> Sadly, having a microSD Express card slot on the Raspberry Pi 5 does not make a lot of sense at this point due to the cost of MicroSD Express card. An M.2 NVMe SSD is cheaper... For those reasons, [we] will not manufacture the HAT, but the design is released under a permissive MIT license, so anybody could manufacture it if needed. Maybe a microSD Express slot will make sense in a future Raspberry Pi 6, as prices come down.

I don't get the hostility around this article. Nobody is forcing you to read it or to do it this way. If your system is architected in a different way where you can run your whole system on a single instance, then good for you! But Amazon presumably doesn't have that luxury, and others may not either.

For the painting though, even in "simpler" cars, vehicle painting is ridiculously overpriced and complex, IMO. I've been quoted nearly $2000 to fix a dent the size of a nickel on my basic 10 year old car because the body shop said they'd have to repaint the entire door, then repaint all of the panels adjacent to the door to blend it in. In other words, fixing a dent the size of a nickel somehow requires repainting an area thousands of times larger. It's ridiculous. There must be a better way.

I'd also note that a special support channel isn't really needed here. This situation (lost access to account due to owner no longer being available in some way) is a common situation that AWS Support is pretty good at handling through the standard channels.

This announcement is about these services coexisting, not about them competing.

Amazon Pay and other payments products from Amazon are customer-facing products that make it easier for customers to make payments. Stripe is the backend software that makes it easier for Amazon to process those payments. They coexist, they don't replace each other.

> Hundreds of tags transmitting is bad for the same reason that phone's have to be shut off during flights.

Phones don't have to be shut off during flights. That hasn't been a thing for years.

Any given commercial flight has hundreds of phones, wireless headphones, tablets, smartwatches, etc all transmitting radio signals at significantly higher power than Airtags.

The airline is effectively just saying "we follow the rules we are supposed to follow". In practice, I doubt they care at all, and you're not going to see anyone trying to sniff out AirTags to prevent them from being in luggage... but you're also not going to see the official spokesperson of an airline make an announcement saying "yea go ahead and just ignore the rules, it's fine".

It's entirely possible that a company can have a drop in productivity and record profits at the same time.

Anecdotally, my company had record profits during the period of WFH, and I personally think my productivity stayed the same or improved. However, as a company we also shipped significantly less new features/products than we did in years past (and my opinion as to why is because we had significant organizational delays caused by miscommunication about timelines and priorities (stuff that in theory might have been improved if we were not WFH)). If we had not had a drop in the amount we shipped, it's possible our record profits would have been even higher record profits.

There's many more metrics too, like attrition, or poor onboarding experience for new hires, or inability to coordinate across teams (sure you're producing more personal output, but is it the right output?)

Organizations are more than individuals working in isolation. They're coordinated masses of people that have to work together, and what is best for one person's personal productivity may not be best for the organization's overall productivity.

It does? I don't think I follow. In your list of components, every single one of those is, at least in the US, largely or almost entirely handled by private companies.

The big semiconductor companies are private. I actually don't think there are any notable public entities that make their own chips. Hardware companies (I'm assuming you're talking about things like motherboards, routers, switches, etc) are private. Fiber optics/communications/networks are laid almost entirely by private telecom companies (and there's actually a big push to take this away from private companies and make ISPs be government entities). The article that you're commenting on is all about a private entity investing money into laying fiber and improving the protocols that communicate over it.

>I have rarely seen a start up on improving optical fiber or electronic chips.

There are a lot of SMBs working on chip design. I'm less familiar with fiber, but a quick google shows at least a couple, all private.

Every single adjacent grid to Texas was also suffering from rolling or consistent blackouts during last year's February winter storm. Oklahoma had blackouts, Arkansas had blackouts, Missouri had blackouts, Louisiana had blackouts.

https://kansasreflector.com/2021/07/26/fuel-shortages-drove-...

The blackouts were not as bad as Texas and had they been on the same grid, it may have been able to spread (and lessen) the pain a little bit, but the point stands that Texas' neighbors did not have much electricity to spare.

This month is a little different because other states do have spare electricity AFAIK, but the links Texas has to those grids have relatively low capacity to share it.

There was/is a plan to create a large hub for sharing up to 30 GW of electricity between the East, West, and Texas grids, but unfortunately it was scaled back significantly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation

May 2022 is on track to be the hottest May on record in Texas. It's already hitting over 100 degrees in most of Texas. It does not typically get this hot until July. Most of the country is facing a huge heat wave this last week, and while some of the country got a reprieve this weekend, Texas did not.

For comparison, this time last year the temperature was in the 70s/low 80s. The average high for May in Austin is 86. The temperature this week in Austin is forecast to be over 100.

It's ridiculous that the Texas grid can't handle this, but to say "it's not even hot yet" is disingenuous. It's fucking hot.

https://news.yahoo.com/texas-shatters-heat-record-temps-1805...

https://weather.com/forecast/regional/news/2022-05-06-heat-w...

https://www.kvue.com/article/weather/may-2022-track-to-be-wa...

Not necessarily. The specific implementation being talked about in the article is to use your phone as your FIDO device, and your phone has to be unlocked. So the "something you have" is your phone, and to unlock it, you can either use "something you are" (biometrics via face ID or fingerprint), or you can have a PIN/password on your phone to make it "something you know".

I wouldn't be surprised (and I would hope) that the FIDO app or feature on phones would also come with the ability to restrict it via PIN/password even if your phone unlocks via biometric.

I've always been hugely disappointed that AWS doesn't have a better PaaS offering, given Heroku's languishing, and I was hugely disappointed when App Runner launched and was missing some key features... but there is at least a little hope that it's improving.

This is true for smaller stores (eg the mom-and-pop corner store or even large stores), but once retailers get to the super-large sizes, eg Target/Walmart, the relationship flips. People go to Target first and buy Nabisco because its at Target. If Nabisco wasn't there, they buy something else, but they don't stop shopping at Target.

>Thus, stores absolutely pay for every item of inventory that appears on their shelves except for some new products that might have special consignment arrangements.

>Suppliers do not pay for better shelf placement. Stores determine that based on sell through and margin; the products that generate the best overall revenue get the best placement on the shelves.

This is 100% incorrect. As I mentioned in my previous comment, some stores may operate like this, but not all. I can tell you from personal expertise in this space, but also just from a simple Google search about how retailers operate (do a search for the terms: slotting allowance, shelf-space rental, pay-to-stay, pay-to-display). See below for some links to get you started. Big retailers do not own all of the products on its shelves, and they certainly do make arrangements where manufacturers can pay extra fees to get preferential endcap placement, shelf placement, and shelf space. I have even seen agreements where a manufacturer will literally own (rather than rent) a specific shelf in an important store and can do whatever they want with it, as long as they pay recurrent fees (it reminds me of someone owning a condo in a building and paying HOA fees).

Big retailers may of course choose to not sell a certain shelf placement to a specific product because they want to reserve it for another purpose (like another competing product), but as a general rule of the thumb, if you're willing to pay enough, you can have whatever shelf spot you want.

Big retailers will also charge fees to manufacturers for the transportation and storage of the product for when the product is being stored in the retailer's warehouses or being moved by the retailer's trucks (sound familiar to what Amazon does?). The reason they can do this is because the retailer doesn't own the product, the manufacturer still does. The retailer profits by facilitating the sale of the product.

In some situations, big retailers may indeed purchase a block of products, but in every scenario I have personal experience with, the agreement was always one in which the manufacturer was obligated to buy back any product which did not successfully sell in the store, which ultimately has the same effect as just renting shelf space.

Further reading:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/718711109

https://www.vox.com/2016/11/22/13707022/grocery-store-slotti...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-grocers-wring-extra-cash-ou...

https://www.businessinsider.com/r-wal-mart-to-impose-charges...

https://cspinet.org/resource/rigged

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/rent-space-grocery-store-ven...

This is incorrect. I wish people would stop repeating this in this thread. Some stores purchase their stock. But the really big players do not operate like that.

When you go into Target and go to the cracker aisle, Target has not actually purchased all of the cookies and crackers that you see on the shelf. Target effectively rents out shelf space to Nabisco, who then comes in and puts their items on the shelf (or will pay Target to take the product and put it on the shelf for them). The pricing agreement can get quite complicated and depends on the amount of shelf space, location in the store, and can also depend on number of items eventually sold... but the takeaway is that Target does not just outright buy boxes of Oreos and then try to resell them. If the Oreos don't sell (say perhaps because the customers opted to buy the Target brand sandwich cookies instead), Target isn't out any money, because they still got their shelf rental fees from Nabisco.

Going even further, Target also engages in the same type of activity Amazon does with their analytics (including sales volume, margins, customer profiles etc) and use that information to decide who gets to rent how much shelf space and where. Target et al spend incredible amounts of money optimizing this stuff, which isn't far off from what Amazon does.

People have this old rusty view of brick & mortar stores, but the reality is that they've been masters of this stuff far longer than Amazon has even been around. Amazon championed bringing these practices to the online space and became the most obvious juggernaut, but that doesn't mean these other companies are angels.