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These stores were solving for an Amazon problem (brick and mortar stores without the expense of workers), and not any significant customer problem.

They often put them in places, hoping that people would be attracted by marginally lower prices and brand extension, all while removing one of the primary appeals (for most people) of in person grocery shopping: impromptu community socialization, even if it is simply greeting the checkout worker.

I'm not surprised they failed.


> When I think about the counterfactual me that grew up in a large American city, New York or L.A. instead of Toronto, I see someone who's more stunted than me, in important ways. No skating classes, libraries too far to walk to on a regular basis and more poorly stocked. Student debt. Without generous public incentives, that version of me would only have the life that her own parents can afford to provide for her.

America has long been a place where hardship or trauma for a subset of the population has been seen as the system working "correctly".

It's just that the makeup of that subset has shifted over time (although much less so for black Americans).

You'll find many people here that will believe that without deprivation of basics and even comforts, nobody would want to pursue or achieve anything.

This is often believed by people living in communities that - because of wealth clustering -provide basics and comforts, as well as growth opportunities, and sometimes especially by the few people who escaped deprivation into comfort and security through their grit, thereby assuming that is the best route for all of society.

We think we did it all ourselves, without any helping hand up, while often being ignorant of our own privilege.


> When someone is arrested, the police can get a subpoena to enter your house, right?

That's a warrant. A subpoena is an order to appear in court.


And by the way ICE officers can still enter your house even if they don't have a warrant. Apparently.

Yeah, one wonders what a warrant actually means at this point.

> That pervasive behavioral surveillance is the main reason Apple has never allowed a native Chrome app on iOS.

There is a native Chrome app on iOS. It gets all the same url visit data as Chrome on other platforms.

Apple blocks 3rd party renderers and JS engines on iOS to protect its App Store from competition that might deliver software and content through other channels that they don't take a cut of.


Like everything else, it depends. In the extreme case, if you eat beef every day but use a bicycle for transportation, live in a mild climate with little need for heating and cooling, and rarely fly in an airplane, your diet could be a significant part of your carbon footprint in percentage terms.

Eh, it's just that the entire supply chain that keeps them alive means that their per-capita carbon footprint is almost certainly not dominated by their diet, let alone by beef alone (it's an outsized fraction, but it's just not that significant compared to other stuff). But yeah, hard to talk accurately in broad strokes about a very varied audience.

In this case, they said they live in Rome. Concrete, heavy machinery to make it livable, trash movement, maintaining their public transit, household goods, electricity via nat gas, etc. Sounds like they're making a good effort, though, and in terms of just the discretionary part, they might be right.


> They don't see the effect of their taxes being spent,

They are quite aware of taxes because 13.5% of their income on average comes directly from federal subsidies paid by taxes on "city folk".

https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...

> The voters will vote against their own interests over and over and over if they keep hearing something that resonates with what they feel.

Most large farm owners are very well off and are absolutely voting in their own interests for the party whose primary goal is to cut taxes on the wealthiest while cutting government support for the poorest.

The rural working class and poor on the other hand are however often voting against their economic interests, but their economic situation has long been ignored by both partie, so having given up hope for economic change, they often vote on culture/identity issues.


> They are quite aware of taxes because 13.5% of their income on average comes directly from federal subsidies paid by taxes on "city folk".

I have some investments that will go up and down $10K on a daily basis. That's just a number in a mainframe somewhere, I don't even notice unless I go look, and even then it doesn't "feel" real. If I have to hand over an extra $1 for my coffee in cash, I feel it viscerally. I grind my teeth. I hate it.

The immediacy and in-person nature of an EPA fine feels a lot worse than some grant that may be little more than an annual electronic deposit in a bank account.

> Most large farm owners are very well off and are absolutely voting in their own interests for the party whose primary goal is to cut taxes on the wealthiest while cutting government support for the poorest.

To be fair to farmers, it's more complicated than that. A lot of farmers are wealthy because the poorer farmers have been squeezed out, often because of the actions of the very governments they voted for. This has caused a lot of consolidation into large conglomerates, which utilise their tax breaks to outcompete smaller farmers, further squeezing them.


> To be fair to farmers, it's more complicated than that. A lot of farmers are wealthy because the poorer farmers have been squeezed out, often because of the actions of the very governments they voted for.

Of course, it's not so different in that way than other oligopolistic industries, like tech.


>Most large farm owners are very well off

Most family farms (From my area) are land rich. The land is worth a lot, but they never sell it. The farming essentially pays for the land, and maybe a little to live off of. They are NOT raking it in.

Also almost all of them have notes on this land, not owned outright.


What % of farms in your area are small family farms (either by count or economic %)?

In the country it’s like 40% of the farms and 20% of the value. That stat alone shows the real problem, big agricultural is wildly more efficient (without wading into the externalities). And big agricultural gets the lions share of the benefit of the subsidies.

I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing but half the reason these conversations are so circular is that small family farms are not what most agriculture in the US is yet we vote like it is.


I'm not sure the definition of "family" farms, you can have a family name corporation that is still $100M+ in value. Even then I have no idea who all of them are.

My family farm is small enough they alone cannot support a entire family upper-middle class lifestyle, but the land is still worth millions. But they all have notes, good years mean the crop pays the bank and maybe some supplies for next year.


    > My family farm is small enough they alone cannot support a entire family upper-middle class lifestyle, but the land is still worth millions.
This makes no financial sense to me. I call this: "asset rich, but cash poor". It is like living in a house that you inherited worth "millions", but working a job that "alone cannot support a entire family upper-middle class lifestyle". Simple solution: Sell the house. Cash out and invest in the stock market or rental real estate. You should do the same. If what you say is really true, then call Dave Ramsey (or someone similar) and ask for their advice. They will say the same.

Small farmers are generally aware that this makes no financial sense. They're participating in a multigenerational family tradition. There are also typically relatives urging those still farming to sell the farm so they can get their share (which may not be that huge, when all is divvied up).

The USDA where I pulled that stat defines it as farms that have less than 1M in income (gross) per year. A farm that makes that much is going to only support at most 1 full time farmer. The further subdivide farms under 350k which clearly falls into some terrible definition of hobby.

Which tracks with my experience. I don’t know any family farmers where farming is their only, or even primary, occupation.


> In other arid areas, people use terracing on hills so the water runoff is slowed and the water can soak into the aquifers. Also, dikes are built around fields to hold the water and also let it soak into the ground.

> Are these done in California?

People terrace where the only arable land is in hills or mountains. The vast majority of California's farmland is flat as a board.

California's central valley also has one of the most massive systems of water control (aqueducts, levees, etc) in the world.

The problem with water and Ag in California is caused by the massive disparities in water rights that make it extremely cheap for some and expensive for others, depending on their water rights.


I infer they aren't bulldozing a dike around the flat farmland to prevent runoff and allow the water to soak into the ground.

This will also reduce flooding from overloading the rivers with water.


> I infer they aren't bulldozing a dike around the flat farmland to prevent runoff

Earthen dikes and berms are a common feature around farmland in California.


You need some outflow to carry away salts. Otherwise, the water just evaporates and leaves the salt there, and eventually the land becomes unable to grow crops. This has historically been a serious problem in Mesopotamia, for example.

Pedantic, but the article is talking about the way we structure/organize information, not store it. When I think of the word store, I think of the physical medium. The way we organize the information is only partially related

It's not pedantic, you are correctly using words as we understand them, and they are not. The headline needs a sharp correction. Editing jobs are in very short supply these days.

Oh come on. Programmers discuss how to "store" data in memory as a data model all the time.

You're reducing definitions and meaning too far to make an ultimately empty point just to contribute the thread.

If social medias only contribution is language policing, then it really should die off. What a waste of resources so functional illiterate nobodies can project ego.


No, I'll think I'll double down, because I do think I'm right here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_storage is a different website from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_store because they are different, slightly overlapping concepts.


I mean if we're talking about the physical storage of medium, the single most dense way would be to write it on the surface of a black hole. I still haven't figured out how to read it back though.

I recommend a backup butane stove, which is what I have for outages where my induction stove doesn't work.

Also an outdoor camp chef stove. Both are cheap and work great. My camp chef doubles as an outdoor pizza oven.


> According to linguists, elongated variations [of hello] such as "heyyy" ...

Not to be confused with the vocative interjection "Hey" which is likely thousands of years old, at least back to Proto Indo European, but probably earlier.


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