Manufacturers themselves generally don't want to sell directly to consumers: consumers are fickle and need support and have questions and sometimes want refunds or returns and if you sell directly to them, you need to have the staff and policies to deal with all of that. They're also located all over the world, and you might not want to deal with figuring out taxes and duties etc for shipping your product around and figuring out your warranty obligations everywhere you want to sell.
Much easier if you can sell wholesale (sometimes via distributors) to a retailer or network of retailers, and the retailer is responsible for owning the customer relationship, dealing with their part of import/export, local regulations, etc. Retailers are businesses who will buy hundreds of your product at a time, can accept it as palletized freight, and pay you via bank EFTs instead of credit cards.
There are notable exceptions to this model like Amazon's FBA system, but they're the outliers. I'm sure we can all point to inefficiencies in legacy product distribution networks but they solve some real problems.
Definitely historically true, but I think the equation might be changing if I have an AI as a concierge shopper to do the grunt-work of browsing through a bunch of stores to extract useful product info and prices.
I think its at least as much of a working environment preference.
Once I became experienced enough to have opinions about things like my editor and terminal emulator... suddenly the Visual Studio environment wasn't nearly as appealing. The Unix philosophy of things being just text than you can just edit in the editor you're already using made much more sense to me than digging through nested submenus to change configuration.
I certainly respect the unmatched Win32 backwards/forwards compatibility story. But as a developer in my younger years, particularly pre-WSL, I could get more modern tools that were less coupled to my OS or language choice, more money, and company culture that was more relevant to my in my 20s jumping into Ruby/Rails development than the Windows development ecosystem despite the things it does really well.
Or to say differently: it wasn't the stability of the API that made Windows development seem boring. It was the kind of companies that did it, the rest of the surrounding ecosystem of tools they did it with, and the way they paid for doing it. (But even when I was actually writing code full time some corners of the JS ecosystem seemed to lean too hard into the wild west mentality. Still do, I suspect, just now its Typescript in support of AI).
High-protein everything is riding the wave of GLP-1 popularity right now. Doctors are begging people on that class of drugs to chase protein targets more similar to what might have previously been reserved for heavy weightlifters just to prevent muscle wasting.
As a result, the entire packaged food industry is pumping up protein numbers and marketing it as the primary attribute of the food (where they might have previously marketed low fat or low sugar or whatever else in the past).
So, saturated market... but certainly one people are investing in now.
Don't forget the US administration jumping on the train and throwing the full weight of the diet culture, sorry "Healthy eating" clique at "Ending the war on protein" as an absurd part of the culture war.
Very fun. The only war on protein I have been a part of is personally removing hundreds of pounds of protein from circulation. By eating it. I think I'm winning.
I hear the most ironic stuff on glp from the people I know on it. So doctor is obviously a reasonable person with an interest in making people healthy, not trying to set up glp addicts, and are encouraging better diet and increased exercise while eventually tapering and getting them off the glp entirely as the final end goal.
The whole time they are telling me this I can't help but wonder what the hell is the point of the glp1 here? You still have to improve diet and regularly exercise anyhow. So its like there is no point. Might as well just rip the bandaid off, diet and exercise, get there 6 months slower, while not taking the glp. Like wouldn't you want to actually increase muscle mass while burning fat?
If you are 3-400+ pounds, quickly shedding 100+ pounds makes exercising MUCH easier, and the accompanying loss in appetite will HOPEFULLY teach you better portion sizes. Countless morbidly overweight people have tried for years/decades to lose weight, without success, and GLPs allow them to bootstrap the process.
Yes, CICO, blah blah, but overcoming food addiction by asking people to eat less is like forcing a smoker who wants to quit to work at a cigar bar or something. You can't just not buy food, especially if you have a family you have to feed.
When you talk about morbidly obese usually that is when you start seeing egregious portion sizes. Like multiple plates of food. Multiple big macs. I'm pretty sure they are aware that a portion is just one big mac and probably not the largest fries and coca cola. GLP isn't much of a helper in that I don't think, and makes me think whenever they go off the glp they will just go back to multiple portions since the issue circles back to willfully ignoring recommended portions.
But that being said everyone I know on GLP (only like 3 people admittedly) isn't close to obese. Maybe at most 40-60lbs overweight. And again all getting the recommendations for diet and exercise interventions, which they are all starting up, but begs the question whether they could have just lost those couple dozen pounds starting up diet and exercise without having to go on the drug. Especially as the drug isn't actually "doing" anything like raising resting metabolic rate to physically burn more calories, but instead slowing digestion and making you feel as though you are more full to trick you into taking in less calories.
> while eventually tapering and getting them off the glp entirely as the final end goal
It's an honourable goal but the evidence isn't great for that
> You still have to improve diet and regularly exercise anyhow
You don't have to. Should though.
When the drugs are working as intended, you'll lose weight without 'trying' to improve your diet, exercise will speed up the weight loss, but isn't strictly necessary for it to "work". Encouraged, sure, but you'll get weight loss from the appetite suppression alone.
The 'high protein' advice is because a lot of glp1 consumers had poor diets to begin with, and they're catabolic drugs. Combine that with reduced appetite and you're at risk of insufficient protein consumption to maintain whatever muscle mass you started with.
Because long-term calorie restriction is 100x harder than popping a pill and downing a protein-and-fiber shake, and you can't outrun a burger but you can outlift a calorie deficit, so lumping them all together under "improve diet and exercise somehow" is a nonsensical rhetorical flourish / troll move?
I lost weight the regular way. You don't understand how much will I expend to not continuously eat. The strategy I deploy: I never have ready-to-eat anything home, I cook everything just before I eat it, I chose ingredients based on their satiety index, I always have something to drink. I fast 5 days every year to 'reset' my grahlin levels (it still hurts, even if it's way less than it used to). I'm still at 26 BMI, so overweight (from 33 to 28 in 3 years, from 28 to 26 in 5).
I have a very good support system. Not to brag, but my parents are amazing, my family have a small amounts of doctors who helped me getting through it at first. My siblings are great too, and my SO support me despite my quirks. I love sailing, which is a great way to loose weight. And I'm a SWE, the easiest job there is when you're not bad at it, that makes good money without real responsibilities or stress. It was still fucking hard. If glp1 can help people less lucky than me, let them have it.
I realize there are probably a lot of low hanging fruit in my own consumption habits that let me generally coast into healthy BMI that for a lot of people, nonobvious tradeoffs might block. I'm a water and black coffee drinker for example. That puts me up a good couple hundred calories on the day compared to people who might reach for something sugary instead. I'm active every day, exercise, and play sports, another couple hundred calories from that. That's not even getting into the actual eating and I'm up probably well over a thousand calories on a lot of people a day.
The “easily constrained” people like the person you are responding too don’t understand. I’m not sure they ever will.
Ive also done it the right way, and it was literally easier, by far, to get a masters degree while working 40 hours a week than it was to drop from 250 to 175. Incomparable. The constant mental pressure to eat, to eat more, to search the cabinets, to stop at x on the way home, etc.
I’ve heard “wow sounds like a severe addiction” yeah no shit. It’s an addiction to a substance you MUST have 2-3x a day. Imagine if you needed alcohol twice a day to live.
I think you are right that I just don't think I will ever have a concept for it. For me I can easily skip an entire day of meals. I can be hungry. I've gone to bed hungry plenty of times in my life. I remember reading some Herman Hesse, Siddartha actually considers it a skill that he knows how to fast and be content.
Cigarette addiction is even more perplexing for me. I've had nicotine addiction before in college, quit, got the headaches and nausea and all that but IMO having the flu is worse, I just rode it out then it was done. I don't understand what goes on for someone who say wants to quit cigarettes, is trying to quit, is aware of the health issues, but still makes the very conscious dozen plus decisions that have to take place in sequence to get that next pack of cigarettes. I think deep down there is a side of them that is maybe extremely depressed, and self loathing, and maybe wants them to fail to quit because that would satisfy their own internal working model of themselves being a failure, too weak to ever quit. Something that goes beyond any one vice and is a general phenomenon, but unfortunately might never be appreciated with so many targeted vice-specific efforts vs understanding the wider whole.
I'm sure I could fast, but that's actually a separate issue from what you previously wrote:
> For me I can easily skip an entire day of meals.
You mentioned fasting during Ramadan. I had to look it up, it apparently allows a predawn meal and another meal after sunset, which can include meat and a dessert. Hardly skipping an entire day of meals! (and also rather less rigorous than the fasting rituals of some other faiths as well, although perhaps Islamic different sects have different takes on this)
I don't have many regrets about having spent my career in (relatively) tiny companies by comparison, but it sure does sound fun to be on the other side for this kind of thing - the scale where micro-optimizations have macro impact.
In startups I've put more effort into squeezing blood from a stone for far less change; even if the change was proportionally more significant to the business. Sometimes it would be neat to say "something I did saved $X million dollars or saved Y kWh of energy" or whatever.
My debit card is a direct line to my primary bank account. If something goes wrong there and an attacker gains access, my cash is simply gone. Yes, the bank will perform an investigation and yes they may issue some provisional credits as a bridge, but there's a window of time between the theft and that investigation concluding where my actual cash is not in my account.
With a credit card, if the card is compromised, its not my money being stolen - its the card issuer's money from my line of credit, and they were planning on settling up with me when my monthly statement closes. I still have to launch a fraud case with the issuer, but critically, _all of my money is still in my bank account_ and I can continue to pay my other bills and obligations as normal.
I think its reasonable to consider giving up that buffer to be additional risk for the debit card approach, setting aside any other advantages or disadvantages between the two.
My debit card is a direct line to my primary bank account. If something goes wrong there and an attacker gains access, my cash is simply gone.
Your bank lacks proper security protections then. Here most banks have limits on debit card transactions. If you want to do a very large transaction, you have to increase the limit for a short time period in your banking app, and there is a delay of a few hours (they'll warn you when the spending limit is increased).
IANAL, but also consumer protection is much stronger in Europe. E.g. in NL if you stick to 5 basic rules, which are sensible things like not intentionally giving away your banking card or PIN code, the bank has to refund stolen money:
EU has much stronger consumer protection and it's on the banks to provide secure systems. Like if my card gets skimmed by an ATM or merchant the bank pays for the fraudulent charges. And overall the EU has much less card fraud.
I've personally had a decent amount of luck with trying to reframe this sort of sentiment from "being useful" to "having purpose".
Right now, yes, its true that a lot of my day to day purpose is driven by participating in the economy and setting myself up for the life I'd like to have in my later years, and I get genuine validation from solving problems and collaborating with people in my day job.
But sometimes, my purpose is to go snowboarding and forget about work. Or to help a friend fix their bicycle. Or to get lost in conversation with a new person I'm dating. As far as any of us know, we only get one turn to be alive on this rock, so we might as well purposefully enjoy it as much as we try to purposefully be useful.
If you look at Ginny Oliver from the article, it might be fair to question whether she was as useful on a lobster boat at 105 as she might have been in her youth. But I doubt she was concerned with usefulness since she had such sense of purpose.
Its less about torrents being the delivery mechanism and more about bringing data from a potentially unknown source, under potentially unknown licensing, and distributed for a potentially unknown reason into the corporate computing environment.
Torrents would be a perfectly valid way for Google to distribute this dataset, but the key difference would be that Google is providing it for this purpose and presumably didn't do anything underhanded to collect or generate it, and tells you explicitly how you're allowed to use it via the license.
That sort of legal and compliance homework is good practice for any business to some extent (don't use random p2p discoveries for sensitive business purposes), but is probably critical to remain employed in the sorts of giant enterprises where an internal security engineer needs to build a compelling case for spending money to upgrade an outdated protocol.
The thing about trademarks is that, if you want to prevent other people from using them, you generally have to still be using it yourself and be able/willing to justify to a court that you're still using it. (At least in most legal systems that I'm familiar with)
Since the original company both changed names and was subsequently liquidated in bankruptcy nearly 20 years ago... that seems unlikely. There's only so many names out there, and occasionally they get fairly recycled.
I have no insider knowledge here but it doesn't seem outlandish to think that the negotiations would go a little differently for an established product vs a brand new one. Goldman may have simply been the only bank willing to work with Apple when the customer base (in size, demographics, spending patterns, whatever) was hypothetical.
What bank offers rewards and no fees to subprime(below 660) customers? There aren't any. Why no wanted the deal. Guaranteed to lose money. Its not like there's name recognition, i doubt most people could name the underlying bank for the Apple Card. Only place the bank is mentioned is the fine print at the bottom of the card details. Everything is branded "Apple Card"
> i doubt most people could name the underlying bank for the Apple Card. Only place the bank is mentioned is the fine print at the bottom of the card details.
And in the bottom-right corner of the titanium card and in the picture in Wallet. And it's advertised practically everywhere they mention the titanium card. And if you have Apple Savings it's also specified to be from GS everywhere.
GS was inexperienced and didn't know what they were getting into; that's why Apple was able to get such a good deal and also why GS now wants out. I fear Chase does know what they're getting into and Apple likely has far less favorable terms now. Though I'm incredibly glad they didn't give it to Synchrony (who runs PayPal and is incredibly sociopathic)
Game mode being latency-optimized really is the saving grace in a market segment where the big brands try to keep hardware cost as cheap as possible. Sure, you _could_ have a game mode that does all of the fancy processing closer to real-time, but now you can't use a bargain-basement CPU.
Much easier if you can sell wholesale (sometimes via distributors) to a retailer or network of retailers, and the retailer is responsible for owning the customer relationship, dealing with their part of import/export, local regulations, etc. Retailers are businesses who will buy hundreds of your product at a time, can accept it as palletized freight, and pay you via bank EFTs instead of credit cards.
There are notable exceptions to this model like Amazon's FBA system, but they're the outliers. I'm sure we can all point to inefficiencies in legacy product distribution networks but they solve some real problems.
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