Google is nothing but blinded by greed at this point, they are so shortsightedly chasing a dollar that they can't seem to recognize this behavior is exactly what is losing the money. They are inconveniencing paying customers to combat pirates who don't care and will only double down on their efforts and incidentally expose all of this for the brain dead blunder that it is.
Radio shack is at least indirectly responsible for me disassembling ( and sometimes successfully reassembling) most of the electronics in the house growing up. The tools and DIY gear they carried enabled me to learn and build electronics.
I'm still salty about the bafflingly stupid decision to become little more than a cellphone store.
Same! I took apart so many electronics when I was a kid. In retrospect, I really have to appreciate my parents putting up with this. Fortunately, I didn't permanently destroy anything... most of the time. Radio Shack was paradise for me in terms of being able to fix stuff and also build my own electronics. I built an AM radio transmitter from scratch using Radio Shack parts. That made my 11 year old self feel like I had discovered fire.
What happened to Radio Shack is pretty sad. I get that the business simply wasn't going to sustain at that scale as consumer tech evolved, but RS caused their own decline way sooner than it should have happened. Becoming a high pressure cellphone retailer was a stupid idea, and I remember their selection not even being that good to begin with. And, like Kramer from Seinfeld said, Radio Shack really wanted your phone number for purchasing something as simple as batteries. Today, phone numbers are asked for all the time when purchasing something like groceries, but I remember Radio Shack being overly aggressive in getting your phone number. Meanwhile, their electronics component inventory kept dwindling.
At least with Fry's Electronics, they still had a lot of components on the shelf right until the very end, as ridiculously overpriced as they were, whereas Radio Shack seemed to dismiss its core audience.
Silicon Valley's convenience store when JDR Microdevices, Graybar, and such weren't open... such a tiny addressable market that vanished to zero and failed to keep up with the advent of the internet. Other regional shops in other regions like B & H Photo at least figured out how to sell to a national audience and keep parity with their brick & mortar to complement each other (MicroCenter and Central Computer Systems also managed to survive). Fry's carried overpriced oddball inventory and failed to focus as Amazon, eBay, and Best Buy grew while even CompUSA (the long-time tech hypermart) died.
>I'm still salty about the bafflingly stupid decision to become little more than a cellphone store.
That was a little after my time, but back in the 90s my second job after I got tired of being a dishwasher was at Radio Shack.
During the brief time I worked there if I sold a single Tandy Sensation! (had to say it with the exclamation mark) the profit on that sale would exceed, by a lot, every single component we sold the entire month, and as an awkward teen I sold a lot of Tandy Sensation!s per month.
At my store, when I worked there, electronics parts took up about a quarter of the square footage of the store but was practically none of our revenue.
The only people buying electronics parts were church AV guys trying to fix a worn out 1/4" jack or blown capacitor in an amplifier.
Can't pay rent on those guys.
As an outsider I watched the parts shelves go from most of the back of the store to a single set of drawers to nothing and I can't say I blame Radio Shack. A lot of time was spent inventorying a mindboggling array of components, none of which sold in volumes great enough to justify the expense or the space.
The ability to have those parts was lost without the access and distribution enabled by widespread internet.
I would walk to to my local radio shack at least once a week for different parts for a few years as my friend and I were constantly modding our consoles, breaking our computers, and making little gadgets.
I’d love a place I could walk into now and get a breadboard kit or a potentiometer, and it’s just not there.
Microcenter still does but it costs 50% more for worse quality parts and the selection is still not great. Handy if you need flux or solder in a pinch though
They didn't quite hit the right tone in their other markets either. It's hard to pay rent selling $2 packs of components. Computers were ok for a while, especially at the beginning, but not selling. They didn't want to compete on TVs. Hifi gear seemed a shrinking market. I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.
I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.
I remember some buzz around carrying Arduino not long before they went out of business. They drifted away from the DIY scene into cellphone kiosk territory. Maybe if they shuttered a bunch of stores and leaned into the new era of DIY (Arduino, 3D printing, drone parts) they might have survived.
Yeah ours had an Arduino branded section for a year or two at the end. Some starter kits, proto boards, a few relays and servos, that kind of thing. Not enough to pay the rent obv but fine for jumpstarting hackers.
Right plus that was the transformation that was happening that they didn't follow - electronics and gadgets out of the mall and into big box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City.
Tough too to get by on small parts for minor repairs when things break rarely and then aren't worth fixing. Time was grocery stores had little tube tester kiosks, you know. That said, Batteries Plus seems to have a business.
My recollection is that they got out of the computer business after a very serious embezzlement case left them kind of broke around 1990, and that was the beginning of the long tailspin, but I can't find a reference to the exact story.
I was told I managed to disassemble most clocks and electronics in my parent's and grandparents' homes before kindergarten age. I don't even remember most of it.
As much as I love giving the middle finger to a company as awful as HP, people need to stop supporting garbage companies like this and then this wouldn't be necessary.
Business laser printers emit more particulates than consumer models into the air that aren't good for your health. Even their website displays that warning.
So keep it in a dry garage, just away from living spaces.
As an infrequent printer (a few pages every few months), their ink subscription plan (Instant Ink) is awesome for us. For $1/mo you get 10 pages (color included), and overages are 10 cents/pg.
So basically for $12 a year we can have a home printer but never have to worry about cartridges. They just show up in the mail when we need more, and the used ones can be recycled in the included mailer.
> For $1/mo you get 10 pages (color included), and overages are 10 cents/pg.
The math works out when I think about it but for some reason I’m still floored by the fact that $12 only gets you 10 pages of paper for an entire year.
If I have to wait for a cartridge to show up in the mail, why wouldn't I just go to FedEx and do my printing there?
My Brother B&W laser printers never die and a $30 cartridge ($60 if you buy OEM) lasts a minimum of 2600 and will never dry out. I replace the cartridge once every few years and if I need color then driving over to FedEx etc. is much faster than waiting for something to come in the mail to replace an ink cartridge that will inevitably dry up if you're not using it every day.
Color is the biggie. Color lasers are expensive, around $300 or so last I checked? If we printed more, I'd definitely get one, but we don't (and likely never will). At our usage, buying a new color laser would take a few decades to pay itself back vs this subscription.
PS you don't have to wait for new cartridges. It's all connected, so they will automatically mail you a new cartridge as soon as the printer senses it's low-ish, long before it's totally dry.
Their customer service bot is generous too. I lost a cartridge during a move, told it I was running low and it automatically shipped me a couple new ones, no questions asked.
I don't really know how HP manages to make any money on this, but it's incredibly convenient. Probably they hope you'll end up moving to a higher subscription tier, but that makes no sense because if we printed more, we'd just get a laser. Shrug. I'll enjoy it while it lasts though!
In India, 90% of the inkjet printers use refillable ink tanks. The ink is way cheaper than in the US, there are no ink cartridges, print quality is the same, and the printers are roughly the same cost too (in USD).
Americans are dumb for accepting locked inkjet cartridges.
>In India, 90% of the inkjet printers use refillable ink tanks. The ink is way cheaper than in the US, there are no ink cartridges, print quality is the same, and the printers are roughly the same cost too (in USD).
No they don't.
Indian market sells same printer as they sell in US.
Difference is, indians refill those cartridges, reset chips, or use fake cartridges.
There are only few printers in market which can be filled for real.
Indian cartridges are cheap only because labor in india is cheap. If US had same labor prices.
But quality is just not same. I lived in both US and India.
Being exploited doesn't come from being dumb. If anything, the way I see it, it's no coincidence if people just happen to be kept ignorant in a way that's beneficial to the systems that are also exploiting them.
We do have some printers here that are designed for this use case for what it's worth. Dunno if they are any good. Personally, I have had a Brother color laser for years.
"Dumb" is an insult to someone's intelligence, as if the problem is them. Ignorant is a bit closer.
But that's not actually my point to be honest, my point is that the problem is not the people who are getting screwed over. It's the people screwing them over.
Everyone being pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs due to macroeconomic and political forces, generally. Possibly by a population wide event like a pandemic too, of course. And/or religious influence.
Yeah. Either buy their printers and throw them away when the sample ink runs out (because, while you are correct about HP, you are also a terrible person that hates the earth), or just buy from a different brand.
Having said that, we have an old Samsung laser printer, and the Samsung printer business was bought by HP since we got it. Recently, HP started shorting me on toner in the replacement cartridges (they cartridges go streaky with 25%+ “toner remaining”).
Switching to third-party ones that bypasses HP’s authenticity checks was clearly the right move (they’re higher quality, cheaper, and also, screw hp).
By the way, there is an excellent film called Rebel Ridge now on Netflix where the basic premise is about small town police abusing the practice of civil asset forfeiture.
If that comforts you (I know it doesn't) Swiss police can take any money claiming it touched cocaine so it was maaayyyybe used in trafficking. Stats say about 90% of banknotes qualify so it's a sure shot for them. Even if you're cleared of the accusations, they will STILL keep your money.
It's been recommending that movie to me, and it looks excellent, but I know if I watch it it's gonna end up with me throwing the TV out the window out of rage.
I know it's just a figure of speech, but I'd also like to add a reminder if someone needs to see it: channeling that same rage into investing time and effort into making a change is the very reason why such an enraging show is made and why it should be watched. Just raging into the wind is pointless, specially after choosing not to invest anything into making a change
If this were the case, would someone not have challenged it in court by now? If the dogs and their handlers were challenged in a controlled trial and shown to be biased, that would make for a useful test case.
"Handlers were falsely told that two conditions contained a paper marking scent location (human influence). Two conditions contained decoy scents (food/toy) to encourage dog interest in a false location (dog influence). Conditions were (1) control; (2) paper marker; (3) decoy scent; and (4) paper marker at decoy scent. No conditions contained drug or explosive scent; any alerting response was incorrect. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used with search condition as the independent variable and number of alerts as the dependent variable. Additional nonparametric tests compared human and dog influence. There were 225 incorrect responses, with no differences in mean responses across conditions"
"To test this, we influenced handler beliefs and evaluated subsequent handler/dog team performance according to handler-identified alerts. The overwhelming number of incorrect alerts identified across conditions confirms that handler beliefs affect performance."
The FBI spent 4 decades grossly lying about their ability to analyze hair. Think about that. The charade actually went on so long that some people would have lived their entire adult life, their entire career lying their asses off. It was later found that at least 90% of cases contained errors.
During this time someone could have similarly proved that it wasn't so because were it so surely someone could have challenged it.
An alternative explanation is that forensic science or indeed any sort of science as practiced by law enforcement has always been a joke and the bar to do something about it is always very very high.
The cost of challenging anything is often prohibitively expensive both in terms of legal costs and in risk of drawing a sentence several times worse than a plea and any case which might result in police losing a valuable tool can be mooted by simply dropping that particular case after that high bar is met.
Remember also that the prosecution and the judge aren't scientists but ARE colleagues. Perceptively evidence from dogs are brought only when they actually find something so even if they don't provably always "work" in the scientific sense they perceptively help them nail bad guys. The idea that the judge would be liable to remove that useful tool because it didn't pass scientific muster is both optimistic and naive.
Police science is a parallel world of non-science. Over and over, fake science like hair id, bite mark analysis, fire, shaken baby, excited delirium, and others are debunked. But the courts have been terribly uninterested in hearing science contradict police-science.
To be clear: courts have their own way of deciding disputes, and that process has distinct differences from the scientific model. E.g. stare decisis is actively hostile to new evidence; appeals may not reference new evidence; police practices are given deference as experts in their own magisterium, and may not be held to normal scientific practice; and others.
To do that, dog should be handled by someone who is not their regular police handler. Then they would claim he doesn't know how to handle the dog properly, or doesn't have the required "soul bond" with the animal. Can't win against crooks.
> To do that, dog should be handled by someone who is not their regular police handler.
Not necessarily if the experiment is double blind. (Or tripple blind I guess because it is the dog, the handler and the on-site experimenter who are not aware of where the samples are hidden.)
I hadn't heard of this before, but here are some sources. Note this quote from [2], U.S. Customs and Border Protection:
"Canines are taught to detect concealed U.S. currency and firearms. Both the Officer/Agent and canine are taught the proper search sequences when searching vehicles, aircraft, freight, luggage, mail, passengers and premises."
I have no idea what the ratio of scientific backing vs. security theater is, though.
> I have no idea what the ratio of scientific backing vs. security theater is, though.
Yes, dogs give you a convenient excuse to produce 'probable cause' in order to authorise a search whenever you feel like it, because the signs the dogs give are interpreted by their handlers.
Cannot find the story now but there was situation where they sentenced woman for drug possession ONLY because dog indicated so, but they found no drugs on her or in her car.
Do you happen to remember if she was sentenced because she was convicted by a jury? I have very little faith in the U.S. justice system so I guess that wouldn’t surprise me, but it feels likelier that they used the K9 “evidence” to coerce her into accepting a plea bargain (which, to be clear, is also bad).
During a three-week period, fishermen fooled the Nazis and police dogs who
searched their ships – lacing handkerchiefs with a mixture of rabbit blood and
cocaine, in order to fool the dogs.
That kind of seems like the mixture of rabbit blood and cocaine overwhelms other scents?
The government has always been a violent gang that steals people's labor and property by force, and says that's okay because they wrote on some pieces of paper that they are allowed to do that.
But when I point that out I'm the delusional extremist.
For what it's worth, I agree with you.
After all, none of us living in "democracies" were ever given a chance to vote about the legitimacy of the constitution, of the law codes, of the armed thugs, of the state itself...
I don't know that a system with no government or voluntarily funded common services and functions would be "better" than what we have, but civil forfeiture is not fundamentally different than taxation, from the perspective that OP viewed it. The government decides that is a legal way to raise revenue and they carry it out under threat of force.
You can disagree with civil forfeiture while agreeing with taxation, but not with general complaints about a state sanctioned violent gang stealing from the populace.
I'm certainly no fan of civil forfeiture but I eould argue that it's fundamentally different from taxation.
Taxes are impersonal. The rules apply to "everyone" [1]. They are written up, voted on (by congress) and so on.
Civil forfeiture is a random event made by a random cop on a targeted individual. It is the very definition of unfair.
Equally you can define taxation as "stealing" hut it's really not. (CF is stealing in my book). It was different in the past, but today taxation is used to pay for things - it doesn't just go to the bank account of a person.
-some- govt and govt services are necessary for society to function. (A quick look at places without govt demonstrate that.) And yes, one can argue about the priority of one service over another. But fundamentally govt serves the society and taxes is just the way that gets paid for.
The scale, priorities, spending of govt is obviously up for debate, but funding it is necessary, and so I don't consider taxes to be theft.
Incidentally, if you feel that all govt is bad and we should exist without one I recommend trying to live in a place where the govt is non-functioning. Thats when you discover where all that spending goes and what it achieves.
[1] for some definition of "everyone" - the system has flaws.
Well of course, the big three would hate for you to have access to affordable, reasonably sized cars. Then they would have to compete or innovate, It's much easier to just pay someone off and make the problem go away.
I have always felt that any officer of the law charged with breaking the law should face a mandatory doubling of their sentence. They "know the law" and therefore have no excuse. The fact that only one person is being charged despite several others participating in this is just yet one more miscarriage of justice.
“But the special prosecutors also concluded that police — despite their misunderstanding of evidence, a rushed investigation, and faulty and unlawful search warrants — didn’t commit any crimes by investigating a baseless suspicion of identity theft or carrying out the raid.“ https://kansasreflector.com/2024/08/05/special-prosecutors-p...
The changes against the chief are for asking a witness to delete text messages after the raid
No, they don't. They are police officers, not lawyers. Exactly this causes many problems when, sorry to speak this way, testosterone meets incompetence in law enforcement.
The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why?
The US Supreme Court has repeatedly held the opposite - that police officers are immune to prosecution for their ignorance of the bounds of their powers unless explicitly informed.
IANAL; I believe you are referring to the second prong of the qualified immunity (QI): "right infringed has to be "clearly established" at the time of the official's conduct."
We should maintain QI but this second test needs an update.
Also not true. They have a duty to enforce the law as they understand it (noting that verification is just a phone call away), which may be better than average due to training and experience, or not.
Either way, your duty is to cooperate with law enforcement. If they are wrong, the only proper place to determine that is the courts. If they are right, you'll still have avoided a "resisting" charge
> No, they don't. They are police officers, not lawyers.
How do you enforce laws that you don't know or understand?
Think about it. These guys mobilize themselves to use force to achieve their goal. How is step 0 of this whole process not "check if what we are about to do complies with the law"?
If they mobilize themselves to use force to achieve a goal through illegal and criminal means, they are not different than organized crime.
This is true for almost anything. 99.9% of the people out there know, for example, that killing another person is illegal. Your logic makes no sense here
They are saying police should be held to the highest standards, as enforcers of the law. The punishment for an enforcer should be higher than a punishment for a lay person.
