161 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2024
    1. here's a way to do direct to 00:16:46 Consumer sell and can make some money and don't just be like so worried about being on the music platform streaming and now you're diluted because the AI

      for - new music sales model - direct to consumer - helps mitigate AI music

    1. for - paper

      paper - title: Carbon Consumption Patterns of Emerging Middle Class - year: 2020 - authors: Never et al.

      summary - This is an important paper that shows the pathological and powerful impact of the consumer story to produce a continuous stream of consumers demanding a high carbon lifestyle - By defining success in terms of having more stuff and more luxurious stuff, it sets the class transition up for higher carbon consumption - The story is socially conditioned into every class, ensuring a constant stream of high carbon emitters. - It provides the motivation to - escape poverty into the lower middle class - escape the lower middle class into the middle class - escape the middle class into the middle-upper class - escape the middle-upper class into the upper class - With each transition, average carbon emissions rise - Unless we change this fundamental story that measures success by higher and higher levels of material consumption, along with their respectively higher carbon footprint, we will not be able to stay within planetary boundaries in any adequate measure - The famous Oxfam graphs that show that - 10% of the wealthiest citizens are responsible for 50% of all emissions - 1% of the wealthiest citizens are responsible for 16% of all emissions, equivalent to the bottom 66% of emissions - but it does not point out that the consumer story will continue to create this stratification distribution

      from - search - google - research which classes aspire to a high carbon lifestyle? - https://www.google.com/search?q=research+which+classes+aspire+to+a+high+carbon+lifestyle%3F&oq=&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCQgGECMYJxjqAjIJCAAQIxgnGOoCMgkIARAjGCcY6gIyCQgCECMYJxjqAjIJCAMQIxgnGOoCMgkIBBAjGCcY6gIyCQgFECMYJxjqAjIJCAYQIxgnGOoCMgkIBxAjGCcY6gLSAQk4OTE5ajBqMTWoAgiwAgE&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 - search results returned of salience - Carbon Consumption Patterns of Emerging Middle Classes- This discussion paper aims to help close this research gap by shedding light on the lifestyle choices of the emerging middle classes in three middle-income ... - https://www.idos-research.de/uploads/media/DP_13.2020.pdf

  2. May 2024
    1. Walk into store to buy bread, get to till, no you MUST buy 1 kilogram of fillet steak as well so that the average price of the goods you buy is more than what the bread costs, which is the only thing you need. Leave bread, walk out. It does not matter how good you explain it, buyers do not understand how you have an item on the shelf you are not willing to sell for the price you are advertising it at, or for which you need a degree in mathematics to work out how many you must put in a cart before you can, well, pay for it at checkout. I would rather BL take this away altogether. You already have minimum buys to avoid small orders, you can already set a minimum lot quantity for purchase. Why give an impression that an item can ship by itself, when you as the seller is not willing to sell it like that? It confuses buyers when sellers willfully shows prices for goods they are not willing to sell at. Rather suggest, if sellers really want to use this, that the quantities the buyer wants cannot be added to the cart unless the minimum average is met automatically. That way the cart is managed for the buyer and nobody has to know the why and the wherefores of why an item cannot be bought for the price it is listed at.
  3. Feb 2024
  4. Dec 2023
  5. Oct 2023
  6. Aug 2023
  7. Apr 2023
    1. Based on yesterday's discussion at Dan Allosso's Book Club, we don't include defense spending into the consumer price index for calculating inflation or other market indicators. What other things (communal goods) aren't included into these measures, but which potentially should be to take into account the balance of governmental spending versus individual spending. It seems unfair that individual sectors, particularly those like defense contracting which are capitalistic in nature, but which are living on governmental rent extraction, should be free from the vagaries of inflation?

      Throwing them into the basket may create broader stability for the broader system and act as a brake via feedback mechanisms which would push those corporations to work for the broader economic good, particularly when they're taking such a large piece of the overall pie.

      Similarly how might we adjust corporate tax rates with respect to the level of inflation to prevent corporate price gouging during times of inflation which seems to be seen in the current 2023 economic climate. Workers have seen some small gains in salary since the pandemic, but inflationary pressures have dramatically eaten into these taking the gains and then some back into corporate coffers. The FED can increase interest rates to effect some change, but this doesn't change corporate price gouging in any way, tax or other policies will be necessary to do this.

  8. Mar 2023
    1. Sustainable consumption scholars offer several explanations forwhy earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers falter when itcomes to translating their values into meaningful impact.
      • Paraphrase
      • Claim
        • earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers cannot translate their values into meaningful impact.
      • Evidence
      • “the shading and distancing of commerce” Princen (1997) is an effect of information assymetry.
        • producers up and down a supply chain can hide the negative social and environmental impacts of their operations, putting conscientious consumers at a disadvantage. //
      • this is a result of the evolution of alienation accelerated by the industrial revolution that created the dualistic abstractions of producers and consumers.
      • Before that, producers and consumers lived often one and the same in small village settings
      • After the Industrial Revolution, producers became manufacturers with imposing factories that were cutoff from the general population
      • This set the conditions for opaqueness that have plagued us ever since. //

      • time constraints, competing values, and everyday routines together thwart the rational intentions of well-meaning consumers (Røpke 1999)

      • assigning primary responsibility for system change to individual consumers is anathema to transformative change (Maniates 2001, 2019)
      • This can be broken down into three broad categories of reasons:

        • Rebound effects
          • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=jevon%27s+paradox
          • increases in consumption consistently thwart effciency-driven resource savings across a wide variety of sectors (Stern 2020). -sustainability scholars increasingly critique “effciency” both as:
            • a concept (Shove 2018)
            • as a form of“weak sustainable consumption governance” (Fuchs and Lorek 2005).
          • Many argue that, to be successful, effciency measures must be accompanied by initiatives that limit overall levels of consumption, that is, “strong sustainable consumption governance.
        • Attitude-behavior gap

        • Behavior-impact gap

    2. The resulting focus on saving the world as a consumer, onegreen-lifestyle action at a time, blocks inspirational avenues to work-ing collectively as citizens toward the good life.

      // key observation

    3. People cannot reason and weigh every consumer decision every timethey act. Most of the hundreds of small decisions we make are basedon daily routines. We simply would not be able to function otherwise.And our routines, in turn, are strongly infuenced by their social andmaterial contexts. Time, societal norms of comfort and appropriatebehavior, and fnancial structures, all play a role here. Breaking rou-tines and practices requires far more than the provision of informationabout products and product use. It requires a change in the institu-tions and structures supporting them.

      // argument against consumer sovereignty

    4. Another is strate-gic coordination: a great many consumers must make the same productchoices at the same time, with persistence. But this requires a level ofdiligence, focus, conviction, and resistance to greenwashing that doesnot emerge spontaneously. It comes from collective action, most oftenpromoted and organized by civil society organizations.

      // - indeed - coordinated collective action is what is missing here

    5. The starkest danger of the “consumer in charge” narrative is that itdepoliticizes the challenges before us, at a time when a citizen politicsis most called for. With consumers in charge, only the softest and mostbenevolent policy interventions are required from governments, likeproviding consumers with information on the environmental and so-cial characteristics of products, and information on how to use theseproducts in a better (especially more effcient) way. For these reasons,the consumer sovereignty narrative is attractive to politicians, as itshifts responsibility away from producers, retailers, and those taskedwith regulating commercial activity

      // - this, however, can be transformed through coordination. After all, it's the same principle of having enough people in consensus - one is in the economic arena, the other is in the political (voting). We can and should do both

    6. The advent of a consumer sovereignty/individual control narrativeparallels the re-emergence, in the early 1980s, of neo-liberalism, a po-litical and social philosophy that emphasizes individual responsibilityfor larger social conditions.

      // - consumer sovereignty, neoliberalism and democracy have elements in common of the individual having some form of power to determine collective decision

  9. Nov 2022
    1. Unlike a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, the digital yuan is issued directly by China’s central bank and does not depend on a blockchain. The currency has the same value as its analog equivalent, the yuan or RMB, and for consumers the experience of using the digital yuan is not that different from any other mobile payment system or credit card. But on the back end, payments are not routed through a bank and can sometimes move without transaction fees, jumping from one e-wallet to another as easily as cash changes hands.

      Not a cryptocurrency, not a bank card

  10. Sep 2022
    1. The processing systems fee is generally fairly low, around one 10th of a percent of the total purchase. There's a large market the merchant can choose from, which can keep this cost down. Then there's the credit card's network fee, around a quarter of a percent. And the largest fee of the system also happens here. The interchange fee, it's usually around two to 3%.

      Credit card fees

      The interchange fee is variable, and is paid to the bank. If a merchant wants to accept a network's cards, it must accept all of the variable interchange fees.

    1. Bank branches are no longer self-contained entities. They are feeders into a lather conglomeration of services intended to draw in new customers and sell new services to existing customers.

    1. Fraud is an unavoidable part of commerce in a society that values any sort of lower friction transactions. Companies accept differing amounts of fraud depending on the nature of the business. Fraud prevention and punishment is more external to government than other types of crime.

  11. Aug 2022
  12. Jul 2022
    1. From society’s perspective, the wide availability of cheap credit is generally considered a good thing, as it allows for productive investment, consumption smoothing over consumers’ lifetimes, and a form of risk-pooling not entire dissimilar to public support or insurance programs. (It is underappreciated that consumer credit is, effectively, one of the largest welfare programs in the United States. Chargeoffs of e.g. credit card debt effectively transfer a private benefit to the defaulting consumer in return for a diffuse cost to the rest of the public, mediated by the financial industry; the net amount of them is almost as much as food stamps.)

      Consumer credit as a form of societal risk pooling

  13. Jun 2022
    1. What happens in Indonesia when a textile manufacturer illegally dumps dye waste!

      This is an example of the manufacturer / consumer dualism created by the Industrial Revolution. Since manufacturers have become a separate layer that no longer exist as part of the community, as artisans once did, along with globalized capitalism, the consumer does not know the life history of the product being consumed. The sensory bubble limits what a consumer can directly know.

      One answer is to promote a trend back to local and artisan production. Relocalizing production can empower consumers to inspect producers of the products they consume, holding them accountable.

      Another answer is to develop globalized trust networks of producers who are truly ethical.

      Cosmolocal production has networks by the commons nature can promote such values.

  14. Mar 2022
    1. it’s even less clear if the current war in Ukraine will speed up stalled federal climate policy. But the war might convince some consumers to retrofit their own homes.

      Community scale efforts can play a big role now....mobilise the commons!

  15. Feb 2022
  16. Jan 2022
  17. Oct 2021
    1. Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.

      In retrospect, the dynamic I'm addressing here is bascially My Whole Shit. That is - one of (if not the) primary forces that have compelled The Psalms.

  18. Sep 2021
  19. Aug 2021
  20. Jul 2021
  21. Mar 2021
  22. Feb 2021
  23. Jan 2021
    1. A big app will have lots of components compared to regular html elements and these need to be wrapped before being fed to a slot, every single time on the call site
    2. Ahh ok, it's a regular let. It's too bad it has to be so intrusive on the call sites.
  24. Oct 2020
  25. Aug 2020
  26. Jul 2020
  27. Jun 2020
  28. May 2020
    1. You don’t need to have any reason for exercising this right — you can simply change your mind
    2. Consumers located in the EU are also protected by a default legal 2 year guarantee on products purchased at no additional cost. Here again: 2-years is the statutory minimum
    3. EU consumer law applies to contracts or other legal relationships between consumers (on one side) and professionals, businesses, companies on the other (B2C). It does not apply to B2B (e.g. a supermarket places an order with its fruit supplier) or C2C relationships (e.g. I sell my old bike over eBay).
    4. In the US, there is no one national law in regards to returns/refunds for purchases made online as in most cases, this is implemented on a state-by-state basis, however, under several state-laws, if no refund or return notice was made visible to consumers before purchase, consumers are automatically granted extended return/refund rights. In cases where the item purchased is defective, an implied warranty may apply in lieu of a written warranty
  29. Apr 2020
    1. When Casper filed its S-1 in January, analysts, investors, and business nerds descended on the document like vultures. Not only was it a precarious moment to take a startup public, it was the first time anyone could actually access the raw numbers under the hood of a DTC. “The economics work better if Casper sent you a mattress for free, stuffed with $300,” jabbed NYU Stern marketing professor and tech doomsayer Scott Galloway. “This appears to be Casper’s business,” tweeted number-crunching Atlantic columnist Derek Thompson. “Buy mattress at $400. Sell at $1,000. Refund/return 20% of them. Keep $400, on avg. Then spend $290 of that on ads/marketing and $270 on admin (finance, HR, IT). Lose $160. Repeat.”

      Summary of Casper's business model

  30. Jan 2020
  31. Nov 2019
  32. Jun 2019
    1. The value of organic imports during Jan.-Aug. was up 25 percent compared to the same period in 2016, the trade data showed, while the value of organic exports during the first eight months was up 14 percent. Last year, the U.S. organic products trade deficit hit nearly $1.2 billion, its highest level ever, with U.S. organic imports reaching $1.7 billion, while U.S. organic exports came in at $547.6 million. Check out the Top 10 U.S. organic imported and exported commodities for 2016.
    1. , demand for organic food is growing so fast that consumer demand is outstripping some domestic supplies. Once a net exporter of organic products, the United States now spends more than $1 billion a year to import organic food, according to the USDA, and the ratio of imported to exported products is now about 8-to-1.
  33. Feb 2019
    1. As with neoliberalism more generally, New Public Management is invisible, part of a new “common sense” that has somehow become hegemonic, whereby the “entrepreneurial spirit” has infused the public sector, leading to “businesslike government”. As with the claims of neoliberalism more generally as to its positive outputs in terms of prosperity, NPM has never been shown to have been successful even in its own terms. NPM “introduced punishments and rewards to produce better services with lesser staff. Instead of having freed energies and creativity of employees formerly shackled by their bureaucratic turfs, NPM reforms have bound energies into theatrical audit performances at the cost of work and killed creativity in centralizing resources and hollowing out professional autonomy... Fundamental deprivation of the legitimacy of public employees . . .has traumatized many most-committed employees and driven others toward a Soviet-type double standard.” (Juha Siltala, New Public Management : The evidence-based worst practice?, Administration; Vol. 45, No. 4.; 2013 pp. 468-493) Sekera quotes Christopher Pollitt et al., who “after compiling a database of 518 studies of NPM in Europe, determined that “more than 90% of what are seen by experts as the most significant and relevant studies contain no data at all on outcomes” and that of the 10% that had outcomes information, only 44% of those, or 4% of the total, found any improvements in terms of outcomes.” But in the end, the point of NPM is less that of measureable outcomes, and more that of the ideological victory of turning the public and its good into customers exercising their “choices” (see tax revolt example in Duggan), along of course with the radical disempowering of public administration workers and their unions, instituting “cost savings” by cutting their real income and putting more and more of the public sector’s production directly into the profit-making market.
  34. Nov 2017
    1. SubscribePattern allows you to use a regex to specify topics of interest

      This can remove the need to reload the kafka writers in order to take consume messages.

      regex - "topic-ua-*"

    2. The cache for consumers has a default maximum size of 64. If you expect to be handling more than (64 * number of executors) Kafka partitions, you can change this setting via spark.streaming.kafka.consumer.cache.maxCapacity.

      You might need this for keeping track of all partitions consumed.

  35. Jun 2017
    1. You measure the throughout that you can achieve on a single partition for production (call it p) and consumption (call it c). Let’s say your target throughput is t.

      t = throughput (QPS) p = single partition for production c = consumption

    1. In merced, we used the low-level simple consumer and wrote our own work dispatcher to get precise control.

      difference between merced and secor

    1. A better alternative is at least once message delivery. For at least once delivery, the consumer reads data from a partition, processes the message, and then commits the offset of the message it has processed. In this case, the consumer could crash between processing the message and committing the offset and when the consumer restarts it will process the message again. This leads to duplicate messages in downstream systems but no data loss.

      This is what SECOR does.

    2. By electing a new leader as soon as possible messages may be dropped but we will minimized downtime as any new machine can be leader.

      two scenarios to get the leader back: 1.) Wait to bring the master back online. 2.) Or elect the first node that comes back up. But in this scenario if that replica partition was a bit behind the master then the time from when this replica went down to when the master went down. All that data is Lost.

      SO there is a trade off between availability and consistency. (Durability)

    3. keep in mind that these guarantees hold as long as you are producing to one partition and consuming from one partition.

      This is very important a 1-to-1 mapping between writer and reader with partition. If you have more producers per partition or more consumers per partition your consistency is going to go haywire

    1. On every received heartbeat, the coordinator starts (or resets) a timer. If no heartbeat is received when the timer expires, the coordinator marks the member dead and signals the rest of the group that they should rejoin so that partitions can be reassigned. The duration of the timer is known as the session timeout and is configured on the client with the setting session.timeout.ms. 

      Time to live for the consumers. If the heartbeat doesn't reach the co-ordindator in this duration then the co-ordinator redistributes the partitions to the remaining consumers in the consumer group.

    2. The high watermark is the offset of the last message that was successfully copied to all of the log’s replicas.

      High Watermark: messages copied over to log replicas

    3. Kafka new Client which uses a different protocol for consumption in a distributed environment.

    4. Kafka scales topic consumption by distributing partitions among a consumer group, which is a set of consumers sharing a common group identifier.

      Topic consumption is distributed among a list of consumer group.

    1. Kafka consumer offset management protocol to keep track of what’s been uploaded to S3

      consumers keep track of what's written and where it left off by looking at kafka consumer offsets rather than checking S3 since S3 is an eventually consistent system.

    2. Data lost or corrupted at this stage isn’t recoverable so the greatest design objective for Secor is data integrity.

      data loss in S3 is being mitigated.

    1. incidents are an unavoidable reality of working with distributed systems, no matter how reliable. A prompt alerting solution should be an integral part of the design,

      see how it can hook into the current logging mechanism

    2. Consumers in this group are designed to be dead-simple, performant, and highly resilient. Since the data copied verbatim, no code upgrades are required to support new message types.

      exactly what we want

  36. May 2017
    1. The Kafka cluster retains all published records—whether or not they have been consumed—using a configurable retention period. For example, if the retention policy is set to two days, then for the two days after a record is published, it is available for consumption, after which it will be discarded to free up space. Kafka's performance is effectively constant with respect to data size so storing data for a long time is not a problem.

      irrespective of the fact that the consumer has consumed the message that message is kept in kafka for the entire retention policy duration.

      You can have two or more consumer groups: 1 -> real time 2 -> back up consumer group

    1. Consumer Federation of America

      This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

    2. Consumer Federation of America

      This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

    3. Consumer Federation of America

      This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

    1. For a topic with replication factor N, we will tolerate up to N-1 server failures without losing any records committed to the log.

      for Eg for a given topic there are 11 brokers/servers and for each topic the replication factor is 6. That means the topic will start loosing data if more than 5 brokers go down.

    2. The way consumption is implemented in Kafka is by dividing up the partitions in the log over the consumer instances so that each instance is the exclusive consumer of a "fair share" of partitions at any point in time. This process of maintaining membership in the group is handled by the Kafka protocol dynamically. If new instances join the group they will take over some partitions from other members of the group; if an instance dies, its partitions will be distributed to the remaining instances.

      The coolest feature: this way all you need to do is add new consumers in a consumer group to auto scale per topic

    3. Consumers label themselves with a consumer group name

      maintain separate consumer group per tenant basis. Helps to scale out when we have more load per tenant.

  37. Sep 2016
    1. A recent Hewlett-Packard printer software update changed the printers so they would not work with third-party ink cartridges. Worse, the change was made as part of a security update.

      https://act.eff.org/action/tell-hp-say-no-to-drm Petition HP to fix this wrongdoing, and promise not to repeat it. They are also being asked to promise not to invoke the DMCA against security researchers who find vulnerabilities in their products.

  38. Feb 2016
  39. Nov 2015
    1. If this were true for modern society, it has multiplied in ourage of social media, in which control and value are indissolubly linked to the machine ensemblesthat comprise contemporary digital infrastructures.

      I have studied in my International Marketing course here how social media is a cultural institution in society and has an extremely powerful influence on societal structures regarding preferences, levels of acceptance of products/technology, and how consumers are influenced to use them.

  40. Aug 2015