bobthepanda

It was both storage and transport. The development of international shipping logistics, improved infrastructure and refrigeration were all needed to make this happen.

You can grow the food and you can store the food but that doesn’t do much good if locally you make too much and someone somewhere else is starving but you can’t get from point A to point B, and it has to get there not only unspoiled but intact, or at least undamaged enough to eat.

For most of human history calories in was way more important than nutrition since we could barely even manage that. Just the fact that you can buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the middle of a harsh winter is an incredible feat of logistics and technology that has taken a century to develop.

i did recently see something interesting where if you look at buybacks from the Mag7, they basically almost entirely offset vesting employee RSUs. which kind of makes sense, those RSUs have to come from somewhere or they dilute the current shares.

i don't know that people on this website in particular would like the "solution" to that.

this is already happening via asset price inflation.

where i live (Seattle) small businesses are trapped in a death spiral as their rents are going up, the wages they have to pay are up to even attract workers who also need to pay rent, but purchasing power has not caught up.

Don’t really know what that has to do with my comment

Unfortunately the current administration is also weaponizing the justice system and trying to suffocate its opponents in legal fees.

Realistically speaking, it is also because the nature of law and society has changed since the Constitution was drafted. Congress is not set up with so many experts in all the fields of society and cannot literally line by line specify all the regulations pertaining to, say, aviation.

Underground cisterns are generally the way to do it and even the Romans were building them

An interesting feature of Trump 2.0 is that his party has essentially entirely keeled over.

Presidents are not historically all powerful within their own parties and the nature of the big tent systems means usually it is fairly difficult to get agreement on everything within a party without some compromise. Trump has managed to defang everybody else in the GOP.

you could say the same thing about AWS or Cloudflare hosting anybody and everybody. Spain actually started blocking a bunch of their IP blocks during football matches due to a poorly thought out legal decision.

Basque would be truly weird since it is one of a few known language isolates

To be fair, restaurants have always had very high failure rates (something like 75% close within the first year.)

Keeping a restaurant open is more about managing costs than having good food; many die because of not great inventory and supply chain handling, for example.

while the seven day week is arbitrary, it is also worth noting that the French Revolution had experimented with a metric ten day week, which ended up being a total bust because laborers only got one week in ten of rest rather than one in seven.

Unfortunately in most countries the blocker is politics, not the desire of public health officials to do anything. See the current US admin going after vaccines while declaring open season for peptides.

TEMU also existed because of the de minimis exception. To speed up customs processing and ease business, the US and EU had minimum package values before customs and tariff inspection occurred.

TEMU and Shein just kind of took it and ran with it by shipping $5 shirts en masse.

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This also only really happened because China's whole export oriented policy relies on keeping workers underpaid via capital control. Workers get their bank accounts at uncompetitive rates and that capital is used to fund manufacturing expansion. The normal thing that happens as a country gets richer is that workers earn more, start buying more of their domestic surplus and their export advantage goes away. However, the current thinking promoted by Xi is that consumption is just capitalist decadence, and so Chinese consumers can't buy the ever increasing goods surplus even if they wanted to. And China is also dealing with internal deflation now due to the massive confidence shock after the property bust.

Even with mechanical stokers you still needed a dedicated fireman making sure the proper amount of coal was making it in.

Nothing like a modern liquid fuel engine where you can just drive yourself without manually adjusting the amount of fuel burn by hand.

This is actually not the first major energy transition.

The world moved from coal to oil for transport and shipping fairly quickly due to the higher energy density and significantly easier handling of liquid vs solid fuels. Using pipes and tubes was a huge labor savings compared to having people shovel coal into a hard to control boiler.

I think we’ve only got here because social platforms are large and also own advertising auction platforms.

I wonder how it would look like as a new antitrust vertical slice to enforce against.

Plus you can always self host content and set up your own monetizing partners.

I think there is a distinct difference between deplatforming content, and simply not monetizing it. You have the right to shout in the town square but I do not have to put money in your cup when you do it.

Alternatively, cutting out labor just results in mass poverty except for the moneyed few, and a new era of technofeudalism.

It seems pretty clear that the current crop of executives strongly prefer the latter scenario.

IIRC the big push to contactless and Oyster before it is just reducing the cost of handling money. Transit agencies do not really want to be in the business of banking, and physically printing paper tickets and maintaining the machines to accept them properly is a lot more expensive than an RFID reader.

In particular for paper and magnetic strip, you have to keep the reader clean enough to accept reads properly, and the machine also needs to not damage the ticket. This is a non issue with tapping.

you don't even need all of that to track people.

there was a bit of a kerfuffle where a dataset that literally only contained the start, end and time, and some deanonymized data of NYC taxi rides was successfully deanonymized and used to track celebrities. Most people have fairly sparse, unique travel patterns, and so armed with only a few known paparazzi photos you could accurately derive their whole travel history. https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-re...

to put this in perspective;

a lower hood will strike somewhere lower on the body like the legs, and bounce them off the hood (absorbing some impact)

a higher hood will strike somewhere closer to the head and torso, causing substantially more damage, and cause you to go under and get crushed by the wheels, so at a minimum level damage is much more severe.

and this is for adults. they're basically death sentences for shorter people and children.

part of the problem, at least in the US, is that the SUVs destroy other cars, so it is quickly becoming a weird safety arms race.

I think Hong Kong has been enough of a cautionary experience for Taiwan that this is more or less not going to happen willingly.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As an example, 110v American outlet plugs are almost certainly not the most efficient way to power devices and appliances; but, because they are so standard and are good enough, using them massively eases the burden of making, buying and selling powered appliances in the US. Similar story with USB C.

Japan itself is involved with a lot of the R&D, the factories are there because of that and because of major buyers also being there. It’s not like we’re going to evacuate the hundred million plus of Japan.

The emerging thing is that the earthquake caused a gas leak which later caused an explosion. Pipes will just go out of alignment during an earthquake, there isn’t a ton you can do to prevent that wholly.

My question is why upon calling in a gas leak, the mall was not immediately evacuated and cordoned off.

this isn't even that weird, when I worked in a BigTech it was pretty explicit that there were certain countries where you should not bring your actual work device through the border, and you'll get set up with a different one while in that country.

A diversity of media is a good thing. Most of the bad things you could say about state media also apply to sufficiently concentrated private media.