> prices should determine what an effective use of resources should be
I have $1,000,000,000 and an insatiable appetite for both material and domination. My 9 neighbors, stupid naive fucks that they are, only have $100,000 in total and do not have imaginations sufficient to even begin to want all materials and power in the world.
So of course, when the sole owner of water comes along and offers to sell it, I buy it all for $100,001. I can really never have enough water, especially as I need to power wash my driveway everyday. (I absolutely cannot stand the sight of grime.)
Anyways I guess my point is, I’m glad we all understand that price determines efficiency. Once my 9 neighbors die of dehydration, I’ll be able to gather more materials and power with less obstruction and competition. Hooray!
Personal time is a highly constrained resource: finite, non-renewable, non-storable and mutually exclusive. You can’t simply value someone’s personal time based upon their paid time. (Though people love to do this anyways…as if a poor person’s life time is objectively worth less than a richer person’s.)
Poor people often have less time available, less supply, than others due to longer transportation times as well as having more chores that they must complete by themselves.
For example, a person can be making $15 / hour and only have 4 hours of available waking personal time per day. If during those 4 hours they must complete all personal and household chores, as well as find some time for recuperating, then they would likely value those 4 hours as much more than $15 each.
Or considered another way: the value of the first hour in a day is not worth the same as the last hour. That last hour is valued according to the tasks that must be accomplished during that time and what is lost if the tasks are not successfully accomplished. And when under stress, the value can change drastically.
> While there are some people who live in "food deserts" with very limited options, complaints by most HN users about the difficulty of finding healthy food don't align with reality.
Some… Most…
You’ve made some broad assumptions here. I’ve lived in various neighbordhoods in one of the largest cities in this country and near and far suburbs of the same. Only when I’ve lived in ritzy or trendy areas have I had no issue eating healthy (according to my definition of healthy), and always at significantly greater financial cost.
My guess is either your concerns are less restrictive than mine annd others’ on this thread. Or you’ve been privileged enough to not have a clear perspective on just how large, dispersed and discontinuous, the American “food desert” truly is.
I haven't made any broad assumptions. You can buy healthy food like frozen vegetables, raw chicken, ground beef, potatoes, beans, rice, apples, olive oil, plain yogurt, etc pretty much anywhere. I travel a lot and have seen these foods widely available in neighborhoods that are not remotely ritzy or trendy. They are usually inexpensive, and if you have a little storage space then you can stock up when stores have discounts to save even more.
There are a small fraction of people who do live in food deserts and we ought to help them out. Probably the best thing we could do to make many food deserts "bloom" would be to fund the police and strictly enforce shoplifting laws, especially against organized retail theft gangs. Good grocery stores have been driven out of some neighborhoods partly by high shrinkage rates (not the only problem but a major contributing factor).
> You can see exactly what you're getting without even squinting at the fine print on the back.
So the nutrition facts and ingredients list doesn’t convey any new information? The designers managed to cram all that info into an appealing front facing label? And the marketers refrained from soft deceptions and convenient omissions, prioritizing truth and clarity over sales numbers? Sure.
Lots of people in this thread missing that unsweetened yogurt options are probably not distributed evenly across US supermarkets.
Your local coastal city store might have a half dozen plain greek yogurts but I bet there are plenty of areas where they are not stocked because they know it won't sell.
You would lose that bet. I eat plain unsweetened yogurt. I have seen it on the shelf in supermarkets everywhere, not just coastal cities.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Most large supermarkets now offer online ordering. Pick a few small Midwestern cities at random and look what dairy products the major local supermarkets have in stock. It's hilarious how people keep posting uninformed comments here without taking 5 minutes to do some trivial fact checking.
Ah. I don’t have much optimism that companies like Burger King will ever get that 2nd signal (mostly because I don’t think the average consumer-facing business suffers much impact from this kind of incident), but I agree with your premise.
Appreciate your clarification despite the bluntness of my reply.
> He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow
This is flat-out wrong. (And the comment you replied to is also wrong.)
He mentions tomatoes only 6 times in about 1500 words. These words appear half-way into the article, in only 2 of the roughly 16 paragraphs. Three of those instances are in direct reference or comparison to the wild ancestors of tomatoes.
While not specifying, the article also mentions high-altitude, tropical plants and cacti.
The presence of the single dot determines how to read the grapheme, ie which specific letter of the alphabet it is.
A missing dot over the “i” in the Latin alphabet is unambiguously a mistake (depending on the font or script style). But if you missed the horizontal crossbar within the letter “t”, you would read it as an “l”. For example, confusing “mate” as “male”.
See this related article and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051546
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