Hard to feel sympathy for industry that left to its own devices requires a 50% discount to sell in store, near 40% to get to Amazon/BN etc, and for bricks and mortar, requires you to accept returns that end up as a loss.
Interesting article. I have a book still in print, very niche subject. First released in 2013, Amazon mysteriously stoppped stocking it last May, even with recent annual sales of 150-250/yr. Life time print sales are over 1,300 with close to an additional 500 in digital copies.
Hardly a life changer but I've managed to keep the bottom line compensation to $6 per copy, give or take, the entire time so dinner money ;)
Was on HOA board where we had a road with quite a few of these trees. They were a fortune to prune because of the numerous small branches at higher reaches. As a board, we actually hoped they would come down in storms so we could replace with something more appropriate without the take down cost (and resident complaints).
Another unqiue thing is during the summer it was not uncommon for a branch to suddenly explode - apparently some type of moisture/vapor build up in the interior.
Bradford pears were all the rage in the 1990s to 2000s. At one point HOAs thought these were the best tree. Local gardens and nurseries would sell lots of them to landscapers and homeowners.
To this day, they're all over my home state of Georgia. And they're still selected for new landscaping.
They did have a few pros:
- Look great in the spring
- Huge, lush, thick canopy in the summer
- Fast growing
But there are way too many problems:
- Kills all the grass underneath them from shade and root structure
- Seedlings and root offshoots are pervasive pests
- Produces a lot of fruit, and it's toxic to humans and dogs. It smells bad and can smear if you step on it
- Trees only live 7 - 15 years, and they leave a gnarly root system to deal with.
- Extremely prone to falling over during winds or tornadoes. Can easily damage fences, housing, etc. We had to replace our fence once because of one. Even small storms can bring down the older trees.
- And of course, everyone knows how awful they smell in the spring
I think this takes the cake for "first invasive species I've seen populate over my lifespan."
Just moved back to GA after 3 years away and asked folks what all the white-blossoming trees in meadows are this spring, as don't remember seeing so many blossoms previously.
Cherries (closest blossom I know) aren't that fruitful / clustering. Dogwoods look completely different.
> Extremely prone to falling over during winds or tornadoes.
Also kids climbing on them, from childhood experience. Weak wood.
Japanese Cherries can be much more packed with flowers than this pear (It depends on the cultivar). Both Cherries and Dogwoods are royalty on gardens, but both deploy to much wider structures that can be low branched and tend to hang searching the floor, so this Pyrus is still pretty much unbeatable for narrow streets. Palms have their own problems, like thorns, but are "designed" for streets with extremely windy areas. The problem is that palms don't survive the same frost than pears can.
There are maybe five or ten trees so narrow in their category that, unlike conifers, bring blossoms, clean relatively dry fruits, and excellent fall colour in snowy areas. Some are among the most alien things that you can have in a garden.
And all that grows in such acute angles is prone to catastrophic cracks for wind damage. It comes in the package.
Having a Dogwood that would grow fastigiate retaining the "dog wood" part, would be a revolution, but is not available at this moment (and probably will never be). Dogwoods love the 90 degrees angle. I have a maple 'Tsukasa Silhouette' that would look great, but is too small, too expensive and too delicate to be used as that.
Pears are still one of the tastier fruits in a garden, not ornamental royalty, but food royalty for sure. I just ignore the short interval of smell as a necessary tax to pay.
There are some small ornamental apples that have been in my yard for decades that look very similar dogwood. No idea about the cultivar or anything (previous owner planted them AFAIK), but they are beautiful with reddish-pink leaves and white blossoms.
As toxic like apples probably. In a small fruit that is easy to ingest whole nobody would take care of removing the seeds. Apple seeds have cyanide so if you eat a lot is unpleasant
From earlier response, the HOA I mentioned was along Long Island Sound so much more northerly. Our trees were a good 30+ years old. They were somewhat sheltered from high winds, especially when younger, by the nature of the buildings (two story row houses). It wasn't until the canopy reached a fair bit over the rooflines that they really started coming down in thunderstorms. That no parked cars were crushed was pretty much a miracle.
And spot on with the no grass underneath...and the homeowner complaints about dirt in front of their units ("if you pay to take it down and replace, we'll let you!")
It doesn’t even take wind or storms, if they get too big/spread out, they’ll sometimes just spontaneously split down the middle (one in our backyard pulled this trick and one in our front yard, but we were planning on cutting them down anyway - planted by builders and/or previous residents).
IIRC they were introduced aggressively as being a non-propagating, non fruiting tree or something, both of which turned out to be false, but by the time people realized this it was far too late :-/
Reminds me of SF planting Pōhutakawas everywhere - an NZ native tree that requires little water, don't fall over, don't fruit, etc. Except as any NZer could tell you, the reason they don't fall over is that they're evolved to grow on/around cliffs and loose earth, so they go all in on strong roots. Which mean constantly breaking roads and sidewalks. yay!
Also while they don't fruit they produce a tonne of flowers that produce a tonne of cruft on the ground :-/
Eucalyptus in southern California; railroads thought they'd be great for building ties out of, they're not, and they're extremely flammable and explode.
I always heard that burning eucalyptus wood was toxic, but now i'm wondering if someone got their signals crossed because pressure treated wood and i think creosote treated wood are toxic when burned, too? I heard it as a teen, at school they took down a couple 100' eucalyptus and said we couldn't have a bonfire because of that reason.
That reminds me of when I asked an arborist why the tree they were taking down was called a “Piss Oak”. They said wait until we drop it and you won’t have to ask. Sure enough the entire area smelled like urine for a couple hrs after they felled the tree.
I believe the polite common name is “Pin Oak” [1] a fast growing, short lived, and relatively red oak. Supposedly the smell comes from a bacterial infection that afflicts most of the Pin Oak population.
I've never been very fond of nature to begin with[0], but I never imagined becoming disgusted by trees. That's until seeing some four different tree species mentioned in this thread, whose common characteristic seems to be the aura of shite and decay that takes years or decades to break through people's desperate need to pretend that since it is nature and handles well, it must be good.
--
[0] - Specifically at human/humane, live in and breathe in and admire it scale. I'm very fond of nature at population scale, and at molecular scale, both of which present interesting puzzles and applications.
> I've never been very fond of nature to begin with
> [0] - Specifically at human/humane, live in and breathe in and admire it scale. I'm very fond of nature at population scale, and at molecular scale, both of which present interesting puzzles and applications.
I can relate to this a lot. I feel the same way about nature as I do about a tiger or a volcano; I think they're cool and I respect them, but I don't care to spend time up close with them.
I don't see why it's inconsistent for me to feel similarly about a small part of something as I do about the whole, or why it might not be rhetorically useful to help explain something by drawing a comparison between them
There's a reason people tend to burn down rain forests.
Well, two reasons: money from the cleared land, and rain forests tend to be unpleasant reserves of biodiversity with all sorts of nasty plants and flying insects that want to lay eggs under your skin.
Honestly, it's the money from the cleared land. Horrors of nature are the reason people stay away. People move in only when those horrors occupy resources people think can be put to a better use.
Yes, it's often enough dumb, short-sighted, self-destructive selfish behavior, which I absolutely do not condone. However, horror or disgust alone are nowhere near enough to get people to engage in such behavior. At most it gets people to try - and sometimes succeed - to clear invasive species out of the gardens they already have.
At least one street here got lined with those. A witty lesbian friend I was walking with identified the scent immediately, so at least the trees were good for some jokes.
Common Pear trees have also this fish smell. Everything pollinated by flies has an offensive smell in one or other way. This is bad but can be desirable at the same time (no wasps or bees in the narrow streets).
Where was this? In Maryland they would break, a lot, but I never heard of them exploding. I don't think the people in our development loved them. Certainly I had seen a few too many across somebody's lawn or walk.
Southern CT near the sound. Yes it would happen with some of the wide, low branches. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't like popcorn, maybe once every other year.
Maybe part of the problem is paying people 200-500K for this kind of job? Is it written in stone at all products require that kind of "skill" to function?
The problem is not that. The problem is that managers will insist that businesses are in danger if they face any competition.
Of course, the only thing that's really in danger is the careers (and egos) of those managers. Internal competition would be an extremely good source of information on the performance of the business those managers manage.
Well, the GP comment already pointed out they do use it for Photos search. Generally if someone is paying for the disk space to store your data, that’s with some use in mind, at the very least serving it back.
Now, if you worry about some use you wouldn’t like… These are declared in open, if possibly too large, text in all the privacy policies. As a Googler I can tell you the internal bureaucracy for upholding these is dead serious. My product is used only by Google employees in their work duties, yet it took a couple months for us to get access to stats of our own UI. Something like an ads subsystem wanting to read a photos data field is likely to involve quarters of disputes with multiple lawyers.
"Amid higher costs throughout the economy, consumers have begun shifting to lower-margin goods compared with higher spending on discretionary items earlier in the post-pandemic period."
If Family Dollar is not lower margin I'm not sure what is. My guess is they have mostly lost out to internet sellers and Walmart.
Dollar stores generally have much higher margins than Walmart or Costco. They're more expensive per unit, but the upfront cash required by the customer is lower.
For this reason (cashflow) they are seen as a good option for poor people, where in reality everyone would be better served by Costco if they had the cash and storage room to buy in bulk, and a car.
Historically, dollar stores do better during bad times.
I’m wondering if Dollar General is what’s really hurting them. I hear people talk about Dollar General all the time, but almost never Family Dollar. DG seems to be the Walmart of the dollar store game.
Due to rock climbing, I spend a lot of time in poor rural areas (most recently, rural Tennessee).
Dollar General has a few things going for them in these areas:
1. They seem to have very low staffing costs. Most stores seem to have at most 2 workers on staff at a given time (obviously this is higher in busier areas).
2. They seem to have no compunction about putting stores in pretty remote locations (example: [1]). This is probably enabled by having low staffing costs--a store doesn't have to make huge revenue if its costs are low.
3. They seem to have a very standard formula for new stores, which allows them to build them quickly. I've seen a flat lot with trees starting to grow in it, go to an open Dollar General in approximately 9 days. I can't imagine what sort of feats of organizational engineering allows that, but it has to be an advantage because it allows them to pivot into an area quickly. And I would imagine the non-descript buildings are fairly easy to sell, allowing them to pivot out of areas quickly as well.
4. Their competition in remote areas is usually gas stations. While DG isn't cheap compared to Walmart or Aldi, they're often about 2/3 the price of gas stations for a lot of items.
A better middle ground at this stage could have been requiring TikTok to daily display to users (and require they confirm/accept) a message stating the indirect CPC ownership, the risk to their personal info, and the serious risk of seeing state directed disinformation campaigns. Most would still use TikTok but perhaps it might get drilled into their heads to actually question some things they see on it.
Personally think the data protection issue are overblown. The ability to influence through disinformation campaings, whether for CPC, Russia or whomever is their friend, is a way bigger thing for me.
Inspection station in my state made comment to me that EVs are failing inspection for rusted brake components because of their heavy use of regen. Add to cost of ownership.
My 2021 EV simply favors mechanical braking over regen for a short period at the start of each trip, specifically to avoid this. (Seems a trivial software feature once you have hybrid braking at all...)
I own a 2010 Prius and I've had to replace the brake pads more often than a regular car because of this, around every two years or 20k miles. I've had to replace the brake rotors twice over 80k miles, as the pads rusted and then wore it down unevenly.
Below 5mph the brakes are used, but it doesn't seem to be enough. Compared to my ICE car they always look a lot worse, and after parked for a day when it's damp have surface rust.
As another comment says, it seems like a software change could fix it by using the physical brakes more. I believe the issue is they get wet, and then don't get hot enough to dry out before parking.
> Inspection station in my state made comment to me that EVs are failing inspection for rusted brake components because of their heavy use of regen.
Are you suggesting some metal brake components have unusual rust because of disuse, where they aren't being used regularly enough for friction to "clean" their surfaces?
Otherwise I don't see how regenerative breaking could cause rust, since the braking force is supplied by electrical fields.
>>Are you suggesting some metal brake components have unusual rust because of disuse
Yes, the brake disks, especially if you drive some place where they salt the roads during the winter. I had to change the rear disks on my hybrid after two years because they started to fall apart from rust, now I have learned to do some heavy braking at the end of trips to clean and dry the disks
Funny story from today while briefly on hold for a support rep. Got the standard 'we'll call you back if you want blah blah' followed by - I kid not - "you're estimated wait time for the next representative is 0.58333333 minutes"
At the end of the call I suggested if she can log a problem for IT to include this and that they should either round up or use seconds (I suspect it was 35 seconds)
We had this issue with time estimates at work. JIRA field was minutes, which got printed as fractional hours elsewhere. Not good if you put 20 minutes. So suggestion was to use 15 minute intervals, but I pointed out that as long as you used multiples of 3 you'd get 2 digit results, so I'd round to multiples of 3 instead
Those are ridiculously fine grained tasks (or very precise estimations)?
Anything that takes less than an eg half an hour, I would probably just do, instead of making a ticket and an estimation. But I guess some companies are more bureaucratic than others?
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