Why Are Barcodes Changing After 50 Years?

AI

Simple Things Revealed

Jul 25, 2026  

Why Do Products Suddenly Have Two Barcodes? and why are QR codes suddenly appearing next to familiar UPC barcodes?

For more than 50 years, traditional barcodes have helped stores identify products and retrieve prices with a single beep. But they usually identify only the type of product, not its individual batch, expiration date, origin, or recall status.

That is why retailers and manufacturers are preparing for a shift toward more capable 2D barcodes.

In this video, we explore how traditional UPC barcodes work, what GS1 Digital Link and 2D barcodes can do, and why many products may temporarily carry both a striped barcode and a square code.

The barcode is not simply being replaced. It is evolving from a price lookup number into a connection between a physical product and its changing digital record.

Would you trust a product more if one scan revealed its origin, expiry date, and recall status?

Subscribe to Simple Things Revealed for more stories hidden inside everyday objects.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond | Full Book Summary

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond | Full Book Summary

The Illiterate's Guide

The Illiterate's Guide

 Aug 5, 2025  

📖 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (2011)

👉 See Book on Amazon | https://amzn.to/46s1r2X

Why Some Societies Collapse While Others Thrive: Lessons from Jared Diamond's 'Collapse'

Explore the key insights from Jared Diamond's acclaimed book, 'Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.' This episode delves into why some societies, like Easter Island and Norse Greenland, faced collapse, while others, like Tikopia and Tokugawa Japan, managed to endure and flourish. Discover Diamond's five-point framework for understanding societal success or failure, the role of environmental and cultural factors, and how these historical lessons can guide us in addressing today's global challenges. Join us as we examine the choices that determine a society's fate and the crucial lessons we can learn to avoid collapse in our own time.

00:00 Introduction: Why Societies Collapse 

00:15 Jared Diamond's Framework for Collapse 

02:28 Case Study: Easter Island's Self-Destruction 

04:19 Case Study: The Complex Collapse of Norse Greenland 

07:20 Case Study: The Maya Civilization's Downfall 

09:01 Understanding Societal Blindness and Denial 

13:28 Success Stories: Societies That Adapted 

16:51 Modern Implications and Lessons 

21:42 Conclusion: The Ultimate Choice for Our Future

I Was Shocked by What the Bible Says About the SABBATH!

MOLTBOOK - AI-Only Social Media Is Full Of Anti-Human Propaganda

 

Saul Alinsky's 13 Rules For Radicals

The 8 Crops I'm Planting NOW To Survive The Coming Food Collapse

What Is Fabian Socialism And What Was Sidney Webb's Role? - Socialism Ex...

EPA Head Lee Zeldin Doing Climate Engineering Awareness Damage Control

Steven Hill's Mission Impossible

 Mission: Impossible

Hill was the original leader of the Impossible Missions Force, Dan Briggs, in the series Mission: Impossible beginning in 1966. The phrase "Good morning, Mr. Briggs..." was a fixture early in each episode, where a sound or film recording he retrieved detailed the task he must accomplish. However, he was replaced in the show in 1967 after the end of the first season. As one of the few Orthodox Jewish actors working in Hollywood, he made it clear in advance of production that he was not able to work on the Sabbath (i.e., sundown Friday to dusk Saturday), and that he would leave the set every Friday before sundown.[7] However, despite Hill's advance warnings, the show's producers were unprepared for his rigid adherence to the Sabbath, and on at least one occasion, Hill left the set while an episode was still in the midst of filming. The producers used a number of ways of reducing the role of Hill's character, Dan Briggs, whereby he would only obtain and hand out the mission details at the start of certain episodes, being unable to take further part in the mission as he was known to people they would encounter (used at least three times), or Briggs would need to don a disguise and another actor would then play his role incognito until the conclusion of the mission (and episode) when Briggs would peel off a face mask. On other occasions, Briggs was waiting to pick up the team at the end. Usually, Martin Landau's character (Rollin Hand) took over as the team leader for missions in Briggs' absence, Landau being initially a "special guest star" for the first season, not even included in the show's original opening credits.[7]

According to Desilu executive Herb Solow, William Shatner once burst into his office, claiming "Steve asked me how many Jews worked on Star Trek. He was recruiting a minyon, a prayer group of 10 men, to worship together on top of the studio's highest building and only had six Jews so far from Mission. He asked if I would come and bring Nimoy and Justman and you."[20]

Hill was briefly suspended from the show near the end of the season, during the production of episode 23, titled "Action!" In it, for the only time, Barbara Bain's character Cinnamon Carter obtained the mission details through the taped instructions, even though Landau's character, Rollin Hand, then actually led the team. The suspension was imposed after he refused to climb the rafters via a sound stage staircase, as was called for in the script.[21] This incident was ostensibly unrelated to any religious observances of Hill's. Consequently, Hill was written out of that episode and when he returned to Mission: Impossible for the five remaining episodes of the season, his role was severely reduced. Hill was not asked to return for season two, and was replaced as the show's star by Peter Graves.[22]

Source: Wikipedia - Steven Hill

Arturo Sosa: The Black Pope, the Reigning White Pope and Vatican State

Who could be the next pope? How U.S. cardinals, including Boston's Cardinal O'Malley, rank

Melina Khan

USA TODAY NETWORK - New England

Published 2:55 p.m. ET Feb. 17, 2025

Key Points

• Pope Francis is hospitalized as he recovers from a sinus infection.
• If the pope were to resign over health concerns, a new pope would be selected through a process called the conclave, which consists of a vote by members of the College of Cardinals.
• Two U.S. archbishops are considered papabile, or frontrunners for pope. One of them is Boston's former archbishop Cardinal Sean Patrick O'Malley.

As Pope Francis continues to recover from a respiratory infection, some have questioned whether he would consider stepping down from his role due to health concerns like his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.

If the pope were to resign, a new pope would be selected through a process called the conclave, which consists of a vote by members of the College of Cardinals.

Titans of Power: How Three Cities Ruled the World

Xavier Learning Community - Jesuits at the Frontiers

The Full Stew Peters Show /January 10, 2023.

The Great Carbon Con Is Coming to an End

MICHELLE YOU

Dec 20, 2022 7:00 AM

IDEAS

No more fluffy climate goals and emissions offsets. Businesses will soon be expected to show real progress.

ILLUSTRATION: YO HOSOYAMADA


A year after COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference which took place in November 2021, the number of FTSE 100 companies vowing to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 grew by 37 percent to 82 percent. Among the pledgers were some of the world’s biggest companies: Amazon, Apple, Ford, IBM, JP Morgan, Mars, and many others. But climate action is not just on the minds of industry giants: it’s a growing concern for every business as scrutiny grows.

Making a pledge is the easy part. In 2023, we will see businesses held to account for what they actually deliver. Organizations will be forced to show that the commitments they’ve made are meaningful, providing transparent and ongoing proof that they are taking necessary actions to reduce their carbon emissions.

Growing skepticism of over-ambitious, opaque, and even fraudulent climate pledges is turning up the heat on businesses. Already, we’re seeing customers voting with their wallets, employees choosing employers based primarily on net zero credentials, and investors making choices about what to fund based on tangible climate action. To put that in numbers, as many as 60 percent of millennials are willing to pay more for truly sustainable products; two-thirds of people are more likely to work for a company with strong and meaningful environmental policies; and research by Amazon has found that as many as 83 percent of investors want to invest in more sustainable startups.

For too long, businesses have been pouring investment into traditional emissions-avoidance offsets—paying someone else to reduce future emissions to compensate for their own. Emissions-avoidance offsets include clean cookstove projects, investment in renewable energy, and forestry protection.

As attention turns to delivery in 2023, awareness will grow that these traditional offsets are at best a distraction that doesn’t count towards net zero, and at worst are downright fraudulent. Until now, carbon avoidance offsets have been an easy, cheap way for businesses to tick the box of sustainability, letting them spin a story about commitment and willingness to tackle the climate crisis. In 2021, more than $1 billion of offsets were sold.

In 2023, businesses feeling pressure from all sides will need to look to other solutions if they want to demonstrate delivery. For instance, awareness of carbon-removal technologies has grown. There is now a broader understanding and acceptance that these technologies, which actively suck carbon out of the atmosphere through direct air capture, enhanced weathering, and other methods, are critical to reaching our global climate goals. And progress has been made—in 2022, a host of major players in Silicon Valley, including Google, Meta and Shopify, formed an alliance to commit $925 million in carbon removal by 2030. While this is a promising step, access to and investment in carbon-removal technologies must become mainstream if they are to go from being in their infancy to scaling at the pace the planet needs them to.

In 2023, a climate pledge will only be a baseline, the bare minimum. People across the board will demand more from the business they work for, spend money with, and invest in. Those that can’t demonstrate tangible progress towards their net zero goals will be left behind.

Source

What's the G20, how did it start and what does it do?

Jesuits in the boardroom

As corporations struggle to survive in a more uncertain world, they should look to the success of the Society of Jesus

by Paolo Quattrone + BIO


Would you give your money to someone who will seek to maximise their returns rather than yours?

The answer is likely ‘No!’ However, as Voltaire warned us, in the corporate world common sense is not very common. Workers, suppliers and lenders provide the corporation with their resources but these are used in the interest of shareholders first. We take the primacy of shareholder value so much for granted that we forget that other and more democratic forms of governance are possible and have, even in our relatively recent history, governed organisations, economies and societies with historic success.

The life of corporations is complex, made of contradictions, power struggles, tensions between different stakeholders, conflicting priorities, and emerging and unforeseen needs and demands. Corporations face Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns, wars, pandemics and black swans. Anyone who has had even minimal exposure to how corporations work knows that, like families, they are political arenas. So, it is very important to consider if shareholders’ value is still a good governing principle.

Recent history is full of commendable attempts to replace shareholders’ value as the organising purpose. One day, the customer is king; another, the stakeholders are, with their defined interests. Lately, other ideas, from the environment to the good of society, have become pressing necessities, as testified by the proliferation of objectives and metrics that corporations have to pursue and disclose: eg, the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The likely outcome of these commendable attempts is an impossible accountability, as addressing the grand challenges of the SDGs and making corporate conduct more attentive to environmental and social issues will bring even greater contradictions, tensions and wicked problems. One forgets that safeguarding the environment is intrinsically in contrast with any form of value production and distribution. We cannot enjoy new cars, clothes, roads, infrastructures if not by consuming natural resources and polluting the environment. It is of course a matter of trade-offs and how we want to tip the scale: there is no magic wand. As the British sociologist John Law said in After Method (2004): ‘if the world is complex and messy, then … we’re going have to give up on simplicities’. Nowhere could benefit more from considering Law’s insight than the world of corporate governance.

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"A Passport from Reality": The History of Heroin (1972)