Balancing out the other comment - there's two real supermarkets within a fifteen minute walk of me (another American). It's fun to leave meal planning up to whatever is on sale that night.
For people in the outer suburbs where that's not an option, I don't know why a service hasn't arisen where you can plug in, "we have X adults living here, they average Y meals per week made at home, we want Z grams of protein per meal, here's our dietary restrictions, solve that system of equations out of whatever's in your warehouse and take a flat rate for delivery and percentage for your overhead." The pure delivery services all seem to be plays to hide huge prices behind tricky introductory rates. Both my local supermarkets offer delivery and presumably have the data to make that possible but they want me to still pick individual items in a vastly worse interface (any website or app) than the experience of standing in a dry goods aisle.
You underestimate how hard people’s food preferences are. They are really locked into their set of brands for each item. Immigrants pay huge markups to just get the same brand of tomato paste or beans they know. These are some of the most commodity style food items
This is also where i'm at with ChatGPT. Its bullshit meter doesn't exist, but it has "read" everything in a way that i can't, so it's bad for truthiness, but it's great for search and correlating items in domains that are out of my scope. For those things outside my scope i ask for links to publication or discussions by real humans. If the source conflicts with the ChatGPT output (which does happen frequently) then i ditch the problem for a while. But it's great to replace hours of my own undirected haystack searching with getting credible needle candidates in a few minutes.
We (us, the people reading here, the demographic building the software and technology and automation) would do well as a community to spend more time on introspection about what ends it serves that tech, which was sometimes promoted as a great equalizer, gets built so often in practice only to make the walls of an aspiring monopolist's fortress more steep with no benefit to anybody else.
Technological advancement by itself merely creates the potential for equalization. Whether that potential is actually realized depends on the culture of society, though. You can use the same basic tech to build Star Trek communism or a cyberpunk dystopia.
We as an industry are seen as defined by crap/enshitification now. The world gave us good faith, cheered us on, mostly excitedly hyped us. And we picked, by small choice after small choice, this.
My guess is it's cost driven? IIRC insurance would not pay for mine when i was out of the recommendation pool but they did (were legally required to afaik) when the pool expanded to include my age group.
The whole mode of taking in trade news has changed. 20 years ago when i bought a Maximum PC i read it cover-to-cover. Can't imagine doing that now with anything other than a book or a movie. Instead i'm reading the one or three most eye-catching articles that twenty different publications put out. Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think.
I still have a few subscriptions, especially if they send it out on a dead tree, but with the nature of the internet it's hazardous to not use an ad blocker. I've come to appreciate when publications run reminders that they are, in fact, also people who need to eat, and i try to make up for what i take from the trough by buying swag or sending a check if they take donations. But i get that there's not an enviable business plan on the other side of that equation. It's an ongoing evolution.
> Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think.
I'd place the shift happening earlier with early web portals. People made (or were coerced by their ISP) web portals their home page. The model of portals was show people headlines with direct links to the articles.
Hyperlinks are fundamental to the web so it's not like portals were doing something bad. It is just a model that's difficult to monetize for the destination site. More difficult than a traditional magazine or newspaper since the site only gets paid per actual impression vs paid per square inch from potential impressions estimated by circulation.
RSS readers were more about the democratization of portals since a site feed let the end user build their own "portal" from their collection of feeds. In terms of traffic patterns an RSS user was pretty similar to a web portal user, just a visitor that dropped in on some deep link and didn't necessarily hit any additional pages.
A friend bought land to build a house on where dowsing was culturally pervasive. He knew it was bogus but it was cheap compared to the land price and everybody around was heavily pushing it. An old guy came out and, during the performance, told him the total history of the land parcel, including stuff that would be inappropriate in formal disclosures ("those neighbors are assholes" etc). They did hit water, but the whole area is pretty verdant.
The book is wonderful, as biz-tech-optimist quick reads go, and some of its ideas have stuck with me over a decade after reading it. I'm almost entirely off MSFT products now but i was heartened to see the Recall announcement the other day. Bell was a rare visionary. RIP
Yeah, and the people in the cars on the blocked highways are also non-consenting whatevers to sitting activists, activisting about whatever it is they feel passionate about. Both suffer some kind of substantive harm right?
I just wonder how you imagine change is achieved. Because you tell me, how is Prop 13 going to get repealed? Are you going to run a ballot initiative? There are lots of popular laws that are bad.
And speaking of, you know, we kill tens of millions of lab mice and rats every year, and rats are quite smart, and the people working with lab mice realize the gravity of the animal suffering they inflict. They are smart people. Every single medicine you use today has animal suffering animal testing on mice related to it.
The nonconsenting media experiment framework people have a much more expansive framework than the one you are invoking, you are invoking a popsci version of it, and your version doesn't accommodate the intractability of everything being consensual. You just don't know enough about this stuff, and you say something kind of reductive that is really about absolving these now-adults of responsibility for their own screwups.
You're getting co-opted by people who only think to the first level of the expanding brain meme. Oh, some people got upset at my innovative form of protest. Boo hoo.
I'm not going to rank one kind of suffering or using or betrayal against another. It doesn't matter. It was definitely in the students' interest to repeal Prop 13. If only they cared!
We lost something as a society when McDonald's shifted its good prices to their app. I'm able to keep up with the app deals but it's frustrating to spend any brain space on something that was simply $1 or $2 without fuss a decade ago. If McDonald's was simply keeping up with inflation instead of cravenly trying to revenue-management squeeze their customers, these items would be $1.30-$2.60 now. Certainly they're squeezing more orders out of fewer staff so I'm not sympathetic here to arguments that low-end wages are to blame.
There's a regional chain here whose prices (and ads, interiors, and everything else) seem to be stuck in the 90s, and i like them, but i groaned when i saw that my last order came in a bag promoting their new app deals.
For people in the outer suburbs where that's not an option, I don't know why a service hasn't arisen where you can plug in, "we have X adults living here, they average Y meals per week made at home, we want Z grams of protein per meal, here's our dietary restrictions, solve that system of equations out of whatever's in your warehouse and take a flat rate for delivery and percentage for your overhead." The pure delivery services all seem to be plays to hide huge prices behind tricky introductory rates. Both my local supermarkets offer delivery and presumably have the data to make that possible but they want me to still pick individual items in a vastly worse interface (any website or app) than the experience of standing in a dry goods aisle.