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@kr
stacking since: #5040
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 4h \ parent \ on: City Streets Don’t Have To Be Ugly Design
these are great!
Nice, sidewalks are a good place for them too.
I just discovered someone made a list of all the brick/cobblestone streets in Toronto, there are more of them than I thought, but they're usually just short sections on asphalt streets: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1xXqGP2DrSlHYyEzo4t1grds_ohc&ll=43.711937839670796%2C-79.3963252&z=11
Yeah, asphalt has a tendency to crack with every freeze/thaw cycle, whereas bricks and pavers have spaces that allow for some shifting without breaking. So repair frequency is higher with asphalt to start with, but the cost to repair also involves more equipment. Fixing cracked bricks just means taking out the broken one and putting in a new one.
People have quality expectations, whether from products in a store or products on a farm, and regardless of your opinion about their ability to judge quality. Decisions are made based on expectations.
Have you ever been to a farm? Or a farmers market? They let you taste their food samples right in front of them. You don't have to guess the quality of your food based solely on the "Made in USA" label.
Anyway, it seems like you're committed to just denying that my perspective has any validity, so I'm going to disengage.
Why would you ask me a question about my argument and then in the following paragraph tell me you're going to stop engaging?
By and large, consumers aren't willing to pay much for those quality differences.
No. Your entire argument rests on the premise that consumers are able to judge quality in a grocery store. Consumers don't have the tools to assess quality that they might at a farm or a farmer's market, and grocery stores, regulators, financial markets, etc... have an incentive to downplay differences between products.
Further, because food is largely treated (and regulated) as a commodity, it's not even feasible for producers to make products with maximum taste, nutrition, etc... so it's likely people have never even tasted great wheat or heirloom corn.
How can you expect people to make make quality judgments when they've only ever tasted the foods that barely pass the USDA's minimum acceptable standards?
we can observe willingness to pay premiums for quality
wrong. you don’t even know what is different about the organic apple and the non-organic apple. the non-organic one may in fact be of a better quality if it were analyzed for taste or nutrition. but in the grocery store, you have absolutely no idea.
Why would one pay premiums for a “commodity” product?
You’ll never know the difference between the chicken or the broccoli in store A vs store B.
You don’t have access to the factories that produced them, you don’t get insight on the production methods, you don’t know what date your food was harvested.
And the reason you don’t get access to the information that differentiates two products is because regulators have a much easier job if all food is treated equal. Everyone stores and ships and packs their food in the same way, everyone adheres to the same safety standards, and farmers have a single, highly liquid market in which they can sell their food for reliable prices.
This made a lot of sense in the 20th century, but it hurts anyone trying to differentiate and produce better food. If you’re going to sell in a grocery store, your incentive is to be the low-cost producer, not the high-quality producer.
The highest quality food is found at local farms. This isn’t a personal preference, this is fact. The food is harvested that day, it doesn’t spend a week flying around to processing plants, farmers have real accountability to their customers, and you can observe growing conditions with your own eyes. The more time a tomato spends in transit, the less nutritious it is when you buy it.
This is why so many Michelin star chefs directly source their food from local farms.
But the local farms who choose not to fit the mold of commodity food production, often have their production levels capped, and their production prices are higher for using different processing systems. For example, a farmer in Canada can choose to raise exotic, more flavorful breeds of chicken, but once they produce more than 6,000/year, they must buy quota rights from the government which allows them to produce a set number of chickens for a set price.
So the exotic chicken breed that takes twice as long to mature, produces half as many eggs, but makes for higher quality and tastier food isn’t produced at scale. It just doesn’t make sense when every step along the food production chain values all chickens equally.
What you’re doing is extrapolating your preferences onto other people.
Wrong.
There are higher quality foods on the market and, if more people wanted them, there would be even more.
It's not this simple. Commoditizing food isn't just about pricing it the same. It's also sending all food through the same safety and supply chain "pipes". Federal regulators have strict rules for how to process food, and it often requires farmers to make decisions that lead to lower quality food, whether they like it or not.
Beef is a good example. Within 1 hour of killing a cow, it must be in a federally inspected cold room. A grass-fed cow's body has less fat, it cools down quicker, and the rapid cooling causes the meat to be less tender than grain-fed beef.
Those are commodity rules designed with the assumption that grain-feeding is the only way to raise cattle, and those regulations limit the quality of food a farmer can produce.
The truth is that you and I are strange and our preferences are not reflective of most people.
Also wrong.
it certainly seems like we could do better
Agree, more than advocating for any one specific voting system design, I would just love to see more experimentation in this domain
10 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr OP 9 May \ parent \ on: Nothing Was Ever Created by Two Men BooksAndArticles
hadn't heard of this book before, will check it out!
50 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr OP 9 May \ parent \ on: Nothing Was Ever Created by Two Men BooksAndArticles
In this case we give sole credit to the guy with the initial idea?
Not sole credit for the whole project, just saying that one person came up with the idea, breakthrough, formula, etc...
Maybe Apple is a good modern example. Steve Jobs doesn't deserve sole credit for the company, he doesn't even deserve sole credit for any of their products, but one day he made a set of breakthroughs or decisions that other people built upon which led to new products that wouldn't exist if he weren't there.
Again, no question other people were involved and were important players in building on those breakthrough ideas, but I think Steinbeck's point is that the task of going from 0 to 1 requires an individual to make a breakthrough, not a committee.