I think it’s worth noting that this is the effect of the free market behaving as designed, however no one has risen up to challenge Amazon enough along the way. So many retailers ignored e-commerce in the early days and went on with business as usual. Fast forward 20 years and Amazon has eaten into their market shares. A large retailer like WalMart absolutely has the ability to challenge Amazon by investing in the user experience and warehousing/delivery infrastructure. But often the old heads at these companies ignore improving the user experience in favor of making cuts. Amazon didn’t happen overnight. It’s been a steady growth in their business model over decades and the user experience is key to what made them so popular. It takes seconds to find what you want, for often times cheaper than the competition and in many cases the shipping is lower and faster.

What would be difficult is for a start up company with little capital to try and take on these behemoths. Perhaps a coalition of large companies like Target, Best Buy, B&N, Kohl’s, etc. grouping together to create a large distribution network and app platform with a good user experience could compete.

Just a thought.

AWS is a whole other can of worms.

He found a flaw in the system and exploited it. Although he didn’t do anything particularly wrong, the tools he used allowed him to do it. Yet, somehow he has to pay the consequences and the companies that made the tools to exploit the system are not liable. Got it.

Windows 10 will be my last Windows operating system. It’s been fine and it works well enough. I’ve already started setting up a drive with Linux Mint 22 for use moving forward.

Been that way for a while. When I was a kid I remember copays were $20 and almost everything was covered under good insurance. Now I pay close to $1000 a month and still have massive out of pocket costs and deductible. The bulk of my debt is medical and is only mounting. The US healthcare system is broken.

Too expensive. Not owner repairable. Too much unnecessary tech baked in.

There’s a path forward for EV’s, but I don’t think the current philosophy is it.

My auto insurance rose 27% this year. My cars sit in a locked garage 20ft away from me practically all week long as I work from home. I was shocked to find my rates rose so high as I barely even drive at all anymore. Their solution was for me to get their data collection puck. What a fucking racket!

I was a day one GPM music user until it was discontinued. That app was my most used service ever and it took thousands of hours to curate my whole collection there. When Google killed it, I vowed to never become dependent on a Google product much less a cloud based service ever again. PlexAmp is my go to now.

Safe to say Bungie no longer cares about retaining high quality talent.

As a Minnesotan, fuck Tom Emmer. Most Minnesotans can’t stand that piece of shit.

This is a common occurrence at my home as well. When there’s heavy rain frogs get caught in our window wells, some make it inside, some get caught between the windows and screen. I just put on a pair of gloves, fish em out and set them free on higher ground.

Once my cat frantically came yowling up the stairs with a frog in her mouth. Set it down gently, unharmed and stared at me loudly meowing as if to say “look what I found, WTF is this? Do something about it.”

Toss it on the pile.

“Boomer company pushes boomer policies, more at 10.”