reeddavid

There are many calls for personal responsibility here. But I think the average person is not making a choice to sustain permanent hearing damage – most people don't know the risks.

I used to own a decible meter. I brought it to a movie theater (large chain) and found sustained volume of 100+ decibels. It was physically painful. I was the only customer who complained to the theater. I asked what sound level they intended to set the movie to. They told me it's up to the projectionist, who sets the volume knob in the booth based on no measurement or preset.

There's a lot of real harm being done, and I would like to see at the very least some basic informative disclosure. And operators should be held responsible for creating dangerous conditions that are not disclosed or agreed to by customers. If people want to sustain hearing damage for a night of enjoyment, they should do so only willingly (and therefore knowingly).

I'm very keen to protect my own hearing, so I carry musician's earplugs (reduces volume without sounding muffled) and wear them often – not just at obviously loud places like concerts, but in common situations like loud restaurants.

I have followed the crowdfund-launched Nebia shower, which looks like a similar mist technology: https://nebia.com

I’ve been curious about it, but it’s kind of hard to try a permanently installed plumbing fixture without buying it.

This looks awesome, just tried it out on Poshmark (they don't have a feature to alert me when new items in my size are listed). I was a huge fan of Kimono Labs before they stopped operating, and this serves a similar purpose for me.

I might have missed it, but how can I see (or edit) the configuration of my configured API? It looks like all I can do is run the API or delete it.

This is incredibly abrupt. They pulled the plug with rentals still active!

What a bummer. I was disappointed when I learned about the merger of the ReachNow / Car2Go parent companies, because I predicted one of them would shut down the other and there would be fewer cars available and less competition.

This seems like a no-warning shutdown for a lot of folks. StreetCrowd (https://www.streetcrowd.io) was a gig economy service that paid people in cash + ReachNow credit to move the cars into high-demand areas in Seattle. Their app had an outage notification today, seems they had no notice. And everyone who received ReachNow credit has no way to use it.

Ha, in the time since I posted the parent comment, I got a typical email from Poshmark:

Subject: 'Score DISCOUNTS on your likes TODAY'

Email says "These discounts won’t last long, so snag items before they’re gone."

Call to Action (big button): 'View Offers Now'

Result: Takes me to poshmark.com/offer/my_offers and says "No active offers". They must be sending millions of these irrelevant emails to their members.

I've seen services that "clone" your favorite jeans. But it's incredibly expensive to make one-off jeans. The last time I bought jeans I picked up 7 identically-cut pairs at once in a few different washes and colors, for exactly the reason you describe. I've done the same with shirts (even in the same color, just to get double the longevity for that particular style).

What would be more helpful would be true measurements for each piece. For example, very few pants list the leg opening measurement, which is a crucial sizing clue.

The praise here is over the top. Poshmark is a peer-to-peer clothing marketplace – think eBay, but focused mostly on used or one-off pieces of clothing.

Poshmark has incredible potential given the huge amount of quality clothing inventory, but in my opinion their product and marketing optimize for all the wrong things and make it hard to actually buy things.

What I want from Poshmark is to find and buy clothes I like that fit me. That's it.

What I get from Poshmark:

- They ignore "My Sizes" and show me a feed of women's clothes and incorrect sizes every time I login. I cannot understand how this is still a problem. Why would I buy clothes that are not in my size?

- No way to filter out "One Size" items. Good luck finding your size when shopping a brand that has accessories; you'll be drowning in watches, ties and hats

- Constant notifications for some type of event. Example: 'pm_editor has invited you to "Street Style Chic Party" Today at 7:00 PM' – I get multiple of these daily. I don't want to join a party, I just want to find clothes that fit on my own time and buy them.

- No way to set notifications when items that match my criteria are listed

- Constant promotional emails that are not relevant to me. Example: "Login to to get discounted shipping on your active offers, 4 hours only!" – when I have no active offers.

- Until recently, comments on items (e.g. questions and answers between buyer and seller) did not trigger notifications. So sellers would have no idea that potential buyers were asking questions on their items. I skipped many purchases because I couldn't confirm an important detail

- No option for returns. If I'm buying high-end used clothing, I want the ability to return it if it doesn't fit as expected. I'm happy to pay for return shipping, I just don't want to be stuck with something. I've skipped many many purchases because it was too expensive to commit to without trying it on.

- Disempowered support team. Each time I raise an issue with support, I get the sense they are measured entirely on how little they escalate to teams that can actually change things.

In summary: Poshmark has an incredible inventory of quality used clothing, but they focus on all sorts of features and activities that don't do anything to help me find and buy more items in their marketplace.

kimonolabs – cloud-hosted web scraping, configured in a browser-based UI. It would let you make a GET request to your scraper, which would live-scrape the web and return structured data. They were acquired by Palantir, and kimonolabs shut down. http://www.kimonolabs.com/

Quality prefabricated homes and apartments are a great idea. There's a negative association with prefabricated homes, but I've seen a lot of newer companies that seem to be focusing on quality and efficiency, often targeting the higher end of the market.

And lots of new homes built on-site are of very poor quality these days:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/where-we-live/wp/2017/05...

This approach doesn't seem like a solution to affordable housing, even though many of these companies use that concept in their marketing.

In the least affordable housing markets with worsening trends, including Seattle and San Francisco, construction cost is a tiny fraction of the problem.

Efficient, prefabricated housing isn't going to make housing meaningfully more affordable in places where the majority of the cost of a dwelling is its land.

When was Apple great? Snow Leopard 10.6.

Most of the early OS X problems were resolved: Pretty much any printer you bought would work instantly; there was a healthy ecosystem of well-supported native apps; bundled apps worked well and used open standards (Mail, Address Book, iCal); networking worked well, including sharing files between Macs and PCs. And built-in utilities worked great, like printing to PDF and opening PDFs in Preview.app.

And hardware was quite good around that time too – with unibody notebooks (both plastic and aluminum) released during that time.

Things went downhill with 10.7 Lion and beyond, when Mac OS X imitated iPhone OS and usability started to decline:

- Bundled utility apps suffered: iCal and Address Book got photorealistic leather, and lost key functions like column-based navigation for your contacts and easy handling of multiple networked calendars.

- Flagship apps lost core functionality in the name of simplification: iPhoto took up the whole screen but lost core functions; iMovie was dumbed down (prior to 10.6); Final Cut Pro X left a massive gap in functionality from Final Cut Pro; Aperture was discontinued.

- Things just got worse for no valuable reason. Example: watch a Quicktime movie full-screen on a multi-monitor setup, and all the other monitors just show... textured linen.

- Reliability declined. I don't have data to back this up, and I'd really like to find an objective source for "reliability" on the Mac. But I no longer say "it just works" seriously anymore. That used to be mostly true, but it's no longer true for me. Personal example: constant problems when adding or removing my external display – permanent sleep that requires a hard reset, or display will repeatedly not be detected, or built-in keyboard and trackpad won't work until I plug in my wired keyboard again, type something, then remove it again.

When I worked in UPS operations, Peak season (generally starting in August / September when retail stores started stocking up, and building to full force in December) saw volume approximately double.

It's pretty hard to fine-tune a system for maximum efficiency most of the time, then make everything go 2X during a spike with the same level of efficiency. Especially when you're dealing with physical space and people who require training.

Paypal offers a separate fee structure for micropayments:

PayPal's micropayments price is 5% + $.05 and is designed for merchants who process low-value transactions (typically under $10 in value). The micropayments rate is available to all merchants and in all countries where Business accounts are available. If you sign up for micropayments, you will be charged the micropayments rate on all transactions regardless of payment size.

From PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/us/selfhelp/article/what-are-micropay...

Yep, I'm with you. I use Shure SE846 earbuds, and even though the dongle supposedly uses a DAC chip identical to the DAC in the iPhone 6, the audio is noticeably flatter and less enjoyable. Since the chip is the same, I figure it must be either the amplifier (haven't read whether that's the same) or the bit of super thin cable between the chip and the headphone port. It was a downgrade from the iPhone 6.

Yes, it's a huge inconvenience. I got the iPhone 7 knowing it didn't have a headphone jack. What I didn't realize was how awful the adapter would be (I have two, both have problems). I barely use headphones anymore, because the adapter just doesn't work reliably. Audio sometimes won't play, so I have to unplug / re-plug many times. And when I put it in my pocket, the thin wire seems to lose continuity when it bends. The sound crackles or cuts out with any pressure on the adapter. It was a terrible solution to... I don't even know what problem it solved.

If you're talking about a checking or savings account, you can safely close it without it affecting your credit score.

Closing a credit account could affect your score, but unless your checking account has a credit product attached (e.g. an overdraft protection line of credit) that gets reported to credit reporting agencies, it won't have any impact.

You can use https://annualcreditreport.com once per year to get a copy of your report from each of the three agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). If your HSBC account doesn't show up on any of those reports, you can be assured that closing it won't affect the scores generated from those reports.

Wireless does have some features of a natural monopoly. In order to compete with Verizon Wireless, you need access to a finite amount of wireless spectrum. The FCC auctions off exclusive access to the wireless spectrum, so you can't just start competing with Verizon on the same spectrum.

This is pretty similar to how you can't just freely add your own fiber to a utility pole, or freely build your own utility poles.

Yes, and counterfeit books have also been sold through third party sellers who don't have the Buy Box – it's a problem independent of the Buy Box.

Yes, Amazon definitely has a counterfeit problem. But that's not a problem with the buy box.

If it were, then Amazon could say to publishers, "We fixed the counterfeit book problem, now customers have to click on another link to buy fakes from third party sellers." But putting counterfeits 2 clicks away instead of one click away isn't actually a solution.

There's a lot to criticize Amazon for. I just thought the linked Vox article was incredibly terrible reporting.

Oh I absolutely agree, nothing wrong with people selling review copies. My point was that review copies for sale is an entirely separate issue from which seller wins the Amazon Buy Box.

This was a terrible article. The complaints have nothing to do with the buy box. I can think of three ways that "publishers aren't getting paid" could be true:

1) Books are stolen

2) Books are counterfeit

3) Books were purchased through "unauthorized" channels, e.g. free review copies

None of these is a problem with the Amazon buy box. We don't complain that "Samsung doesn't get paid when people buy Samsing TVs at Best Buy" and I don't see how this is any different.

I think Amazon is guilty of a lot of shady practices that harm businesses (like co-mingling potentially counterfeit Fulfillment by Amazon inventory with Ships From and Sold by Amazon.com inventory). But this article makes no sense.

You're right. Just because everyone uses it, doesn't mean it's "good". By making most ads free, Craigslist dominates the market even though they have a poor product. Take these examples:

- Buy a car. Poor make/model/year metadata requires loose searches to identify cars with keywords. So you end up sorting through irrelevant cars, or missing out on the ones you want to see.

- Find an apartment. Map search was finally introduced after Padmapper did it. Before then, you could search by the names of neighborhoods, but then you'd have the same problem: sort through tons of mis-categorized results, or miss out on the apartments you wanted to see.

- Buy used electronics. Again, poor category metadata. Want to buy a MacBook Pro, or iPhone 7? Good luck manually sorting through results that include the word "retina" or "non-retina" - or similar issues.

- Advertise your business. Great news, ads are free! Bad news: the flagging system is terribly abused, and there's no recourse because "it's free" and "the community does the flagging".

In all these cases, whether I'm the buyer or the seller, I'd much rather pay a small transaction fee or advertising fee for a better marketplace. But usually, craigslist dominates. They don't dominate because the product is good, they dominate because of network effects and an artificially low (free) price for most listing categories.

I've had the same problem with kitchen strainers, bike seats, and microphone stands. Hundreds (thousands?) of nearly-identical products on Amazon, all private-labeled, most with questionable reviews. Zero confidence that it's a good product.

> who goes to ebay before just buying the item from Amazon

I do, all the time. For one, the exact same products are often cheaper on eBay.

Second, it's much easier to discover the right items on eBay. Amazon search/sort/filter is absolutely terrible unless you're looking for a specific model or just want the best seller. It's a very fuzzy search, so you can't force an exact match on title.

eBay in contrast allows you to use booleans in the search terms, and makes it possible to filter by well structured category-specific data.

The environmental costs are one thing, and those could be served by carbon taxes. But that doesn't address the congestion costs or the infrastructure costs.

Ideally we'd separately tax each thing appropriately: Tax carbon to account for emissions, tax road use (per mile in accordance with vehicle weight) to account for road wear, and tax congestion (by time-based demand for commuter corridors, bridges/tunnels, or central business zones) to account for the congestion cost of adding another car to the road.

I really enjoyed Blendle for a while, but I found that I frequently ended up paying for articles on the Blendle platform that I could have accessed for free from the publisher.

The FedEx you're probably thinking of is the Express division. It's the original service oriented around high-priority packages getting places quickly via plane.

This part of the company uses purple/orange colors, and is staffed by FedEx employees.

The FedEx Ground (business) and FedEx Home (residential) operation is an entirely separate transportation network, formerly called RPS before they were aquired. They don't share long haul trucks or delivery trucks. And they're staffed by contractors, not by FedEx employees. The Home Delivery part of the operation operates Tuesday - Saturday.

Google often ignores quotes. I've had success using "intext:someword" (without quotes) to force Google to only return results that include someword.