assaultpotato @ assaultpotato @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

I think you misunderstood.

1. Shame we have so many horrid companies with so much power.
2. Biden's admin is amazing because I've never seen so many pro-consumer cases get filed.

Medicine price negotiations, antitrust lawsuits, price gouging lawsuits, unfair fee lawsuits, etc. Biden admin FTC+DOJ have more teeth than I've ever seen.

I can't remember a period of time with so many anti-trust and other consumer protection lawsuits from the FTC and DOJ.

Shame we got to this state, but Biden admin is deeply based.

They're voting Jill Stein because Daddy Putin says vote splitting is a communist conspiracy

Idk... lotta people on mics in pre/post-game lobbies in Splitgate for it to be bot matches

What's wild to me is that legal segregation was like, not that long ago at all. It always feels like it's taught as ancient history but it was only half a lifetime ago, really... and still ongoing. It's not like this happened a thousand years ago and "you should really be over it by now", this was the experience of some people's still living grandparents and parents.

The idea that an entire demographic of people should magically recover and be equals again after like 30 years of half-assed "equality" after literal generations of slavery is fucking wild.

Absolute goblin energy to not recognize the ongoing effects of such a recent thing.

I know they're paid for by Walmart/whoever, but they should get actual private security that doesn't cost the taxpayer 300 grand to train and prepare for service. The police force can stop complaining about being understaffed too when they're playing rentacop.

Congrats officer you caught a guy stealing 2 loaves of bread and a $10 rotisserie chicken. Mind going to arrest the guy who committed an assault 2 blocks away just now?

Yep - not u common in my shitass city these days for a couple cops to be posted at the doors of safeway, walmart, etc. full time. Me getting mugged by 5 tweakers in broad daylight? 8 hour response time. Homeless dude stealing bread to survive? Immediately arrested.

Meanwhile the police force complains that they need more money because they don't have enough resources to do their jobs... full 1/3rd of our civic budget already. Totally fucking useless, unless you're a big brand.

It doesn't even make me mad, I'm just scared and confused

I cannot recommend the book "Escaping the Housing Trap" highly enough. It talks a lot about the funding and financial products around housing and some of the fundamental flaws in the system. It's quite easy to blame institutional owners and they're certainly partly at fault, but it's vastly more complex than that. It's a really great scary read that genuinely had my mouth hanging open at times.

Tech people tend to be very black-and-white when discussing ideology. Reality is more forgiving.

If you can get your hands on it, the opening chapters of "Practical Event Driven Microservices Architecture" by Hugo Rocha gives a reasonable high level view of when you might decide to break a domain out of a monolith. I wouldn't exactly consider it the holy grail of technical reading, but he does a good job explaining the pros and cons of monolith v microservices and a bit of exploration on those middle grounds.

The reality is, as always, "it depends".

If you're a smaller team that needs to do shit real fast, a monolith is probably your best bet.

Do you have hundreds of devs working on the same platform? Maybe intelligently breaking out your domains into distinct services makes sense so your team doesn't get bogged down.

And in the middle of the spectrum you have modular domain centric monoliths, monorepo multi-service stuff, etc.

It's a game of tradeoffs and what fits best for your situation depends on your needs and challenges. Often going with an imperfect shared technical vision is better than a disjointed but "state of the art" approach.

Yeah that's what allows me to afford to live here, lol

Only thing I'd say (as a cyclist) is that "skill issue" is not a great reply for all cases. My city swings from +40 to -40 and it's not uncommon to see wind chills down below -50. Winter cycling is not always viable, which is why a robust transit network needs to include a variety of options.

Otherwise, this is a good comment.

If you're going moderate or short distances in a city, odds are it will literally be faster to bike, even at a no sweat/leisurely pace.

Average speed of commuter traffic in cities is sub 20 kph.

I wish I could take credit, but those quotes are all directly from the linked article! I felt the comment I was replying to was incorrect about the content of the article and wanted to clarify. Truly they did write a good piece worthy of recognition, though.

Not really, if you read the article in full.

In our analysis, only three per cent of the over 200 explanations for food price changes point to grocer actions or other agency in the private sector as driving price increases. This reflects a tendency to portray food prices as erratic and overwhelmingly opaque.

Other issues — such as the over-reliance on fossil fuels across the supply chain — also go unmentioned.

It's really shitty wording, but they're basically saying "of the 200 proposed causes, only 3% of those proposed are about grocer decisions" rather than "grocer decisions make up 3% of the cause in rising costs".

In the rest of the article announcing the report (it isn't released yet), they pretty clearly call out anticompetitive behaviors and price fixing:

These reports also rarely consider the decisions that grocers and other private sector entities have on food prices. Increased consolidation and concentration in the grocery sector is a structural issue that deserves scrutiny.

The bread price-fixing scandal a few years ago showed how a lack of competition enables price manipulation and hurts consumers. Canada’s Competition Bureau recently announced they are launching an investigation into the owners of Loblaws and Sobeys for alleged anti-competitive conduct.

In the United States, there is also strong evidence that the private sector has been profiteering on supply chain issues and inflation. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission likewise recently found that big grocers used the pandemic as a smokescreen to pad their profits at the public’s expense.

The underlying thesis of the article is basically "people keep asking why food is expensive but all these reports are unscientific and all but 3% of them neglect things like price fixing and monopolies".

What we need is a new approach. Food is a human right, but a unique one in that we rely on the private sector to provision it. We should expect a higher standard than with other consumer goods, and the private sector has arguably not earned the benefit of the doubt given their history of price fixing.

One positive step towards generating trustworthy evidence about food prices would be to incorporate transparency measures into the code of conduct the Canadian government is developing with grocers. This could include third-party audits, open data-sharing and a clear breakdown of what’s driving price changes — from the farm to the shelf.

The article authors (and report authors) are very based.

Majority of lemmy users are US based, and the overwhelming majority are western. Similarly, the majority of lemmy users are pretty leftist compared to the average citizen.

It shouldn't be surprising that we're not hearing much about bad stuff happening in China. And that's not even accounting for the difficulty in getting trustworthy information out of China.

If you want examples of semi-recent stuff from China that largely got passed over, take a look at the civil unrest regarding the apartment fires during China's COVID lockdown, the forcible repatriation of Chinese citizens abroad, suicide rates in major manufacturing hubs, the huge economic hits in real estate and public/private transportation infrastructure, etc.

There's a lot going on that we simply don't hear about because people tend to share what relates to them.

Incredibly based scientist

Ok, I make this comment in complete good faith as an urban cyclist from NA who desperately hates the modern car industry...

Why not storm the VW plant or an ICE car manufacturer? Going after car manufacturers is kinda based, but from what I can tell the main problem with Teslas is build quality and the scam of FSD, not anything particularly environmental. Is it because they sell their carbon credits to other auto manufacturers, bypassing the point of them? Or is it because they're cars and encourage unsustainable growth patterns inherently?

Wouldn't shuttering an ICE factory be better than shuttering an EV factory, even if neither are good?

I agree. Sadly, I think it's poorly implemented right now.

I'd have to find the news article about it, but I'm pretty sure this program exists already. I think an external study on the program shows that the Northwest Company is pocketing something like 60% of the subsidy for Northern grocers and only passing on 40% of the value to lower consumer prices. I saw this article perhaps 6 months ago? Let me go looking.

E: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/rising-food-prices-canada-north-1.7122481

From this article, I got the numbers backward: 60% goes to consumers but 40% goes missing.