webscaleizfun

They push 10,000+ parcels like that a month, and send their shipping out to bid every year, helps to have big companies ordering tons of hardware from ya. 3 years ago they were on DHL which was great for DHL same day, I could order something at 8am and have it at the customer's site later that evening.

It seems by "Open Platform" they mean shoving all your data onto their chat platform, basically an open API. That definitely is not an open platform in my book, as you can't federate, run your own, etc.

I see some of the upsides of both Slack and Gitter, but having used both I still find IRC or a Signal group much easier and more convenient overall. Perhaps its the familiarity, or that I find both to be yet another tab to have open/app to install & maintain, but I just can't call myself a fan.

Definitely, you should be able to get a shipping price without going into the checkout, Amazon makes it quite difficult compared to Aliexpress & eBay when it comes to finding out shipping prices, to the point that I avoid shopping on there with a rare exception occurring every 6 months or so.

For the average shopper, pricing in shipping and sales tax will make them buy more online. Breaking out sales tax has caused a 9% sales drop in states Amazon charges sales tax in.

Why do hundreds of pregnant women die every year in the US, but significantly less die in Singapore, Greece, Canada, Ireland, etc? This shouldn't be a thing, and we shouldn't be this far behind other countries on this, its not an impossible problem to halve or even cut into a quarter that death rate. This isn't even discussing complications of pregnancy or infant mortality, both of which we are not doing amazing at.

Dude, you can't even buy a crackerbox in Seattle for 300k euros anymore, a 500sqft apartment has gone from 270k euros to 400k euros in the past 2 years, and that is before the 4500 euros you'll pay to go to an "exclusive" wine tasting/auction to bid on the few units that are up for sale.

Perhaps property value is in line then if 40k euros is an inflated price, I think 110k euros in Tacoma is a price too high for that area myself, the average income down there is around 22k euros a year for a working person [1].

[1] - http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/washington/tacoma

Free shipping is a lie, but the average consumer thinks of dealing with shipping costs separately as pesky, and Amazon & eBay have configured their fees to charge you more on any extra shipping line item to encourage sellers to make shipping "free".

I don't see "free" shipping going away, nor do I see Amazon's new delivery service succeeding where DHL and other have floundered in the past, since you need a certain volume in that business to even be viable, and Amazon has stated they can't push that volume alone to make running a shipping service make sense.

What might happen, and what I hope happens is the lower end, smaller businesses get better next day and 2 day shipping prices. Currently, from one wholesaler I can order a 50lb box of hardware, and UPS charges them $21 to $23 to ship it from Chicago to Seattle in the span of about 18hrs and get it on my doorstep.

Another much smaller vendor I deal with can't get anywhere near that pricing, half that weight/size box will run me $150 easily, with ground (a week and change) being $40 usually for a 25lb box from them.

Edit: Another layer to this is USPS and China Post teamed up a while back and offer Chinese sellers dirt cheap ePacket shipping, where 1lb of goods can be moved to the US for $5, whereas USPS charges $50 to the American seller to ship something to China [1]. Essentially, it makes American online sellers uncompetitive in our own market. This is why people like Trump, since he says he'll put a 35% tariff on foreign imports and end programs like ePacket (not supporting him though, just to be clear).

[1] - https://www.skubana.com/e-commerce-trends/the-usps-epacket-p...

So overvalued property in the current economic context combined with unprecedented (for Greece) property taxes is making home ownership a burden? Plus the maintenance costs wipe out what remains of the value.

With austerity feeding on itself as it has been for many years in Greece, the rental market seems to have become flooded with properties. If your citizens have no money, and your economy is shrinking in the double digits every year for years on end, how does anyone do anything economically?

What area are you in? Compared to Seattle/Portland/San Diego prices, 40k euros seems cheap for a 1963 670sqft apt. A similar house in Tacoma would run 110k euros right now, and it is a terrible location.

Well, you've got this amazing compiler that just likes to change things you write, they're known as politicians :P

Its still extremely dangerous to give birth in the US when compared to Greece, our maternal death rate is 7x higher [1], on par with Iran, Hungary and Saudi Arabia.

[1] - http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=2223

Not every investment will be successful either, as any person with a basic sense of business will know.

Dude, grow up. You do not have to live under govt rule, if you choose to follow an ideology that would rather see government not exist, you can and should fully adhere to your ideology and move to such an area. They do exist in Latin America and other places, and you are not living your ideology or helping it in any way if you won't support it in the most basic of ways.

Go live where there is no government, its great to act so infringed upon by the government in the place in which you currently reside, but you do have choices.

Not saying its a rosy picture to live in an area with no publicly owned infrastructure, or any baseline public services like water, sewer, trash, education, courts, etc, but there are places in Latin America which have legal carveouts for a non-governmentally controlled area to exist, without taxes, laws or infrastructure.

Unless you are willing to live & fight for your beliefs, they are absolutely worthless, Martin Luther King & Cesar Chavez didn't accomplish anything sitting at home, they took to the streets and organized like minded people to stand with them and fight for the way things ought to be, regardless what businesses or government tried to do.

Hey now, we need to get that oil out of the US and into a higher priced market ASAP, hence the need for a new pipeline and the removal of restrictions on the exportation of domestically produced oil.

That way, these large foreign oil companies like BP (owned by Britan's public employee retirement funds) and Royal Dutch Shell can make a ton more dough while also raising prices by a few bucks in the domestic gas & natural gas market.

That will just clog roads more, doesn't matter how much you mechanize it. Self driving cars will induce massive amounts of demand piled atop the latent demand that already exists for driving on nearly every arterial and freeway in cities, and even if everything was perfect, with cars driving at an optimal 45mph with minimal stopping distance, you can only move 2200 cars an hour per lane [1] and that scales non-linearly, as you add lanes to highways and arterial streets, throughput drops exponentially due to lane switching.

Now, self driving cars could get us closer to that 2200 cars an hour figure, but there is so much pent up demand for a magical faster option (latent demand) that when those marginal efficiency gains occur, there will be a flood of new vehicular traffic on the roads that will fully negate said efficiency gains, and likely exacerbate said issues since the tolerance for time spent in traffic will significantly increase for autonomous vehicle owners due to being able to do another task while your car drives for you.

[1] - http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hpmsmanl/appn2.cfm

This is called induced demand, whereby something that is plentiful will be utilized since it was built. Commonly, people say "Build it and they will come!" which is all the more true for roads.

Building a freeway or expanding it actually creates more traffic, since it lowers the cost of driving (time & gas) and when building a new freeway you actually create new traffic flows in unexpected ways. Building extra lanes actually causes more cars than those lanes could ever conceivably handle to pour onto the roadway due to the latent demand [1], and the most viable path forward is to create other avenues for said latent demand for transport to be serviced.

Ideally, you will build better mass transit infrastructure, with a sizable light rail network and feeder bus lines in the suburbs. Traffic will not get better due to this in any way, shape or form, but it will lessen the number of additional cars that end up traversing the streets every year, and prevent some additional load.

What this will do though is prevent your local economy from strangling itself in its own traffic, since your community is now providing more than one transport option. The only enemy of transit is density in the US, where we require massive swaths of land be set aside for unused parking that ultimately severely disadvantages every mode of transport, since it forces cities to be more spread out and dense construction to be very costly (underground parking construction costs are insane vs building above ground sqft).

[1] - https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

No, another candidate got it, he had a slightly better resume and went by the same name :P

Seeing as how Google and other major content providers have moved to peering with consumer & business ISPs directly, and bought trans-pacific fiber and built datacenters all over Europe, Asia and South America to bring content closer to end users, I see how both Centurylink & Level 3 are in a weakened state. Both made tons of money shuttling data around on behalf of Netflix and others, and now Level 3 has taken a back seat, and Centurylink has been reduced to a last mile ISP.

Even on the consumer & small business front Centurylink seems to be scared, Portland is fiber only now, along with most of Seattle, only a decade after Verizon did the same thing just prior to selling the suburbs around Seattle.

How long will the merged company be viable? Will it descend similar to AMD/ATI's post merger valuation (combined value was much lower) while forestalling further, more substantial value loss?

With the rise of Internet Exchanges in Asia & South America, perhaps all that is left for these two tier one networks is rent seeking from content providers for access to consumers on Centurylink's network.

Makes sense, its easy to end up with a mythical man month type situation.

There are a vast number of things that fit under the umbrella of tech that needs to be decentralized to give you full control over your money and information.

What part of that stack are you working on? Blockchain currency, low level networking, distributed filesystems, p2p websites, ...

Interesting idea, but then you are essentially forcing everyone to go through their upstream provider or Google's DNS servers, since when DDOS attacks occur, smaller networks won't be in your 8000 resolver whitelist.

Part of me thinks this is just the author building another wall, since now the DDOS will just attack ISP DNS servers instead, and worse yet quite a few of those compromised IoT devices are on those same ISPs networks, providing even better connectivity & potential throughput compared to congested peering.

Perhaps we should be taking a different path, instead of letting Qualcomm, Broadcom and ilk continue to build massive out of tree branches of the Linux kernel and never mainline their changes, thus preventing effective long term support for said hardware, we should seek to force them to properly mainline their code so when the vendors using their chips drop support, all these vulnerable IoT devices aren't permanently sitting there vulnerable.

Otherwise, the future is bleak for your smart toaster. Its likely gonna join a botnet sooner or later, just a matter of time ultimately.

Now, your gonna probably call me crazy, but take a bottle of cheap wine and throw it in the blender before ya drink it, failing that, a mixmaster works too. Completely changes the complexion of the wine when you do this, generally makes it quite a bit better.

There is still so much science to do related to food, we just do not have a good grasp of all the nutrients your body needs and what allows you to absorb those nutrients the best. One form of protein from a plant can have completely different absorption rates than that of protein from a cow, its a complete crapshoot to try and blaze a trail with processed staple food products due to the lack of understanding we have of nutrition, and its going to take decades of research to even start to unravel the mysteries of the human bodies digestion system.

Different food items will have different absorption rates for the nutrients they contain when passing through your stomach, upper & lower intestine. For example, an apple may contain a small amount of iron absorbed at a rate of 20%, while a steak may contain significantly more, with an absorption rate of 80%.

These absorption rates can also vary widely from person to person, based on the flora in your gut, the drugs you ingest, your diet, and also certain DNA (eg. most East Asians never developed specific lactose related digestive abilities [1]) and ancestry can significantly alter this too.

For example, my grandfather had issues with high iron absorption, thus he would regularly donate blood to get rid of the excess iron in his bloodstream. Neither I nor my immediate family share that issue, but he made dietary choices based in part on avoiding iron rich food (like the iron enriched cookies I used to eat, mmm).

TL;DR: Your body & the food you eat are very complex things to understand, and we understand the tiniest sliver about it. Highly processed food likely misses important nutrients you need.

1 - https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/lactose-intolerance#statis...

Yeah, need to mix whole food in there to keep your bowels functioning well & avoid having the flora in your intestines from dieing off.

We can't actually quantify nor do we fully understand all the vitamins, chemicals & molecules in your average vegetable, or how they are digested and used in your body. It might be bad to peel a carrot prior to eating it, since you lose the nutrients in the skin (that may only exist there) and oxidize the rest of the carrot breaking down other potentially good nutrients, similar to how garlic loses certain multi-drug resistant infection killing abilities when chopped or crushed[1].

If we did have a good grasp of the nutrients that the human body needs, and in what form (particularly to prevent your bowels from shutting down or having mass dieoffs), then something like Ensure, Soylent, etc might be practical with a group of people who were well versed in the science of nutrition designing it, but I do not have that kind of faith with our abject lack of understanding & the present lack of nutritional skills Soylent, and many other processed food companies have shown.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allicin

Did it sit in the trunk of your car for an extended period of time?