We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat, and as more automation sets in, labor costs will decline. We are already at artificial scarcity - other than political animus rooted in racism and toil is moral there’s no reason for anyone anywhere to starve. This trend won’t reverse, but will become increasingly perverse.
For example, in my neck of the woods there’s the company Carbon Robotics, which is pretty successful. They develop autonomous tractors and a laser weeding system both of which have good adoption and sales at megafarms. They decrease the cost of herbicide application and labor significantly. That’s just one such company. It’s to the point that farms go fallow, or convert to solar, because the revenue produced farming isn’t enough to justify farming because we would be feeding people for free otherwise. That, my friend, is artificial scarcity. So keep toiling for your food coupons and convince yourself that the market is infallible.
Producing the food is only 10% of the challenge. How do you deliver it to everyone at no cost without rotting? How do you deal with a delivery of flour if you have no oven?
If it's so easy this is ripe for a startup to disrupt. Food is the most necessary thing to human existence. Every living person is a potential customer.
I agree, we can - and should - produce enough food for everyone on earth to be happy and healthy.
But nobody is saying "people shouldn't eat for free, therefore I won't grow crops."
You said it yourself: farms are left fallow because the revenue doesn't justify the cost for the farmer. That, my friend, is basic economics, not artificial scarcity.
> We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat,
Who is this "we?"
There's a kind of circular complaint built into all such endeavors that goes like, "we can do this, but unfortunately we as a group don't want to, but we could definitely do it if we wanted, but sadly we currently have the wrong opinions, but we can definitely do it, if only we weren't inclined not to, but we should and we will, as soon as we all come around to the truth."
Your "we" doesn't seem to want to do what you want them to do, which is why communists so often end up thinking that the real problem is the existing populace and maybe what they really need is to be re-educated or even replaced.
I'm not sure what this is contradicting. People can already get free food through a myriad of different institutions, including the government qua food stamps and welfare. Cheap grains are affordable by basically anyone who earn an income.
No, what I'm really saying is that the baseline of plat growing is "it works by itself". Anything above letting nature take its course is a force multiplier.
As opposed to other technologies; microchips do not grow on trees.
The net margin of around 1.5% seems more relevant: the gross margin is just the revenue minus the cost of good sold plus cost of transportation. The net margin is the money you have left after paying things like Rent, employee wages, electricity, taxes, interest on debt.
as the time period gets longer, the the more likely it is that the numbers represent the true performance of the business rather than randomness. That has to be balanced against the fact that investors get less frequent updates i.e. the information is now potentially 6 months out of date rather than 3 months at worst. But then its just a judgment call of the relative benefit of each - you could argue that with modern accounting systems, modern companies could deliver weekly or even daily earnings , which would give investors much more timely information, and the high frequency would probably mean it wouldn’t be worth making the effort for management to fudge the numbers to bring forward or delay revenue one day or one week. There would be a lot more variance in the numbers if they were daily, but thats a good thing - it would just reflect the underlying randomness, and then the investors could decide when the accumulated trend over a period of time is meaningful or not, instead of management wasting time massaging numbers into a fairy tale of steady growth.
In every sales-led company quarter end is a shitshow. It'll be even worse if there's only one chance to bring the numbers back in instead of 2 or 3. It's used to put pressure on sales teams, but the net result over the year is never good because it sours relationships and reduces overall deal value.
The best thing would be continuous daily or weekly reporting with no defined year end. Unfortunately the entire global system of tax and accounting is set up around annual reporting, so change is impossible.
I think the issue is that you can only be registered to vote in one jurisdiction. So being a citizen isn't enough (though as I understand it, many jurisdictions let you cast a provisional ballot in these situations)
and you’re claiming the process still isn’t complete more than 40 years later? shouldn't the wealth gap between the poor in the US vs the poor in Afghanistan be starting to get smaller if your argument is correct?
why is returning the cart intrinsically some sign of “goodness” but returning your plates to the kitchen and washing them at a restaurant is not? The customer is at the store to fulfill their needs, not the store’s. Taking the groceries from the checkout to the car in a cart helps fulfill the customer’s aims. Returning the cart does not, same as picking up trash in the store car park does not. And the revenue from customers pays for return of the carts from the parking lot, so most customers feel that is a better deal than a place that forces them to return the carts.
The original article and many of the comments have a hugely moralistic tone - where are people expected to learn these implicit rules? If the store doesn’t care enough to communicate these expectations (assuming they even have them, and that they don’t only exist in the minds of the self-appointed “cart police”), why should customers follow them?
> where are people expected to learn these implicit rules? If the store doesn’t care enough to communicate these expectations (assuming they even have them, and that they don’t only exist in the minds of the self-appointed “cart police”), why should customers follow them?
The rules are not implicit; there are typically giant signs saying "RETURN CART HERE" over a metal cart corral that often contains other carts.
People are expected to learn this during their first or second trip to a grocery store that offers carts.
Similarly, at a full-service restaurant, you will be able to notice busboys picking up used tableware, and you will notice a scarcity of customer-accessible garbage bins (as compared to, say, a self-service fast-food restaurant).
If you are ever unsure of the protocol, you are always welcome to ask an employee. Employees at these businesses are typically distinguished by wearing a uniform.
Hope these tips help you on your future trips to Kroger/McDonald's/Olive Garden.
That's because the business is trying to save on their own manpower costs by shifting some of the burden to their customers -- much like self-checkout.
If by returning my cart I was helping the employees, I'd be inclined to go out of my way to do so. But actually all I'm doing is helping the business, who is trying to cut as many employees as possible (talking about big stores like Walmart, Target, not some small local grocery that might even be employee owned).
By that logic, why not also just throw your trash on the ground? And, if you need to use the restroom while you're there, why not just pee on the floor?
That would be a great way to fight the business, which would love to employ fewer people to clean that stuff up by shifting the burden of doing it right onto you, the customer.
Fair. The greater point was that you're not just "helping the business" by maintaining a clean environment (whether the "dirt" be carts or excrement). You're also helping your fellow humans.
And, in fact, you almost certainly are helping employees. Sure, there could be fewer of them, but they'd be doing less menial work. And the ones who got laid off due to your contentiousness would find less menial work elsewhere. Society as a whole would benefit.
You probably already know this, but the idea that we should make the world worse to preserve people's jobs is called the broken-windows fallacy.
I probably should have just responded with that originally.
Because the cart doesn’t belong in the road or parking lot the same way your plate doesn’t belong upturned on the floor of the restaurant. I’m not sure about you but I will even stack my plates and dishes and silverware so the bus boy can grab it all in one go. Maybe that makes me some sort of a holy man.
BTW, a lot of bussers prefer you not do that. They have their own system for stacking things in their trays, and they have to un-stack your things to do it their way. Like, they generally can’t pick up your whole tidy stack, set it in their tub, and walk away like that.
My acquaintances in food service tell me they appreciate the thought, but rather you not go through the effort.
I've found an anecdotal correlation that the (relatively few) people that have moralized at me about returning shopping carts also tend to dislike self-checkout at the same stores. I guess it is immoral to have someone return your cart, but moral to have someone scan your groceries? I generally don't return my cart, but I mostly self-checkout. I'm pure evil apparently.
Full-service checkout is a service that is explicitly offered by (most) stores, and yes, it's a service many people like -- in part because of the poor UX of the self-checkout machines. ("Please return item to the bagging area.")
I don't think many people would object to full-service cart return, in which employees immediately pick up your cart when a customer is finished loading their groceries into the car. But few (if any?) stores actually intend to offer that, as evidenced by the carts that sit for long periods of time strewn about the parking area.
> where are people expected to learn these implicit rules?
In my experience, someone that needs to be taught rules like that, at an age old enough to be pushing around their own shopping cart, is lost forever anyway. All it takes is half a second of considering what might go on with that cart after you leave it.
With regard to carts, because they roll around, into cars, and cause damage. Leaving your cart loose in the lot is a great way to damage other people's vehicles. The first ding in my first new car was caused by a loose cart some asshole left in the lot while I was shopping.
I was going to comment this exact thing about stacking plates. I think most servers/ex-servers also do this regardless of age. It's even easier to do than returning a shopping cart.
fyi, the account confirmation email redirects and ends up on a tab with address localhost:3000. looks like it did work, i was able to login after that, but many users may assume it failed and give up
Current opinion polls for both are abysmal, but I don't think that civic freedoms are the main reason; the main reason is immigration, which all the previous governments promised to limit and then silently decided not to.
Immigration is sucking support more from the tories than labour. They rode into power based upon a promise to do something about it and then massively increased it.
Labour are recently leaning into being anti immigration because it's one of the few wealthy-donor-friendly policies they can pursue which will potentially gain them votes.
Decided not to, but continued to actively campaign on. It’s created a really weird situation where the actual policy choices are hugely disconnected from the rhetoric and emotion in the debate.
Legal immigration from South Asia dominates illegal immigration by an order of magnitude, but nobody wants to lose seats in Birmingham, so essentially doesn’t figure in the arguments about small numbers of afghans in miserable hotels in Essex.
For the Conservatives it's all about irregular/illegal immigration. Labour are hugely unpopular on that having apparently no idea what to do about it but they also have massive challenges on the economy/cost of living and the state of publicly funded services.
Perhaps you would apply the same logic to a family car, or the clothing you bought? Should they tax the value of your medical degree when you leave the country?
Exit taxes are generally applied as if the taxpayer sold all capital assets on the day of leaving.
At least in the US taxation regime (I'm unfamiliar with others), family cars don't qualify for a capital loss, and rarely appreciate. Clothing would be similar.
But it doesn't seem unreasonable that a country should want to be paid tax on unrealized gains as you're leaving. It would probably be more fair to wait until the gains were realized and then apportion the gains among the countries of residence, but if you're leaving, it's going to be hard to compel your participation later, so it makes more sense to do it as you're leaving.
