On the pihole subreddit there's a wiki with lists of domains you can whitelist for certain services. I had to whitelist something for xbox live to work.
I dont think anyone's arguing against generic alternatives of name brand items. The issue here is Amazon using up-and-coming and popular products as fodder for them to generic-ize and push to the top of results, essentially knee capping the original seller.
All retailers do that. It's called private labels. None of the products are made by the retailer either. As unfortunate to those who might genuinely believe Trader Joes products are unique to them, or that Great Value was Walmart using its massive distribution systems to quickly scale core products like Milk out. It's all private labelling.
Amazon is not a traditional retails, it's a marketplace. Walmart buys stock, puts it on sale, gets data and makes decisions upon that. Amazon just skips the expensive first 2 steps by taking data from other retailers on their platform.
I think the algorithms make the difference here. You can't really make a cereal box stand out on a physical shelf in any unique way (or you can, but it'll be a cost expense. Ruining the point of undercutting). IME with online storefronts for traditional brick and mortar their own brands never seem to come on top.
Meanwhle I will almost always get an AmazonBasics if it exists as a first result.
Consumers like a lot of short term factors that turn against them in the long term. That seems to be the theme of the 21st century.
I'd rather these perverse incentives not exist and simply have a more educated consumer base learn to search "Amazon basics X" instead of maximizing conviniece to enable monopolies. We've clearly been shown that we can't handle the latter
I have no interest in becoming more educated about which seller from which factory run has what kind of quality standards. That’s why I use Costco and Target and Walmart and Amazon and Uniqlo and other brands to go out there and do that work. All I want to know is that I’ll be able to return something if it isn’t satisfactory.
And that's how you later get taken advantage of and how Amazon starts to be as bad as Comcast's customer service. But you can't leave because competition is gone.
You don't have to care per se, that's what the government is for. But taking the time and energy to argue against your long term best interests is disappointing.
I understand, but picking out random six letter brands on Amazon is not the competition most US customers are looking for.
It’s not feasible for people to go to China, inspect the manufacturing processes, and figure out what is worth what. There is a whole business there of purveying goods, which is what brands like Amazon and Kroger and Kirkland all the way up to LVMH.
With the advent of the internet, that business is no longer restricted to physical stores, so technically, anyone can make a superior product and sell direct to anyone. There were stories of Kmart and Walmart and whoever else bullying vendors because the vendors used to get nowhere without shelf space.
Those original sellers mainly just look like drop-shippers to me. So Amazon just going straight to the source and selling at lower margin is better for me as a buyer.
I don't think he's spreading FUD. It's a lot of trust you're placing in a 3rd party who doesn't have the source code to patch your system. Independent reviews and A B testing would help sway a lot of people, IMO.
You can find vulnerabilities using a variety of techniques, but to properly patch them you do need access to the source code. These "updates" don't even modify the executables, so would have to be applied every time you turned on your P.C.
I can speak with confidence that its hanging on by a thread. IBM has bean counted the development and support staff to the point that entire critical sections of the OS have maybe one, two people working on it. Bugs take months or years to be addressed and security flaws sometimes take just as long to get patched.
Not to mention features that were new 20 years ago get the IBM red tape and beuracacy treatment and never get implemented, alienating even more customers.
Yeesh. What a weird area to make deep cuts. They spend all that money developing the hardware, successfully, but it needs the software in order to shine.
My conspiracy brain thinks part of the reason for the red hat acquisition was to funnel disgruntled IBM i customers into that while bleeding the platform dry.
I've had multiple friends and family die from this so-called nothing burger. My mother's heath will never be the same, she is now consigned to a wheelchair. Your statement is inflammatory and unhelpful, it does not advance the conversation, and is a provable falsehood.
Tell me about your mom's PD/CVD/Diabetes pre-COVID.
Tell me about your family's history with the above.
I'm sure that I lost more friends due to lockdown-induced depression, drug/alcohol relapse and suicide than you lost family to COVID.
If we should have learned anything it's that modern medicine has spoiled our species in that you can now live an excessively long time with extremely unhealthy lifestyles.
Barely two generations ago dying from common colds, flus and even minor cut and scrape injuries was just everyday life. Maybe half of the children in a family might die before reaching adulthood. One particularly strong (lab-engineered) cold made the rounds and people want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend the sky is on fire.
In the context of human history and coronaviruses, COVID-19 is absolutely a nothingburger.
Victim-blaming is unhelpful and not productive, nor does it move the conversation forward in a meaningful way. My mother was, while in her 70s, perfectly healthy prior to Covid. No diabetes, walking and exercising regularly. I only wish I ate as healthy as my mother. It attacked her heart. Now she has no energy, cannot stand up, is on many heart medications, because Covid-19 destroyed parts of her heart. My neighbor, who died, was in his early 40s, a violinist in a major orchestra. My best friend's mother, in her 60s, was healthy and vibrant. Died months after infection with low energy, brain fog, trouble breathing. I'm sure there are 1000s of examples like these from others. They say 2MM died of Covid-19, but the true cost was likely 5x that number when the dust is settled. You need to re-think your value system, it lacks humanity.
What a sad little world view you have.
Of course it doesn't matter in the long run. But it matters to people alive right now. Which is why we do anything even though its all pointless. I guess you wouldn't care about your life or a family members life being taken by covid since its a nothingburger though huh?
My whole entire family works in medicine and isn't killing themselves with junk food and bad lifestyles, so even though most of us got COVID-19, none of us had the comorbidities that made it serious. Even among our overweight and elderly.
If somebody's so fat and unhealthy that that they're gassed out from walking off the front porch, I'm not alarmed that a cold virus finished them off. I'm also not out here screaming about COVID, I'm screaming about the importance of diet, exercise and self-control instead.
If they're of advanced age, it's (just) slightly more sad but none of us gets to live forever. Everyone will get cancer too if they live long enough. If you want to radically alter how the rest of us live our lives because you or a family member can't stop shoving McDonalds and cake into your face, I'm not fucking having it.
What I AM sympathetic to are people who have to sequester themselves from society (and did so already in the absence of COVID-19) because they have very serious and usually rare disorders. But then maybe these gain of function labs should think twice before they play with fire and break containment.
As with most things in life, garbage in, garbage out.
Also I'll say this right here as a former fatty and current fat-shamer and fat-nonacceptant.
The absolute worst thing about ACA is that it made it illegal to charge obese people higher insurance rates. It's basically stealing money out of the rest of our pockets who have to work with you -- and thank God being an unhealthy mess isn't a protected class because I would never hire somebody to work with me who has a terrible lifestyle.
Japan does this right. Your workplace and the public health service makes you get a check up every year and will follow up with you to make sure you're on a plan to get healthier. And they will both encourage you and also nag the shit out of you until you do it. The fact that we don't follow such a practice here I find almost barbaric.
We have more old people with existing problems (eg obesity), COVID ripped through them like crazy. The biggest indicator was age, and our life expectancy was falling behind the rest of the developed world before the pandemic.
No, I said we had more old people with comorbidities and our life expectancy has been falling behind (not rising) compared to other western developed countries.
If you look at the COVID death rates, age was by far the dominating factor of death, not obesity. But obesity was probably significant in those who died at younger and older ages (though pronounced in older people, since an order of magnitude more died due to COVID than young people). I doubt we are really disagreeing much here, but obesity was a drag on mortality before the pandemic, and will continue to be a problem after.
I wouldn’t take too much stock in comparing USA COVID deaths to the rest of the world, we are really liberal in flagging COVID deaths (eg a 90 year old dies of a heart attack while having COVID is counted as a COVID death), other countries had different standards, especially developing ones without access to as much testing. What we should really focus on is excess deaths overall, and how a life expectancy changed during the pandemic.
A full-featured columns view, like that of macOS (but also implemented by various file browsers over the years), has an arbitrary number of resizable columns. Perhaps optionally with a preview pane at the end where the last column would otherwise be.
