sunshinelackof

Whole foods has pivoted from your local health foods store--at a national scale to a national superstore--at a higher quality. Grocery and especially natural groceries are turbulent. Their customers generally check enough boxes to end up in the enthusiast/early-adopter category. Even if the Amazon purchase didn't turn them off, targeting the more casual "trader joes" class makes more sense.

My personal concerns with grocery delivery and automation in general is that the automation of my boring daily tasks might not free up more leisure time, but more time to spend working.

The only solution that will save small towns is dismantling some of the industrialisation that freed people up to work in the factory or mill that no longer exists. It's a trivial example, but ban preservatives in bread and now they need a bakery that can deliver bread everyday. Bread that lasts two weeks on a shelf is an optimisation for communities that support advanced professions. Heavy industrialisation is a model that no longer fits these communities and while some might be able to attract select tech workers--in effect patchwork, others should realise that they're optimised for a workforce that no longer exists.

All of that may not even be possible. First try and sell your community their way of life is unsustainable, then try and shake the Walmart, McDonalds dependency.

I'm not sure how water rights work in California, but I think in many places on the west (coast) water rights are not transferable to avoid speculation over what--now more than ever--needs to be a public resource.

> The car market in its' totality has always struck me as being irrational.

Consumers aren't known for their rationality.

Visit the rural parts of the US and you'll see that see-destructive behaviors are way too common. There's no hope right now for half the country. Whatever wealth they had has been mined out.

> I am more worried about votes where we have to verify an absent voter simply because the chance of fraud increases How high are the chances really? The work required to fraudulently submit even a single absentee ballot would just not be worth it. It reads as tone-deaf to place concerns of voter fraud above voter engagement when voter turn out is consistently so low.

> You have a new player in social media (yet we apparently need to break up the big tech companies because you can't enter the market anymore).

The existence of competition doesn't mean they're within the spirit of anti-trust regulations. Twitter using their network to eclipse other markets would be the concern.

I think consistent exercise is extremely important as well. And it should be right sort of exercise. I found yoga to be a key activity. It leaves you alone with yourself, no one to compete with. You eventually have to succumb yourself and just exist. There are some varieties of yoga like ashtanga which in my opinion is best for this.

Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road.

A solution is to level the planes of separation between types of traffic in urban areas. With pedestrians closer to cars the cars have to go slower by nature. It's antithetical to the common logic and current policy of building walking paths completely separate from roads and all of the businesses attached to them.

As a kid in the early '90s the corner market, grocery store, schools from elementary to high, both jobs I had, and park were all within a 10 minute walk -- and that was in the suburbs. Cars don't need to be a requirement for daily life even in the suburbs it just requires good planning or planning at all.

Unfortunately I think that's a little idealistic. Compulsory support and funding by the state for the arts and sciences is necessary for a host of reasons. You could say similar things about about climate change - if you care about it, you pay for it. But we know that the individual cannot solve climate change and that it requires some form of top down movement. Maybe it's not fair comparison, but I'm arguing that continual and consistent support for arts and sciences is basically a requirement for the same reasons and that in practice only governments are able to maintain.

Now on the individual level it might be a dumb decision, though it's a hard argument to make to someone in that position. What an enormous opportunity cost it is to not take the loan if you think you'll succeed. It's a bad situation for everyone involved and there isn't a good answer to the individuals in or about to be in that situation.

This comes off as peering from an ivory tower - essentially "stop studying literature and fix my pipes." Considering we are probably collectively in the wealthiest period humanity has ever experienced we could try not leaving the arts completely out to dry.

What qualifies a degree as an "undesirable pile of shit?" Studying English is not at all useless. It definitely provides value to our society and produces people with useful skills applicable across disciplines. Being burdened with student loans pigeon holes great minds into safe jobs that don't make use of their skills.

Ironically it's more stressful for someone to do less work and put on a farce. He's always worried he'll be called out and have nothing to show for it.

> Monopoly is if one corporation owns an entire market. This isn't quite right. Traditionally for a company to be a monopoly it isn't even required it control a majority of the market. It has more to do with the company being in a privileged circumstance in a market and explicitly using that privilege to bolster themselves or suppress competition in the same or related markets.

An example is Microsoft with Netscape. Microsoft was sued with anti-trust laws not because IE or Windows owned the entire market, but because Windows gave Microsoft a privileged place in the web-browser market that they abused.

That is unnecessarily divisive. Northern European countries trust each other more. They might have an ethnic and cultural history that enables trust while The US doesn't. No one can deny the influences and overlaps of public policy, culture, and economics on each other, but no individual aspect of society justifies inaction. That is more of a red herring than anything.

While it may be true for a subset of posters here, the idea of just finding a new job if it doesn't suit you is not possible for most people. The majority of people need to be able to do something mildly productive and be able to live a happy life as a result. If your economic model is leaving this many people behind--or they even feel they're being left behind it's not a good model.

Everyday I find it harder to argue against things like medicare-for-all. Private healthcare only adds unneeded pressure to workers--heck even me sometimes. Even if it weren't cheaper which it should be[1], there is surely some value that soulless accountants could extract from lower stressors in the workplace.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/upshot/why-single-payer-h...

Surely the value of a penny to The US government is more than just the monetary value displayed on the face of the coin. The ability to store 0.01 USD has to be worth more than 0.01 USD or at least (production cost) - 0.01 USD.

At least how we organize work today, it sucks tremendously hard. Someone might pretend he likes it, but no one likes waking up at 6am, commuting both ways, and effectively losing half his day doing something he might not enjoy. There's no real reason most work needs to be like that either besides the momentum of the status-quo.

I'm not an expert in any degree, but it seems that there are plenty of problems out there, just that the only ones being solved cater to investors and wealthy tech-workers. There's no money in improving infrastructure, returning good food to food deserts, teaching school children - or otherwise the things that most would probably agree suggest the success of the society at large.

Very likely this is what stakeholder-profits-at-all-costs leads to.

To me basic income seems like an incredibly -bourgeois- solution. Accepting it as a solution accepts that the current economic practices are not working for large swaths of the working-age population.

>For some reason that period of tremendous growth barely helped millennials.

I don't think it's just us, though it probably disproportionately is. What wealth small and medium towns had has moved to cities, you just won't have a good job unless you move to the city.

Something about it all seems so sinister. Not everyone can be an engineer or a doctor. If society is to function people need to be able to live a reasonable life just being mildly productive.

Nostalgia is dangerous and the past isn't better simply because we remember the good parts from it. We pretend memory is crystal, but we tend to stitch together the best memories and even fill-in the gaps of what we forgot with lies. It isn't comfortable to think about the past and remember all of the things that sucked when you've got plenty to complain about today. When you yield to nostalgia you forfeit your agency to make today and tomorrow better. Suppose the past was better, what are you going to do so you can look back at today with the same fondness?

This theme was explored quite a lot by David Lynch in "Twin Peaks: The Return;" where he annihilated fans' desire to feel nostalgic over the original show.

> If there was then patents, copyrights, trademarks, and fit of licensing, etc would all be wrong to the same degree.

Patents and copyright exist novel and interesting works and ideas for a limited amount of time. It's an obvious argument that it would be anti-competitive to allow a giant competitor to steal novel ideas from their creators without recourse. It's not obvious to me how protecting serendipity is clearly anti-competitive.

Trademarks are in no way anti-competitive. They exist to support fair business practices, in particular to prevent malicious actors from falsely claiming they represent a business. It would be anti-competitive to allow anyone to steal your trademark and sell products under it.