Meh, it just looks like any other truck to me. It even has a sprinkle of the silly "wow very technology!" aesthetic pandering that's typical of EVs. But plenty of strong-selling EVs do that (see: Hyundai).
But you're right! An electric pickup truck is a status symbol, but an F-150 isn't a status symbol. The F-150 brand, and the blue oval itself, is associated with being an appliance. The branding is at odds with the starry-eyed futurism that drives EV sales.
Don't get me wrong, plenty of folks buy F-150s and Rams and Silverados who don't need them. But, those people are cosplaying their imaginary blue-collar grandfathers. An electric car goes against that retrospective way of thinking.
As for folks who actually need a pickup for practical reasons, they don't want a Lightning. Ford doesn't sell it with an 8 foot bed. Every time you get plywood or drywall or whatever, it's gonna hang out the back. Can't wait to see the look on your face when a ladder falls over onto the hood of your $75,000 truck.
The instant I read the first sentence of your comment, I thought "McMaster-Carr but for food" might be the most appealing pitch for online grocery delivery I've ever heard.
...with the caveat that McMaster's facilities are staffed by people, not robots.
Amusingly, the Kroger near me is almost that way already.
Log into website, fill the cart, pick a time window, and push the button to order it. Someone starts working on it nearly instantly. The order is picked and waiting in a few minutes.
It's fast as fuck. Except...
---
If someone at Kroger ever reads this, then:
That time window aspect is the part of the system falls down hard for me.
Before I order, I have to pick a window in the future when I want to pick it up/get it delivered.
"I'm ready when you are; ASAP" isn't an option. Nor is "I'm already in the parking lot, you bunch of dweebs -- just bring my stuff out. Please?"
So if it's 6:05 when I order and the next window starts at 8:00, and they're fast as fuck (as they are) and have it done in less than 15 minutes, then: I'm waiting around for more than an hour and a half for nothing.
Because until the apparently-completely-arbitrary window is reached: It won't let me check in to pick up. It won't schedule a driver. My groceries are just sitting there (ideally stored at the right temperature but I can't know this) at the store while some wallclock mechanism that was designed by an asshole runs out.
This makes the whole thing feel clunky, stupid, and insulting.
It results a system that I use only when I absolutely do not want to be inside of a grocery store, like when I'm sick as hell in January and every body part hurts. Any other time, it's way faster for me to go in the store and shop it myself.
It should be convenient. It is instead almost always a burden instead of a benefit.
If picking up a pizza from Domino's worked like this, then they'd have gone completely out of business decades ago.
Our Kroger has the same service, we use it a lot. Grocery stores are annoying to me, and Kroger feels almost intentionally designed to piss me off, so that's why we use the pickup order thing. Beware:
1. Prices on the app are frequently higher than prices in the store.
2. Not all options available in the store are available in the app.
3. Don't assume they'll always have it ready on time. Or, at least, don't plan your day around it.
They force you to pick a window because stores have limited staffing, and only so many orders can be fulfilled at once. "Hire more people," you say? Hah!
We don't do delivery, so I can't comment on that aspect of the service.
And most of the process is very similar between Domino's and Kroger.
Just pick out a selection of stuff on a website, and order it. They both provide timely status updates of that order. They both have varying staff levels and workloads. They both certainly have days when they're running very far behind, and days when they feel like they don't have much to keep busy with.
They both have pickup and delivery options; sometimes, with different per-item prices, deals, or fees for each option.
But that's where the similarities end.
If a person orders a pizza at 6:05 and it happens to be ready by 6:30, Domino's doesn't make that person wait until 8:00 to pick it up. They want it gone; the sooner, the better. A person can pick it up (in the store, or they'll bring it out to the car) as soon as it is ready. Domino's does not want any queues at all; neither inbound, nor outbound. And this makes sense: They're in the business of selling pizzas, not storing pizzas.
Kroger isn't like that. If a person orders groceries at 6:05 and the order is ready by 6:30, then: They hold the groceries hostage until 8:00. It's as if an otherwise-complete order just isn't ripe to be picked up by a customer until it has had time to purge itself in a waiting area -- regardless of workload. The queue is mandatory, and is governed not by the physical readiness of the order but instead by the clock on the wall.
This is inconceivably stupid and unnecessary. It serves no benefit to me, nor to the corporation, nor to the employees that work for that corporation. One might think that they'd be aware that they're in the business of selling groceries, but this mandatory purgatory shows otherwise.
(I'll betcha McMaster-Carr doesn't sit on stuff while a clock runs. That's a Kroger specialization. :) )
One difference is that the Domino's employee's job is to make your pizza. None of their other duties are exactly rocket science. I ran a pizza place, I'd know. Meanwhile, preparing your grocery order is maybe the third priority on any given Kroger employee's list, behind running a register, stocking shelves, inventory, cleaning, tending to Kroger's spastic self-checkout machines, ...
I guess I prefer my groceries to be ready at a predictable time, rather than sitting around waiting between 1 and N hours. No experience I've ever had with food delivery in the age of DoorDash has made me think "yeah, I want more of this experience in my life."
My nephew works for Kroger, primarily picking stock for online orders.
He's a good dude and I enjoy hanging out with him, but I absolutely promise you that he doesn't do all of those jobs. He doesn't do anything quickly-enough to shift roles like that, and never has. To use a polite managerial description: He definitely works at his own pace.
I don't see that kind of task diversity at the store I usually shop at, either.
The register people do register stuff. The self-checkout people do self-checkout stuff. The order-pickers do order-picking. The people who bag groceries and fetch carts just bag groceries and fetch carts. The produce folks do produce. The florists florist. And so forth.
Sometimes I see a management-type range-walking from one problem to the next, but even that's exceptional.
It's the only real grocery store we have in the small city in which I live, so I get to spend a fair bit of time there whether I like it or not. I've spent years passively becoming familiar with the people who work there, and the jobs they do.
If they moved around much between different roles, I'd have noticed it by now.
(It's also a union shop, which may have something to do with it. When high-speed shifts from pushing a broom and heads out to the parking lot to fetch carts before he starts sorting produce, he's taking work away from the people who normally do those jobs and diminishing their roles. Unions may tend to dislike that kind of thing.
We didn't shift around much when I worked in union retail, either. It was a big deal for me to spend a day away from my department to help out with another one that was short-handed, and an opportunity was always presented for me to say "No, I'll just keep working where I normally work."
It was an even bigger deal if they needed help over on the grocery side of the store, which had a completely different union with a completely different contract. The union guys had to agree to allow it every time before that could happen.)
There are plenty of decision makers who will not be sold on an abstract concept like software sovereignty, especially when it requires them to change. Tell the same crowd "$15 million saved" and more of them will listen.
They're out of their minds if they're donating nothing to Libreoffice, though.
The manufacturer doesn't make it clear why they axed it, but from my experience in med-tech I think this translates to "the FDA is going to balk at it"
If you think you (or a loved one) may have a psychological condition, go to a psychologist and get a screening. The diagnosis isn't the important part. The value is in the 20-something pages of detailed analysis by a professional.
At a bare minimum, it will give you a fresh perspective on things you already knew. In my experiences, there will be things you didn't realize about yourself.
They aren't going to tell you what the solution is to all your problems; that's for you and your doctor to figure out. They will give you everything you need to make well-informed decisions, and that's priceless.
The problem is such screenings are incredibly expensive (at least in the US), and for things like ADHD or Autism, you need a specific screening that is often even more expensive.
And even then if you get an autism diagnosis as an adult, this report is effectively all you get, there are no medicines or treatment options that this opens up afaict.
Here are a few ideas to get you started: My spouse's paperwork has helped us change habits around the home to better fit their needs. They're getting better at self-advocacy, in part because it's easier to articulate what exactly feels wrong. Their quality of life was directly improved because we read the paperwork together, and took action based on it.
This is something you can do with a self-diagnosis. If reading the literature on autism gives you processes that improve your life, you don't need the diagnosis to confirm that. The life improvements were the end-goal in the first place.
This kind of presupposes that you have suspicions about autism rather than just something in general. If you think you have autism, you're can target that literature anyway regardless of the diagnosis, while if you have no concrete suspicions, you'll be firing blind, and probably miss a lot more than if you could nail it down to one diagnosis.
By the time I got mine, I didn't need the processes, since I'd figured those out by myself, so the diagnosis is just a nice piece of paper pointing to a road I've already walked.
For ADHD though, that story is very different, since step zero there really should be medication,[1][2] and that is locked behind a diagnosis.
Nope, I've been architecting, creating, and maintaining web apps since 1996 (most recently 12 years at an S&P 500 company), but I can't do live coding interviews to save my life.
Nobody will accommodate me in two years of job searching. They don't deny me outright, they just ghost me if I ask to do a "take home" or any other alternative.
> If you think you (or a loved one) may have a psychological condition, go to a psychologist and get a screening. The diagnosis isn't the important part. The value is in the 20-something pages of detailed analysis by a professional.
Throughout my entire interaction with psychiatry (years, on and off) I never figured this is a thing. Go figure.
Get screened for whatever you think you've got. Think you've got ADHD? Go get an ADHD screening. Autism? It's not easy to find a psych who does adult Autism screenings, but they're out there. OCD? You get the idea.
Regardless of whether the conclusion is "yes you have x" or "no you don't have x" the diagnosis will be accompanied by a detailed analysis of your psychological condition. Whether or not you are diagnosed, that analysis will cover the issues that led you to believe you may have that condition.
Mental health, like physical health, requires action on your part. If the only thing you're seeking from a diagnosis is accommodations from others, then yeah, you're probably going to be disappointed.
I think you mean the full diagnostic process? Screening is just the first step in (what should be) a long process to decide whether the full workup makes sense. Screening takes on the order of minutes to an hour and it doesn't come with a diagnosis, the actual diagnostic process should take many hours and several appointments.
I'm getting a full neuro-psych screening next month because my therapist suspects I may have OCD. It's a 4-6 hour series of tests/interviews (and probably other stuff, I'll find out). I'm guessing that's what they're referring to?
I never understood why people, especially americans, are so hyperfocused on "mental health" and wear their pseudoscientific bullshit diagnoses like medals. I agree that there is a small fraction of people that do have mental issues, but it is very likely that most of the people that encourage "therapy" and yap about "mental health" very likely don't have any meaningful issues worth diagnosing and are just unnecessary burden on the medical system. The term "autism" in itself is so overused nowadays that it doesn't mean absolutely anything anymore, the fact that it doesn't have precise, rigorous definition doesn't help either.
By downvoting we missed out a joke: Lets apply the article to the comment
>> I never understood why ... americans ... wear their pseudoscientific bullshit diagnoses like medals.
> Borderline Personality
Borderline personality disorder involves intense emotional instability, ... and devaluation of others.
>Social Communication Disorder
... knowing how much detail to give, adjusting their speaking style for different situations, understanding implied meanings or hints,
> B5: Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD): People diagnosed with ASPD show a lack of respect toward others. They generally don’t follow socially accepted rules.
> B5: Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD): People diagnosed with NPD have a sense of being better than others... They lack empathy for others
---
> I agree that there is a small fraction of people
What exactly makes you believe the fraction is small?
I'll ignore the baiting and just answer this:
>> What exactly makes you believe the fraction is small?
Because it's not as prevalent in other societies. The fixation of Americans, and especially younger Americans with mental health is not something I've (or clearly, GP) witnessed elsewhere.
I don't think the discussion here is due to a lack of empathy, rather it's curiosity of people looking into this society from the outside (which we're doing all the time because we live in an Americanized world, after all). It seems like the participants in this game of self diagnosis and mental health crusade are very self centered and not very fit to deal with life (which is a complicated matter, I admit to that).
This is not to dismiss the hardships of those people professionally diagnosed with mental conditions, obviously.
you completely nailed it, i just want to add more thoughts:
> Because it's not as prevalent in other societies.
Is it because (a) we have not looked close enough, (b) because it is a culture dependent thing, or (c) because there is no norm and therefore no deviation.
> My impression has been that the further someone is from tech, the more likely they are to think that ChatGPT is synonymous with LLMs.
This is still sorta true, but swap "LLM" for "chatbot." I mentor high school kids, and a lot of them use ChatGPT. A lot of them use AI summaries from Google Search. None of them use gemini.google.com.
These are the only reasons I use GitHub. The familiarity to students and non-developers is also a plus.
I have no idea what the parent comment is talking about a "well-formed CI system." GitHub Actions is easily the worst CI tool I've ever used. There are no core features of GitHub that haven't been replicated by GitLab at this point, and in my estimation GitLab did all of it better. But, if I put something on GitLab, nobody sees it.
From what I gather it's that GH Actions is good for easy scenarios: single line building, unit tests, etc. When your CI pipeline starts getting complicated or has a bunch of moving parts, not only do you need to rearchitect parts of it, but you lose a lot of stability.
And this is the core problem with the modern platform internet. One victor (or a handful) take the lead in a given niche, and it becomes impossible to get away from them without great personal cost, literal, moral, or labor, and usually a combo of all three. And then that company has absolutely no motivation at all to prioritize the quality of the product, merely to extract all the value from the user-base as possible.
Facebook has been on that path for well over a decade, and it shows. The service itself is absolute garbage. Users stay because everyone they know is already there and the groups they love are there, and they just tolerate being force-fed AI slop and being monitored. But Facebook is not GROWING as a result, it's slowly dying, much like it's aging userbase. But Facebook doesn't care because no one in charge of any company these days can see further than next quarter's earnings call.
This is a socio-economic problem, it can happen with non internet platforms too. Its why people end up living in cities for example. Any system that has addresses, accounts or any form of identity has the potential for strong network effects.
I'm all for making the roads safer. I used to commute on a moped in Chicago. I'm convinced that the only reason I wasn't killed is because it was an old two-stroke. You might not be able to see me in your giant truck, but you will hear what sounds like an old weedwhacker running full-throttle 6 feet from your rear quarter panel.
Despite the incredible racket I made, I still got into half a dozen near-accidents. I'm surprised it didn't happen more often. You see a lot on a moped, and what I saw was tons of people on their phone, scrolling their way through traffic. Insanity.
This article mostly builds its argument on data sourced directly from Waymo. That's not an unbiased source. I'm not accusing Waymo of anything, but if you're going to argue that autonomous cars are the solution to all the woes of the road, you need a better foundation than that.
To what extent is Waymo's data affected by people's responses to their presence? If I see a weird little car with a bunch of cameras and stuff strapped to the roof, I'm covering the brake and giving that thing a wide berth. Y'know, like what you're supposed to do when you see something weird on the road. Then again, I don't live in the Bay (yet), so maybe drivers have gotten used to them there.
I like this idea, though I'm concerned about how we could make sure the courts are ready to handle the deluge of activity.
Update: talked to some experts. IANAL, and they aren't either. This would be cataclysmic for the courts unless they knew it was coming AND every claim was filed correctly (fees paid, no errors, etc). Even if everything was done perfectly, it would be a ton of work and there's no way every case would be processed in a day. It's also likely that all the identical cases filed in a single jurisdiction would be heard together in a single trial. There's also weirdness when you consider where each claim is filed. Quote: "you may be in the right, but I can guarantee you would have a terrible time"
Why would that be anyone's problem? If users keep having to sue Apple to get stuff Apple was supposed to have given them, courts may impose higher and higher penalties until Apple starts just giving them to users without wasting anyone's time.
The point isn’t to win every individual case, is it?
I assume the main point would be getting the attention of politicians who would step in and intervene. Especially if it’s a situation where the courts are truly overwhelmed.
The crux of this article is that they won't treat Meta's debt as debt, because Meta intentionally structured this debt to circumvent the agencies' definition of "debt." Should they change their definition of "debt?" Maybe, but what incentive do they have to do that, is any formal definition bulletproof to circumvention, etc.
What's very interesting to me is what happens when Meta doesn't exercise those lease options. If there isn't some kind of penalty for declining the option, well...
But you're right! An electric pickup truck is a status symbol, but an F-150 isn't a status symbol. The F-150 brand, and the blue oval itself, is associated with being an appliance. The branding is at odds with the starry-eyed futurism that drives EV sales.
Don't get me wrong, plenty of folks buy F-150s and Rams and Silverados who don't need them. But, those people are cosplaying their imaginary blue-collar grandfathers. An electric car goes against that retrospective way of thinking.
As for folks who actually need a pickup for practical reasons, they don't want a Lightning. Ford doesn't sell it with an 8 foot bed. Every time you get plywood or drywall or whatever, it's gonna hang out the back. Can't wait to see the look on your face when a ladder falls over onto the hood of your $75,000 truck.
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