Most of the van life you see depicted on social media is actually this though - people who've rented a van short-term for as much as a hotel room or who live in a house and have a van that costs as much as a second home as an accessory for weekend trips.
People who actually live in vans are far less common than people who take photos of themselves in vans.
If people want to use less electricity, they need to have reasonable options to do so in the marketplace without needing a computer engineering degree to figure what sleep states their motherboard supports. That's one purpose of these regulatory mandates: to make the market more transparent and efficient.
Consumers shouldn't have to waste time sorting through products that are broken from day 1 in non-obvious ways.
Red tape is definitely an issue, but freight costs to Nepal are also extremely high. It's a landlocked country with very poor transportation networks. Air courier (eg DHL) to Kathmandu is in the range of $5/kg, and if the final destination is in a village it needs to be hand-carried there. So accessing cheap stuff from abroad is much harder than we might think coming from developed countries. There is no such thing as slapping on a FedEx label right to the final destination.
Any audio encoder - lame is an open source option for mp3 - will have low pass filters. Most encoders will filter inaudible frequencies to improve compression even if not told to, but there are explicit parameters you can set.
An important and related fact, addressed in the article, is that Amazon currently escapes consumer product liability laws because they are neither seller nor manufacturer. But they also cannot tell you with any degree of precision who the seller or manufacturer is.
There is a public interest in making /someone/ liable for defective products, as it provides a incentive for sellers to do due diligence on what they sell.
The party most able to root out sellers of defective or counterfeit goods is probably Amazon, but they currently have no incentive to do so as the liability is offloaded to judgement-proof Marketplace sellers.
Amazon's business innovation here is figuring out how to run a multi billion dollar retail business without product liability, and that's negative for society.
> California’s Court of Appeal (Second Appellate District) determined that Amazon could be held strictly liable for injuries a consumer suffered from a defective hoverboard she bought from the retailer, even though Amazon neither manufactured nor sold the product.
> The plaintiff in this latest case, Kisha Loomis, bought a hoverboard through the Amazon marketplace. The Amazon marketplace carries both products sold by Amazon and by third parties. In this case, the hoverboard was sold by a Chinese company called SMILETO.
> The Court of Appeal... [held] that a party who has control over and is integral to the chain of commerce, and receives a financial benefit from it, is strictly liable for injury caused by a product’s defects.
Oh, that's important, and new. Here's the actual decision in Loomis vs. Amazon.[1] Amazon has been fighting that case since 2016, and last April, they lost at the appellate level in California.
But the plaintiff hasn't won damages yet; the case will now be sent back to the LA Superior Court where discovery will continue; a trial date is expected to be set in 2022.
So, in California, you can now make product liability claims against Amazon, despite their terms and conditions.
Yes, ever since the 1960s, actually. In fact, California was the first state[1] to adopt strict product liability. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_liability#Landmark_leg... Most U.S. states and many other countries have since adopted California's regime. So California courts extending their common law strict product liability doctrine to encompass Amazon's marketplace is quite a noteworthy precedent.
Not just in California, but in most of the U.S. and E.U.
But if you weren't yourself negligent, you can recover your losses from an upstream supplier. In practice it's manufacturers or importers who bear most of the insurance cost.
The whole point of the doctrine is that someone injured by a faulty product shouldn't have to hunt down the negligent party, who may have chosen to sell through a byzantine supply chain in order to protect themselves. Similarly, a downstream seller shouldn't be free to benefit from such an arrangement, either. IOW, retailers and other sellers should (and because of strict product liability do) have some responsibility to choose their suppliers wisely.
Note that at least conceptually strict liability lessens the need for centralized product regulation. By making recovery for actual damages more efficient, there's less need for government to try to prevent negligence beforehand. And at least in theory that makes it easier for industry to innovate--to take calculated risks. Alas, the U.S. doesn't embrace this potential as well as it could.
What counts as a supplier as far as California is considered? If someone sells a non-functional piece of equipment via Ebay, how does that work? Unlike Amazon ,which some argue is closer to a store, Ebay is an open market where you're buying the product as is and not as an SKU. When does caveat emptor become a consideration?
Strict product liability usually only applies to commercial sellers. That doesn't directly answer your question, but suffice it to say there are bodies of law that exist to answer that question. It's certainly not a new question as flea markets, garage sales, charity drives, and many other situations long predate Amazon and eBay.
They would likely just need to show "reasonable and prudent" attention to what they are selling. Electrical appliances UL listed, that sort of thing. Selling mainstream brands and not nameless Chinese products is another layer of defense. IANAL.
I feel like the offloaded liability is just a technicality and is a poor lack of incentive for Amazon to do anything. Sure, the product was sold by a non-Amazon third party, but from the user perspective the defective product was purchased on Amazon. The company can deflect blame to the marketplace sellers all they want, but it's still Amazon's reputation that receives the most lasting damage.
I am wondering if Amazon is immune to reputational damage though. People have been complaining about counterfeit and defective products from Amazon for about 5 years now, and it doesn't seem to have had significant effect on market share.
I've been disentangling my purchasing habits from Amazon, but I don't know too many other people who are.
I don't think the majority of people care about quality. I think most focus mainly on price.
See Walmart for an example of this. They force manufacturers of otherwise decent stuff to make lower quality versions of products to sell only at Walmart, just to lower the end price.
Considering that Walmart is one of the largest companies in the world, this seems to be a winning tactic.
People only care about quality for a very few select goods in their lives. Most of them are of hedonistic nature and/or are publicly visible so are a status symbol.
Everything else will be as cheap as can be bought (so probably 90% of purchases).
People are unable to accurately judge quality before they make a purchase, and often well after the purchase the quality is uncertain too. Who knows how long it'll take before you find out that your cheap USB charger was made of shoddy materials and will catch on fire when it fails?
But you can know the exact price before the purchase.
People are optimizing based on the information they have.
Amazon doesn't have the best prices though; it's big selling point is, IMO, convenience (this is IMO a bigger factor for Walmart as well; while they heavily advertise a few particularly aggressively priced items, most of Walmart's SKUs are pried middle-of-the-road).
i cancelled my prime subscription yesterday after finally getting frustrated enough by so much of what i've bought/wanted to buy on amazon being clearly fraudulent in one way or another. forget free shipping, i want products that work, and which actually are what they are advertised as. i've wasted too much time munging through reviews to try to figure out if a good product was stealthily replaced with a dud, if manufacturing standards dropped significantly, if the seller was paying for positive reviews, not to mention time/effort wasted on returns and discovering that the products i got were in fact blatantly counterfeit/defective.
yall probably know rule 34, but I'm pretty sure there should be another rule of the internet: "if a product exists, it will be counterfeited on amazon". just try taking a look at how many people on the amazon sellers forum have their businesses/brands seriously harmed by the myriad of counterfeiters on amazon.
My biggest problem so far has been finding alternatives that are not just as fraudulent. So far picking a retail store and only getting things that are "available for pickup" even if I plan to have it shipped seems to work for me, but that greatly reduces the available options. Buying direct from the manufacturer often works, but some mfgrs have switched to a storefront on Amazon :(
Air source heat pumps are fine for the places where most Canadians live including southern Ontario & Quebec and coastal British Columbia. If you live in Winnipeg or Saskatoon it might be dicey, but unless it routinely drops below -20C for extended periods you're fine. And you can have backup resistive heating elements for the occasional cold snap anyways.
Are GP mentioned, the safety procedure to protect you from a line you're working on becoming inadvertently energized is temporary protective grounding. A grounding jumper is connected to each phase of the power line near the work location so that the worker touching the line works in a zone of equipotential. Because everything the worker is touching bonded together, if the line becomes energized the worker's hands and feet are elevated to the same voltage simultaneously, so there is no potential difference across the body and no current flows through the worker.
But since lives are at stake here, we prefer to have layers of protection rather than just one thing. Grounding jumpers can fail if not properly connected (a large mechanical force will be applied to the jumper when the phase-to-ground fault current flows through it).
Bottom line, respect the electrical code and connect generators through a transfer switch. These rules are in place for a reason.
Transformers only block DC. Unless your house is wired for that (pretty rare in almost every country) You'll backfeed AC which will go through transformers.
In fact it's likely the transformer on the street between your house and the network that's responsible for the death of the linemen. IIRC that's a step down transformer (so step up when run backwards like this.)
> I personally believe that DHS should make this sort of thing illegal for critical infrastructure.
I can't speak to non-electrical infrastructure, but the NERC CIP "high impact" standards already make it largely impossible to operate critical electrical infrastructure from anywhere other than a secured control centre. Operating from your laptop or iPhone from the kitchen table is however allowed for "low impact" assets like small power plants.
And it provides a method of price discrimination between people who care where they sit and those who don't.
A hidden charge would be if you had to pay for seat selection to sit anywhere at all and it wasn't included in the original price.