> [Authors] bring together the physical climate, weather and hydrology data and reconcile that with local expert feedback, impact reports and conditions observations. The author is also responsible for weighing different indicators based on what’s most appropriate for a particular place and time of year. In the West, for example, winter snowpack has a stronger bearing on water supplies than in the East
Knowing how to make an accessible website is so rare that companies pay me money to do it for them. I wish it was good enough for people, much less companies, to rely on.
Even if no attempt at proper accessibility was made, it's still generally far easier to attempt to find an HTML (or other form of UI) element, than to attempt to scroll to the right spot and use visual inspection to find things.
When you're Meta, "generally" might not be good enough. There are just too many bizarre limitations to this, like image buttons, or interactivity attached to random elements (making a div a link, etc)
To really take it to that next level, snap the headphones in half when you get up on stage for a lollipop. Even seen one bring a corded phone and cradle to a set.
If you've ever seen those "Click To Reveal Price" or "Price Only Revealed At Checkout" products online, this here is one reason why. They help businesses keep discounted prices hidden from Amazon's crawlers.
Long-time seller/distributor here -- the main reason for this is mandated by brands, who want to make sure their MAP (minimum advertised price) is respected across all channels.
Basically different distribution channels (speciality shops, big box marketplaces, and ecom stores) have very different levels of overhead, so if each channel was allowed to set their own price, you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low).
This pretty much happened in the early 2000s-2010s so over time brands became VERY particular about enforcing MAP.
> you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low)
This is what I see happen in Poland with clothes and electronics stores, but I don't exactly understand what MAP is supposed to be solving here, given that the brick&mortar and on-line stores are literally the same entity/brand, and in case of clothing, they're also the manufacturer brand?
From my short experience with this - manufacturers want to ensure this internationally too. So then same product would cost around the same in Germany and in Poland. Otherwise Germans will check fit of shoes in German B&M store, then go buy it online from some Polish store for X% cheaper.
Manufacturer does not want that, because then it will lose most of it's distributors in Germany.
NB: Though I am not debating if it's right, fair or best for consumer. Just mentioning, what I've experienced.
So game-theoretically: if I know the price for an item is the same everywhere, I'll buy it at the place where I see it first (one of the big values of brick and mortar stores).
If I know I can go online and it'll be some % cheaper, I'll wait and order it online, defer my gratification for a few days, and end up with a cheaper product.
Not sure about Poland, but most B&M brick and mortar stores in the US are distributors/resellers of the brand, they buy for $4 and sell for $10, and their rent/labor/etc costs $3 and they profit $3. Another distributor let's say is an e-commerce website, they can setup a warehouse in a rural area with cheap labor so it costs them $1 and they profit $5... so they can afford to discount it to $7 and make $2... which the B&M store can't do because they won't profit at all.
I believe that it prevents the price from being indexed (by dumb crawlers).
I remember hearing our marketing folks talking about enforcing MAP, at the company I used to work for. That company didn’t have the clout of Amazon, but we did sell premium kit.
For us, it wasn’t about money, as much as we didn’t want to ever be forced to reduce Quality; which included the shopping experience. We were concerned that outlets selling lower-priced kit, also had a worse shopping (and support) experience, which we believed (probably correctly) would reflect on us, and our most favored retailers.
Premium brands are often driven by factors other than just money. Brand reinforcement is a really big deal.
> if each channel was allowed to set their own price, you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low).
Um... and? That's quite literally "the market working as intended" and while I am not a free-market apologist by any stretch, that seems to be a rather benign effect.
What makes MAP especially suspicious in my eyes is that it's the manufacturers that seem to be overly concerned over well-being of one specific kind of their downstream buyers/distributors/resellers, not those distributors/resellers themselves. I understand that if B&M stores would try to impose that, then the FTC would (hopefully) smack it down pretty quickly but apparently when a manufacturer mandates the price to the resellers, it's perfectly fine? Somehow? Isn't there collusion somewhere in there, probably?
The problem with "the market working as intended" is you get unfortunate second-order effects. The brick-and-mortar is providing a valuable service by letting you browse, try things on for fit and style, feel the material, and hypothetically by curating products and trying to engender trust in their curation, only selling things of at least passable quality (some more than others).
Historically, you only paid for that service when you bought something, since most stores can't convince you to pay an entrance fee. When you go to the store to select products and then buy online, you're leeching on that service and putting the entire business model at risk. If everyone did that, brick-and-mortars would go out of business and you wouldn't have access to that service, which sucks for everyone.
+1 to this. I was around for the 90s and early 2000s to see when MAP wasn't tightly controlled by the brands; the B&M stores got destroyed because they simply couldn't price-compete because their footprint was way more expensive.
I do think that by not having physical stores, it directly/indirectly promoted a decline of product quality as well as misrepresentation of product, with Wish and Temu kinda exemplifying that to an extreme. Price differentiation is way greater now which I guess is a net positive to the consumer.
As a brand owner of midtier kitchen products (cheaper versions of designer OXOish products, but more expensive than your baseline Walmart stuff), our products look visually similar enough to both ends of quality, but shines more when a person gets to interact with the items themselves, feel the product texture, press the lever action, etc. So I do value B&M for their place in the economy and want to make sure they can have some margin (even though I'm selling the same thing in my Amazon store and Shopify and can make more money there).
This can also be true if the manufacturer of the product requires that retailers not offer a price below a certain amount. This is called the minimum advertised price (MAP) and is common for big brands like Apple. Another way to get around the minimum advertised price is to bundle the product with some other product or service, such as is done with cell phone contracts.
> If you've ever seen those "Click To Reveal Price" or "Price Only Revealed At Checkout" products online, this here is one reason why. They help businesses keep discounted prices hidden from Amazon's crawlers.
That is obviously not a reason why, considering the place where I've seen those listings is Amazon.
It can be both. I worked for a brand that wanted to have a sale just on their own, new site to be able to drive visits, but Amazon's "most favored nation" policies would have caused a backlash.
I know myself as well as others in my family have talked about this many times and have a hard rule that if someone has to hide the price they are ashamed of it and we refuse to support them.
I literally experienced this tonight. I've been wanting to try some SnackCrates the service where you get snacks from around the world delivered monthly or just a single box if you want. Well the Company SnackCrate stopped shipping to Canada so been looking for another company that does. I see an ad on Facebook and check it out. First looked if they deliver to Canada before anything else. Then try find a price and you can't. Looked all over their site with nothing that even hints at the cost. They want you to first do a snack test to determine good snacks you may like then provide information and so on. Then you can see pricing options.
I refuse to do that. Instantly left the site and read the comments on Facebook where I then saw several comments state how expensive they were for such little abouts of snack which made me say yep they are ashamed of the price and that's why they hide it.
I think most are familiar with throttling because most (all?) phone plans have some data cap at one point, but I don't think I've heard of any broadband connections here with data caps, that wouldn't make any sense.
Data caps are just documenting the reality that ISPs oversubscribe - if they sell a hundred 1Gb/s connections to a neighborhood, it's highly unlikely they're peering that neighborhood onto the Internet at large at 100Gb/s. I don't know what the current standard is, but in the past it's been 10/100 to 1 - so a hundred 1Gb/s connections might be sharing 1-10Gb/s of uplink; and if usage starts to saturate that they need a way of backing off that is "fair" - data caps are one of the ways they inform the customer of such.
I've seen it with my new fiber rollout - every single customer no matter their purchased speed had 1Gb up and down - as more customers came online and usage became higher, they're not limiting anyone, but you get closer to your advertised rate - but my upload is still faster than my download because most of my neighborhood is downloading, few are uploading.
I have 5 Gbps symmetric at home. I and my fiancee both work from home, so our backup fiber connection from another provider is 2 Gbps. We can also both tether to cell phones if necessary. We can get 5G home wireless Internet here, too, and we might ditch our 2 Gbps line in favor of that as a backup. We moved from Texas back home to Illinois last year, and one of the biggest considerations was who had service at what tiers due to remote work. Some of the houses we looked at in the same three-county area in the Chicago suburbs didn’t even have 5G home available (not from AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile anyway).
My parents have 5G wireless home as their primary connection, and that was only introduced in their area a couple of years ago. Before that, they could get dial-up, 512 kbps wireless with about a $1000 startup cost, ISDN (although the phone company really didn’t want to sell it to them), Starlink, or HughesNet. The folks across the asphalt road from them had 20 Mbps Ethernet over power lines years ago, and that’s now I think 250 Mbps. It’s a different power company, though, so they aren’t eligible.
Around 80% of the US population lives in large urban areas. The other 20% of the population range from smaller towns to living many kilometers from any town at all. There’s a lot of land in the US.
Here in dense NYC, most apartments I've lived in have but a single ISP available. It's common to hunt for apartments by searching the address on service maps.
I'm pretty sure one landlord was cut in by his ISP, as he skipped town when I tried to ask about getting fiber, and his office locked their door and drew their shades when I went there with a technician on two occasions. The final time, we got there before they opened and the woman ran into the office and slammed the door on us.
That’s pretty common in apartments to have a single provider, especially in high rise ones or ones built before broadband was common. It’s unfortunate, but the cost of running wiring for multiple providers through old buildings can be prohibitive. The providers won’t pay to install it for a single unit. Other tenants might not like the disruption if they’re not going to use the new service. If you get a big enough block of tenants to pre-sign then it becomes a conversation more worth having for the provider and the landlords.
Wow, it's got some issues on Chrome (dropped frames on scroll) but Safari is another level. Selecting text takes time. Looking at Activity Monitor, I see "Safari Graphics and Media" using 200% of my CPU even at rest.
A quick profile on Safari shows some layout recalc happening regularly, but surely that shouldn't cause this bad of perf...
The last time I found something like this, it was because of 100's of box-shadows.
Edit 2: Ah, they're using shadow DOM for the img reflection, so we can't affect it. Good gravy is the shadow DOM stuff overwrought, it's 87 elements all told, just for one img.
reply