I use the Ikea lights and bridge, although mine is a few years old at this point. Everything just works and I've maybe had 1 issue in just over 4 years. Easily integrates with either Google Home or HomeKit or HA. My only complaint is (my) bridge needs hardwire ethernet access and each bridge only supports 5 devices. I bought one of the wireless physical switches which seemed like it would come in handy, but the battery died pretty quick. Not a big deal though as I never used it anyway, but having the option was nice.
Any light you want to independently control is a device. So yes, each bulb is a device. But that was with the TRADFRI, which it seems they don't sell anymore. It looks like the DIRIGERA supports up to 100 devices though, so probably nothing to worry about. Feels like I probably bought the first gen of their smart products.
Echoing the sentiment that a gov website asking for location permissions is off-putting. Especially a gov website about cyber security. Yes, it seems to be for the feature that matches you to local courses, but all courses listed are online. I would expect more from CISA.
You missed the biggest point - North America is a capitalist society and there's no money in any of these solutions. There's profit in deforestation. There's profit in using pesticides. There's profit in razing forests to expand suburbs. But there's no profit in maintaining a natural and healthy habitat for the creatures that live in the areas we want to exploit.
Do local solutions work? Yes, they absolutely do. I've been working with state and local foresters on a habitat improvement project on land that I own and it is producing real results. Since 2018 I've been converting ag land to forest and meadows. I've planted over 6000 trees with my own hands and constructed and curated scrapes (ponds) and meadow areas with local grasses and flowers. It took a couple years but the turnaround is evident. I have families of ducks living on my land that never used to be there before. The area has become popular with migrating geese and sandhill cranes. I have a healthy array of woodland creatures who took up residence including a family of bobcats. Local wildflowers have attracted and given a home to more bees than I've ever seen out on that property. By all measures my project is a success and I'll continue it for as long as I can, but all monies that fund this come out of my own pocket. I can enroll in the state's managed forest program to receive tax breaks on my property, but that's about it. I could solicit donations and look for grants to help foot the bill, but even then I'd still be in the red. The only ROI I will get from these actions is the belief I'm doing my part for a social cause. And just like governments or social groups or even corporations, when times get tight the feel-good programs and dollars are the first to get cut since they don't show a return that can be expressed on a balance sheet. If I reach a point where I can't pay for more trees or spend time planting them, I just won't plant more trees. I have 42 more acres of trees to plant but I also won't starve myself and my family to make it happen. I've talked to lots of people about the options I have for funding this work but it all comes down to either pay for it yourself or take charity.
Everyone wants to save the trees. Everyone wants to save the birds and the bees and all the furry woodland creatures but no one wants to pay for it. You're not fighting against goodwill, you're fighting against capitalism and you'll always lose because there are no objective returns on investment for the preservation of natural habitat.
What exactly in the supply chain would someone notice? For those who were either too young or didn't exist at the time, 1982 was a completely different world. You know the cellophane seal around the bottle tops on everything from food to medicine bottles? Those didn't exist. The metalized vacuum safety seal on the inside of the bottle that's a pain to pull off? Those didn't exist. Holographic or numbered tamper seals? Yeah, no one had even heard of those yet. Real-time tracking of a lot ID to trace a product all the way from primary ingredient supplier to manufacture to the retail shelf? Ha! The only way to verify where your products were in the world is if you were standing in front of it. I'm not saying it was the wild west, but I'm also not saying it wasn't. Tamper seals and smart supply chain management didn't exist. Those Tylenol bottles could have been tampered with anywhere - the manufacturing facility, in a shipping warehouse, in transit, in a retail store's stock room or even right on the shelf. Those bottles could have been tampered with literally anywhere along the journey and no one would have known because unless you caught the culprit red-handed, there would have been no indication that anything was amiss. We take food and medicine tampering very seriously today because of this incident in 1982, which is the only silver lining in that tragedy.
If I had a nickel for every time I've been pitched an app/system like that over the past couple years, well, then I'd have plenty of money to pay for news subscriptions. It's a good concept, it just needs a champion big enough to build a standard process that is elegant and painless and then onboard the largest news sources to kick-start the ecosystem. The hardest parts will be money transmission and getting everyone to agree to your standards and processes (in a way that gets them paid and doesn't steer potential paying eyes off to a competitor because you want to build a platform or marketplace instead of an add-on payment tool). Of course with all the new things happening in fintech, this type of system is not that hard to build today.
Technology is a non-issue IMO. People don't want micropayments for the most part. Some people tolerated "midi-payments" for songs and mobile apps to some degree but even that has mostly migrated to subscriptions and "free to play" apps with in-app purchases.
People don't want micropayments because even now in 2023 the entire payments industry seems to not be able to design a payment flow that doesn't suck. The UX on almost all payments is just terrible. Being gated behind login flows, awkward input forms, TOU acceptance dialogues, receipt and confirmation screens, and being bounced back and forth between the store and third-party systems is just an overall awful experience. I don't care how much something costs, if it takes me more time to pay for an article than it does to read it, I'm out. I still remember the very first time I used Google Pay on my Android in a physical store as it was such a magical experience. I actually stopped myself twice on the way out of the store to do a double-take at my receipt to confirm I had actually paid - it was that fast and easy. Micropayments need that magic and speed. If the only thing standing between me and an article I'm interested in is a FaceID auth, that's very acceptable. This flow can be done today, it's just that no one is willing to strip the process down to its most basic form. If you can solve that first step then there's only 99 more problems to go.
I think it's actually because people don't like spending money, even very small amounts, for things they have decided fall in the 'free' category. As previous poster said, it's a monkey problem, not a tech problem.
Yet, "free to play" games are ludicrously profitable. Surely a large part of that is addiction, but there also is a tech problem here. If paying for a newspaper article has lots of friction (sign up here, confirm email, credit card, 2 factor confirmation, now you have a subscription instead of just buying; cancelation only by carrier pigeon at midnight), then no way.
That is also why the Google and apple appstores can charge such large fees. Sure, buying on websites and sideloading are possible but much higher friction -> many customers simply won't bother.
I don't think so, the media has been pretty resistant to providing this kind of model. If they allow you to read a single article cheaply it would mean a lot of lost subscriptions and it isn't easy to price individual pieces of content.
It’s really the credit card fees that make it non-viable. That and it’s hard to charge someone $10 to read a $.99 article, and promise them they’ll have $9 in credits they can use in the future. That and network effects.
If I had the option to pay $1 each time NYT or other sources pay-walled me out, they’d have a lot of my money.
I'm pretty sure you're in the small minority. If people were clamoring for micropayments, there's a large fintech/startup world that would find a way to make it work. (And Apple sold/sells $0.99 apps.)
Probably 4-7 dollars before you read something not worth the dollar and give up.
Would you be willing to pay for all content? Reading the first few 2 pages here would cost 60 dollars. Should you be paying to read everyone's comments?
I topped up a multi site system back in 2018 with £3, something like 10p an article. PayPal I think, but fine sat online payment cost 10% fir that or 30p, still worth it for the publisher.
Alas not enough readers used the system and it shut down. People don’t want to pay.
> It's a good concept, it just needs a champion big enough to build a standard process that is elegant and painless and then onboard the largest news sources to kick-start the ecosystem.
Micro-transactions wouldn’t eliminate ads. How many years did people buy ad filled newspapers or magazines? How about paying for cable tv that channels show ads on in between tv show segments that also do in content ad placement? You’re just describing another source of revenue for websites, not the only one.
Paid users are better target for ads, so they cost more. Users are paying to self-select them for the costly, highly targeted ads, increasing income and reducing expenses. Win-Win
> I still say the web would be better than it is now, if microtransactions had been built into protocols ASAP.
No, for dog’s sake! Microtransactions are a cancer and come with perverse incentives leading to enshitification of everything they touch. They would not solve any issue with clickbait or sensationalism. Plus, I am not going to count pennies when I read news online or manage yet another pseudo-currency.
Some kind of all-you-can-read aggregated subscription is much, much better: more reader-friendly, it comes with incentives to keep readers happy on the long term, and media don’t need to rely only on hit pieces. In fact, Apple News would be close to perfect if it weren’t siloed into its app. I’d sign up with a decent competitor in a heart beat.
> An all you can read aggregated source is pretty much micropayments with an extra step involved.
From the user’s perspective, it is one less step involved. We just have to pay x every months and not think about it. We don’t have to babysit yet another number going up or down on yet another account.
> It's not a business model media companies are typically too eager to be involved with in either case.
Yeah, and I imagine the value proposition is not great, from what we’ve seen in music streaming services. Still, for me it would be better than either paywalls or microtransactions.
We already have the Payment Request API, which is more than enough to handle this. My general view on the "process" mostly revolves around the UX from the customer's perspective. Someone needs to build a flow and say, this is how it works, take it or leave it.
You're not wrong, but that's a very one-sided view. The alternate outcome is that when the current mods abandon ship there's likely going to be many more people waiting in the wings to get their shot at modding their own sub. What other service is a perfect substitute for Reddit? The thought that most users will give up Reddit cold-turkey and stay away permanently is a bit naive. Internet use can be an addiction and addicts staying away under their own power and no alternative is unlikely. Ultimately a vacuum will be created, it will be filled with fresh bodies, and Reddit will continue along after a short period of unrest and uncertainty, with new mods running new subs.
"The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets."
I don't think most users will quit cold turkey. However breaking muscle memory is a really quick way of breaking addictions. If people can no longer use their favorite apps to check Reddit then it'll force them to make a conscious choice to download the official app and relearn their bad habits (assuming they consider using Reddit a bad habit).
If a significant portion of users (especially power users who are more likely to contribute to discussion and posting content) leave the platform then it could cause a lot of issues for the future of Reddit.
new untrained and inexperienced moderators will disrupt the site experience. The poweruse and mod community fleeing to another site will start it becoming more common among barely involved users. Its exactly what happened to digg. The site became (to quote huffman) "profit driven" and it quickly fell from grace.
Could also say it's happened at Twitter, too, outside of sports Twitter. When I had my main account with 2K followers for years engagement was pretty high and consistent. Then Twitter made sharing links to your own content impossible to drive engagement to your own content which, considering the amount of anger and virtue signaling on Twitter, caused me to use it less and less.
Then Elon bought it and it became a right wing platform for what I can only describe as fascism disguised as "free speech". I'd log in and see virtually no one over time. Granted my main account was very tech/developer heavy and those communities seem to skew left. But I decided it just made me sad to login and have to see how hollow it was.
Glad to have experienced it 2014-2016 though. That was peak Tech Twitter for me.
The whole point of reviews is to inform others on your experience. If you’re uncomfortable with others knowing you’ve been somewhere, why are you giving reviews in the first place?
I disagree. I review when I have polarizing experiences (good OR bad), or when I want to show support for a business.
I think tying a review to your google account is also good, because anonymity on the internet is generally used by people to say things they wouldn't say in the real world, often in harmful ways.
>I think tying a review to your google account is also good, because anonymity on the internet is generally used by people to say things they wouldn't say in the real world, often in harmful ways.
You're not wrong, but this is also the argument politicians use to strip you of your privacy on behalf of corporations
Generally, no, you don’t. Reviews can absolutely be positive and if you had a good experience that’s just as much motivation to leave a review. But positive or negative, that doesn’t address the issue that reviews are meant to be seen by others. It’s the entire core concept of the process.
If that was true then reviews would generally be bad, but that doesn't seem to be the case. One example is IMDB (good large dataset) where the average rating is 6.8 (wish I knew the median, but couldn't find that number).
Every single game jurisdiction that has confirmed cases of CWD or confirmed cases of CWD nearby has instituted baiting/feeding bans. The predominate reason for this is because prions can be spread through bodily fluids, including saliva, which can be passed from animal to animal when they share a common feeding source. Making corn piles and letting them eat off of that could spread CWD instead of preventing it. If you truly want to feed these deer, plant food plots. Turnips, sugar beets, and pumpkins will keep them fed through deep winter. Prions cannot be killed, not with fire or chemicals, so your sanitizing routine is pointless.
Every single game jurisdiction that has confirmed cases of CWD or confirmed cases of CWD nearby has instituted baiting/feeding bans.
Agreed but it is not banned in my area. The game warden does discourage it for the reasons you mentioned but the real undocumented reason is they don't want the obligation of paying for running a deer/elk food pantries. They do have a few of them for the elk. There are about 100 elk not far from me that they feed whereas I only have two elk on my property. I create N+2 piles of food to minimize saliva swapping but they do still move each other around at the start of winter. After a couple of weeks they stop swapping and fighting and the ones that have been here before don't even start with the swapping.
The plants you mention do not grow here in the winter outside of a greenhouse. People here that can afford to do so feed them pellets. On the other side of my county all the deer are dying because nobody is feeding them.
Never feed corn to deer, especially during the winter. It will give them diarrhea and dehydrate them. If you see someone feeding them corn try to get them to stop and use nutrient dense pellets and occasionally some oats to assist their digestion.
> The plants you mention do not grow here in the winter outside of a greenhouse
You're right, they don't. That's why you plant them in the late summer, with a mix of kale, chicory, rape, and other brassicas. The deer and elk eat the greens above ground right up until snowfall and then they dig the turnips and beets out of the ground over the winter as needed. They usually leave the pumpkins for last, but come late January they'll eat every last one.
The deer migrate away from here during the summer. I would have to plant them up in the mountains which I am not opposed to doing if they give me permission. That might be a fun little project and an excuse to do some off-roading.
My corn piles are only for squirrels, coons, beavers, possums, and squatches, and are clearly labeled as such. Any deer, found engorging itself on my corn, will be shot.
