Great another thing to self diagnose, except now you can sound pretentious too. Most people, myself included, don't have anything truly wrong with them other than bad habits and bad discipline that will just take a year or more time horizon to struggle and work through until resolved. It's not that they're not real. I just don't like the idea of adopting something as a title or ownership "I have depression/I am depressed" vs "I am experiencing depression as a symptom from a lack of exercise and an abuse of the internet and entertainment."
Also therapy is more available than ever and talking to a real person is guaranteed healthier than reading WebMD. If you can't afford a therapist talk to your friends. It takes a bit of courage to admit your feelings but everyone has experienced these feelings to some degree and likely has great advice. Even finding out, for example, that it took one friend a few years to get over something is helpful since it means you don't have to beat yourself up about not getting over it today.
Are they being greedy or is this just inflation? $7.99 was the original DVD rental fee in 1997 → which is $12.51 in 2019 dollars.
I wish I had a better mental tool for working with inflation in my "get-mad-o-meter", haha.
Wasn't $7.99 for the one-at-a-time plan? I also recall it being more like $10 or $12, but I wasn't paying for it at the time so I'm not an authority.
I felt like my family was lucky to get through 7 DVDs a month with one-at-a-time. We had a pretty good 3-4 day turnaround, but no matter how hard you tried to watch every movie the day you received it, we always managed to end up holding onto a disc for a few days. We eventually switched to 2-at-a-time so we could have one in-flight and one at home, that helped smooth out the gaps.
But even counting 2 or 3 at a time subscriptions, with unlimited streaming I am able to consume more content in a week and a half then I could in an entire month with DVDs, so in terms of content viewed per dollar I still think I'm getting a good deal. Streaming is especially a boon to anyone binging on a TV show. DVDs would have 3, maybe 4 episodes per DVD, so going through a show could monopolize your subscription for weeks at a time. Today I pop the show I want on and it just goes and goes.
> Another big change is BluRay, which I've found has far and away higher quality than streaming of any type.
Standard Blu-ray (As opposed to UHD Blu-ray) doesn't have, to me, subjectively better (or even as good) quality than either 4K and/or HDR content available from YouTube, with the particular data connection I have at home, and with the screen I use. (I'm not currently paying for the 4K service from Netflix.)
I haven't actually compared UHD BluRay to 4K/HDR streaming. But a lot of this is going to vary by streaming provider, codec, data connection, and display hardware.
Why does it have to be one or the other? I don't think a company is greedy if they raise the price on a luxury item more than the rate of inflation. Consumers speak with their dollars. If a company prices out their consumers, consumers will stop spending and they'll either be forced to reduce their prices or go out of business.
Could we actually do this in a safe way? Having ill fitting shoes can cause a lot of long term damage. There could be a case that it's worth the X-ray risk...
Modern xray machines deliver low enough radiation doses that they could probably be used for this reasonably safely. They are routinely used in medical settings after all, but I suspect it would still be a liability nightmare.
But there's no real need to see the bones for fitting shoes. There's plenty of 3D scanning technologies today that do not involve ionizing radiation and would probably be more useful for fitting shoes anyway.
Not only are there technologies that could be used for this, there are working products in the market that do it already. I work for one of the technology providers in this area.
Having x-ray images or such would actually be somewhat helpful, as you could much more easily identify the metatarsophalangeal joints (the joint where the toe meets the foot), the locations of which do influence shoe fit to some extent.
However, the cost, safety, usability etc. of using x-ray machines in a retail setting makes it infeasible by a wide margin compared to optical measurement methods, and those generally take you far enough anyway. I'd rather go for dynamic analysis (i.e. scanning the foot while it is in motion taking a step) if more data on the skeletal structure is required.
Perhaps most obviously, you just can't try a shoe on if you buy online. You can if you buy five pairs and return four, as some do, but it's a lot of hassle and a waste of resources for all the shipping back and forth.
Secondly, a significant portion of the population (tens of precent) have "problems" enough that most shoes in a store don't fit, meaning you have to try on a lot before you find one that does. And even if you don't have such issues, sizing between brands (and even styles) is so inconsistent that you usually have to try multiple different sizes to decide which one fits you. Having a 3D model paired with an AI system that tells you which shoes fit and what sizes to pick saves a lot of time for a lot of people, both shoppers and staff.
Finally, if you ever want to order custom made footwear, there is really no way around measuring your feet. And arguably the only reliably well-defined and repeatable way of doing that is to do a 3D scan to capture the shape.
My aunt would knit socks for me as a kid. I'd stand on a sheet of paper and my mom would draw the outline of my foot, and mail her the sheet. Worked great!
That method is actually used by many shoemakers when you order a pair of bespoke shoes (in combination with a series of tape measurements). It's not accurate enough to produce a fitting shoe in a single attempt, however, so what usually happens is they make a "test shoe" based the measurements and drawing, then modify the last after having you try that on. This procedure can be repeated more than once if needed.
Knitted socks are quite a lot more forgiving than leather shoes, fortunately, since the material accommodates by stretching when you put it on. I'm not surprised it worked well for you and your aunt!
Thanks this is interesting. Is part of the problem that people's feet change size with weight?
I have the impression that this is half the battle with finding shoes myself. Probably the bones are the same size left and right, but I think they deform differently as I stand (or walk) in a way that depends on the contours of the shoe... and that sounds like a problem that would be hard to model with laser scanning or whatever.
You're right that the feet deform significantly when you stand on them. For that reason you usually measure them load-bearing (i.e. you stand up with even weight distribution on your feet).
I think it's more likely that it's the deformation of the shoe that is uneven than that the shoe affects the deformation of the foot much. An exception would be if it has a built-up sole with support for the arches, preventing the arches from collapsing.
Either way, it's a complex process that is hard to model, just like you say. The way we're getting around it is by collecting various data on what people end up liking and then infer the properties of the shoe, rather than trying to explicitly model it. So the solution is a combination of 3D scanning and machine learning.
Also worth mentioning, by the way: most people actually have slightly different size and shape on their left vs. right foot. For about 50% of the population the length differs by more than half a US size. Being perfectly symmetrical is the rare case.
I think you could just use photographs to make a 3d model.
As someone with hard to fit feet, I have often wished for custom footwear made with modern materials and design. I envision a system where you go to the store, they create a 3d model, you pick a design, and it is sent off to a factory that has been tooled to efficiently build the footwear from the model.
I think you could charge 150 or even 200% over off-the-shelf versions for modern custom fit running shoes/hiking boots/ski boots, etc. These markets already spend extra money for premium products. I know I would pay it, gladly.
Runners seem to go through shoes like clockwork. You could setup a subscription service.
My understanding is that digital dental x-rays deliver an order of magnitude less radiation dose than traditional film x-rays. So maybe there's a way to do this with an extremely small dose, especially because you might not need to produce super-sharp images.
Randall Munroe's radiation dose chart (https://xkcd.com/radiation/) says that a cross-country flight delivers a higher dose than a typical dental x-ray or even a chest x-ray. Maybe it would already be worth it with really modern imaging equipment.
The thing is, the X ray cannot tell you much about the fit, other than that your bones are roughly fitting into the bounding box. Which you already know from the ability to put the shoe on at all.
The X-ray image can't possibly tell you things like that the shoe's upper is too tight over the metatarsals, or that a seam inside the shoe is rubbing on your pinky toe, which will cause blistering.
At the end of the day, a good shoe fit is a simple matter of feel.
Even if the risk were worth it for the person being fitted, it might not be for the techs using it. Remember that this was only affordable at the time because there was zero health and safety. If you take proper precautions and only use trained personnel, it’s going to be cost prohibitive. I think sonagrams and laser scanning would be the better choice, safer, and cheaper.
Medical/dental techs leave the room when they're taking these X-rays for precisely this reason. You could have a separate room in a shoe store just for the X-rays ... but realistically I can't see that happening. How many people would even go for this? I sure as hell wouldn't want X-rays taken in a shoe store.
I think we all tend to focus on building the system which is the most point of failure resistant rather than the point of failure itself. I've found performance reviews to be fantastically valuable and motivating when I have a good manager.
Rather than endless optimization of the system. Train your managers. Everything from giving good feedback to ignoring or forgetting a bias is a skill that can be learned.
It's hard not to be dismissive of what appears to be a simple set of concepts, but you're missing on an opportunity to learn a very cool set of skills here. I recommend that anyone who wants to live a better life and do better work read books on the Toyota Production System and Taiichi Ohno. As for Poka-Yoke, It's a word that seems simple but when used in industry contexts communicates a deeper set of requirements than just "make it foolproof". Also, don't undersell how useful systematizing common sense is (and how difficult its application can get).
I don’t mean to undersell it. If anything, I’ve been growing increasingly impressed at how many of life’s secrets also turn out to be things that everyone knows.
Edit: Plus, Wikipedia does a very inconsistent job of explaining conceptual things in non-superficial ways; probably because most extended discussions of “poka-yoke” wouldn’t be “neutral” or “verifiable” or would “favor one particular source”. I haven’t checked it lately, but Wikipedia’s article on method acting used to do almost nothing to explain what the hell it was; it just had a lot of verbiage about who does it and who learned it from whom. Maybe there needs to be a separate concept explanation wiki that has different requirements.
There seem to be handful directly from Taiichi Ohno (including a management book), and then many that refer to him and his process. Guidance would be appreciated!
We see a lot of words written on "lean" software development but I feel like it's better to learn from broader sources, and from industries that have had a lot more regulation and time to develop good practices.
The best book on Lean for beginners is “2 Second Lean” by Paul Akers. You can buy the book or get it free directly from Paul Akers’ website.
https://paulakers.net/books/2-second-lean
And for an impressive display of what Lean can do, watch this video “Lean Manufacturing - Kaizen Methodology - Lean FastCap Style”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su9CulCZTBg
Also therapy is more available than ever and talking to a real person is guaranteed healthier than reading WebMD. If you can't afford a therapist talk to your friends. It takes a bit of courage to admit your feelings but everyone has experienced these feelings to some degree and likely has great advice. Even finding out, for example, that it took one friend a few years to get over something is helpful since it means you don't have to beat yourself up about not getting over it today.