The Rail is by Cleveland-based product designer Brian Hendricks, a/k/a Lofted Goods. It's a rail-based, wall-mounted planter system consisting of a wood dowel and 3D-printed components.

The vessels are easily removable, and slot into the brackets via a sliding dovetail.

The bottom of each vessel is unscrewable, allowing you to drain water as necessary.

What I really appreciate is that Hendricks put careful thought into how the system could be easily installed and assembled:

Hendricks doesn't sell The Rail as a product, but posts the files here so you can 3D print it yourself.

Some words are carved into regulation, others were invented during a lunch break in brand strategy.

The post What Terms on Alcohol Labels Really Mean: The Words You Trust and the Tricks You Miss appeared first on Primer.

We live in an age of shitty product design and no customer support. Stuff breaks because it's poorly made, and then you have no recourse but to throw it into the trash, because it's unrepairable. If you try to get someone on the line, it's endless sub-menus before you finally get a live person overseas, who struggles with the language and has not been empowered by their bosses to actually solve your problem.

Here, however, we have a product design failure that was handled masterfully.

I think Peak Design, which designs and makes travel gear, is a great company. I own two of their bags and they've never let me down. They're also a B-Corp and an employee-owned company, which I like. I was excited to learn they'd expanded from bags into carry-on rollers, as I think there's a dearth of good design in that space, and I wrote about the launch of their Roller Pro (which I do not own).

Peak Design fans have started a subReddit where they review the company's products and post mods and hacks. Recently an owner of their new Roller Pro posted this:

"Took my bag out of the overhead compartment on the first flight segment to find the handle no longer attached to the carbon fiber tube. Has been used for a total of 12 days travel. I could live with the squeak/fart noises but this is going to make things very difficult."

And all of us have had something like this happen to us. What happens next? You try to call the company, and can't get through. Or you do get through, and get the run-around. E-mails go unanswered. You try to fix it yourself, but you can't. You throw the thing out.

However, it appears Peak Design monitors this subReddit, and they responded immediately. Within two hours of the post above going live, Robb Jankura, the company's Principal Design Engineer, made a video to the customer--not just apologizing, but trying to help the customer improvise a fix.

Jankura recognizes that the customer has been inconvenienced on the road, is taking ownership of the problem, and is trying to make it right. I recommend clicking the link and watching the video before it disappears. In it, Jankura attempts to duplicate the problem, explains how the mechanism works, and suggests temporary fixes using commonly-available items.

"Within 2 hours of posting," writes the customer, "one of their design engineers sent me a field repair guide video explaining how the parts work and what to keep an eye out for when I do a temporary repair. And of course, made plans to replace it as soon as I'm back."

Now, why did the bag fail so quickly? Maybe it's a design flaw. Maybe it's a manufacturing defect. Things go wrong. And when they do, you usually have no recourse. The easiest thing for the company to do is ignore your post and continue clocking profits. Instead, Peak Design owned the problem, took responsibility, reached out to the customer unprompted and tried to solve the problem (as well as guaranteeing a replacement).

I'm guessing Jankura is now studying the problem and taking steps to remedy the design. Obviously 12 days is an unacceptable window for product failure. I expect to get 12 years or more out of my Peak Design products. If I don't, I'll reach out—and I like knowing that someone on the other end of the line gives a damn, stands behind their product and will try to help.

I’m on a two week trip to London and Ireland (yes, there will be UK graves and no, grave donations did not pay for them, not sure that the $20 a month I’m getting these days quite sent me here….) and so am getting more European labor news than usually. In the U.S., the quality of union leadership is a mixed bag. I suppose that’s inevitable in a sense, but you’d like it to be better. But the truth of the matter is that anytime money and power are involved, humans are likely to be tempted by corruption. That can lead to outright indifference to your own workers. And thus, here’s a really not great story from the UK labor movement.

One of the world’s best-paid trade union officials has been challenged over union-busting allegations as his workforce face losing their jobs.

In June, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) announced a cost-saving restructure which involves getting rid of 25% of its staff, putting around 50 roles at risk of redundancy. Every single rep for the ITF’s Unite branch is at risk. The ITF denies targeting union reps.

The ITF is a federation of hundreds of unions and represents 16.5 million workers around the world. Major British unions such as the RMT, Unite, ASLEF, GMB, PCS and TSSA are affiliated to the ITF. A French trade union has threatened to pull out of the federation if any cases of union busting are proven.

In July, workers from the ITF’s Unite branch lodged a complaint to Stephen Cotton, ITF general secretary. Workers wrote: “A hugely disproportionate impact of the proposed cuts falls on current or former union representatives, so much so as to amount to potential trade union victimisation.

“Our review of management’s proposed changes indicates that 100% of current or former union representatives in scope of the restructure have been placed at risk of redundancy … Ordinary members of the union who have been especially vocal – for example by posing challenging questions to leadership during recent all-staff meetings – have also been put at genuine risk of redundancy.”

Workers voted to strike over the proposed redundancies in July, but postponed the strikes as negotiations started.

Cotton is paid over £300,000 a year, likely making him one of the best-paid union general secretaries in the world. Often seen wearing a Rolex watch, Cotton has washed his hands of the redundancies. These are instead being handled by assistant general secretary Rob Johnston, who was caught up in a ballot-fixing scandal in 2002 when he worked at the Amicus union, which was Labour’s biggest donor at the time.

The Rolex is a great touch. At least Jimmy Hoffa had the class to not be personally corrupt and in fact lived in modest circumstances.

The post American Unions Not the Only Unions with Bad Leadership appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I know districts in which the young people prostrate themselves before books, and like savages kiss their pages, although they cannot read a single letter.”  

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel.”

The historian David Bell explores (gift link) some of the parallels between the claims of 18th century enlightenment thinkers, and contemporary proponents of AI. He concludes that in the end the parallels break down in an ominous way:

It is here, with this question of engagement, that the comparison between the Enlightenment and A.I.’s supposed “second Enlightenment” breaks down and reveals something important about the latter’s limits and dangers. When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.

When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery: “That’s a great question.” It has never responded: “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.

And why should it? It is, after all, a commercial internet product. And such products generate profit by giving users more of what they have already shown an appetite for, whether it is funny cat videos, instructions on how to fix small appliances or lectures on Enlightenment philosophy. If I wanted ChatGPT to challenge my convictions, I could of course ask it to do so — but I would have to ask. It follows my lead, not the reverse.

By its nature, A.I. responds to almost any query in a manner that is spookily lucid and easy to follow — one might say almost intellectually predigested. For most ordinary uses, this clarity is entirely welcome. But Enlightenment authors understood the importance of having readers grapple with a text. Many of their greatest works came in the form of enigmatic novels, dialogues presenting opposing points of view or philosophical parables abounding in puzzles and paradoxes. Unlike the velvety smooth syntheses provided by A.I., these works forced readers to develop their judgment and come to their own conclusions.

What Bell is talking about is related to the broader problem of turning education into a consumer-driven for-profit (or quasi-profit because of our tax code) activity. If the central axiom of consumer capitalism is that the customer is always right, the whole basis of pedagogy might be said to be the opposite: the customer is always wrong, or at least often wrong, in ways that are not flattering to their self-esteem.

In a society in which money is basically God, how do we decouple the need for enlightenment and edification from a phony discourse in which students are told constantly that they are asking great questions, because it’s profitable to lie to them? That’s a great question.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

The post The customer is always wrong appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

In this video entitled Rush Hour, cars, pedestrians, and cyclists have been edited together to produce dozens of heart-stopping near misses.

Reminds me of the world’s craziest intersection, traffic organized by color, intersections in the age of driverless cars, and the dangerous dance of NYC intersections. (via colossal)

[This is a vintage post originally from Sep 2014.]

Tags: Fernando Livschitz · timeless posts · traffic · video