The stores in Hawaii are certainly nicer and more full-featured than the ones on the US mainland, but the stores in Japan and Taiwan are still light-years ahead.
This does not work if your communication enpoint is the same as your encryption endpoint.
Or you don't control your key material.
Or your tech supply chain.
Or leave your device unattended.
Or aren't susceptible to the same "five dollar wrench" attacks used by certain in-person Bitcoin wallet thievestgat are also available to state actors.
You may never be able to completely protect yourself, but you can make an attack much more costly. For example, I use Heads with a hardware key to defend myself from an Evil Maid.
You raise an excellent point. I'd only counter that a number of the factors I raised are manipulated to retain mass surveillance even in the presence of mass encryption. Let's start with manipulating random number generators or controlling elliptic curve constants...
Many many moons ago I refused to implement a calendar event scraping system at Meta where it would look at all of your meetings on the calendar and do "analysis". IDK what ever happened to that task, I assume it died a death of no one else being willing to do it. This was probably 2011 or so, I can only imagine it has gotten so much worse.
It's pretty easy to scrape your own calendar events in Meta. I'm not sure about others' as I'm not a manager, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were visible as long as someone is in your report chain.
It's been a while so I don't remember the specifics, but the I think the request came from someone working at Accenture from one of the FinTech teams? At the time the proposal had both technical limitations and performance implications on top of the privacy issues. To do it right would have meant standing up a new set of client exchange endpoints and permissions that were far too permissive so the task just got ignored for a long time and I think that manager behind it went away eventually or they settled for public data inside the company.
The only report chain based permissions were around distribution lists which were just some powershell scripts that walked AD every night. These also got used for security groups to gate access to some things. Be default, calendars were visible to all authenticated users unless you made them private or individual events private. The meeting tool leveraged this for example.
I was working on corp email (among other things) there from 2009 to 2016, so I can't speak for now.
Actually, the date was 29 June 2007. This is when GPLv3 was released and Apple could no long continue using the fruits of open source labor without giving anything back. That's when MacOS X's UNIX underlying began to ossify. Sure Apple kept backporting important security things, but it froze in time all of the GNU utilities that made UNIX on MacOS X good.
I order from Amazon because of their logistics. For some reason Amazon can ship for free at the same price as the producer's Shopify page that wants to charge me insane shipping because I live in a remote location.
Yes, I understand the price fixing is why they aren't selling for less on their own site, but Amazon's superpower is logistics, not years of goodwill and brand loyalty.
Along that line: I know that Lowe's, Home Depot, Chewy etc ship to me with speed matching or beating Amazon's (at least above a minimum purchase), so if what I'm buying is sold by those companies, Amazon does not get that sale.
Amazon is hugely anti-competitive, but their moat can be surprisingly shallow in some areas.
What Amazon has shown the rest of the industry is that shipping matters. Others are learning, at their own pace.
I mean, 1-2 day shipping is a huge part of their consumer-first policy, which is why every seller has got to do FBA -- for the longest time until COVID, the algorithm heavily penalized FBM fulfilled by merchant from ranking in the search results.
Once FBA started failing during COVID due to warehouse restrictions + sellers and 3PL third party logistics centers really stepped up did FBM even become a thing (and Amazon smartly gave access to Prime badges for FBM sellers who could deal with stringent shipping times).
IMHO the other big superpower Amazon has is to force sellers to eat returns and provide retroactive refunds when a product gets recalled.
It can be 1 or 2 day shipping. That's normally what I get at my house in Ohio. But it can also be a lot faster.
I took a trip to Tampa not so long ago for a few days to hang out with an old friend who I don't see very often, and also to help him with a long list of technical stuff around his house. I flew down in cattle class with no luggage, which meant that I didn't get to bring anything in terms of tools or materials. That left me a bit out-of-sorts -- I'm used to having a work truck with me that is full of the tools and stuff that I find useful.
And we got into all kinds of projects. We got a lot actually-finished, and we had a great time doing that stuff together.
But there was a recurring theme: We'd need to buy some widget or other to move forward. So I'd fire up my pocket supercomputer and start looking to see if Home Depot or Best Buy or Wal-Mart or whoever had it locally, and then start to figure out some ideal factor of best price and travel time.
Because that's just what I know how to do. In my life, when I want to get things done today and doing that requires more widgets, then I have to get in the car and drive to the store to get them -- ideally, with a good plan in place first.
And he wasn't having any of that. Over and over again, he'd shut me down and say "No, look. Just order it on Amazon. They'll probably bring it over today."
And over and over again, I'd look on Amazon and: Sure enough. They brought it over today. Sometimes, with 3 different deliveries in a single day as projects progressed and our need for widgets changed shape. Sometimes, late at night.
I don't think we drove anywhere at all while I was down there except to tool around the neighborhood to find some yard sales one morning, and another trip to pick up more liquor and some Chilean sea bass from Costco.
I didn't address that specifically, but the prices were OK. They were within a sensible range of what local shops were charging for the same/similar widgets.
Sometimes Amazon was a bit more expensive (and they brought it over today). Sometimes, it was even a bit cheaper (and they still brought it over today).
The price was fine. It certainly wasn't 2x or 3x. It was always an OK price.
(Remember: Over and over again, I kept checking local stores. I didn't make that part of the story up. I didn't make any other part up, either.)
correct, amazon's policies made it impossible for local stores to offer a deal, making sure you pay the 2-3x inflated sum no matter where you go, instead of what the real cost would be if fair competition were allowed
I'm not sure if your point is that Amazon's price is too high (as you previously stated), or if your point is that Amazon's price is too low (as you've now stated).
But I am sure that I cannot accept both of these things being true at the same time.
>IMHO the other big superpower Amazon has is to force sellers to eat returns and provide retroactive refunds when a product gets recalled.
I value free and easy returns above lowest price, especially in this day and age of rampant mis and disinformation. Which basically means I almost always buy from the big box stores (including Amazon).
Social media is mostly about what you make of it and how you interact to find value. This is the same in Twitter, TikTok, FB, Instagram, even LinkedIn.
If you don't interact with the product, you get lowest denominator crap.
IDK, I still find my Facebook and Instagram feeds very topical and useful to me, so I keep using them. I also curate aggressively, have a wide variety of interests and a few hundred close connections. It could be that I am just fitting into what the algo is steering to, but I don't get the low quality stuff that OP is complaining about.
sure, but now it's giving me days old crappy posts with 3 votes from those subs as it leans wholeheartedly in the Dark Pattern of always feeding me something so I keep reflexively coming back for more.
Was curious what my abandoned FB shows if I log in now. Mostly posts from groups I joined ages ago that are surprisingly still active, some random local news articles, and ads for restaurants.
I am both strongly pro 2A, and extremely liberal. Sometimes it gets things wrong, but I just use the feedback buttons and snooze content I don't agree with and it remarkably stays mostly on track for me.
I have a very sweet elderly friend of the family who only uses Facebook for church-related stuff, and since I'm "the tech guy" she asked me to look at her facebook and help her understand why she sees so much Trump, right-wing, hateful, violent, "Nazi-adjacent" (interestingly never -overtly- Nazi) stuff in her feed. I didn't have the heart to try to explain to her demographic bias, revealed preferences, and overlapping group interests, so I just said it's probably a software glitch in Facebook.
The issue with those inclined pillows with the arm hole in them is that they can be a really hard angle for a side sleeper to be at. It makes my back and hips hurt way worse than my shoulder.
You clearly did not live in the world of watching two teens on computers in the same room hold two entirely different conversations out-loud and over AIM.
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