> The idea that we should allow cheap vehicles to flood the domestic market because that will "cause the US auto manufacturers compete" ignores the wholly uneven playing field at work here
We have been here before. This is Japan and the 1970s all over again.
The US car companies will absolutely refuse to deliver the affordable, high volume cars everybody wants until kicked in the ass and balls several times. In the 1970s it was land yachts; in the 2020s it's gigantic SUVs and brodozers.
I do not like what China and BYD represent. However, if they are the only way to dislodge the US car companies that are blocking progress, so be it.
> That's not to say it's an easy problem to solve.
Incorrect. You simply decide that having less than 5 suppliers at any level is unacceptable and you bust companies up, repeatedly until you have those suppliers. That way when one goes bankrupt, you don't wind up with complete supply chain disintegration.
The solution is quite straightforward. However, it requires an electorate that has a couple of brain cells to rub together in order to understand the solution. And 30% of the US is willfully hostile to any real solutions while another 30% is happy to fiddle while everything burns.
> You simply decide that having less than 5 suppliers at any level is unacceptable and you bust companies up, repeatedly until you have those suppliers.
This is a very extreme solution, and eliminates many of the benefits from horizontal integration even when the benefits are passed onto customers. Consider:
- insurance companies
- banking
- utilities
It’s also hard to implement. What counts as a supplier? Is Google the sole supplier for search functionality? If 4 suppliers provide 1% of demand, and one supplies 96%, does that comply? If there’s only one company offering some new service (e.g. driverless cars), do they immediately get broken up?
Yes. Always. At all levels. I might provide a limit below which that doesn't happen (like $50 million in revenue), but as soon as you cross that limit, scrutiny should be automatic.
> This is a very extreme solution, and eliminates many of the benefits from horizontal integration even when the benefits are passed onto customers. Consider: - insurance companies - banking
There is no advantage to horizontal integration for consumers in those industries. If anything, the value is negative. The fact that people are quite a bit happier about credit unions than Chase says everything you need to know.
Sure, there are "efficiencies" to be gained by horizontal integration. What we have seen is that the horizontal integration is so strong that the industries are sclerotic in the face of crisis or change (see: toilet paper manufacturers in Covid who couldn't switch gears). It has become repeatedly clear that we need resilience and competition more than we need efficiency.
> utilities
Should be limited to natural monopolies and strongly controlled by the government. We have seen what happens when you create hybrid-type utilities that try to have some existence in the market (rather than being solidly government regulated) and the result is poor (see: PG&E).
> There is no advantage to horizontal integration for consumers in those industries. If anything, the value is negative. The fact that people are quite a bit happier about credit unions than Chase says everything you need to know.
IMO this claim is just too strong. I think you'd end up breaking up (or trying to) Lloyds of London, Spacex, Fedex, DHL, Boeing, Panasonic, ASML, Google, Apple, and many other very specialized companies. These businesses would be very expensive if they could only supply 1/5 of the market, to the point that many people would be totally priced out. The world can barely support 1 ASML, imagine if we had to pay for 5 of them. We'd be sent back to the 2000s, and that's _just_ computing.
> I think you'd end up breaking up (or trying to) Lloyds of London, Spacex, Fedex, DHL, Boeing, Panasonic, ASML, Google, Apple, and many other very specialized companies.
I see exemplars and no counterexamples.
Boeing turned to garbage when it took on McDonnel-Douglas--we were better off with the separate companies. YouTube not being bought by Google means that you don't have a single giant ad juggernaut and the copyright infringement that goes along with it. Apple being busted up means we have a division that actually focuses on computers in their own right rather than being a vestigial graft to the phone services division. Fedex was enough of a monopoly problem that Amazon bought carriers and, very painfully, set up its own delivery system.
> The world can barely support 1 ASML, imagine if we had to pay for 5 of them.
So, you prefer that we are two Chinese drone strikes from having a chip economy meltdown?
This is the kind of stuff that absolutely needs diversity. And part of the reason the ASML stuff is so expensive is because it doesn't have enough volume. So, for example, if the US had multiple fab lines that could consume the ASML machines, that would reduce the costs for ASML.
> Canned fruit, like what these farmers were producing, has been losing popularity for years. You can't force consumers to like it.
Has canned fruit actually lost popularity? Or did the grocery stores decide that the shelf space had a higher profit margin pushing something else?
The last couple of times I tried to get canned fruit for a recipe I had to actively hunt for the particular cans of fruit I needed (I needed to hit 3 different grocery stores).
I haven't tracked peaches recently, but I can tell you that canned apricots have been a bit thin on the ground for at least a couple of years.
> Has canned fruit actually lost popularity? Or did the grocery stores decide that the shelf space had a higher profit margin pushing something else?
> The last couple of times I tried to get canned fruit for a recipe I had to actively hunt for the particular cans of fruit I needed (I needed to hit 3 different grocery stores).
> I haven't tracked peaches recently, but I can tell you that canned apricots have been a bit thin on the ground for at least a couple of years.
Groceries stores with canned fruit being harder to find is entirely consistent with it being less popular. Pushing you to go to another store for something is bad, if you're a grocery store. That's a great way to drive off customers. There's a lot of shelf space at my local grocery stores still dedicated to fairly-redundant products or high amounts of extra copies of items, so I don't think they're being pushed out because something else is way more profitable. (My local stores have much larger selections of canned beans than canned peaches, for instance.)
I think it's just generational trends. Generally health-conscious consumers these days are more skeptical of canned vs fresh, and non-health-conscious have more junk food options than ever. It's also gotten easier to source fresh fruit across seasons than thirty or forty years ago, further squeezing canned options.
Another thing in short supply these days is actually being able to buy an actually good Apple pie or Peach pie. Oh well…
I shall try and see if I can get a Peach or an Apple pie. This weekend you know the old-fashioned pie that actually tastes good and is well made.
That’s another thing that’s in short supply along with actually getting any good baked goods unless you can go to a small Bakery somewhere if you can find one they usually cost a more but not that much more than what you could find in the supermarket times have been changing for the worst when comes to baked goods.
Del Monte in recent times was passed between four equity companies. One of those equity companies actually bought them twice. Del Monte was on the pathway to hell.
Hopefully some of those trees can be transplanted within a 50 mile radius of where they are. If I lived up in that area. I would seriously try to see if I could transplant a few.
Yes. Global supply chains have improved, so it's easier to get fresh fruit year round (or closer to it) than it used to be. If they can, people will choose fresh over canned, for obvious reasons.
> people will choose fresh over canned, for obvious reasons
Not at all obvious. A lot of "fresh" produce in the US was refrigerated for more than a week before it arrived in the supermarket, from varieties that were designed to hold up to transport rather than flavor. Fruit that was canned at the height of the season is often much more flavorful than "fresh" off-season fruit.
The US has a problem with packing fruit in added sugar, which is sad but not inherent to canned fruit.
Where I live peaches are rare. It's all pears, oranges, and fruit cocktail. Not joking, there's five different variants of pears on the shelf at the grocery store, from sugar free to light syrup, and from three different brands. Canned plums? Nope. Apples? Nope. Strawberries? Nope. Cherries? Only around Thanksgiving and Christmas.
At the very least I can get all of those fresh and not canned, but honestly I'd prefer having canned versions as well because of all of the import uncertainty that ended up affecting things this past winter.
> Has canned fruit actually lost popularity? Or did the grocery stores decide that the shelf space had a higher profit margin pushing something else?
Do grocery stores make their own decisions about what goes on their shelves? I thought they mostly rented the shelf space to food vendors who were responsible for that.
For example, a while ago I complained on HN that a particular flavor of Triscuits was reliably out of stock whenever Safeway discounted Triscuits, and I was told that the way to address that, were I so minded, is to reach out to Nabisco on Twitter, because they - and not Safeway - make the stocking decisions.
Abandoning aether was NOT a "simple" answer. One you abandon aether, all manner of weirdness suddenly pops in.
Light being the same speed irrespective of observer is weird. Velocity dilating length and time is weird. Not having a preferential observation point is weird. Not needing a medium for transmission is weird. Not being able to agree on simultaneity is weird. etc.
Aether wasn't just something that a bunch of dullards clung to. You have to abandon some very long held common-sense understanding when you give it up.
> Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause.
Dark matter is the Occam's Razor theory. It explains almost all of the observations while assuming the least.
Why do you assume we have no evidence just because we don't have direct observations? Black holes were a similar phenomenon that we had no direct evidence for a fairly long time even though we had lots of other indirect phenomenon that really couldn't be explained any other way.
William of Ockham objected to his fellow theologians inventing things out of whole cloth (like dark matter question mark). That’s the point, not that a simpler explanation is more likely to be true.
The common understanding would have us believe that creationism, being simpler, outshines evolution, or that there is no such thing as a color revolution because the simplest explanation is that the mass protests are earnestly aggrieved locals.
At this point, online fraud control is getting absurd, and AI is just making it untenable. I simply won't use ebay for anything above $50 anymore.
Having physical locations that you have to come to pick up your Thneed protects both buyer and seller. Buyer can verify that what was described is delivered and seller can verify actual pickup with ID.
If they apply a bit of logistics for shipping between stores, Gamestop could crush it.
Fraud is forcing the pendulum to swing from everything-online back to everything-in-person.
Zig also differentiates between the wrapping and non-wrapping operators. The for loop example would toss a runtime error when the index underflowed in most compiler modes.
The if statement won't work since Zig would force a cast.
The tricky wrap sucks unless you use a power of 2. Then the Zig type can match (u4, u5, u7, etc.) and you would use wrapping arithmetic operators. And on smaller CPUs you NEED to use a power of 2 because division and mod are expensive.
AltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.
For example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones.
This is a feature still unmatched by any search engine today.
We have been here before. This is Japan and the 1970s all over again.
The US car companies will absolutely refuse to deliver the affordable, high volume cars everybody wants until kicked in the ass and balls several times. In the 1970s it was land yachts; in the 2020s it's gigantic SUVs and brodozers.
I do not like what China and BYD represent. However, if they are the only way to dislodge the US car companies that are blocking progress, so be it.
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