I mean, it sounds like your kids are just following the example you set. They're watching you sit in front of a screen as a form of recreation and they're simply doing the same. I think it's also worth noting that your hobbies are solo activities, so even if your kids did want to connect with you in a non-screen hobby, you'd be unavailable anyways. Maybe you could make the first move and invite them to do something outside with you?
Yes, only the best buildings from hundreds of years ago have been preserved, but that still doesn't explain why we build ugly buildings right now. You would think we would be able to draw on centuries of architectural trial and error to determine what is objectively pleasing to people. Instead it's like the past never existed. Architects keep building hideous blobs of steel and glass and wondering why people don't like their creations.
"hideous blobs of steel and glass" were originally known as glorious and beautiful modern architecture. oversaturation makes the creative into the tired and boring
I am not sure - I can see why Empire State or Chrysler are majestic, but WTC was hideous. And I saw them simultaneously for the first time. The shard is probably nice, shanghai tower is not too ugly, burj khalifa is ok - but almost everything else is eyesore.
Everything about building in the US is either forbidden or mandatory; "liking" doesn't come into it, there generally isn't a choice in the matter.
The main aesthetic reason new buildings don't look like old ones is Baumol's cost disease, i.e. nobody can hire that many laborers anymore. The second is fire codes and accessibility requirements.
This article has a graph going back over a century. The percent of young adults living with parents in 1960 was only 29%, so I'd say the current value is pretty significant.
That's not why the electoral college was created. The three fifths compromise was appended to the electoral college system, but it was not the reason for it being created in the first place.
The reason why we have an electoral college system, according to James Madison in the Federalist papers, is because the United States is intended to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. States within the US are not meant to be mere provinces; they are intended to be mini-countries with their own laws and customs under a broader federal umbrella. The electoral college system allows the states to cast the votes for President, instead of the majority of citizens voting directly.
It's sort of like how an HOA works, where each unit has one vote. The units themselves comprise the voting body, not the individual people living in each unit. The individuals in each unit might have different opinions and preferences, but at the end of the day they must submit a single vote representing their unit. The electoral college system works the same way, with the caveat that the number of votes apportioned to each state is relative to the size of the population.
The “hidden tax” described in the article is to sellers, not consumers. Free shipping is subsidy for consumers that costs Amazon billions of dollars. I have personally never seen what you’re describing.
The TL;DR is that the “hidden tax” is onerous advertising fees paid by third-party retailers to have their products appear high in search results.
I don’t really see the issue here, since this appears to be a win-win for both consumers and sellers. Consumers get the cheap stuff they want with free shipping, and sellers get access to hundreds of millions of customers and the volume of sales needed to survive in a low-margin business. The fact that sellers are willing to pay these fees suggests that’s it worth it for them to be on Amazon. If it wasn’t worth it, they would be somewhere else.
You pay these fees so the products aren't cheap. And Amazon (using its size) made it impossible for sellers to sell their products cheaper elsewhere.
This is anticompetitive.
> You pay these fees so the products aren't cheap.
Except they are, otherwise consumers wouldn't use Amazon. Whenever I want to buy anything, I check Amazon first. 9 times out of 10 it's the same price as every other retailer with the added benefit of free shipping and free returns. If that wasn't the case, I would have no reason to use Amazon.
> Whenever I want to buy anything, I check Amazon first. 9 times out of 10 it's the same price as every other retailer with the added benefit of free shipping and free returns.
That's the problem! The issue is that Amazon forces sellers to raise their prices elsewhere, so that Amazon is the best deal for a shopper. But if Amazon didn't have the power to do that (if it didn't have a monopoly as the gateway to online shopping) then other retailers would be able to lower their prices.
That's the "tax" referred to in the article. By inflating prices across the board, but still ensuring that they're the least expensive option, Amazon retains customers and increases profits. Individual consumers choose it because it's the best deal, but the system as a whole loses out because prices are higher than they "should" be.
I'm a consumer who uses Amazon for 90% of their online shopping and let me tell you: I'm not doing it because Amazon is cheap. In recent years more often than not, Amazon isn't actually the cheapest option except for the occasional deal for a subpar product they want to remove from their inventory (but these would be cheap in brick and mortar stores too). Even the deals are largely bogus: "Prime Day" largely exists to buy Amazon equipment at a more reasonable price point and the rest of the time the deals are either for "stocking fillers" (i.e. the kind of stuff you'd find in the discount bin at the supermarket) or noname white label dropshipping products you can barely tell apart from the real deal until they arrive.
I don't use Amazon because it's cheap. I use it because it's convenient. I can do 99% of my non-groceries shopping on Amazon and I get 30 day free returns on most products and next day delivery for some of them, not to mention free shipping on most things I buy (or near-free shipping if you consider the cost of Prime).
What's been pushing me away from Amazon recently is that they're not very good (or even increasingly worse) for some categories of products and in many cases search results are cluttered by Chinese dropshipping products to the point I can't find trustworthier brands at all or for categories I'm less familiar with have to do research to figure out which brands actually exist outside of Amazon's Chinese dropshipping hell. And again because of the free returns (and in the case of non-free returns the A-to-Z guarantee still often resulting in free returns or full refunds) this is not a cost issue but more about the reduction in convenience.
Mind you, I live in Germany and German Amazon is likely different. But Amazon is still the biggest online retailer here despite not being the cheapest. Arguably it still maintains the illusion of being the cheapest because of the free shipping (if you pay for Prime) and the constant barrage of "deals".
And that is why this case is being brought. Amazon are requiring that the price on Amazon is the cheapest price, even if the retailer would like to sell it on their own store (or eBay, Walmart, etc) for cheaper. If it’s sold on Amazon you won’t see it cheaper elsewhere.
did you read it all? it claims the prices are higher due to the hidden tax and that amazon is price fixing by threatening to block 3rd party sellers if they sell at a more reasonable price elsewhere. this doesnt necessarily mean that consumers will get a better deal elsewhere but it is probably unhealthy to put all that price setting behaviour in the hands of one company.
That doesn't really sound like price setting power. They are saying you can set whatever price you want, but it has to be the same as other sales channels.
"Other sales channels" being Amazon's competitors - suppose you sell a... cup that costs $1 to produce, and you sell it on Amazon and Bmazon. Amazon charges $2 in fees, and Bmazon charges $0.50 in fees.
In this hypothetical example with demonstration numbers for effect, you could sell your cup for a minimum of $1.50 on Bmazon and $3 on Amazon - everything above that is pure profit. In such a scenario, you would obviously much prefer selling at $2.50 on Bmazon over selling for $3.50 on Amazon, since you make 2x the profit, and the average customer would much prefer to buy the device at a ~30% discount! Unless the customer legitimately derives an extra $1 worth of value from using Amazon instead of Bmazon, in which case Amazon gets the sale anyway.
But, if 90% of your sales are on Amazon, then you can't offer this deal that both you and the customer are legitimately incentivized to do, because you'd lose 80% of your revenue.
In such a scenario, Amazon has no competitive incentive to reduce their fees! It suppresses market signals towards lower-overhead sales platforms, i.e. you have no way to signal to your customers that a sale on Bmazon benefits you twice as much as on Amazon.
Basically, Amazon is trying to abuse a network-effect instead of actually competing with their competition. They're deplatforming anyone who doesn't voluntarily price-fix for them. It's insane.
If Amazon did that, sales would drop to zero and retailers would leave Amazon. eCommerce is a low-margin business. Sellers will only stay on Amazon as long it's profitable for them.
> For his final presentation at architecture school, Hedström proposed Inxect Island, an apartment complex built around mealworm farming, sustained by ocean-borne plastic, on a decommissioned oil rig moored outside Tórshavn.
This sounds more like the set of a Balenciaga runway show than an a helpful vision for the future. Complete with a dash of "zey vill eat zee bugs", it's hard to tell whether or not this is satire.
Architecture school is all about the fanciful. Whether or not the proposals will work in real life are secondary to the creative process that gets you to them (aside from purposeful courses like Structures or Materials). That something like this was proposed for an architecture final crit doesn't surprise me. The real accomplishment here is this student getting his way into a New Yorker featured article.
Every once in a while, you'll hear something in a final crit like, "Uh, do you realize all your structural loads are coming down on to that one point?" Always good for a chuckle when someone brings up the practical failings of a design.
> For me, it's harder and harder to find the initial novelty that made programming fun.
I struggled with that for years before finally accepting that the magic wasn’t coming back. I’ve since moved on to other non-tech interests that are giving me that sense of magic again.
I think what a lot of us found to be so magical and entrancing was the initial process of discovery and learning. At least for me, it was downright addicting to figure out how to bend the computer to my will, but the thing about that phase is that it’s kind of a one time deal. Once you’ve learned how to write software to a professional level, the only way to keep the magic alive is to keep going deeper. And frankly I got to a point where I didn’t want to spend any more time in front of screen.
This. Since first getting paid for programming I've almost never programmed on my own time. Sometime I do still get in flow but rarely given what I'm tasked.
Also started "labor" hobbies (car maintenance, welding, etc) but I think a professional mechanic or welder would say the same thing about their jobs. Why?
"Professional" (aka money) ruins everything after a while. You get to a point where all you do is the same thing over and over, maybe with slight variations in between. Unless one has full, money no object, choice of what jobs to accept, this will happen.
