I don't actually hate Musk. Although he has done bad, I think he has done far more good than bad. He has, for one, directly improved my quality of life on the transportation front.
Rule changes like this create market inefficiencies that can be exploited by retail; if everything plays by constant rules, the vast majority of alpha gets concentrated in the institutions.
I love shaking up the firms. Gives normal people a chance to build wealth.
You won't be able to see a doctor when you're sick.
You won't be able to open a bank account to receive your salary.
You won't be able to buy train or plane tickets.
My point is I am most worried that these kind of "digital verification" type things most impact actual necessities. The social media I couldn't care less about. "I just won't use it" isn't really a solution.
You already have to provide your passport/health insurance/legal id which already has your identity to your airline/doctor/employer. Why is this suddenly a problem when it is digitized?
You already can't do any of these things without some kind of governmental issued ID which already has your birthdate on it.
idk why people are so scared of it, do you really believe they don't know what you do on your personal internet connection linked to your name and payment data ?
Like yeah sure if you pay everything in cash and never use internet OK that's a big problem, but for the average HN shitposter who's already terminally online it really doesn't change much
> do you really believe they don't know what you do on your personal internet connection linked to your name and payment data?
Many people in the Western Europe used, until very recently, prepaid anonymous mobile data cards that they recharged monthly with charging vouchers paid for in cash.
All this ended in the last 5 - 10 years. The U.S.-American corporate glass citizen slave mentality is actually a little tad bit new here, thus the outrage.
Where exactly in Europe? Countries I interacted with did not had anonymous burner phones. You could buy prepaid card, but you had to show your id and give out your name. You had contract like any other (contract for that number).
Prepaid card was just a payment thing, not anonymity thing. I know, because I functioned on prepaid cards for anonymity unrelated reasons.
> You already can't do any of these things without some kind of governmental issued ID which already has your birthdate on it.
Do you have to present this ID for every purchase you make or every website you visit? Will it be stored and processed by every shop you enter? If not, how is this relevant here? Currently, the personal data exists but is not accessed by anyone unless it is really required. And even then, the scope can be minimized if the user wants.
> do you really believe they don't know what you do on your personal internet connection linked to your name and payment data ?
Yes. I use Whonix on Qubes to access HN and other websites.
> but for the average HN shitposter who's already terminally online it really doesn't change much
> Do you have to present this ID for every purchase you make or every website you visit?
Basically yes, your mobile connection is attached to a name, your landline is attached to a name, your adresse too, the card you use to pay online too.
Well yeah, and that's why we use a third party app instead of having each website implement their own half assed solutions. That's like the entire point of this thing...
Probably in the future nobody will be able to figure out how these things are written, because studying math doesn't make as much money as vibe coding.
... and then there are the actual planet-threatening astronomical events that humanity should think about ways to mitigate but I'm worried that human lifespans and capitalism prevent us from working towards mitigations. Everyone will just say "meh, 1 million years is a long time, I won't be around" and a million years will go by.
Capitalism, in particular NASA's commercial space development program, have already provided and demonstrated initial asteroid redirect capability via the DART mission launched by SpaceX, which impacted an asteroid and measured the changes to its trajectory.
I don't think 50000 60-ft mirrors at the height they intend to fly would cause that to happen. Not enough light gathering power.
50000 60-ft mirrors is about the same area as a single mirror 2.5 miles across. So the area of the mirrors is about the area of a city. You gather as much light as the city itself in regular daytime. If you focused all of that perfectly efficiently onto a city, that city would just look like daytime.
I think what you're missing is that they could all be focused in one spot, not spread over the city. If curved reflective buildings can melt siding, and mirror solar plants can melt salt, I'm pretty sure a city's worth of sun focused on, say, a college campus, could start a massive fire
I see your concern. The mirrors could be deliberately manufactured to have enough imperfections, or slight reverse curvature, to prevent this. It's possible with properly-designed optics to prevent the mirror from being able to focus on a spot smaller than, say, 1/50000 the mirror's area on the Earth's surface. Make each single mirror only optically capable of focusing down to a 3-mile diameter at best. Then it would be optically impossible to focus all the mirrors to a single 60ft spot, and the theoretical highest brightness at any point on Earth would just be regular daytime levels of light.
I think people overestimate the relative strength of the sun.
Then again, assuming there's no dispersion or loss, 50.000 times the sun focused on a 60ft patch will likely have some impact. But that's complete fiction.
Reality: A few years ago this would have been relevant. Most people can only afford the knockoffs now.
My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. The $9 difference is going to come out of my budget to buy authentic brands and buy local stuff.
If you don't like it, make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary, reduce my taxes, and don't pull random geopolitical shit that crashes the S&P500 every other weekend, and then we'll talk.
> My Chipotle meal cost $17 yesterday. It used to cost $8. [...] make my Chipotle meal $8 again or double my salary
I don't know what the date brackets are for your meal ranges there, but the largest component of the price increases in things like takeout meals over the past few years has in fact been wage increases for low-wage workers like the people making your Chipotle meal. In other words, it's more expensive because their salaries have doubled.
If we're being pedantic, investment income comes from a bunch of people who trade pieces of paper for a living deciding that a particular piece of paper is now worth $1 more today than yesterday. Well, okay, it's not paper anymore, just entries in some computer database in New Jersey or Delaware or something.
Investment income--in the form of capital gains--isn't coming from profits, it's coming from the mass delusion in the value of stock assets (which is somewhat correlated with profits, although the existence of stocks like SpaceX or Gamestop show the possible disconnects).
If you wanted to complain about the salaries of billionaires, or the stock grants on the other hand... but you said investment income!
This is the problem with populism; it's thought-terminating. Do the math on this. Liquidate a mega-billionaire to cover Chipotle's payroll. What happens next year?
You're not wrong. People are going to be on about "just cook at home" but the general point still is correct. Life has just become a lot more expensive.
We need to realize that the cost of food at grocery stores has gone up a lot too.
Exactly. My point is the price of everything has gone up, and the authentic "original" brands are no longer affordable. The knockoffs are still affordable, and with them I'm doing great.
I have no incentive to change anything about my spending habits. If the "system" changes itself so that I have a ton more disposable cash lying around then sure I'll re-consider the authentic brands.
About the only situation I still buy authentic brands is if there's an electrical safety or lithium battery involved. But yeah, I'm not spending $52.99 on a nice-looking bike bell ([1] with shipping and taxes) when there's a $10 knockoff of it that looks exactly the same and works just as well.
Back in the days when the original was $5 and the knockoff was $1, I might be willing to pay for the original.
Do you enjoy eating just rice wrapped in a tortilla or something? Burritos are a harsh illustration of the economy of scale. Doing a quick tally with sale prices, and I'd think buying all the ingredients to make one single burrito would be upwards of $20-25, at least. Never mind the time to cook each ingredient that needs to be cooked. And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
> And most of these supplies and prep are going to last what, ~4 days before they spoil?
Rice lasts a very long time. Tortillas last a long time in the fridge (you can probably freeze them?). Freeze the meat. Beans last forever. Sour cream and cheese last a long time in the fridge and you'll certainly use them for other things.
Guacamole/avocados/other veggies are potentially harder to deal with for long term storage, but that depends and it looks like there are some options. Salsa also keeps for many, many months.
As far as time goes, if you're single, many of the ingredients could be cooked in a batch and then frozen, even as whole burritos.
You're expanding the scope to a much larger process and pattern of behavior that has to be undertaken and managed. Sure it's doable, and you can save a bunch of money that way. But as a one line throwaway comment it's still nonsense.
Also freezing things or letting them sit in the fridge for weeks tends to change the texture. A main point of a burrito shop is the fresh ingredients.
Well, you also don't have to freeze anything. When you cook almost every meal, you end up using most ingredients before they go bad. The ingredients for a burrito are pretty basic and can be used to make all sorts of things.
"cook almost every meal" is exactly the type of "expanding the scope" I was talking about. Cooking food yourself is a well-known way of saving money. Starting by trying to reproduce burrito shop burritos is not the way to get there.
To you, that's expanding the scope. To many, many people that's just the way we live, the way our parents lived, etc. We eat food from a restaurant maybe...twice a month? Usually fast food because we're out and about.
If you have the money and you can stay healthy eating that way, go for it. But your original comment seems absolutely ridiculous to anyone that regularly cooks. I sincerely don't mean this in a mean way, but it was quite ignorant, as if making burritos was some herculean task and just what are you going to do with all of the staples foods that can be used in so many other recipes that you don't use?
No, I'm not talking about my own life, but rather the scope of the original response - making it out as something simple you can just do, rather than an undertaking in both prep time and resource management.
> We eat food from a restaurant maybe...twice a month?
I'm right there too at this point in my life. But it's still absurd to suggest someone casually cook a number of dishes that would make a decent Thanksgiving dinner. "Skip the burrito and pack a sandwich" would be reasonable advice, but we have no idea how much OP is already doing that! Rather they merely brought up the price of a burrito for a benchmark about price inflation. Rather than accept the point about price inflation, people then shot the messenger with some fantasy of easy frugality.
> what are you going to do with all of the staples foods that can be used in so many other recipes
You've got guac/pico that want to go bad in a day, and rice/beans/protein that want to go bad in ~4 days. So many other recipes like... more burritos or a different Mexicanesque meal that tastes just like burritos?
> You're expanding the scope to a much larger process and pattern of behavior that has to be undertaken and managed. Sure it's doable, and you can save a bunch of money that way
No, absolutely not. This sort of thing is seriously just the baseline of how we should be expecting people to act in society. Buying stuff for one meal at a time is ridiculously decadent behavior and should not be affordable
> But with those ingredients costing $20-25 you would be able to afford to make how many burritos?
It doesn't matter. The post I was responding to said that you could create a substitute for a burrito shop burrito with $4 and some work at home. Spending much more money and then amortizing it over multiple burritos is out of the scope of the original comment. It would be nonsensical to say that you can get a burrito for free by making three burritos and selling two, right?
There is obviously an underlying time-money tradeoff here, and my point is that focusing on burritos is the wrong place to start trying to optimize that for saving money.
(Although I do question why someone would go to Chipotle for anything other than "I'm on a road trip and need food". Their food is so bland it was the literal inspiration for the term premium mediocre. Support your local burrito shop!)
I see what you're doing, and you're completely correct. It's expensive to make meals solo.
But it's an uphill battle and you won't win.
Nobody cares that buying new ingredients to make tacos for a party of 1 is expensive.
If they aren't doing it yet, they will soon be telling you that you aren't holding it right, wherein:
You should enjoy leftovers. You should embrace and cherish the idea that electing to have some tacos one night dictates your meal choices for the days that follow.
That extra chopped onion that is all stinky and sulfurous by day 2? The meat that isn't ever going to be remotely the same again? The tomatoes that are reverting to slime? All that extra lettuce? That fresh cilantro that doesn't have any other culinary use in your chosen diet? Buck up and eat it, or shut up.
People are broadly incapable of having non-disingenuous conversations about the cost of preparing fresh food in small quantities.
---
Tacos for 2? Or 3? Or 8? Or 16! That's really easy and efficient to make for a one-time meal at home. It scales up very well, indeed. It's a great way to feed a bunch of people relatively inexpensively.
For a person cooking for themselves who isn't inclined to eat the same thing for multiple days in short succession, tacos get do kind of expensive -- expensive enough that buying them hot, fresh, and pre-made becomes very attractive.
(My personal favorite is when they tell me that I should try having different taste and just change my preference for the foods that I eat instead of complain about the price. Or when they tell me that I'm a very poor meal planner just because I want only one burrito: FFS.
Sometimes a burrito is just a burrito, and that's OK.)
The funny part is that I'm currently at the home-centric cook-for-multiple-people end of the spectrum. But burritos are just such a comically bad example of things to make at home to save money. Switch to pasta or basic sandwiches and then there is a point.
People can complain about whatever they want and Other People are free to tell them "your problems are trivial, quit whining"
My end goal is hopefully to give people some perspective that "I don't want to eat the same meal two or three nights in a row" is a ridiculously entitled, childish mentality and they should get over themselves
This is what you said: "Make your burrito or bowl at home, and it'll cost $4 or less"
That statement implies you can straightforwardly save by substituting that one meal with a made at home meal. The reality is much more complicated, as shown by your backpedaling to making several burritos and other meals.
I could just as easily lob that economic literacy jab right back at you. For example, perhaps OP has a burrito once a week, to break up the monotony of eating a home made sandwich every other day. That would be savvy, right?
I mean, I figured the concept of buying ingredients to make a single meal for one person and then just throwing whatever's left away is so ridiculous on the face of it that I wouldn't need to qualify it, but apparently I was wrong.
I currently live by myself and I bought a pork loin to barbecue for Independence Day as a treat. I bought one of the smallest ones I could find, then ate about a third of it that night. Then I put the rest in the fridge and ate it over subsequent days - one night I had it on its own with some veggies on the side, and another I sliced it up thin and topped some ramen with it. The loin cost me about $5, but to say that the meat for that one meal on Independence Day cost me $5 is baffling logic.
Maybe we can simplify this. Do you eat breakfast cereal? If you buy a box of breakfast cereal for $4 and a gallon of milk for $4, then have a bowl of cereal with milk the next day, do you think that means that one bowl of cereal cost you $8?
You're talking about meals that take 2 prepped ingredients (pork/veggies, pork/ramen, cereal/milk) versus something that takes on the order of 10 (tortilla, rice, beans, some kind of protein, cheese, pico, lettuce, guac, sour cream, hot sauce), many of them individually seasoned. That's exactly where the economies of scale come in!
Point out that prepping meals at home is a great way to save money, sure. It just falls flat when pushed in the context of burritos. I would posit that the majority of people who set out to save money by trying to make burritos at home do end up wasting a significant portion of the ingredients, and end up considering the experiment a failure. So I'd say if you're trying to encourage financial savvy, focusing on burritos actually hurts that goal.
That sounds really cheap, if you don't consider that you need to do all the shopping, you need to prepare all the food, and deal with probably a bunch of food waste.
He says it right after returning from the store. Like "I bought this bag of 12 tortillas, I only need one for this burrito, obviously I would be using the rest for other things".
Sure. Tortillas can indeed last for quite a long time without any particular extra effort. Those 11 unused tortillas account for $4.39. We'll take that off of the total.
The cost of the singular burrito has now been reduced to ~$30, which still seems rather expensive.
I'm not going to do the whole split here. If you want, watch the video. If you don't want to, just take my word for it that there's plenty of leftovers besides the tortillas.
Actually given that in the US especially you would have to drive to chipotle, queue and then wait for them to prepare it, and you are already doing groceries anyway, you are exchanging driving and waiting at a Chipotle by cooking things at home. I find the second more enjoyable, but I understand that for people that don't like cooking it might not be the case.
Are you someone who has the capability to be constantly making money any time you want to? If not and you just have a normal 9-5 job or something close to it, you have plenty of time to shop for an hour once a week, then spend 10-30 minutes a day making your own lunches and dinners and still come ahead financially -- way, way ahead.
I have no idea where you're coming from with the "dealing with food waste" part so I'll just ignore it.
Are you someone who has the capability to create extra time in your day? If not and you just have a few hours of free time per day, you can choose to spend some of that free time cooking, or you can let someone else cook for you and use that time on other things you value more than saving $10 or whatever.
The strategy is dependent on what is more precious to you - time, or money. Telling someone they should spend their time to save $10 is pretty pointless if you don't know what their financial situation is and whether that $10 has any meaning.
Food waste is food that you buy which is not ultimately consumed , which increases your cost per meal. This might be trimmings, it might be something you burn, it might be leftovers you don't get to.
