I just want affordable, linux-powered displays in a slim tablet form factor.
Performance and battery life are not a priority for my use case
Unfortunately I feel anything sold as a tablet comes with the assumption that it needs to compete with an iPad and be used for content consumption and gaming.
Ive seen raspberry pi kits sold that do just about everything else but this.
No, I think we'll start with Apple and work our way down. Scale is everything when you're concerned about remediating market damages.
John Deere is already subject to extra regulation in Europe; it's only in America that they're allowed to molest consumers in the aftermarket. And Xbox has had sideloading for decades now, in case you were unaware: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
I have a really hard time believing that people who are actually struggling to make ends meet would use Instacart. This article does point out some pretty despicable behavior, but its attempt to pull at heartstrings falls flat due to the idiotic nature in which the argument is constructed. It’s comparable to complaining how terrible it is that caviar costs different amounts to different homeless people. Should’ve just stuck to the numbers — they are compelling and the story does need to be told.
Have you ever watched Caleb Hammer's "Financial Audit?"
People in dire financial situations very often have a history of making bad decisions with money.
Personally I do not struggle with money/budgeting but the only time I will ever use something like InstaCart is if I am sick and can't leave the house.
You are privileged enough to be ABLE to make good decisions. Some people are victims of the boots theory of economics and better choices aren't actually an option.
Lifting yourself by your bootstraps only works if you can afford boots in the first place.
Pratchet said:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness." [0]
You make dangerous assumptions about me in order to justify your preexisting view of poverty and socioeconomic mobility.
My background is very poor. Food stamps, raised by single mom, whole nine yards. For most of my 20s I existed in the very same cycle of bad financial decisions that many other poor people engage in.
My situation had approximately a 0% chance of changing until the behavior changed. That doesn't mean behavioral changes are always enough, but they are the absolute bare minimum and an excellent starting point.
People I still know in bad situations refuse to acknowledge this and refuse to critically examine their decisions. They do nothing but avoid, avoid, avoid and hope for a miraculous windfall.
You arent wrong that some people just stink at finance. Thats not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about those who WOULD make better decisions if they were able. What is sometimes referred to as "the poverty trap."
> You make dangerous assumptions about me in order to justify your preexisting view of poverty and socioeconomic mobility
You said that you don't struggle making good financial decisions. I am claiming that you were lucky to be in a situation that allows you to make good decisions.
I believe that to be accurate, regardless of your history.
You must remember that the legitimately poor often do not have many choices to make at all. Poverty can constrain choice to the point of irrelevance. EG - Somone with a thousand dollars has more options than someone with a hundred dollars.
In your case it seems that you (now at least) have enough to be able to make choices. If you only had $50 to your name you would have far fewer options to choose from and most of those options would be bad.
Imagine a single mother working for minimum wage with a flat tire she cant afford to fix, and needing groceries. Instacart might make her problem worse, but surviving is all she can hope for sometimes.
Similary imagine an elderly widow on fixed income who is injured. Or a 17 year old who had to flee an abusive home situation, and is lucky to make rent on a weekly rental room.
For any of them it is easy to imagine they might have enough money to eat, but not enough to buy a car or even a bicycle. They will starve long before the situation improves enough to make that happen, regardless of their choices. So they make ends meet and they survive.
Its not Instacarts fault, any more than it is Dollar Generals, but it is also true that the service often worsens their long-term well-being.
> When you live in a food desert where your only store is a Dollar General that defrauds you at the cash-register, you are more likely to accept a higher price from Instacart, because you have fewer choices than someone in a middle-class neighborhood with two or three competing grocers.
Yes, that’s exactly my point. My family has been poor. You just take the bus to the store, because you don’t pay extra money for someone to go there for you. You don’t have that money.
The effect of money is the opposite of this. You use it to save time. The poorer you are, the less your time costs effectively and the more things you do yourself, like going to the grocery store, no matter how far.
Personal time is a highly constrained resource: finite, non-renewable, non-storable and mutually exclusive. You can’t simply value someone’s personal time based upon their paid time. (Though people love to do this anyways…as if a poor person’s life time is objectively worth less than a richer person’s.)
Poor people often have less time available, less supply, than others due to longer transportation times as well as having more chores that they must complete by themselves.
For example, a person can be making $15 / hour and only have 4 hours of available waking personal time per day. If during those 4 hours they must complete all personal and household chores, as well as find some time for recuperating, then they would likely value those 4 hours as much more than $15 each.
Or considered another way: the value of the first hour in a day is not worth the same as the last hour. That last hour is valued according to the tasks that must be accomplished during that time and what is lost if the tasks are not successfully accomplished. And when under stress, the value can change drastically.
In the city I grew up in they had no busses until a local company paid for the first one simply to get the poorer employees to work reliably because it was impacting production.
There are still many places in America where you either walk or you own a car, period. When the car breaks down and you need parts.. you walk. Worse there are no sidewalks. When the snow is a foot deep you risk frostbite and hypothermia.
This is also nonsense. Instacart is too new for anyone over 18 to have somehow not died of hunger if they live out of reach of food if they had no way to get food before Instacart’s existence…
Cars breakdown. Bodies become injured. The weather gets bad. Babysitters get ill or quit.
Many things can leave a person temporarily or permanently unable to fetch their own groceries. Many of those things happen to the poor more frequently. They at least have more severe consequences when a person is poor.
For example, a middle class person can just buy a new tire when one goes flat. A poor person may have to walk for a few paychecks.
Poverty is nothing if not diverse. You can't judge what others are dealing with based only on what was true for your experiences.
Instacart is a SNAP/EBT vendor, so clearly they have low income customers. Some people prefer online shopping because of the stigma of using benefits in-person. For others without reliable access to transportation, delivery might be the most reasonable option. Public transit also takes time that might be better spent with family, or at your job.
> Instacart has disclosed its pricing experiments in corporate marketing and investor materials, noting that “shoppers are not aware that they’re in an experiment.”
If it’s not a big deal why don’t they come out and tell the users?
Why doesn't Instacart directly display their sucker ooops "surge pricing" ? This would empower poor people to make an informed choice on directly funding the billionaires associated with Sequoia Capital so that they can buy their next luxury yachts faster. Have some pity for the oligarchs!
As an electrical engineer: you'd be surprised how many people "discover" long held truths like that you can use the MPN ("Manufacturer Part Number") of a device to find it's documentation and that this documentation sometimes contains useful data.
It's everywhere. Just recently (a couple of months ago) on HN there was a story about an SQLite-but-rewritten-in-Rust [0], how they've discovered some peculiarity in SQLite file format by reading its source code. Except, of course, this peculiarity has been documented for decades, on SQLite's official site. How did they manage to write SQLite-compatible DBMS without reading the official documentation of the file format, I have no idea.
Add a small "charger error" LED which will be lit by your PD uC to indicate negotiation error or a charger unsuitable to your device due to voltage or current issues.
You fell into the trap I predicted a few years ago when the renaming happened. Microblaze refers to the old microblaze soft core, not the new one that they named the same thing and that is based on RISCV.
What has been long considered one of the most wealthy markets is a country descending into a billionaire controlled kleptocracy. And they're pissing off every other country in the world with tariff blackmail and punishment (or extra judicial executions) for any country that fails to bend the knee and fawn obsequiously enough to their leader.
One of the most populous markets is a country that manufactures approximately 100% of all consumer electronics, and will have a hundred versions of this available for 10% of Pebble's price on AliExpress as soon as it shows any signs of gaining market traction anywhere (quite likely stolen or "3rd shift" ones from Pebble's own outsourced production line).
India, who these days has more than enough local skill and experienced ex-H1B tech people to create this from scratch at home (and at least some with a deep resentment over how they were treated by US tech companies while they were there)?
One of the no longer EU markets is suffering post Brexit austerity and isn't likely to be buying a heap if tech toys - even if their fucked up new importing goods paperwork doesn't make it impossible to get your product into the country.
There goes about 40% of the planet's population.
That leaves, what? Manufacture locally and try surviving by selling to the US market at prices driven by US labor costs which'd make the product prohibitively expensive globally? South East Asia, who're likely to buy the Samsung copy over one from a US company? Russia, who (at least for now) is under trade sanctions for a US based company like Pebble? So perhaps Canada (until their southern neighbour make good on their threat to try and make them the 51st state)? South Africa? Australia and New Zealand?
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