[What if customers] begin to reconsider whether Amazon Prime is worth shelling out $79 a year for anyway, and Amazon starts losing money to canceled Prime subscriptions? Why in that case, the company just might decide that it needs to make the advantages of Prime a bit more clear-cut -- for example, by upping the threshold for non-Prime free shipping to $30, $35, $50...
I'm not making a moral judgment here but a strategic observation. The $25 free shipping threshold was too good to last. Amazon was overreaching, and now they're making the biggest retreat in their history, conceding the market for low-priced items to brick-and-mortar stores. It's just more cost-efficient to send a shipping container to Home Depot, than to send it to Amazon and then pay the postal service to deliver all those items to people's houses.
Now, I've heard that it's more energy-efficient to have a few trucks making optimized delivery routes to a thousand houses, than a thousand people driving to the store. But for some reason shipping still costs more. Maybe Amazon could start its own shipping company using automated solar-powered vehicles. And then local stores could respond by installing giant fabricators to make everything on site. For reasons I won't get into here, I do not expect a utopian Maker revolution where everyone has an autonomous home 3D printer.
]]>Clement Vidal has pointed out that there are certain binary star systems that astrophysicists have had difficulty explaining with conventional astrophysical models. These binaries are semi-detatched stars that exhibit an energy flow that is irregular, but not out of control. Vidal argues that instead of an astrophysical model, we need an astrobiological model to describe these strange systems.
In essence Vidal is claiming that these systems are not typical binary stars, but rather civilizations that have advanced well past a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale and are now actively feeding on their parent star. He calls these hypothetical civilizations starivores. And if he is right, then there are approximately 2000 known starivores in our galaxy alone.
]]>The Tea Party right is not only disproportionately Southern but also disproportionately upscale. Its social base consists of what, in other countries, are called the "local notables" -- provincial elites whose power and privileges are threatened from above by a stronger central government they do not control and from below by the local poor and the local working class.
]]>When you are not told what to do you begin to think what to do. You begin to see without distraction. Urban spaces these days can seem the antithesis of Monderman's vision of freedom. The state's cameras are trained on streets where people's gazes are trained on hand-held screens that map their movements -- offering facsimiles of the experience they might have if they ever looked up.
And Video games: the addiction is a well-written piece by a guy who spent years addicted to Grand Theft Auto and cocaine. The header says he has no regrets, but if you read it, he regrets the cocaine and not the gaming. The difference between him and me is that the game I would enjoy as much as he enjoys GTA does not yet exist.In her game, guys like you are the low-level monsters that pop up every time she walks through tall grass. Nobody expects long-term cooperative play from a guy they meet at a bar, but you're treating sex like a boss battle. This isn't a situation where you have to lower her stats until you win. You're adding her to your party for a mission.
One of my friends gave me a copy of Field and Stream. Much of this particular issue is taken up with the question of how to hunt on public land, or how to find a farmer or other landowner who will let you hunt without charging a shit-ton of money. Apparently, hunting is being enclosed, in the sense that the very rich are finding ways to lock up resources for themselves.
More optimistic: a long article about The Rise of the New New Left, arguing that the election of Bill de Blasio as NYC mayor is the start of a trend of Millennials saving America.
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