* PE, on the whole, has extracted wealth from quality. This is true at both the consumer level and B2B. E.g. its impossible to trust any aftermarket car part manufacturer, and some OEM brands have turned to dogshit too.
* "most people just buy trash at WalMart and Amazon" I'd rephrase that to: most people either can't or are unwilling to pay the premium for quality in an increasingly disposable world.
So, I'd say that similar to post war Japan, while Chinese manufacturing has an image problem, they're just producing what we asked for.
I'm very willing to pay a premium for quality, I just can't seem to find any reliable signal for quality before buying. Price and brand are both increasingly meaningless signals.
I'm in a similar boat, and it annoys the shit out of my wife, and any family member that thinks I'm "just cheap" or a "budget shopper".
I'm a value shopper. I was happy with the McDouble when it was under $1, but not now that it is nearly $2. It isn't worth that, but the BK Double Cheeseburger IS worth it even for $1 more than the McDouble (at least in my location).
Same is true for almost everything I buy. A certain fabric I want in my button ups, or a stich type I want in my pants. I hyper inspect almost every item of clothing I'm even contemplating buying. Same with furniture, with tools, with appliances.
It is almost a compulsion. I cannot pay more for something than I think it is worth... unless I REAALLLLLY want it.
The lengths "drop-shippers" or similar groups are willing to go to game the system also has made almost all reviews and feedback useless. A few years ago I bought a feline water fountain and the lengths they went to get a 5 star review (extra free filters, etc) made me realize just how bad amazon reviews had gotten. I've slowed my amazon purchases significantly since then (along with other problems ordering from amazon has slowly introduced).
The book "The Paradox of Choice" led me to using Wirecutter and Consumer Reports in recent years - if it's not something I care that much about, I will just buy whatever their top recommendation is without second thought. The cost of the subscriptions pays for a human to wade through all the junk and select something that is at least adequate for the job, and is cheap compared to the effective hourly rate of having to search through mountains of junk.
For more niche stuff, Reddit groups like BIFL and seeing what niche hobby groups coalesce around is helpful for me. Which I suppose is the same reversion to word-of-mouth expertise when, as you said, brand and price are degraded signals.
I'm in the same boat. The only signal that I still trust is (for want of a better term) governance longevity, i.e. how long has the company/brand been under its current management structure. This requires some digging, but good salesmen are usually well aware of management changes at their brands. That may not apply to generic clothes shops, but in my experience this still works for tool shops and appliance stores. You'll want to talk to tradespeople though, not sales drones.
Then there's two signals that negatively inform my trust of a brand:
- company size: the larger the company, the lower they start on my trust ladder;
- advertising: when a brand is overly present in the public sphere, that to me signals that they're overcharging for their product.
I don’t fully agree with either of those arguments. I think parts of it are certainly true but at the end of the day it takes two to tango. American consumers on average want high consumption for the lowest cost. I hate the argument “just buy less $5 coffees” but there is at least a kernel of truth in it. Consumers stretch the limits of their budget.
It's because people like you don't consider the indigenous people of Judea and Sumarea to be people, and you think it's OK to rape and murder them--as do the folks at "RightsCon"
Its not always about speed, This winter I was on interstate 93 in a 4WD with winter tyres. I was doing 25-35mph because the roads weren't treated. I still spun out, like many others. The road was an ice rink.
Humans and Control System Models need feedback to operate, and worse still... when any input into the vehicle's controls produce zero results, you will spin out.
My concern with a model in these conditions is that it wouldn't recoginize the fact that other cars were in the ditch and that it should probably slow down
When it comes to controlling the wheels to prevent sliding and slipping, the AV control system is unbeatable. The ABS and traction control on a regular car has to cope with whatever control inputs the driver has made; on an AV, the computer models the grip limits of the wheel and plans a trajectory to not exceed them. It's not just for snow but also for changing pavement surfaces and the rain.
The main limitation is still sensors in the snow, but it seems to not be that big of a deal to build sensor packages that are better at seeing in the snow than a human is.
Being able to plot a series of inputs that can more efficiently use available traction than a human doesn't prevent you from blundering your way into a dumb situation where the laws of physics dictate that the only possible outcomes are various flavors of bad ones.
It's not clear how often the software will chose poorly and need to brute force its way out with traction/handling. The fact that they seem to be hedging against this by putting the hardware on particularly performant cars indicates it must happen enough to matter or be rare but bad enough to matter when it does happen.
Waymo will probably also rack up a ton of technically not at fault accidents by being obtuse in traffic since there's when there's snow there's a lot less margin for the "two people trying to pass each other in a hallway" type missteps that behavior tends to create.
They put the hardware on performant cars because it would be stupid to choose gas for stop-and-go city driving. Electric cars are fast; a new Honda Civic does 0-60 in 6 seconds!
No, this is not a "works in a textbook" take. The path planner is aware of surface conditions on the road. This is already a big deal because otherwise the AV would not be safe to operate in the rain.
Waymo will not be touched in most of those accidents. I've been driving in snow long enough to know that there are always going to be idiots who drive too fast for conditions and lose control of their car; I'm sure some of them will blame Waymo because it's nearby. I once watched a guy with a TX license plate spin out on a perfectly empty, perfectly straight freeway. Waymo doesn't really need to do anything for human drivers to crash.
Right, and the outcome changes little that wasn't already known.
The interesting part of this story is why was this switched on now, by whom? Why was it briefly turned off? Was that an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle?
Why a bail of straw? Reminds me of the forgotten reason why the onion was thrown into the varnish
"Primo Levi was working in a varnish factory. He was a chemist, and he was fascinated by the fact that the varnish recipe included a raw onion. What could it be for? No one knew; it was just part of the recipe. So he investigated, and eventually discovered that they had started throwing the onion in years ago to test the temperature of the varnish: if it was hot enough, the onion would fry."
Often, these things are utilitarian, not mystical. So my educated guess: Back in the day, the main problem was river mariners getting hurt by bridge arches that were lower than expected, and the bale of straw was a 'soft buffer' - better to get your head hit by a swinging bale of straw than a rock-solid bridge.
Also if it comes undone and falls in the river, it's not likely to do any harm.
Aside: Although the article makes the same mistake, hay and straw are not the same thing. Hay is dead green grass-like plants. Straw is dead brown grass-like plant matter that has finished it's lifecycle and used up all the sugars and things in it. Hay gets moldy more easily but has nutrients for animals while straw does not decompose as quickly.
Yes, I realized that after the edit grace period. Specifically, straw is the dried stalks of cereal that have very little nutritional value to begin with, whereas hay is reaped grass, legumes, whatever herbaceous plants that grazing livestock normally eat.
Indeed. Cheap, readily available, heavy enough to hang, soft enough to bump out of the way. Honestly, it's a mystery to me why it's a mystery. What else would they use, a dead sheep?
I was wondering about that but it would only work for the sailor standing in the right place on a boat sailing dead center of the river where there is typically two way traffic.
This doesn't seem like a utilitarian solution, more of a signal with a symbolic intention?
The law explictly requires "large enough to be conspicuous and by night a white light", which suggests it's about visibility, particularly at night. That makes sense, there is a black metal bridge near where I live, and when it is cloudly I've noticed it's suprisingly difficult to see, even when you know where it is.
Hm, I guess arches were lower back then, and a lot of the riverboats were actually the staked kind (think: Venetian gondolieri)? With different arches for different directions?
Honestly, this is all guesswork. But I can imagine something like that to be the case.
* PE, on the whole, has extracted wealth from quality. This is true at both the consumer level and B2B. E.g. its impossible to trust any aftermarket car part manufacturer, and some OEM brands have turned to dogshit too.
* "most people just buy trash at WalMart and Amazon" I'd rephrase that to: most people either can't or are unwilling to pay the premium for quality in an increasingly disposable world.
So, I'd say that similar to post war Japan, while Chinese manufacturing has an image problem, they're just producing what we asked for.
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