In Denmark we have a long history of cooperative retail stores, so a development like this is not too surprising sering as there have been quite a few examples of stores getting bought by the community here as well. I think it is a good move in general since there is not going to be the same profit over everything mentality in those stores since it is owned by people who buys stuff there.
There are a lot of co-ops in the US too, but that’s not quite what this is. I’m this case the town government bought and runs the store. A co-op might be better, but you may need a certain population threshold to make that work.
For sufficiently representative government, I think that government-owned and cooperatively-owned are synonymous. Especially for small towns, the overhead of having two separate organizations, each of which represents all people in the town, would be quite large.
They definitely are not. A government owned enterprise is many steps removed from voters, and will be run by bureaucrats. This creates an internal constituency and an opportunity for several kinds of graft. A co-op involves your direct participation in operations, and probably an opportunity to be directly involved in decision making depending on the size of the co-op.
Maybe for a really small co-op, but beyond 100 to 200 folks, any co-op will have the exact same internal dynamics as city hall, just on a smaller scale.
Not really. A co-op can’t levy a tax on your home. A co-op can’t pass laws. A co-op doesn’t have a police force. Co-ops also have to comply with generally accepted accounting principles. Municipalities also have the backstop of the larger state if they become insolvent.
I shop at a couple of co-ops, and they're excellent.
Ideally I'd like to chat with a lawyer knowledgeable about co-op formation to create an open template for a version designed to leverage a long term lease from a nonprofit land trust. The structure could be mixed use to include housing; resident owned, appreciation moderated, with support from the trust for affordability.
I've seen a few organizations that might help in a generic way, but lawyers haven't been interested in the 'open' aspect.
I think a populating of the around 1000 of the city and the sorrunding area is maybe enough though it is likely harder to compete in these times where everyone has cars and such.
(THere is also recent examples here where it is not really a cooperative but a group of citizens getting together and raising money to buy the store and rent it out to a grocer. For example in Halvrimmen https://nordjyske.dk/nyheder/jammerbugt/borgere-koeber-koebm..., where they have made a LTD that owns the store)
I find it strange that citizens of democratic countries agree that democracy in politics is necessary but democracy in economics is not...
By that I mean humans are born into this world with one vote for every election in politics but in economics people are born with zero votes and must rely on the benevolence of their parents.
There is no minimum access to pollution rights, natural resources, land and perhaps money granted to every citizen equally the moment they are born. It doesn't have to be an insane amount that people can live off, just enough to feel like you are not born as an illegal alien on this planet.
People vote each time they choose buy a good or a service. Isn't it democracy if you have the freedom to choose to whom you give your hard earned money (what is left after taxes)?
If you proposed that people could buy extra votes in elections, at say 100$ a pop, virtually everyone would call it an affront to democracy, as rightly so. Yet it is precisely what happened when it comes to governance of joint-stock companies.
For one, a vote is a right. It costs you nothing to vote. A vote has a single purpose.
Buying an item is not the same. You have a fixed amount of money and there is an opportunity cost to buying anything. Moreover, you need to buy certain items to survive.
If you are poor you are not in a position where you have a choice, you have to buy the cheapest items that you need to survive. If you are rich you have more than enough resources to survive, to buy the items you actually want, and more beyond.
When you are forced to vote in a certain way because you cannot afford not to, that is not democracy.
It's an analogy. There's also an opportunity cost to a vote, insofar as casting a vote for A means you can not cast a vote for B. You also have a fixed amount of votes, 1.
> If you are poor you are not in a position where you have a choice, you have to buy the cheapest items that you need to survive
This is a really dull and tedious way of looking at things. Poor people make choices based on preference all of the time. Especially because food in the US is dirt cheap in historical terms. Sure you aren't buying organic grass fed meat, but you can pick from a wide range of cheap foods. Are your choices more limited, sure, but you still have choices.
It's just a shitty democracy. Funnily enough, especially since Citizens United (but even way before ofc), that's basically how our government works too.
People say this, but I think you probably aren't clear on what the Citizens United decision meant. It boiled down to overturning a law that prevented groups of people from spending more than a certain dollar value on anything that could be considered campaigning. The law was so broad that it was used against a Michael Moore documentary, and was obviously unconstitutional.
Also the idea that you can just reliably buy congresspeople by spending money on ads is a farce.
A cursory look at Wikipedia would tell you that Citizens United overturned a Supreme Court decision from 1990 called Austin v. Michigan.
In other words it did not boil down to "overturning a law" but created a new conservative doctrine that would apply to any law.
If it's not possible to buy politicians with campaign ads you shouldn't have a problem with a law making it illegal to buy politicans with campaign ads, no?
Yet for some reason you are spreading falsehoods about Citizens United, claiming a highly contested 5 to 4 decision turned on what was "obviously unconstitutional" (if it was obvious shouldn't it have been a unanimous decision?) almost like you want people to believe the case's ruling was sounder than it was and are afraid of it being overturned.
You're talking out of both sides of your mouth. "Buying politicans is my right as an American but also doesn't work so stay calm and don't panic over the fact I am buying politicians"
> I think you probably aren't clear on what the Citizens United decision meant
Should I take this as a prompt to assume random crap about you?
CU drastically increased spending by outside, untracked groups, on the ridiculous premise that money is not a corrupting influence in politics. It was the end of meaningful campaign finance regulations.
> Also the idea that you can just reliably buy congresspeople by spending money on ads is a farce.
Why are companies and groups spending so much then, including spending on both sides of many races?
I think you're mixing concepts... It's a free market economy if you can choose who to buy from; it's a democracy if the citizens choose the rules and laws, which may prohibit you from buying certain things.
This is even more important due to the fact that the amount of power in the political sphere keeps shrinking, while the power in the economic sphere keeps growing.
The amount of real power politicians truly have is laughable compared to the state of affairs even 50 or 60 years ago. If you think about it there is almost no decision of substance that can be made without deference to economic power (in the person of un-elected, in-accountable actors), i.e. the amount of power that political actors have is very small, compared to say pre-wwii times or the couple of decades afterwards. Historically this has never been the case, to this extent.
I don't think that's necessarily a widespread agreement. Even within the bounds of basic centrist liberalism, people believe that sufficiently concentrated wealth can rival the power of governments, and deserve to be limited in the way that governments are.
The state's monopoly, qua Max Weber, is on the claim to the legitimate use of violence. That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state, or an entity acting in the effective capacity of a state, whatever it happens to call itself.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition The State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California Press. p. 54.
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
No government has an absolute monopoly on violence. Here in the US, some thug could steal my bike and likely get away with it. Much of the literature using that definition includes coercion as a form of violence, and no government fully covers economic coercion.
If the number of entities in a society with discretion over violence is not equal to 1, what is the optimal number?
The literature normally refers to an "absolute monopoly on legitimate violence," since the state has no practical way to prevent all incidental acts of non-state violence.
Sure, that makes sense. I still wonder what an oligopoly on legitimate violence looks like. The closest thing I can think of is the sweatshop system, where each sweatshop has coercive power over its workers, legitimized by the idea that the worker chose to join a particular sweatshop.
Consider that term "violence". It means to violate. To cross the line into what's private and holy. Not just your body, but your right to speak, your right to property, all that stuff. Which is exactly what we're talking about here. The legal right to cross the line.
It's kinda like having write permission on a file.
From the 2022-07-25 minutes, they discussed that the store is losing money. They decided to transfer money from sewer & equipment funds to it. They also decided to lower prices.
I'm wondering why the city council is making such decisions. Do they have experience running grocery stores? Perhaps they cannot hire a capable manager to set prices and make the store break-even? They should consult someone with experience on the matter. The previous owners would probably be willing to give advice.
From the 2022-06-27 minutes, the council approved a request to use the store's freezer for a city event. The store's manager said they needed council approval. I think the council is micro-managing the store without competence in retail management. The store manager doesn't have authority to run the store. This is probably the root cause of the store's financial troubles.
Here's a better question: Should the store be break-even?
If the store is "losing money" then the community's taxes are collectively paying some part of the community's food costs. That sounds like a good thing! You still have personal choice, and your money still means something, but the town is collectively paying for more equal access to food and other essential goods, in a very direct way.
> The cost: $300k, plus the cost of inventory (~$100k) and a 0.5% cut to the store’s previous owners for the next 10 years — in total, less than ~$500k.
Who knows more about grocery retail, and can say: What makes buying an existing store like this preferable to just starting a new store, and avoiding the $300K and 0.5% cut for 10 years?
Think the same reason you buy any working business. The previous owner has managed to solve a great number of non-obvious operational problems. To name a few that come to mind:
* Established supply chain
- Working agreements with suppliers (no need to find and negotiate suppliers)
- Working logistics. Scheduling of supplies is sorted, you have reliable delivery slots with all supplies
* Employees. No need to find and train labour.
* Working pay roll, accounting, taxes. No need to create that infrastructure from scratch.
* Know good business model, with auditable accounts. You substantially de-risk the investment, because you have meaningful historical data to estimate future performance from.
* Physical infrastructure already setup. No need to find a building, buy equipment (shelves, tills etc) and setup equipment.
* Business generates revenue for new owner immediately after purchase. No time needed to solve all of the above problems, instead time can be used to grow or stabilise business.
Owning the only grocery store in town doesn't sound like a risky business model compared to the existing and apparently de-risked "only grocery store in town" business model you'd be paying for.
I normally think of the existing customer base and "brand" as the main asset, which isn't much of an asset here. But I don't have experience managing retail business, and what you say makes sense, thanks!
The very small town I grew up in had to do this ten years ago. They formed a co-op and it bought the store. They split the co-op into 100 shares costing a thousand dollars each. I thought about buying one effectively as a donation, but didn’t.
Class issues and racial issues intersect. If you skew too far toward class issues, you wind up in class reductionism (the demonstrably false notion that creating economic equality will solve racism). If you skew too far toward race issues, you get... I'm not sure what the term for it is, but it's essentially trying to achieve racial equality by building up a class of Black entrepreneurs and ignoring everyone else.
An interesting thing I've found (anecdotally) is that corporate and nonprofit efforts for "racial justice" skew very heavily toward the latter, but community aid and grassroots racial justice groups strike much more of a balance.
Obfuscated probably isn't the right word: the reality is that there are both class and racial issues. The latter feeds into the former; the former gives political cover for the latter.
It's often very sensible to own something oneself, if you can organize it.
If someone else owns it, they're going to want to extract profit for themselves and it's a very different situation than just getting an employee. For example, compare renting with being part of something like a condominium association.
Building capital and controlling things oneself is the thing to do with almost everything.
Why would you expect a subsidy to be as efficient?
As someone who grew up in USSR I am generally a bit sceptical about collectively owned businesses. Not saying that it never works, but in general privately owned business is usually more efficient. Owning a business collectively opens it to politicking and bad decision making by committee.
On the other hand, if the business model is simple enough, co-owning it might make sense.
The problem I see with public ownership is the risk that the government will sell it and that one will thus be exposed to someone reaping monopoly rents, and this creates my preference for co-ownership.
However, I think Soviet problems are in part due to a near-total absence of market mechanisms and of game-theoretic thinking-- i.e. 'what is this state enterprise actually incentivized to do', so I don't think it's applicable to these kinds of things unless they get ossified.
Government ownership/operation is rarely a problem by itself. With the right management structures and incentives, they can be as productive and efficient as privately run businesses. In some examples, they can actually out-preform privately run businesses.
Around the world, there are many (partially) publicly owned logistics companies (airlines, cargo shipping lines) that are good examples of this working well. They can easily be profitable for the government owning them during the good times, they can actually run leaner with smaller rainy-day funds and be competitive with the private companies they are competing with. They can also operate in markets where private companies might choose to not operate, and can even drive more business to a country. Then when the bad times come around (for example, covid19 shutdowns), they can rely on government subsidies to get though the harsh times reasonably unscathed, while private companies might end up needing to do extreme cuts, or even go bankrupt.
With your example of the USSR, we are talking about an economy where every single business is collectively owned. And then to make things worse, the entire supply chain is collectively owned, and centrally planned. You can hire a good manager for the local store, but they aren't going to be able to change a thing when the government doesn't allocated them enough product to sell. You can't have two local stores compete with each other, they are both collectively owned and supplied by the same centrally managed supply chain.
It wasn't the collective ownership of the store that failed the USSR. It was the central planning of the whole economy.
With this example of a small small town grocery store, there is plenty still competition. There is the local Dollar General with it's shitty product selection. There is another government owned supermarket a in a town 9 miles away, operated by a different government. There are privately owned supermarkets in at least three larger town within 30 miles, and a town large enough for Walmart 45 miles away. There are probably also grocery delivery services (or at least amazon) covering the areas.
It will be forced to be competitive, and all the numbers are public for the residents to see.
> Not saying that it never works, but in general privately owned business is usually more efficient
The whole article is about how "market efficiency" has let down the small town. The town is simply too small to profitable enough for private businesses: as evidenced by no one chosing to buy the business for years.
I completely understand; I came from Mexico and it took me 20 years to stop seeing the government as always corrupt.
Private ownership opens it to all sorts of exploitation of workers or customers, plus if you subsidize it, you just move the politicking to the subsidy contract, and the bad decision making to the owner.
Building capital and controlling things is good for individuals or families, but less so for large, uncoordinated organisations, especially governments. If I, an individual, own a shop, I'm incentivized to make it profitable- in this small town case, I'm incentivized to stock things people want to buy, to reduce waste, and so on. (Or to bail out and sell the premises if the economic conditions don't make sense anymore). Making the shop better makes me richer.
If I'm a wage-paid employee in a large shop (or any organization), then I'm looking to a) not get fired b) get a raise c) get a promotion. The bigger and more bureaucratic the organization, the more personnel decisions tend to become disconnected from ground truths and the more it becomes possible to rise through politics, whether or not the shop gets better. The people at the top, e.g. the owners of Walmart, want their shops to be more efficient, but if line worker #529 doesn't think he'll be paid more for making his local shop 5% more efficient, then he won't- and if there are more reliable ways up, he'll take those.
When a government owns/runs the shop, even the people at the top don't care about it making money- it's not their money to lose! The shop is probably useful as a political tool/division point, though. Imagine left-right debates about whether the government store should stock condoms, or meat, or whatever.
The problem with that plan is convincing someone to be interested enough to actually take the subsidy.
In this example, the old owners were retiring, and nobody wanted to buy it. There isn't a lot of revenue for a Grocery store in a town this small. So it was easier for the town to just buy it and then operate it.
Apparently the store was profitable before the sale, and the town operated store in the neighbouring town also operated at a 3% profit.
But looks like this town have made the choice to keep prices lower (probably to compete with the dollar general) and operate it at a slight loss, at least for the 2021 year, which is the only year they have released the annual report for since they bought it. Maybe the 2021 year included to startup costs and it would have otherwise been profitable.
This is a good question. Patronizing the store should be sufficient to handle the economics, but I would guess the price of products is not their biggest concern or consideration.
If it was my town store, I would only want to make it a co-op and become part owner if there was an issue with management and/or cost control, e.g. bad owner, staffing, salaries, inventory, profit margin, upkeep, etc.
That depends on what you mean by "the town". In many cases the town may not be a legal entity, or it may be part of a larger county, that have zero interest in a rural grocery store. If you're thinking the inhabitants of the town then that might be somewhat unstable, as in people might be able to afford it one year, but not the next, people leaving, new people who are not interested.
We did something similar where I live. A new owner wanted to reopen the grocery store, and the town collected around $100.000 to get her started. A few people work for free a few hours a week, stocking shelfs and stuff like that. In the end though, it's a business and she needs to turn a profit. The people in the town are motivated to shop there, because if the store closes, the value of their homes will fall dramatically.
>We did something similar where I live. A new owner wanted to reopen the grocery store, and the town collected around $100.000 to get her started. A few people work for free a few hours a week, stocking shelfs and stuff like that. In the end though, it's a business and she needs to turn a profit. The people in the town are motivated to shop there, because if the store closes, the value of their homes will fall dramatically.
Sounds like you guys did the opposite: give a private owner a cheap loan and free volunteer labor. Hope she's at least opening up the books to you guys.
One thing neglected in economic discussions is economy on a small scale. In a town of 1000 people, in the middle of both natural ravages of the pandemic and artificial economic drain imposed by state and national governments through health orders, invisible hand of the market is not going to be enough. It's going to take specific individuals invested in continued existence of the town above their own personal prosperity and ease of life to make that happen. In this situation, democratic control may well be the means to select the right individuals. Just so long as we don't confuse practicality of a tiny town with global solutions for food security or climate change or mRNA vaccines...
Would you please not take HN threads further into flamewar and not cross into personal attack? You've done it more than once in this thread, it's completely gratuitous, and we've had to warn you about this (indeed, ban you for this, if I recall correctly) many times before.
If you'd please make your substantive points without any of that, we would be grateful.
I don't remember what I've mentioned before; in any case, it's not the most important thing. The important thing is that we need you to follow the site guidelines from now on, and we ban accounts that won't do that.
>I don't see any indicator that he thinks there are only two
there are only about 10 other isms that would have more accurately described this, and "communism" is used in the 1995 film Hackers for a reason, but it might not be the one you're picking up on.
It is capitalism. The capital necessary to purchase the store, maintain cash flow, and make periodic maintenance and upgrades will come from the ownership. Profit, an important part of capitalism, may be generated by the business to the benefit of the shareholders. In this case, that profit may be cash, discounts, additional goods or services, reinvestment into the business or whatever the town owners/shareholders or their designees decide.
More neighborhood co-op businesses should be formed!
Have you considered that capitalism and communism are economic systems that are in a sense Turing complete, i.e. they can describe the exact same arbitrary economic phenomena
And therefore what you have described is in fact communism but in a language that is subjectively more palatable ?
I have considered that co-op’s, public utilities and mutual aid societies are excellent solutions to problems such as the one presented small towns, like Erie. It is possible to utilize private capital, such as the store purchase, for public benefit (the residents of Erie) and the mechanism by which that is accomplished is secondary. The fact that the city council was involved was a matter of convenience. It could have been accomplished by any means of group cooperation. For example, only half of the town (500 people) could have been involved, rather than the whole town. Palatability is in the details.
Billions of people living in a country called china have an opinion that dwarfs that viewpoint.
Communism is a relevant word and an appropriate one given the amount of people who live under "communism" in china and have not watched the 1995 movie. (There's a large cohort of Chinese users on this site)
What other isms are you thinking about? Socialism? I mean there's not too much of a difference there in terms of meaning or connotation.
People are polarized on the topic of communism vs. capitalism but the reality is these are just two different colors. Two different aspects, similar to solid or liquid.
When you treat it as a sport team you become biased. If you hate capitalism you become blind to how capitalism produces powerful economies like most of the western world. If you hate communism you become blind to how stories like this can benefit a community.
There are plenty of public goods that cannot thrive under pure capitalism. Grocery stores with razer thing margins are an example of this.
No free market economy to ever exist has been a pure capitalism without hints, shades or straight up chunks of communism, socialism and many other flavours of -ism.
>State owned enterprises are feature in every free market economy.
And that is why it is technically true.
>The comment is not true, technically or otherwise.
This makes zero logic, or sense. You literally just stated that every free market economy has elements of communism then denied your statement right after.
I think you're caught by the connotation of the word instead of the definition. Team communism is the enemy to you.
I think you’re projecting a lot here. It’s simply a zero-insight (and factually incorrect) comment to look at one centrally planned initiative and starting saying “communism”. The “not a real free market” and “not real communism” cohorts are equally stupid, and should be dismissed with equal passion.
Surely even the most simplistic definition of communism would include society-wide common ownership of the production and distribution of goods. A local government owning one small commercial enterprise in a capitalist market economy is just not remotely close to even the crudest imaginable definition of communism.
Are you saying that there's no distinction between local society and the entirety of the United States? That there's no concept of society at different levels?
Huh? This definitely has nothing to do to with the No True Scotsman fallacy. It’s closer to the sorites paradox, except that I’m not claiming that there’s a clean line that can be drawn between systems of common ownership broad enough to be called communism and systems of common ownership that are not. There can undoubtedly be grey areas in the middle where reasonable people can disagree. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be systems that clearly are communism and systems that clearly are not, and a small town that buys a grocery store is very clearly not communism by any remotely reasonable definition.
> You're saying this isn't communism because it's not at sufficient scale or depth.
No, communism simply isn’t an attribute that a small store has if it is owned by a local government. If 10,000 small town governments in the US start running their local grocery store that still has nothing to do with communism. Communism is an ideology and movement about establishing a society whose fundamental socioeconomic system is based on common ownership of production and distribution of goods and services.
You keep saying "this is not that, because this is not that" - which is fine and all, but it doesn't make it true.
Please keep telling us what communism is and is not. With how certain you seem to be, these comments will surely end up being cited by a PhD in politics and history
Let me just point out that you think communism is an "attribute" that a shop could have, like OOP is your guiding philosophy for political structure. My gut tells me you aren't splitting hairs between, say, Marxism and positivism when you're spewing this shit from your mouth.
If the workers live in the town - which is highly likely - they can have (substantial, since the town is small) influence in city council.
City council manages the shop.
You could say, then, that the workers can have substantial influence over the management of this shop.
Note that this influence is much more direct than the worker -> shareholder line. Note that this influence is given as a matter of citizenship, rather than wealth.
Is this communism? Maybe not. After all, the goods that the workers stock aren't produced by them (after all, circles don't exist). Political and economic theory is far from solved. Again, if you think communism is an "attribute", I don't really want to engage in further discussion. Doubly so because of your latent assumption that the most widely used definition is the most correct one.
Take a look at China. The word clearly lives on a gradient when you ask someone from China about it... (aka asking someone that actually lives in a communist country). Communism is therefore not strictly "society wide". Clearly.
The parent prefixed his phrase with "emulated" as in "emulated communism" meaning that, obviously, the parent wasn't strictly reffering to "society wide" communism either.
Communism has a definition and a connotation. The connotation is negative and is twisting YOUR personal definition of the word. To you, communism is evil, so you must twist the definition for it to function at the extreme. To you capitalism is good, so it's not at the extreme... it's more of a moderate concept to you.
The reality is both communism and capitalism are SYMMETRIC concepts standing on opposite sides of a gradient. It's debate-able whether communism refers to extreme society wide ownership OR whether it refers to more moderate society wide ownership.... However, to strictly define communism to be extreme means that, symmetrically, capitalism must be defined in such a way too. If not then you're just being biased, because the consequence of defining things this way means that your in your personal vocabulary.... no word exists for "extreme capitalism," while such a word exists for "extreme communism." So stop being biased, open your mind a little.
> Communism has a definition and a connotation. The connotation is negative and is twisting YOUR personal definition of the word. To you, communism is evil, so you must twist the definition for it to function at the extreme. To you capitalism is good, so it's not at the extreme... it's more of a moderate concept to you.
I’m very confused how you came to that interpretation from my comment.
The interpretation is correct. Maybe the wording is a bit to over the top. Evil and good is not exactly right. Negative is the better word, but if I used it in my comment it would appear repetitive. The sentences wouldn't flow because I used the same word in the previous sentence.
Either way, the overall logic is accurate. This is indeed an accurate depiction of your bias if we discount the the extremities associated with the words good and evil.
The people who work in the shop can exert influence in city council. Since the town is small, they can exert substantial influence.
City council owns the shop.
You could say, then, that the workers can exert substantial influence over the ownership of the shop.
Note that this influence is much more entangled with working the shop than being a shareholder. Note that this influence is given as a matter of citizenship, not wealth.
Is this communism? Maybe not. After all, the people working the shop aren't responsible for producing all the goods (after all, circles don't exist).
Sociopolitical and economic theory is far from solved. You're assuming that there is a correct definition of communism. Speak quickly if you do, leading historians and sociologists all over the world are listening
Probably because it was an unsubstantive and possibly snarky comment on a divisive ideological topic. That's flamebait and therefore against the site guidelines.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
>Probably because it was an unsubstantive and possibly snarky comment on a divisive ideological topic. That's flamebait and therefore against the site guidelines.
You wish this were true. People get voted up or down because others agree or disagree with the topic, unsubstantiated or not. Nobody truly follows the spirit of HN rules. People place their own ideologies first and they don't even realize it. It's blatantly obvious that this is the case just by looking at what comments are voted up/down and who gets "banned."
Sure. It's a minor possibility. But we both know that personal ideology is the overwhelming motivating factor... so much so that it might as well be described as the singular motivating factor.
You don't even need to reference hacker news for evidence of this. Look at other forums, the news, the rest of the world... people operate this way by nature. It is rare for someone to make a genuine attempt to be unbiased; and even rarer for him to succeed in that attempt.
I don't think it's divisive, it's pretty straightforward
Access to goods is managed & provided by a communal government, in this case even in direct opposition to market forces - I'd say that's communistic
It's a sad state of affairs when just mentioning something is considered flamebait. I wasn't trying to be sarcastic. I find this idea of using rules that already exist to meet an economic need when market forces would have it otherwise - literally emulating communism, or socialism, feudalism, idrc - to be awesome. To be sure I didn't mean anything substantive, but if people are getting upset over what's supposed to be a nothingburger, that's pretty substantive in itself-
Are we angry that capitalism didn't come in and save the day? Are we so entrenched in market ideology that we are downright offended when it's implied that another could be useful?
Sure, mentioning communism is flamebait, especially if you mention it in a provocative way in a throwaway one liner. There are many such things that people have strong feelings about and are reactive to. Perhaps it's sad but it's the way things are.
I believe you that you weren't trying to be sarcastic but that sort of intent doesn't communicate itself—you have to encode it in your comment somehow, so the rest of us can know that. Past explanations about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
The only downside seems that it’s now more difficult for another grocery store to open and be competitive. Then again, this downside doesn’t apply here, I guess that’s the point.
