>In 2024, DeCA estimated that it saved patrons $1.58 billion and had an operations cost of $1.7 billion, $1.5 billion of which was funded from appropriations.[8]
Isn't this the "selling $1 for 75 cents" business model (aka moviepass) that people made fun of a few years ago?
I think this is the mindset required for this conversation. There is no way to make a library drive a profit, let alone financially self-sufficient. However, the library exists because the city values the externalities, specifically an educated public and reduced crime. For those purposes, libraries are incredibly cost efficient.
The same argument can be made for public grocers. Reducing poverty has cascading effects including better health and lower crime rates.
Well no, because the library is often the sole provider of book lending services and there's no private sector alternative. The same can't be said for grocery stores. To continue your analogy, it would be closer to the government setting up its own streaming service, even though there's netfilx and several other competitors. Even though people hate netflix for its price hikes or whatever, it's unclear how the government can do a better job here than netfilx (or other competitors), aside from strongarming/expropriating rights holders.
>Major grocers are more inclined to form cartels on price than to engage in organic competitive action.
Even if we take at face value that this is happening, their margins are famously low (ie. low single digits[1][2]) that any improvements are likely negligible. In the best case scenario where they're run as competently/efficiently as a normal grocery store, but don't take any profits, you'd be saving like 50 cents on a $10 pack of ground beef. Of course, all of this would go out the window if it's less efficient, either due to government incompetence[3], or lack of scale.
"The Transportation Department workers arrived at 9:15 p.m., right on time. Mr. Boyce and his crew were ready, having fitted the roof and rear wall panel 30 minutes before. By Monday, the structure was nearly complete. “This is all like synchronized swimming,” Mr. Mansylla said. “To build a structure in New York City in, what, 48 hours? That’s as fast as it gets.”
Your article doesn't say anything about cost, only that it got built fast. Every time the toilet example gets cited, the punchline is the cost, not how long it took, although that was appalling as well.
From the wikipedia article:
>The toilet's original proposed cost of $1.7 million inspired media coverage and criticism of the San Francisco government.
The whole point is in principle these things are good ideas but in practice they are tools weaponized by NIMBYs. This is the fig leaf that keeps them around. "But why would you do away with environmental review???" As if you were to stab 55 gal drums of toxic waste and dump them into a river. But really you were trying to build an apartment as large as many other existing apartments in the middle of the city. Or in this case, install something on the sidewalk.
What's the point of this observation other than for shock value? Yes, when you multiply small percentage by a huge number, you're still left with a huge number. That doesn't mean it's suddenly worth doing unless you can make the argument that it scales easily.
>That doesn't mean it's suddenly worth doing unless you can make the argument that it scales easily.
Otherwise it's like saying "you know what everyone should do? Raise their own chickens! Sure, you might be only saving $1 or whatever a day, but multiply that 365 days per year and 340 million Americans, and that's billions we're all collectively saving!"
And no, running a grocery store isn't something that scales easily.
> The class-action case was brought against a group of companies that includes Loblaw and the Weston companies, Metro, Walmart Canada, Giant Tiger, and Sobeys and its owner, Empire Co. Ltd.
> The plaintiffs allege those companies participated in a 14-year industry-wide price-fixing conspiracy between 2001 and 2015, leading to an artificial increase in packaged bread prices.
The whole egg fiasco is as far as I am concerned the biggest proof of price gouging cartel behavior there is. And people assume it is normal.
Vast majority of product sold when inventory is low, they just go out of stock still at MSRP right to the last sku in the inventory. Then, you wait until more are available, also at that same price.
Really, why would prices go up for the eggs in this situation if not for gouging? Sure plenty of chickens were culled. But the remaining chickens aren't costing more than they did before the cull. Whoever is producing the remaining eggs being produced is producing them for the exact same overhead they have always been producing. Feed is still probably the same. Maybe cheaper with an excess of feed on the market needing to be sold and moved out of feedlots before the next crop comes in, from the chicken culling your competitors were doing. Water is still probably the same. Power is still probably the same. Staff are still getting the same pay. Property taxes are still the same. Really, who is getting the $10 from the $12 dozen of eggs? Probably some guys smoking cigars if we are being honest.
>Really, why would prices go up for the eggs in this situation if not for gouging? [...]
Supply and demand. Just like blocking the Strait of Hormuz doesn't make oil 2x more expensive to produce everywhere else in the world, you're still left with the problem that the world has ~20% less oil to go around. That means the price of oil gets bid up until it's high enough to convince 20% of oil consumers to stop using oil.
Scott Alexander wrote a piece[1] a few months ago which rebutts many of the arguments made in this article.
For instance, the article argues that boomers are NIMBYs:
>Older generations used the levers of government to create this situation. In high-cost cities, the building of new homes and apartment complexes is often derailed in local planning and zoning-board meetings.
However Scott notes:
>It’s not even clear that Boomers are that much more likely to be NIMBYs. From Pew:
The article also talks about social security as benefiting boomers, but Scott notes:
>The Social Security Administration’s own website says that its generosity peaked in 1972, when the program primarily served the Greatest Generation; since then, it’s been one contraction after another.
>It’s not even clear that Boomers are that much more likely to be NIMBYs
Most Boomers aren't NIMBYs, but most NIMBYs are Boomers.
This is a thing that uniquely threatens them because their home is their primary investment, so anything that can be leveraged to keep prices high, they'll do. Environmentalism is usually the weapon they reach for, and because they have nothing but time, they have the advantage when it comes to a court system that privileges this kind of retireded spam.
>Social security
This is more because everyone under 40 or so doesn't trust social security will even be around for them to collect, so that group sees it, correctly, as an unfair wealth transfer from young to old. Combine that with the above, and combine that with the abject refusal to even entertain basic reforms (which goes double for non-US nations), and that's where the resentment comes from. Throwing good years after bad ones.
>According to FRED/Indeed[1], software job openings have been roughly flat for 2-3 years, and they've actually been slightly increasing again.
None of this contradicts OP's claim, because at least anecdotally, juniors/interns are getting disproportionately squeezed by AI. Why hire an intern to write random scripts/tests for you, when claude code does the same thing? Therefore overall job posting could be flat or slightly rising, but that's only because everyone is rushing to hire senior/principals staff to wrangle all the AI agents, offsetting the junior losses.
That is the value of other companies doing that and you going to poach those new seniors. With the money you saved not training those juniors you can offer better salaries and still have higher profits.
What happens if you flood the market with a bunch of implausible bets like "sun won't rise tomorrow"? Sure, you might try to filter that out with some sort of "seasoning" period (ie. don't buy new markets), but then that means more time for arbitrageurs to correctly price the market, depriving you of any price advantage you might have had.
This locks up your money in the meantime, right? If so, considering the fed funds rate is 3.64% (and you can probably get higher rates on stablecoins), a huge chunk of those "winnings" is going to be eaten up by the opportunity cost of the money.
You forget that Polymarket is just a casino, and the house always wins.
For example, recent events show that any bet can be selectively disputed by arbitrary reason ("we found insiders", "we found this immoral/illegal", etc.).
That logic doesn't work because not every bet have even payouts. If there's a market for whether a dice rolls 1 or not, the odds might resolve to "no" 83% of the time, but if it only pays you $1.1 per dollar wagered on "no", you're still losing money.
>This is fundamentally the argument against all "SaaS is dead due to AI" claims.
The steelman version of "SaaS is dead due to AI" isn't that SaaS companies will disappear, it's that competition will greatly intensify, to the extent that it becomes a commodity business with thin margins, rather than the money printer it is today.
Plenty of companies proactively take action against shady users, even if not 100% required under law. Youtube has content id, social media companies have "community guidelines", and ISPs have AUPs.
The figures I cited are for GDP per capita, which accounts for population growth. Moreover immigration should have the opposite effect of depressing per-capita GDP, because immigrants typically take lower skilled jobs, dragging overall productivity down. So if anything, the figures are artificially depressed, not inflated.
You should read down that table a bit. Sure the Spanish economy had higher growth rates the last couple of years. The way they managed to have a higher rate was to have the economy shrink by 8% in 2023. So according to my math, the estimated size of the Spanish economy in 2026 is about the same as the 2023 Spanish economy (within 1%). Hard to claim that as a win.
Technically you can say that they have been in a depression for the last 4 years and counting as their functional growth rate (accounting for inflation of the Euro) is negative over that period (down about 10% inflation adjusted).
> So according to my math, the estimated size of the Spanish economy in 2026 is about the same as the 2023 Spanish economy (within 1%). Hard to claim that as a win.
That conclusion does not seem to check out just by eyeballing the charts.
It shows a divergence from the EU back in the 2010s, but afterwards is recovering at the same pace or even faster than the EU. Could be better, but not "in shambles" either.
>and business expect the level of productivity witnessed before, will have no choice but cough up whatever providers bill us.
Is that bad? After all, even if they hiked to price infinity, you wouldn't worse off than if AI didn't exist because you could still code by hand. Moreover if it's really in a "business" (employment?) context, the tools should be provided by your employer, not least for compliance/security reasons. The "expectation" angle doesn't make sense either. If it's actually more efficient than coding by hand, people will eventually adopt it, word will get around and expectations will rise irrespective of whether you used it or not.
The insidious part is the thought that if you spend your limited learning and recall on AI Tools, then you wont be able to "still code by hand" because you'll have lost the skill, then there will be a local minima to cross to get back to human level productivity. Of course you'll get PIPed before you get back to full capacity.
OpenAI and Anthropic have been getting stingy with their plans and it's only it's been what, 1 year, maybe 2 since vibecoding was widely used in a professional context (ie. not just hacking together a MVP for a SaaS side hustle in a weekend)? I doubt people are going to lose their ability to think in that timespan.
I think you're 100% correct that people won't lose the ability. There's a scary thing I see as a person who works with and recruits students and fresh graduates -- they might not have spent the time to get the skills in the first place.
>In 2024, DeCA estimated that it saved patrons $1.58 billion and had an operations cost of $1.7 billion, $1.5 billion of which was funded from appropriations.[8]
Isn't this the "selling $1 for 75 cents" business model (aka moviepass) that people made fun of a few years ago?
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