From the concept pics they have up it looks more like each container is a self contained 'train'. They say it is for zero emissions but it takes energy to move cargo. 'conveyor' belts do not have free energy. You have to move the belt and the cargo.
Interesting idea though. I hope they come up with some cool ideas.
I remember him being in a very mediocre shooter on the psx called Blasto. The game play was fairly meh. But the one liners were a lot of fun. I bought the game specifically because he was in it.
I do not have that exp with Steam as I run it at computer launch so it is fairly a non event. However, I feel your pain. My playstation and switch I have that nearly same exp as I do not use them much. Which means pretty much any time I do want to play something on them is an update. Sometimes a fairly large one at that! By the time I am done updating I have decided to do something else.
These update systems only have one good use case. If you are pretty much connected all the time. If you rarely run them. You are pretty much stuck in a update stack.
I even joke with my wife 'i am playing my favorte playstation game "updating"'.
Also to understand it you have to think about typewriters, printers, and then text terminals. With a typewriter a cartage return with no line feed could be desirable if you are editing or using strikethru chars. Or on a CRT going to the beginning of the line to overwrite whatever text was there could also be a desirable thing. Then add in the mix of a dozen different companies making things and it was a recipe for 'you get all the different ways'.
That 'revolutionary approach' is making one of the other things that we can recycle very easily cheaper. Plastics are wildly cheap and durable enough for their use. But paper (kinda recyclable), glass (very recyclable), metal (very recyclable) are kind of expensive vs plastic. Taxing it would create a weird perverse thing. The real thing that needs to happen is the remaining 3 things we can recycle easily need to be cheaper. When nat gas became cheaper vs coal (which is really cheap) the energy companies very quickly started switching over to NG.
How do you imagine those things "become" cheaper without things like taxing? Just suggesting that the only way forward is to "make them cheaper" seems to amount to "do nothing to fix the problem, just wait until someone invents some magic solution". What if a magic solution is not possible, or at least noone finds it?
In most terms if you constrain supply price goes up. If you make cheaper to make and get and supply goes up it becomes cheaper. Waving the 'just tax it' flag does not actually make things cheaper or better. It just shifts costs and removes capital from the system. It is the broken window fallacy. If you just spend money on 'this other thing' 'this other great thing will happen'.
Getting tax law and pushing things to work are a delicate balance. Recycling is a good example of it. We are paying people money to 'recycle' plastic. When the reality is only 5-10% of plastics can be recycled. There is no magic fix. The basic problem is economics. Plastics are cheaper to use. Because they are a byproduct of something everyone needs. That is not going to change. If you tax it here they can find some other country willing to crack the oil and do it for the cheap way. You have to make other options cheaper. That usually comes thru volume.
> It's not the device, it's the users' choice in how they use it.
This right here. But I take it in a different way. That tool is mine. I get to chose how it is used. Advertisers seem to think they own some of my time to get 'free things'. Application makers seem to think they own some of my time to try to get more money out of me thru the use of dark patterns. The phone companies seem to think they own some of my time and sell my data because I pay them. Other people seem to think they own my time because I have the thing and should be on call 24/7 whenever they want to get ahold of me.
When they first came up with the idea of the current smart phone. It was really cool. Then I have realized that everyone is using it to grab my time from me. All of them seem to get mad when I set the thing down on a table somewhere and ignore it and enjoy the things I want to do.
App makers (and mobile phone companies) are competitive marketplaces with alternatives. They're trying to find viable business models to fund feature development and make a profit. Can't fault them for that: users can pick another option.
Who I can fault is mobile OS/platform owners.
It's a duopoly, and they've repeatedly and strategically made user-hostile decisions that strip choice away from mobile device owners.
All of the ills you mentioned wouldn't be ills if OS features enabled user control of them.
Google is obviously the more egregious (user freedom features and need to boost quarterly profits are inversely related), but I don't think Apple would be taking a pro-privacy stance if it conflicted with their business model and they didn't see it as a strategic differentiator.
They have a moat around them right now due to the price of the hardware. As HW gets cheaper and other models grow that moat will evaporate. Especially as that stuff comes off lease and put up on ebay. It is their weak spot that they will have to innovate around. Long/medium term I do not see how they keep it all to themselves.
Interesting idea though. I hope they come up with some cool ideas.
reply