You clearly haven’t heard of private equity

Honestly I would be perfectly happy with the service like this, even if I had to manually input what groceries I need. It’s still an incredibly complex problem though. AI is probably better suited for it than anything else since you can have iterative conversations with latest generation AIs. That is, if I tell it I need cereal, it looks at my purchase history and guesses what type of cereal I want this week, and adds it to my list, I can then tell it no, actually I want shredded mini wheats.

So it would probably have to be a combination of a very large database and information gathering system with a predictive engine and a large language model as the user interface.

This is surprisingly difficult problem because different people are okay with different brand substitutions. Some people may want the cheapest butter regardless of brand, while others may only buy brand name.

For example my wife is okay with generic chex from some grocery stores but not others, but only likes brand names Cheerios. Walmart, Aldi, and Meijer generic cheese is interchangable, but brand name and Kroger brand cheese isn’t acceptable.

Making a software system that can deal with all this is really hard. AI is probably the best bet, but it needs to be able to handle all this complexity to be useable, which is a lot of up front work

I think a big component of the problem is location. I may have a different perspective living in a low cost of living city. Just a few years ago I lived in a two bedroom apartment that was $650/mo. It was old and not very nice, but totally functional and reasonably safe. It was a bigger complex so the landlord was a management company. They weren’t amazing or anything, but they held up their end of the lease. I understand the situation somewhere like NYC or California is going to be radically different.

I think that’s where a really interesting question comes in though, do people have a right to housing? Or a right to housing in the place they’re currently living? It’s a big difference. Forcibly relocating people is… Problematic at best. But there are places like LA where it’s almost physically (geologically) impossible to build enough housing for everyone who wants to live there.

If you haven’t already I’d recommend listening to the podcast mini series “according to need” by 99 percent invisible. I really appreciated the perspective it offers into some of the practical challenges of trying to get homeless people housed.

Ultimately I don’t know that I’d call housing a “right”, purely for semantic reasons, but I do think the very existence of homelessness and housing insecurity is a devastating critique of our social and economic systems. I didn’t think we’ll ever have a system that completely eliminates renting/short term housing, but we do clearly need to change a lot of things about how housing works now.

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What do you mean no choice? There’s always a choice.

Realistically many people don’t have a choice to buy, because they don’t have the credit score, reliable income, or down payment, but I don’t see why that blame falls on landlords and not on the banks or the government?

I’d be willing to bet you bought at least a few years ago, and probably couldn’t afford the house you’re in now if you had to buy it today. I’m in a similar spot. It definitely feels wrong. The rapid increase in prices in the housing market in the past few years is ridiculous. I think it’s a lot more complicated than “landlords” though. I think a lot of the issue stems from restrictive zoning that prevents the construction of small homes in dense neighborhoods. A lack of respect for trade jobs also contributes, with massive shortages of skilled construction workers driving prices up.

Granted, I live in a relatively affordable smaller city. If I were in a city with a lot of real estate speculation like LA or Toronto I might feel differently. But speculators aren’t landlords. I have a much bigger beef with a speculator who let’s a house sit empty than a landlord renting out apartments.

Landlords take on risk. For example, when I rented an apartment, I came home one day to a plumbing disaster. I called emergency maintenance and left. The landlord fixed it and paid for my hotel in the meantime. As a home owner now, that would be entirely on me to figure out. I’m pretty handy, but I have no disrespect for someone who doesn’t want to be responsible for that.

More importantly, selling a house costs about 10% of the value of the house, and the first few years of a mortgage you’re mostly paying interest. If you move every 3 years, it’s actually cheaper to rent than to buy. It’s just that your money is going to a landlord instead of to banks and realtors.

So while I see your argument that landlords don’t “deserve” the money they make, practically they’re an important part of the housing market, and I respect people who make an informed decision to rent.

They could be, and probably should be repurposed

But also, brand new chrome books are ~$80

By the time you collect, clean, repair, and reimage the older computers, it may well be cheaper to just buy Chromebooks.

I hate seeing anything useful going to the trash but the economics aren’t great in this case

You know that’s not actually going to happen though. Maybe one in a hundred will get intercepted and saved at best.

I think there’s some ability to distinguish as anything intentionally discarded due to spillage or damage should be accounted for directly, as opposed to only showing up at inventory

Obviously it is impossible to separate out honest mistakes, intentional theft, and disgruntled employee semi-intentional shrink. If you ask the company, 500% of shrink is theft by organized crime rings and the general public should definitely be spending taxpayer dollars on police enforcement and jail time for pretty thieves. So I would assume most of it is actually accidental check out mistakes and employees “accidentally” checking things out wrong.

Indeed. It would be interesting to run the same analysis for censorship of pro Israel content and compare the differences between the two, though the data would likely still be noisy and inconclusive.

They are not the same, but it is still disappointing to see lots of lazy, reactionary arguments, circle jerking, etc even if you agree with what someone is ultimately supporting.

People aren’t comparing it to alternatives, they’re comparing it to Google 5-10 years ago.

Google used to be astoundingly good at figuring out what it was you wanted, and finding out for you. Now there’s a lot more SEO garbage and meaningless fluff clogging every results page, and if your search could even remotely be related to buying something, it’s only products and ads.

In my city you can’t diy electric without a license if you intend to sell soon. It’s a reasonable precaution to prevent shoddy flips. I assume plumbing works the same way. Just installing a toilet might be fine though, it’s pretty straightforward.

The only thing I miss it for is plugging into the car. I’ve got Bluetooth adapters now though that work pretty well. In theory I might run into a situation where it would be nice to be able to plug into a speaker or someone else’s car or something, but BT is so common it doesn’t really come up.

Great reference!

Polls are important especially in economics because people’s opinions matter. Everyone thinking the economy is bad will cause a recession even if there isn’t an economic reason for one otherwise.

Doesn’t that chart show wages going up during the pandemic then coming back down to basically the same level they were at before?

The baking soda will just neutralize the vinegar though? And you’ll get salt water? Vinegar is good at getting smells out though.