Interesting Links for 04-01-2012

[andrewducker]

• This is What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers to Thousands of Kids
  (tags: art children )
• The US ends its pro-democracy pretense
  (tags: politics usa iran egypt democracy middle east israel )
• Some science on why dieting doesn't work (and what you need to do to make it work).
  (tags: diet weight health )
• 'Big banks make their money from optimism' - an interview with an investment strategist
  (tags: banking finance investment )
• Killer instinct - the financial company that deliberately hired psychopaths.
  (tags: economics psychopath psychology finance banking )
• Paypal forces buyer to destroy disputed violin worth thousands of dollars
  (tags: paypal violin )
• Top Ten Cutest Photos of 2011
  (tags: photos cute 2011 )
• The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value
  (tags: business economics management capitalism finance value )
• Mineways - 3D printing of Minecraft landscapes/objects.
  (tags: minecraft printing 3d )
• Steam reaches 5 million concurrent user mark
  So, PC gaming still not dead? I wonder what the comparative figures for the 360 and PS3 would be.
  (tags: steam games computergames )
• I Have Seen the Future of Retail…And It Doesn't Have Cashiers
  Of course, this is about the low end of the market. Where people are prepared to pay higher prices there will be assistants there to make it easy for them.
  (tags: business shopping technology )

Comments

[buddleia]

That NYT article isn't remotely scientific. It's a long wail about how mean human bodies are to people who want to fit a societally approved model of beauty. Nowhere is it mentioned that a lot of recent studies refute the thin=always healthy and fat=always unhealthy model. Since it has now been fairly conclusively proved that the only way for a fat person to be a thin person is to adopt the psychological and eating habits typical of someone with a serious eating disorder, perhaps it might have been more helpful of the writer to look at the Health At Every Size movement (HAES).

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Cashiers are still much more efficient than self-scanning for large shopping trolleys, though my local Asda, which is much, much bigger than this shop, is self-scan only now. Waitrose experimented with scanning as you go round the shop, but we found it tedious.

But seriously; the future of lower-end retail doesn't just have no cashiers, it has no shops.

[andrewducker]

I'd love to know what percentage of grocery shopping is delivered.

Also, Amazon is going to get a _lot_ less convenient for me soon, when Julie gets a job and isn't in all day.

Hmm - I'm now seeing a synergy, whereby Amazon delivers to my local Sainsbury, who then bring me my parcels along with my weekly groceries!

(Or, you know, hold onto it until I can pick it up, as I only live five minutes around the corner.)

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Here's the model I think will work. Relatively local warehouses, that *store* and *deliver* groceries and household items (like Ocado now), and which stock the sort of stuff you find on a high street. You schedule a regular delivery from that which are available evenings, nights, weekends, or day, and priced according to demand (there is now exactly one Ocado slot in the week that's reliably free, and it's also one that suits us well), and add things to that order, like with Ocado now. You might need shorter last-edit times; for Ocado it's normally last thing the previous night at present. For 'long tail' physical items, national/regional warehouses work better -- but they ship to local warehouses and put the things in your next available regular order. Not *actually* sure there is any such thing as a long tail physical thing, because the obvious things are books and music, and they're going digital only at the lower end. High end retail stays; that's what you're paying for. Convenience stores stay but with much higher prices. Local markets/pound shops stay with much lower prices. Note that some shops already do both of these at once which is why they're so successful. Wall retail is developed -- you point your cameraphone at pictures of things and they turn up either at the next regular delivery or the one after.

But the key part of this is the replacement of royal-mail-style mail order with a regional redistribution network of people who *already deliver to you*.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, and if you live too remotely for a grocery store to deliver then you're screwed, and start to pay the market cost of getting stuff to you. Unless you actually *work on the land* then either suck it up or go live in a town and stop whining.

[andrewducker]

I see a niche for local mini-warehouses that allow people to have orders delivered for pickup.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Of course, we have one of those, run by the post office.

[andrewducker]

Does it allow for third-parties to drop off crates of food though?

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The post office don't let courier companies use it, and a fair few companies don't make it clear whether they use royal mail or not.

[andrewducker]

Makes a lot of sense to me. I wonder why Ocado is lacking in slots, you'd think that if they were busy they'd get more vans and drivers in.

Looking at my local Sainsbury's they're charging £3.50-£5.50, depending on the slot. Frankly, I'm happy enough to pop in and pick things up, but if I lived further away then I'd get food delivered.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I don't mean free as in speech slots, I mean free as in beer slots. Ocado slots are typically £4.99 -£6.99, but a couple of the late night ones are sometimes free as in £0.00 -- and they're our favourites as we're normally home, kids in bed, etc.

[andrewducker]

Aaah, gotcha. That makes more sense, and a good move on their part. Particularly as Ocado are at the premium end of things, so can more easily afford the overhead of the delivery.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Personally I bloody hate going into supermarkets (the lighting and aircon bug me and finding what I want is often hard). Ocado (other delivery companies exist) saved me from all that :-p

The great thing about food delivery is that it comes when *I* want it, not when the post office want it (which is invariably when I am out); it would be nice if my post could go to the Ocado warehouse and show up with my food... (actually my stuff mostly gets delivered to work these days, which is much more handy; works poorly for very large things though).

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

John Lewis will deliver whatever you like to your nearest Waitrose. Obviously this is only an upside for people whose nearer Waitrose is a) close and b) closer than their nearest JL.

I get food in 1 hr slots from Ocado (annual delivery pass), small parcels delivered to work, large parcels delivered to the dry cleaners on the corner and milk and veg boxes left on the doorstep.

[andrewducker]

I'd happily pay my local corner shop to hold parcels for me, if it was an option.

My local JL is closer than my nearest Waitrose too, but neither are as handy as things arriving at home.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Connect Plus is the delivery system you want. Though we don't have a shop for it very close -- and I need to go and get a package from there.

[naath.livejournal.com]

In Cambridge the JL is in the town centre (ENPARKING) and the Waitrose next to the park&ride in Trumpington... they run a van between the two so you can get your stuff into your car easier (if you have a car etc. etc.). It's quite cunning really (but not for me, 'cos I don't have a car and Trumpington is Far Away).

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Waitrose experimented with scanning as you go round the shop, but we found it tedious.

Our Waitrose still does it, and we use it in preference to going to a cashier (we can pack our shopping bags as we shop, so no chance for frozen items to defrost, or for a bag of potatoes to get dumped on the eggs). It also means that we can weigh our loose veg, dump the veg in the veg bag, scan the barcode label and stick it on the back of the shopping list. No extra plastic bags for us!

Self-scan tills, on the other hand, are the work of Satan, and should be put to the torch and the ground sown with salt lest the evil persist. I've never yet found one that works well, and they have user interfaces that are uniformly dire. Most also treat you like a fucking criminal ("place the 38p box of paracetamol, weighing maybe 10g, in the bagging area, where we can fail to register it so that you then need to wait for a staff member to verify your purchase")

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Ah, well, it was treating us like criminals that put off the Waitrose system for us -- invariably bringing us up for a 'random' check whenever we'd done a particularly large and fractious order -- culminating with 'randomly' rechecking our Christmas groceries. At which point I explained that to them that if we were defrauding them they would be able to tell because our grocery bill would be *lower* than usual not *higher* than usual. Idiots.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

We've been using the system for about four years now, and I think that we've averaged about one rescan each year, but they're getting further apart. They even waived the rescan on the 2010 xmas shop, and we haven't had a rescan in over nine months.

This I can handle. What I find unacceptable is a self-scan terminal that insists on every object being placed in a carrier bag on their scales (or alternatively, for you to press the "I'm not going to put the next item on your scales" button after every scan) because, heavens forbid, you might be shoplifting paracetamol worth less than 50p.

[fub.livejournal.com]

Our local supermarket has self-scanning-in-the-shop as well, and we love it. We haven't used a cashier since.

The terminals they use aren't half bad: scan your membership card (which you also need to get the scanner), choose your payment method, and then use your debit card to pay. Sometimes you will get selected for a check, but since the area with the self-scan terminals is pretty compact and there are always three people on call who scan only five items, that's pretty fast and painless.

I don't want to go back to using a traditional cashier, for one.

I like PC games

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Mouse control seems more natural, and my study is set up for looking at the screen.

Re: I like PC games

[andrewducker]

Ditto on both counts.

(Well, for many games. Definitely mouse/keyboard for shooters/strategy games. For Arkham Asylum I have my 360 wireless controller and a USB dongle thingy.)

[tysolna]

I have been playing the violin since I was seven. I own a violin, and if someone asked me what item I would save out of a burning house if I could take only one, it would be the violin every time.

The forced destruction of a musical instrument saddens me beyond words. What makes me even madder though is that the purchaser went along with this and destroyed it.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

OK, reading closely, what happened here is that the violin is almost certainly an *old* fake, but has value in its own right and despite that. So Paypal has applied its rules correctly -- but the rules are inflexible and stupid, and no doubt they'll be refunding the seller quite soon.

[tysolna]

My violin is an "old fake" too - it says on the label that it's an Amati, but it is actually a (high quality) fake made about 200 or so years ago by a Northern European violin manufacturer. So because of those rules, this violin which was worth £2500 20 years ago would have to be destroyed.
The rules are indeed inflexible and stupid.

I'll stop ranting now. :)

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

re: Steam concurrent users

I don't know if Xbox has released its record, but I do know that a couple of individual games have breached the million concurrent-players mark on Xbox Live. (Mainly the big shooters like the Halo and Call of Duty franchises, usually during their respective launch weeks.) XBL also claims 35 million subscribers as of last December, though I don't know if they've ever publicly distinguished how many of these are the lower-service free accounts and how many are Gold accounts that can play online.

-- Steve doesn't follow the Playstation 3 figures nearly as closely, so he won't comment to avoid inadvertantly saying something ridiculous.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, hard to tell how many are active, or how many total Steam has.

21st century shopping

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

One of the keys to the big box store model is externalizing the cost of the last ten miles' transportation. Instead of buying from a small, local store, the small local stores are driven out of business by big boxes with less service and raw warehouse shelving.

Peak oil is ending the viability of that model. I don't know what will replace it, but I've been watching. Online ordering with semi-local delivery may be an early contender. The big fabric store a couple blocks from me now receives packages from J. C. Penny -- just like my mother going to Wards or Sears to pick up her catalog order when I was little . . .

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The US has not been pro-democracy for quite some time. During WW2 it was anti-Imperial (in the sense of the Nazis, Japan and also Britain) rather than pro-democracy, then by the 60s the US was already propping up dictators in the carribean and latin america who happily murdered & tortured their way to power and overthrowing democratic governments to install said dictators.

Here's a funny thing - here's the demands that the US made to the Taliban

Deliver to the U.S. all of the leaders of Al-Qaeda
Release all foreign nationals that have been "unjustly imprisoned"
Protect foreign journalists, diplomats, and aid workers
Close immediately every terrorist training camp
Hand over every terrorist and their supporters to appropriate authorities
Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps for inspection

Aside from the first one, and substituting UN for US in the last one, these are all things that people are/should have been demanding of the US since the end of 2001 if not before.

It's nice that they've stopped pretending. I'm (relatively speaking) more comfortable with a country openly saying "hell yeah we torture people and protect our own interests with force" than pretending they're something else.