alone couldn't get to US beef consumption. Wikipedia says 60 million Bison, so let's use that.

Say you can take a managed 10% of Bison a year on average and sustain a population. Median weight seems to be about 1,600 lbs for males and 1,000 lbs for females, average of 1,300 (assuming harvest is even, but management for population might mean taking more males). Carcass weight to meat seems to be about 57% in cows, so that's:

60 million individuals * 10% harvest * 1,300 lbs each * 57% of standing weight in meat = 2.2 billion pounds, or 13.4 pounds per person. Average beef intake per person in the US is around 60 lbs, so this has a decent distance to go - assuming annual harvest of 20% would only get you about half-way there, and there's still Canada to account for (since a lot of bison range is there). I doubt elk, pronghorn, and deer could bridge that gap as the individuals (sans elk) are much smaller.

For most cheap imports like this, I've found eBay is wonderful.

My girlfriend wanted toe spacers and I found the exact same no-name pair on eBay for $4, compared to $10 on Amazon.

I made the potato cannon from this book as a teenager. It was made of a PVC chamber for the propellant and a narrower ~potato-sized PVC pipe with the end filed to be sharp so that a potato would be trimmed down to create a potato slug with no air gaps around it.

The propellant was hairspray. You'd unscrew a threaded PVC end-cap from the back of the cannon, spray the hairspray into it, screw the cap back on, and ignite with a flint striker from the outside.

It was a really cool device.

I'm very glad you mentioned the homepage spam. It's increasingly difficult (and valuable) to live without information overload these days; Edge's forced "news" spam has pushed me away as well.

It's not a test of whether it was "news" at the time - it's a test of its relevance to you.

If you look back at the news from a particular day and see now that reading it didn't convey information you've used since, then that is a good indication that the news you're reading now probably won't convey anything you find useful going forward.

My favorite way to demonstrate the news's general irrelevance is to go to archive.org and look up the front page of your favorite news source from, say, 10 years ago. In hindsight, paying attention to nearly anything on the news a decade ago gave you no useful information to date. Why would today's news be any different?

I started boycotting Samsung forever when I woke up one morning to the NFL app on my home screen on a Galaxy S6. Able to be disabled, but the fact that they'll install spam apps long after you've bought a device is really malicious.

I've always wondered how this works with CCPA. I attempted to exercise my right to data deletion and was directed to log in. Do those with shadow accounts not have the right to have their data deleted?

I think this is definitely true - and it's enough that I just don't find it worthwhile to use the service anymore. The overhead of doing detective work to determine whether something might be counterfeit, and the too-commonly-realized risk that I'll need to re-pack something and schlep it to UPS makes it utterly not worthwhile.

One will basically never encounter this problem with, e.g., Target, Best Buy, NewEgg, Ikea, Bed, Bath, & Beyond, or other retailers - what makes Amazon preferable to any of those brands, when the diligence you described is required to shop there and not elsewhere?

In my experience they've always required me to go to a UPS store or retail location (Kohl's, Whole Foods, etc.) to process a return, even when it's a counterfeit product.

Returns I've elected are a great process; being forced to run errands for a $trillion+ company because they've deceived you about the bedsheets they are selling is something else entirely.

Shopping at Amazon has become such a blatantly user-hostile experience. More than any company I've dealt with in recent memory, they seem to tolerate just about any unethical behavior - allowing fake product reviews, facilitating sale of counterfeit merchandise, and evidently withholding charitable donations if you don't allow them to pester you via your own device.

It's to the point that shopping at Amazon feels dirty to me. Why support a company that's doing everything it can to transfer your well-being to Jeff Bezos?

I'm not hiring, but wanted to say that I absolutely love Damn Interesting. The Zero-Armed Bandit is among the most interesting articles I've read. Thank you for what you do!

A friend used this service to try to have a pizza party for a small cohort of graduating Master's students, and said that one pizza came hours early and the rest never arrived.

They do. I use pickup lockers without Prime all the time.