I don’t get how plastics can reach the food. Didn’t yours have a stainless steel innerpot with a metal cover on the food side?
activistPnk
joined 1 year ago
Worked for no problem, over Tor in fact. Usually Tor gets the most hostile treatment.
I saw plenty of opportunities for enshitification and designed obsolescence.
There was an APP! So of course the natural order of things is to move more and more functionality from the physical control panel to the app. Then periodically let the app die by obsolescence. Force people to buy new phones to keep up, but then one day the new app no longer talks to old pressure cookers. Make the next version connect to the cloud for programs, and share with the IP maker everything you do. Sell that data to Amazon and Google who want to know what food you’re buying.
Then make the programs subscription based, so users have to pay a monthly fee to operate their cooker. Justify it by adding more and more programs. If someone does not pay their subscription, shut them down. Make the IP the biggest brick in the house.
I was actually disturbed that there was a Google Playstore app. Sure, it was optional, but I did not like the fact that my purchase in part financed the creation of an exclusive closed-source app exclusively available to Google and Apple patrons. It should have been an f-droid app.
Some detergents say “septic safe” on the container. My folks bought the cheapest option which did not say one way or another, so I had to call the supplier, who then said it was septic safe. It’s a shame that in the 2020s we still don’t have transparency on what we buy.
I recall someone in #chemistry (on freenode) talking about measuring detergent. He could have been a nutter, but stressed the importance of measuring the right amount, saying get a scale and weigh it according to the manual.
The manual for one of my machines is shit.. says look at the program table for detergent amount - then it’s omitted from the table. But what was useful was the manual said what the numbers meant. The lines marked “15” and “25” are for 15cm³ and 25cm³. The brim is 40cm³ and the prewash cup is 5cm³. Those are volumes, not weight. So I calculated the weight I needed at one point and IIRC it turned out that 15g of powder came out to 15cm³ (lucky me!). I don’t recall how I figured out that I needed 15g.
Anyway, these are the variables that influence the amount of detergent to use:
- load size (some manuals make that a factor, but it’s unclear why because it’s always the same amount of water in the tub. The guy in #chemistry seemed to think it was important)
- water hardness
- program selected (I have ~6 or so programs plus a ½-load button, so effectively 12; some have a prewash cycle, some not)
- type of detergent
Some of the short programs imply that slow solving detergents (tablets) should be avoided.
I still have not figured out what the ½-load button really does. Manual just says press it if you have less than half a load to save on water and power. That’s it. WTF? So I asked the manufacturer and they repeated the same useless answer, but said fill only 1 rack. WTF.. which rack? I wanted to know what the ½-load button actually changed the program so I could use it wisely. How does the machine know which rack I chose? I think the “load only one rack” answer from the manufacturer is bullshit. I’ll probably sprawl out my partial loads. The manual should be telling people how much water is used with this setting. I have no idea how it saves on energy since the program choice dictates a fixed water temp. Maybe it just comes down to the fact that it has less water to heat. In any case, I should probably use less detergent on partial loads but the manual doesn’t give the calculation or even enough info to be able to calculate it.
Too much detergent → etching (and waste of detergent)
Too little detergent → repetition needed, which wastes water, energy, and detergent
If you don’t care about etching, then using too much is probably not a big deal.
In the past couple months Google has become quite hostile toward front-ends that previously made it possible for Tor users to reach their content. And I don’t have a good connection so I can’t do videos anyway.
But indeed, it’s hard to find proper detergent. I have to go to a big store of a big grocery chain to get it. But it’s worth it on the basis of price alone. Buying a couple kilos of powder gives the most loads for the money. IIRC the pods were twice the cost of powder when comparing a promotional sales price on pods.
Regarding all the companies you’ve critized: isn’t that unfortunately the case for many if not most bigger companies?
Yes but not equally so. As an ethical consumer I choose the lesser of evils. Also, this isn’t about me. Consumers have a right to make their own choices. Most do not give a shit about ethics and the masses tend to choose the best financial deal. Some are lazy but ethical. That is, they heard a negative blurb about one supplier and they boycott that one supplier not knowing that it leads them to support a higher detriment.
Cash shipments are officially forbidden as per the FedEx ToS, no matter if the package is insured or not. If money is shipped anyhow it is not covered by the insurance.
Either way, it’s the sender’s choice whether to take the risk as they understand it. And they may not understand the risk. A wise sender would insure the package regardless of the contents. Even if the insurance would not pay out, the mere flag that a pkg has insurance has the effect of deterrance. Staff mostly only steal packages that are uninsured because those do not lead to investigation.
However, after a quick research many of the issues apply to FedEx as well.
I have been boycotting FedEx over a decade for those reasons (but note that I see nothing tying FedEx to the Better than Cash Alliance). But this isn’t about me. A republican would happily support FedEx.
Regarding acceptance of cryptocurrency or other forms of payments, I think that’s similar for sending cash in a box.
Cryptocurrency is as close as you can get in a digital mechanism that respects privacy like cash, but there is still a big difference. CC is a public ledger. Everyone sees every transaction and identities can be discovered and doxxed.
in Germany you’d be having a hard time to find a jeweler or other professional entity that accepts such a form of payment.
Luckily it’s the jeweler’s choice.
First, they won’t want to have discussions if packages are lost or valuables are partly stolen from the package.
Not sure what the point is here. Of course when a package is lost the parties involved both have a mutual interest in a claim being filed. A supplier who does not do their part in filing a claim does not get off the hook for the missing package. They still owe the recipient a package, so it is in their interest to file a claim.
Second, they don’t want to be associated with dubious businesses.
That is exactly the harm that perpetuates when you tie a tool to a stigma. It’s not okay to take away useful tools and options from non-criminals on the basis that criminals use them. We do not ban cars on the basis that they are a tool for drive-by shootings.
Furthermore, there’s a legal limit for cash payments of 10,000€ to avoid money laundering.
That’s shitty indeed because it oppresses non-criminals with a policy of forced banking.
I think to get back to the original topic, it’d be interesting to see some statistics on what percentage of the cases where police seized cash from packages were legal (although against FedEx ToS) and how many were related to criminal activities.
Not really. Marginalizing and oppressing non-criminals is not justified by a hunt for criminals. If your approach to hunting criminals harms non-criminals, you’re doing it wrong.
The case at hand is even more perverse, as the civil forfeiture practice actually hinders enforcement of law. They do the money grab for the money. When you seize cash, you send a clear signal to criminals that they are being investigated. It tips them off with intelligence that helps them adjust their operations. When you seize money from a tax evader a year before they evade tax by filing their fraudulent tax return, you actually sabotage the opportunity to catch them (it’s crime-prevention prevention). You can only catch them by recording the cash and letting it go, then auditing their tax using that information a year or two later.
Indeed. That was my paraphrasing (note the lack of quotes).
your bank has regulatory requirements
Are you talking about 31 C.F.R. § 103.121, which states:
“(i) Customer information required—(A) In general. The CIP must contain procedures for opening an account that specify the identifying information that will be obtained from each customer. Except as permitted by paragraphs (b)(2)(i)(B) and (C) of this section, the bank must obtain, at a minimum,the following information from the customer prior to opening an account:
- Name;
- Date of birth, for an individual;
- Address, which shall be:
(i) For an individual, a residential or business street address;
(ii) For an individual who does not have a residential or business street address, an Army Post Office (APO) or Fleet Post Office (FPO) box number, or the residential or business street address of next of kin or of another contact individual; or …- Identification number,…
?
I can somehow understand why it’s often a percentage.
But luckily under the capitalist paradigm every consumer can decide for themselves what prices are reasonable and decide whether a transaction is in their interest. I don’t care how they justify their price. If they are charging me 1% to move 5 figures, I’m not okay with paying upwards of $100 to move money. If there really is $100 worth of risk in moving money electronically, then I don’t want a piece of that action.
PayPal, Credit Card, Crypto Currency etc. should typically all process within seconds.
PayPal shares your personal info with over 600 corporations:
https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md
Credit card: there are only 3 to choose from in most regions.
- visa: member of the Better than Cash Alliance; pays merchants $10k to reject cash, thus whenever you pay for something with Visa you help an entity who is trying to impose forced banking on us. Visa also blocked payments to Wikileaks, thus taking away our autonomy.
- mastercard: member of the Better than Cash Alliance. Blocked payments to Wikileaks, thus taking away our autonomy. Sells offline transaction data to Google (and Google does business with the Israeli military).
- american express: ALEC member, thus supports Trump and US republicans, opposes labor rights, fights women’s rights, fights environmental protection and supports climate denial propaganda, fights gun control, fights immigration, etc. Also blocked payments to Wikileaks.
- credit card does not work in the other direction. A jeweler cannot expect customers who sell their scrap gold to accept credit card. An individual is not going to setup a squareup or whatever it is just to do a one-off transaction.
Cryptocurrency requires both people to use, which kills it as an option in most cases.
All of those options, including cryptocurrency, expose more data than cash and bring in risks with that exposure.
my intuitive feeling was, whoever is willing to take that risk, has a lot of money to transfer and is willing to lose some in favor to stay invisible.
Most people don’t have the insight that my fellow jewelers do. Most people think the risk of an uninsured pkg getting lost is the same as an insured pkg. They decide to save money and take the risk without understanding the heightened risk.
My reason for bringing up insurance was that insurance provides a way to secure valuables like cash. The best security is a good insurance policy. It gives a good option for the legit shipping of cash. The jeweler in the article most likely insured the $47k+ value. But if they didn’t, then it was most likely a young jeweler who has not learned that lesson. Either way, insurance does not likely protect victims from government actions, which is likely why the victims had to directly sue the state.
If you use a courier service that’s specialized on valuables which offers also insurance etc.
Something like that might exist in major cities but probably over 95% of the US is rural where some people are lucky if FedEx is within reasonable reach, much less anything special purpose. DHL abandoned the US, IIRC because they could not spread enough with enough reach to be sustainable. FedEx and UPS have a near duopoly.
It’s really annoying that @some_[email protected] just took this on the chin. For me even a dispute over $100 would be worth the courtroom battle just to satisfy my curiousity of what happened. A landlord cannot evict without a court procedure, so the tenant would not have to spend a dime on court costs and bring the paper trail to the court. From there, since the banks (all 3 involved) did a shitty job of investigating, they could have been named as 2nd party defendants (sue them all, let the judge sort it out). The investigation should have revealed the bank where the money landed and the actual bank account from there. They could then use the court to subpoena the agency that has “no record of the case”, but who the bank says has the money. If there is no case, then they can return the money (a judge would say).
OFAC obviously benefitted from someone’s court phobia even though the tenant had nothing to worry about.
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For some strange reason Tor users are able to reach this otherwise paywalled article, so I will post the text below for all those who are unable to reach it. It’s long, so using a spoiler:
full article
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.The Instant Pot is, by all indications, a perfectly good machine—maybe even a great one. The IP, as the device is known to its many devotees, is a kitchen gadget in the most straightforward sense of the term: It’s a classic labor-saver, promising to turn ingredients into family meals while you clean up, tend to your kids, and do all of the other things you could be doing instead of keeping an eye on the stove. Once you get the hang of the electric pressure cooker, it seems to basically deliver on that promise, chugging along gamely through years’ worth of weeknight dinners of pork green chili or chicken tikka masala. Since its debut in 2010, the Instant Pot has sold in the millions and spent years as a must-have kitchen sensation.
Sure enough, in 2019, when the private-equity firm Cornell Capital bought the gadget’s maker, Instant Brands, and merged it with another kitchenware maker, the combined company was reportedly valued at more than $2 billion. A few years and one pandemic later, the company filed for bankruptcy on Monday, weighed down by more than $500 million in debt after years of supply-chain chaos and limited success expanding the Instant brand into other categories of household gadgetry. Perhaps counterintuitively, that the Instant Pot remains a useful, widely appreciated gadget is not unrelated to the faltering of its parent company. In fact, it’s central to understanding exactly what went wrong.
The Instant Pot certainly didn’t invent at-home pressure cooking, but it did introduce the concept to lots of Americans, and it did so in a plug-in, set-it-and-forget-it format that wasn’t as intimidating (or as explosion prone) as using a stovetop pressure cooker. If you weren’t sure how much you’d use the pressure-cooking feature, that was fine—the IP billed itself as a “multi-cooker,” and it also slow-cooked, steamed, sautéed, cooked rice, and made yogurt. At the height of its popularity, in the 2010s, you could get a basic model on Amazon for less than $100, so giving it a shot wasn’t much of a risk, even if you ended up using it only occasionally. As the device became more popular, it seemed to generate endless word-of-mouth praise for its ability to generate one-pot dinners, and Facebook groups, websites, and cookbooks sprouted up to teach new users how to get the most out of their machine.
All of this amounted to the kind of public-relations coup that companies are constantly trying and failing to buy for their own new launches. Those failures are not infrequently a result of the products themselves; at this point, it’s very difficult to come up with a novel idea for a consumer good that addresses some kind of real and reasonably common issue. The average American just doesn’t have that many problems left that can plausibly be solved at the level of inexpensive gadgetry. The Instant Pot flourished because the company found a tiny bit of white space in a crowded market, and it sold a machine that did a serviceable job at helping out a particular type of very common home cook: someone who cooks regularly for more than one or two people, more out of necessity than because they find the process creative or relaxing. There was no slick branding exercise foundational to the Instant Pot’s success. The device was the brand. It still is.
Therein lies the problem, or at least one of the problems. A device developed primarily to address a particular food-prep inefficiency has a natural ceiling to its potential market, and when one catches on as quickly and widely as the Instant Pot, it can meet that market ceiling in pretty short order. Arguably, it can exceed it—people who wouldn’t have otherwise seen themselves as Instant Pot owners buy into the hype. Predictably, after a decade of lightning-fast sales in the United States, things seem to be cooling off. Instant Brands does not release detailed sales figures, but from 2020 to 2022, sales of multi-cookers as a product category dropped by half, according to the market-research firm NPD Group. Instant Pots dominate the category. Very few people seem to need or want a second IP within five years of buying a first one. Why would they?
From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem. A company can’t just tootle along in perpetuity, debuting new products according to the actual pace of its good ideas, and otherwise manufacturing and selling a few versions of a durable, beloved device and its accessories, updated every few years with new features. A company needs to grow.
In the past few decades, the idea that every company should be growing, predictably and boundlessly and forever, has leached from the technology industry into much of the rest of American business. Recently, it’s become clear that those expectations are probably not sustainable even for companies that have produced era-defining software products. They’re certainly not sustainable when placed on the shoulders of the humble Instant Pot, which, despite being an object with a digital display and a wall plug, was never technologically innovative so much as it was a clever, useful packaging of existing components. This was not at all unclear during the product’s heyday, but private-equity interests tried to moneyball it anyway, as they are wont to do.
When Cornell Capital acquired Instant Brands, in 2019, it merged the company with Correlle Brands, which it already owned and which makes a few lines of kitchenware, including Pyrex. It then began steering the brand into new markets with new products—it tried Instant-branded air fryers, blenders, air filters. None of the new product lines really worked out, because lots of other companies already do a fine job manufacturing and selling those things, and no one really had a reason to choose the Instant Brands version over competitors from Ninja or Vitamix or Honeywell, which specialize in those kinds of products in the way that Instant Brands does the multi-cooker. There was a lot of money, at least while interest rates were low, but there was no second good idea. Of course there wasn’t. Success on the Instant Pot scale is very seldom repeatable. It’s vanishingly rare for it to happen to a consumer-products company even once. But the pressures and expectations of private equity mean that that sort of astronomical success can still result in failure.
The Instant Pot, for its part, is not dead. Cornell Capital has brought in a restructuring crew, and the brand’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing allows it to continue doing business while it seeks relief from its debts. The problem is how the debts got there in the first place—in pursuit of growth for its own sake, of increased output with no clear needs that the new output would address. Even if the Instant Pot were the greatest kitchen gadget of all time, it wouldn’t be enough to overcome that faulty financial logic.