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Modern Vitamix benders (roughly within the last 8 years) have the same declining quality issues.

Newer models are typically much lighter. This means they now have far less internal material to reduce noise. I can't use mine without ear protection since it's about chainsaw level of noise. The reduced weight means I also need to hold onto it during use otherwise it will vibrate itself off the counter.

The company seems to be most interested in selling smoothie recipe subscriptions for their blender companion phone app. Aside from subscription selling the app is pretty much useless -- who wants a phone app to remotely control a blender?


Seems like common problem. Some retarded React App developer gets hired. And now business is no longer making some solid, long lasting blenders but "Connected Healthy Solutions"®

I am sure some next generation developers are already demanding to install VSCode on fridges so one can code on Samsung Smart refrigerators screens.

Wouldn't it be great that while fridge telling about running short on Kale green also download a gigabyte of NPM garbage to display image of Kale green in a bag?


> Some retarded

Do better.


Retarded is a fine word to describe a person that is acting like he/she has a mental handcap. Americans are sooo annoying with the language policing mania, tou guys really need to chill.


Baseball used to be America's favorite pastime, Now it seems taking offense is the most common pastime...


I believe the parent was imploring GP to use stronger words more accurately depicting the aforementioned React App developer, such as "braindead" or similar.


Nah, you sound like a school kid when you write like that.


People seem to use braindead nowadays. A clinical condition resulting from an accident, a stroke, ... such an improvement.


Some rodgerd


> who wants a phone app to remotely control a blender?

Here's an idea: if you find the blender to be too loud, go into a different room, close the door, and remotely trigger the blender with your smartphone app.

We put our blender in our pantry because we can close the door and blend without waking up the baby. Otherwise it (Blendtec) is too loud!

EDIT: to the downvoters, this was tongue in cheek. It would obviously be better for them to spend more money on soundproofing and less on a useless app!


This is the worst part about all this smart phone junk and cooking. It's normalising leaving the room and then cooking something remotely a bit too much.


It all depends. Getting notified for time consuming things is great.

Having my smoker self-manage its temperature and graph the amount of heat it's dumped in is nice. Checking on the temperature ramp of the sous vide is nice, too.


Is blending time-consuming? I guess peanut butter takes a couple minutes, most blending is < 40s IME.


I was just speaking about those specific cases. Running the smoker is a 8-20 hour endeavor. Sous vide is 2-6 usually. Smart devices are kinda nice for this.


According to a security researcher[1], a 0-day in Analyticsd allowed any installed app to access the users health data.

[1] https://habr.com/en/post/579714/

EDIT: Found the link to the previous HN discussion about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28637276


the health and PII data making its way to log data may give Apple legal cover to ingest the data "accidentally", also.

Recall that Google got to claim their street view cars wardriving was unintentional, and just paid $13M to make it go away, after using the data for about a decade [1]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/22/tech/google-street-view-priva...


The New York City council recently passed a bill that requires apps, like Doordash, to share the customers real name, number, email address.

Their reasoning is that this somehow "helps" small-business.

https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=4...


This just allows them to sell your name+email+phone+address to Google et al.

State mandated doxxing.

This is why I have a burner phone number, throwaway domain/email, and special alias for food delivery that needs my home address.


..but then they still have your home address in their archive of PII. Which is bad enough (wasn't Dominos or New York Pizza hacked the other day with PII getting leaked?).

I barely ever read spam (and receive it mainly on one of my older e-mail addresses but it does end up in the spam filter). I barely ever receive spam on my phone number. I won't say never, cause it has happened, but probably like twice a year or so. And I use my real phone number and real e-mail address everywhere. Which, in case of using an alias, isn't clever. But in your case, they still got the address.


Every street address is public. All houses order food. Nothing private is disclosed.


> Every street address is public.

Not quite, but I'll give it a pass.

> All houses order food.

Nope, not everyone orders food. Perhaps in your bubble.

> Nothing private is disclosed.

Incorrect, it is PII. It is a real name connected to a street address first of all (one could use an alias; I do). And, possibly (potentially) also containing metadata such as what is being ordered, at which time, and how much.

Moreover, it denotes activity. If you want to lay low, your street address might be officially public (mine is) yet not receive spam on it.

For some reason, it isn't possible to only give a business your address (and other PII) when they need it and force them to discard it completely afterwards. Why not? Because when leaks happen, they're not hold accountable. See the essay Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out? by Bruce Schneier [1]

[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_t...


BBC Select is another option for BBC documentaries if you have either Amazon Prime video or an Apple TV.

https://www.bbcselect.com/


Community based policing, cops on neighborhood patrols, has been on the decline for years.

Police funding is now more often used to to acquire military weapons/hardware.

"Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" is a highly recommended study of this problem.

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ameri...


The "Rise of the Warrior Cop" seems directly correlated with the rise of massive drug cartels.


Drug cartels are on the decline. Rise of the Warrior Cop is directly correlated with centralization of power and the influence of police unions over politics and public spending.


It's also correlated with the change from the US military Soldier's creed, to the "Warrior ethos" [0].

The differences are quite interesting: The soldier swears to always act in ways creditable to the service and the nation, recognizing it as a honored profession not to be disgraced.

While for the warrior the mission always comes first. Honor, credibility, disgrace? Not even in the vocabulary, replaced with "deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the US, in close combat".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier%27s_Creed


> Drug cartels are on the decline.

Are you just saying that because weed is being legalized?

Economic inequality sure isn't in decline, and there are a lot of 18-24 year old uneducated men out there with nothing to lose. The turmoil in places like Venezuela and Colombia leaves power voids that cartels step in to fill.

Look at the southern border.


The person you replied to did make a claim with no evidence, but so did you. What about the southern border, do you have a reliable citation for something bad happening there compared to 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago?


Have you tried cape gooseberries (Physalis peruviana)? IMO they taste very similar to sugar free Red Bull.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physalis_peruviana


I had not but now have plans to! Thanks for the info. TIL.


Unfortunately it seems like I was one of "small percentage of Firefox users" this feature is being tested on.

Contrary to what the article claims, there was no way to disable this feature from the menu: it wasn't possible to uncheck the 'Sponsored Top Sites' button.

I had search for 'sponsor' settings in 'about:config' to disable it. Sadly, I don't think most users will be able to figure this out.

I'm seriously reconsidering moving away from Firefox, or at the very least no longer recommending it to non-technical users


I had Yandex as a sponsored website when I installed Firefox. The process of removal did seem unnecessarily obfuscated, but I only had to spend like five minutes on it.


I found the setting by following FF's instructions and turned it off. Took about 5 seconds, I guess a minute total including searching for how to do it.


Do you know if your data was shared with advertisers before you were able to turn it off?


Of course I know that. What a strange question.


GP is not literally asking if you know. They are asking you if your data was shared or not.


Well, that makes it an even stranger question. Why ask one thing if what you want to know is something else?


I'm sorry my question wasn't clear, but I was not trying to ask one thing and know something else. I will try and restate my question.

Were you given an opportunity to disable the sponsored top sites before they were first loaded and your data sent to advertisers?


That's ok but I don't know if I can help much here - I really have no idea of knowing when I was given that opportunity.


Daniel Elllsberg's "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" covers this (and other related issues) in good detail.

https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Machine-Confessions-Nuclear-...


The lead singer died decades ago, but I think it is still very clear what the band would think: the lyrics of one of their songs are about very similar issues:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_29,_1992_(Miami)

TLDR : Sublime is about as "anti-cop" as you can get.


I would highly recommend 'The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business'

https://smile.amazon.com/Meat-Racket-Takeover-Americas-Busin...


By that title it sounds like a very objective and unbiased source!


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