Also in Israel, stable basic products (like milk) have a government mandated pricing, not even subsidized.
It’s a good idea in its simplistic form, and works well most of the times, but once every 2 years you get a crunch where the manufacturers just decline to produce products at a loss, so we don’t have milk or butter for 2 weeks.
The municipality which has monopoly on land taxes and costs will compete with stores that must pay taxes and rent? Won’t it just cause neighboring stores to close?
Won’t a better option be subsidizing taxes for grocery stores, and let the discounts competitively pass unto the customers?
> and let the discounts competitively pass unto the customers
This is the same trickle down economics principle that has proven not to work over, and over, and over again. There's exactly zero reason to believe these businesses would pass on the savings to consumers.
Consider! Ingles (a supermarket brand here in NC) is criticized for holding huge amounts of abandoned/vacant/dilapidated properties [0], which stifles competition and lets them hold an effective monopoly and makes neighborhoods objectively worse. It's not about the taxes. Don't underestimate a chain's ability to eat costs by maintaining their market position.
You're thinking a tax break which is an unconditional subsidy. That relies on the business passing savings through which folks are right to be skeptical about.
But that's not all subsidy mechanisms. The best ones are where pass-through is enforced, not assumed.
You already know of one that works: WIC. It lowers the effective price for customer, which the store receives as reimbursement.
It's not about trickle-down -- that's ideology. It's more about designing the right mechanism.
You can create subsidies which are inverse to the stores income. It doesn’t HAVE to go to large chains. There are many way to encourage small businesses to open. Competing with them is not one.
When you have a highly competitive market with plenty of actors lower cost does trickle down. Otherwise you’re talking about an extremely complicated cartel which cannot exist.
Major grocers are more inclined to form cartels on price than to engage in organic competitive action. These businesses are too large and incentives too perverse for free market dynamics to apply anymore.
>Major grocers are more inclined to form cartels on price than to engage in organic competitive action.
Even if we take at face value that this is happening, their margins are famously low (ie. low single digits[1][2]) that any improvements are likely negligible. In the best case scenario where they're run as competently/efficiently as a normal grocery store, but don't take any profits, you'd be saving like 50 cents on a $10 pack of ground beef. Of course, all of this would go out the window if it's less efficient, either due to government incompetence[3], or lack of scale.
"The Transportation Department workers arrived at 9:15 p.m., right on time. Mr. Boyce and his crew were ready, having fitted the roof and rear wall panel 30 minutes before. By Monday, the structure was nearly complete. “This is all like synchronized swimming,” Mr. Mansylla said. “To build a structure in New York City in, what, 48 hours? That’s as fast as it gets.”
Your article doesn't say anything about cost, only that it got built fast. Every time the toilet example gets cited, the punchline is the cost, not how long it took, although that was appalling as well.
From the wikipedia article:
>The toilet's original proposed cost of $1.7 million inspired media coverage and criticism of the San Francisco government.
The whole point is in principle these things are good ideas but in practice they are tools weaponized by NIMBYs. This is the fig leaf that keeps them around. "But why would you do away with environmental review???" As if you were to stab 55 gal drums of toxic waste and dump them into a river. But really you were trying to build an apartment as large as many other existing apartments in the middle of the city. Or in this case, install something on the sidewalk.
> The class-action case was brought against a group of companies that includes Loblaw and the Weston companies, Metro, Walmart Canada, Giant Tiger, and Sobeys and its owner, Empire Co. Ltd.
> The plaintiffs allege those companies participated in a 14-year industry-wide price-fixing conspiracy between 2001 and 2015, leading to an artificial increase in packaged bread prices.
What's the point of this observation other than for shock value? Yes, when you multiply small percentage by a huge number, you're still left with a huge number. That doesn't mean it's suddenly worth doing unless you can make the argument that it scales easily.
>That doesn't mean it's suddenly worth doing unless you can make the argument that it scales easily.
Otherwise it's like saying "you know what everyone should do? Raise their own chickens! Sure, you might be only saving $1 or whatever a day, but multiply that 365 days per year and 340 million Americans, and that's billions we're all collectively saving!"
And no, running a grocery store isn't something that scales easily.
The whole egg fiasco is as far as I am concerned the biggest proof of price gouging cartel behavior there is. And people assume it is normal.
Vast majority of product sold when inventory is low, they just go out of stock still at MSRP right to the last sku in the inventory. Then, you wait until more are available, also at that same price.
Really, why would prices go up for the eggs in this situation if not for gouging? Sure plenty of chickens were culled. But the remaining chickens aren't costing more than they did before the cull. Whoever is producing the remaining eggs being produced is producing them for the exact same overhead they have always been producing. Feed is still probably the same. Maybe cheaper with an excess of feed on the market needing to be sold and moved out of feedlots before the next crop comes in, from the chicken culling your competitors were doing. Water is still probably the same. Power is still probably the same. Staff are still getting the same pay. Property taxes are still the same. Really, who is getting the $10 from the $12 dozen of eggs? Probably some guys smoking cigars if we are being honest.
>Really, why would prices go up for the eggs in this situation if not for gouging? [...]
Supply and demand. Just like blocking the Strait of Hormuz doesn't make oil 2x more expensive to produce everywhere else in the world, you're still left with the problem that the world has ~20% less oil to go around. That means the price of oil gets bid up until it's high enough to convince 20% of oil consumers to stop using oil.
You know what they say about massively consolidated multinational corporations with tens of thousands of employees and millions of square feet in real estate: no one making money there.
That may be, but you can direct subsidies towards inverse relation to the store’s income. You can even add extra taxes for large chains.
But as others said, groceries are working on minimal margin. And all of them work with the same wholeselles (except those with vertical integrations), and this is a nation wide problem.
>That may be, but you can direct subsidies towards inverse relation to the store’s income. You can even add extra taxes for large chains.
Not really imo. Private market passes costs to consumers and leverages subsidy offers to achieve rat race outcomes out of competing local governments off each other. It is how you end up with the classic case of a city courting some business but offering enough tax abatement where the city isn't actually getting anything out of the business, and once the abatement expire the business just leaves for somewhere else that will cut them a better deal. City ends up hostage to the business demanding ever more favorable incentives and removal of all taxes (there's been free trade zones established in the middle of ho hum suburbs, stuff brought in there doesn't even count as imported to the US).
Interesting. I think it really depends on the competitiveness of the market.
In a highly competitive market, every cost saved would be passed to the consumer, obviously this is simplistic microeconomics and doesn’t actually works this way.
In my city, there’s a supermarket approximately every 150 meters. Food cost is high, but for the entire country. Actually research shows that food cost is higher in low density towns where there is much less competition.
I wonder if there is a way to improve pricing more systemically by combating some of this.
Or if there could be some kind of network and information protocol that could provide a decentralized alternative.
Maybe there could be an Internet protocol or NYC Internet protocol that food suppliers could list low price items with. Independent stores could order from here, shipped to their store, or maybe one or two city warehouses where they could pick up.
Maybe another system where suppliers could voluntarily detail cost disruptions, allowing government or other organizations insight and sometimes the possibility of helping alleviate those issues etc.
I mean the government already spends a lot to subsidize retail food purchases. Maybe another idea is just a very easily accessible new app for credits that is NYC only?
It's just that making a single store puts all of the logistical and other issues onto one government department and location, which has been shown in socialist countries to break down.
I am all for a few more socialist policies (I am lucky to have survived this long on outsourcing rates without a consistent healthcare plan), but it definitely needs to be a contemporary effort and not some centralized 1950s model.
This is probably not far off from how things already work in distribution. Most restaurants are ordering from the same food wholesalers in a given region. When I go to more "independent" grocers or local chains they still have much of the same offerings as major grocers in my area, so I'm guessing they also order from the same sets of distributors (or lease shelf space to the same groups). And I'm not talking just the packaged stuff. But when certain varietals come in e.g. Cosmic Crisp apples, its like all the grocery stores in the area are getting the Cosmic Crisp apples over the next few weeks with the same sticker and all.
I know for stuff like seafood there is a saturday night 1am fish market near our harbor where significant volume is sold wholesale to restaurants and grocers (but also individuals interested in filling a chest freezer).
So I think already there are just few places to order food wholesale in a given region so those prices are probably somewhat even. Then of course you go to vons, kroger, ralphs, save4less, the local korean grocer, and see different prices for the exact same commodified product like Cosmic crisp apple or 6 pack of coca cola, there is your markup that comes from the grocer itself on top of the regional wholesale price. Grocers like to have flexibility in markup to play psychological games like rotating sales, coupons, and offer rewards programs. Seems that sort of finagling isn't tolerated at the next level of abstraction in business to business sales.
Cost disruptions might be good to put the blame on who exactly in the chain is gouging prices. At the end of the day, the eggs in the egg shortage were not more costly to produce than beforehand. And the egg farms that were culled of their hens, were probably not that much of an anchor on operations given that they probably were not consuming their usual power, water, farmhands probably all laid off, land bought and paid for probably decades ago by this point, way out in marginal farmland where property taxes are probably quite low. Certainly not enough to quadruple the price of eggs. And how interesting how Trader Joes still sold $2.99 dozen racks during this whole crisis.
Those are pretty extraordinary claims with very little evidence.
And, even if they are true, the obvious solution would be to enforce the already existing antitrust and competition laws, not to have the government directly engage in commerce.
Why is government directly engaging in commerce such a controversial topic. The government already does it in various forms: VA hospitals, Medicare price negotiations, government subsidies in agriculture, owning 10% of Intel etc.
Too much to write in a HN comment so here is a substack post (1) probably worthy of its own HN post.
And how is that the obvious solution? You see who is in the Whitehouse and you think this is a champion of antitrust and lifting up the little man? Quite the opposite. NYC government is a separate entity than federal government with different limits to its powers. They can't do anything about cartel behavior. They can, however, open a municipal grocery store.
The government engages in commerce all the time. If we took that argument to its logical conclusion there would be no libraries as they compete with book stores. There would be no armies as they compete with Blackrock mercenaries. No public transit as it competes with private transit. No public events as that competes with ticketmaster. No public schools. No public universities. No scientific research grants. No sheltering or feeding the poor. No treating the sick. No treating veterans. No bridges. No roads. No harbors. No anything. What really would be the role of government after we stripped it of all its potential influences on the world of commerce? I can't even imagine what might even be left...
No, it seems a big role in this country for government is facilitating conditions for commerce. Educating the populace such as to upskill the nation's labor pool. Building roads free for businesses to use in transporting goods to market. Treating the sick before they get so ill as to be an undue burden on the medical system that threatens its entire latent capacity. Offering cheaper food seems in line with that. People aren't going to use the spare money to throw into a river; they will use their extra money to circulate back into the economy probably in more productive ways than Kroger buying back its stock or its executives or shareholders squandering it on oysters and boat fuel.
That post was not at all worth my time, it just cherry picked data without ever putting it together to show intentional price manipulation or monopolistic behavior (no, showing concentration isn't enough).
> They can't do anything about cartel behavior.
Incorrect, several states have passed their own antitrust laws, there's nothing that limits it to the federal government.
> The government engages in commerce all the time. If we took that argument to its logical conclusion there would be no libraries as they compete with book stores. There would be no armies as they compete with Blackrock mercenaries. No public transit as it competes with private transit. No public events as that competes with ticketmaster. No public schools. No public universities. No scientific research grants. No sheltering or feeding the poor. No treating the sick. No treating veterans. No bridges. No roads. No harbors....
I do think the government should get out of many of those, so your argument doesn't really land for me.
> No, it seems a big role in this country for government is facilitating conditions for commerce.
I don't see how the government driving out competition by running its own grocery stores, presumably at a loss, is "facilitating conditions for commerce".
>I don't see how the government driving out competition by running its own grocery stores, presumably at a loss, is "facilitating conditions for commerce".
If someone is stealing your only $20 out of your pocket and I stop them and you now have $20 in your pocket, I've just created conditions for commerce on the part of you taking that $20 and spending it someplace else in the market than on the thief. When you give a dollar to a rich person vs a working class person, that dollar is far more likely to be circulated back into the economy in the latter case than in the former case. The poor person spends the bulk of their paycheck on needs and a handful of wants, real hard items, not speculative assets. The rich person bids up Tesla stock and makes Elon into a billionaire off a PE of 317 now, thin air pumped into the balloon in other words with all this money tied up in overpriced TSLA stock than empowering real work in the economy.
What do you believe the role of government is? Do you believe that every resource we use in life should be priced such that a handful of individuals have the opportunity to live fat off the transaction? Inefficiencies at every level of the supply chain?
> If someone is stealing your only $20 out of your pocket and I stop them and you now have $20 in your pocket, I've just created conditions for commerce on the part of you taking that $20 and spending it someplace else in the market than on the thief.
But, to engage with your ridiculous bait and switch: whether I or the thief have $20 is irrelevant to the commerce as he'll presumably spend it at the market too, so even this ridiculously contrived example falls flat on its face.
> rich person bids up Tesla stock and makes Elon into a billionaire off a PE of 317 now, thin air pumped into the balloon in other words with all this money tied up in overpriced TSLA stock than empowering real work in the economy.
Here you go again with some ridiculously biased example, but I'll engage with it for your own sake: money that's invested doesn't just disappear, it goes into the pockets of employees and suppliers or gets reinvested in some other way, continuing the cycle.
>But, to engage with your ridiculous bait and switch: whether I or the thief have $20 is irrelevant to the commerce as he'll presumably spend it at the market too, so even this ridiculously contrived example falls flat on its face.
Nope, poor person spends far greater share of their wealth on real items.
>Here you go again with some ridiculously biased example, but I'll engage with it for your own sake: money that's invested doesn't just disappear, it goes into the pockets of employees and suppliers or gets reinvested in some other way, continuing the cycle.
Ahh yes, it all trickles down. That is why wages have kept pace with inflation and why inequality has remained the same over the decades! No hoarding going on! It was right in my back pocket the whole time!
Please formally define what you believe the role of government is. I am genuinely curious on what these anarcholibertarians such as yourself actually believe in.
Good article, thanks for sharing. I haven't tried to verify its claims but at face value pretty illuminating.
It seems to me both that:
1. If this article is true then independent groceries should have a slam dunk in keeping prices low. They aren't subject to the price fixing cartel of the big grocers so if they lower prices they'll drive demand to their store and win out on the market. Margins for staples are quite low anyway so volume is the best way to make profits. This means we should observe independent grocers right now outcompeting large chains or driving costs lower .
2. Alternatively if the price gouging is coming from consolidation of the CPG market then state run grocery stores will be just as ineffective at combatting high prices as independent grocers. I guess one can argue that a sufficiently large amount of state run demand can negotiate better CPG pricing but I'm not sure this experiment is big enough.to leverage this.
Personally I'm not a fan of state run businesses because the US is so polarized. Today's support can turn into tomorrow's opposition. It's hard to build a lasting institution when differences in candidates and parties can wipe out any wins or losses.
Instead I'd like to either see state subsidizing of staples and CPGs using taxes (paying into a food price stabilization fund used to negotiate and aquire staples and CPGs at cost and then resold to grocery stores at lower prices, along with maximum margin guarantees from grocery stores) or I'd like so see an incentive program for independent grocers along with a state blessed way of having disparate grocers negotiate better prices.
But I also don't live in NYC and this initiative's success or failure isn't being run on my tax money.
>Personally I'm not a fan of state run businesses because the US is so polarized. Today's support can turn into tomorrow's opposition. It's hard to build a lasting institution when differences in candidates and parties can wipe out any wins or losses.
Certain states the government actually operates the liquor stores so this isn't wholly unprecedented. Government also does this sort of thing for armed forces. It is interesting how the US military with its associated progression, benefits, services, and provided housing, is sort of a gleam into what a communist united states might have looked like in another timeline. Kind of ironic when you get a pro military pro capitalist person I guess. They have more experience with de facto communism than most and seemed to have liked a lot of aspects.
Government owned grocery stores already exist [1]. They are run by the U.S. military, have 200+ locations, and charge at least 25% less than other brands [1].
"Surveys consistently rate the commissaries as one of the military's top non-pay benefits." NYC wants to provide similar benefits for residents.
>In 2024, DeCA estimated that it saved patrons $1.58 billion and had an operations cost of $1.7 billion, $1.5 billion of which was funded from appropriations.[8]
Isn't this the "selling $1 for 75 cents" business model (aka moviepass) that people made fun of a few years ago?
I think this is the mindset required for this conversation. There is no way to make a library drive a profit, let alone financially self-sufficient. However, the library exists because the city values the externalities, specifically an educated public and reduced crime. For those purposes, libraries are incredibly cost efficient.
The same argument can be made for public grocers. Reducing poverty has cascading effects including better health and lower crime rates.
Well no, because the library is often the sole provider of book lending services and there's no private sector alternative. The same can't be said for grocery stores. To continue your analogy, it would be closer to the government setting up its own streaming service, even though there's netfilx and several other competitors. Even though people hate netflix for its price hikes or whatever, it's unclear how the government can do a better job here than netfilx (or other competitors), aside from strongarming/expropriating rights holders.
It’s the idea, although they’ve chosen a weird location for that: La Marqueta is about 300 feet from a grocery store (City Fresh on East 116th). So this pilot store will effectively compete with private groceries for business, muddying the strength of any results (in any direction).
(I say this as someone who is broadly in favor of NYC trying to run city-owned groceries in areas that are underserved.)
Maybe they should look into why the closings occurred. Around here, the Lake City grocery store closed likely because of rampant shoplifting and the police failing to protect the stores, along with excessive taxes.
Sure. Lots of things governments need to do are unprofitable, like delivering the mail or repairing the roads.
I can go to my local public library, borrow the free books, use the free computers, sit in the free chairs, ask the librarian for free guidance, enjoy the free air conditioning, and even book a free meeting room to meet up with some friends to work on a project.
Profitable? Fuck no. Great to have in my city? Fuck yes.
"Share" of the wealth says nothing about what the amount is. For example, if you create $10 of wealth, my share of the total wealth goes down, but my wealth is unaffected.
"About $42 trillion in new wealth was created in the first two years of the pandemic. Two-thirds of that has gone to the richest 1% of the world’s people, according to a report out Monday from the nonprofit organization Oxfam. In the United States, billionaires are a third richer now than they were before the pandemic."
> For example, if you create $10 of wealth, my share of the total wealth goes down, but my wealth is unaffected.
Starting and and investing in businesses are matters of filing paperwork. The mere act is worth nothing but the investment and paper it's written on.
So the question still remains, what did they create to make them worth the money they have? Because it seems to me the only thing that correlates to their wealth isn't what they created but the contracts they've signed. Which is fine but your contention was they as individuals created something to make them worth that much, and I'm wondering what that is.
I've read biographies on Gates and Jobs, also Satya Nadella. I sidestepped that comment because it seemed snide to me. I know who these people are and what they did with their lives, and how they made their money. Maybe you might re-read their biographies and note how their successes were a combination of skill, luck, connections, circumstance, and survivorship bias, and how each one was backed by an army of workers.
> selling a product or service for more than it costs you is creating value.
Okay but other people are building and selling the service, not the 1%. I agree that's what business is, and they create value, but the 1% is not "the business".
So again I'm left wondering what the 1% actually created themselves such that wealth was not transferred. Because if the value is in selling the product or service, then it would seem to me the people who deserve the benefit are the sales/engineering/manufacturing/service people. But you said it's not a transfer of wealth, it's the actual 1% who created the value. You still haven't said what they create and why that means they deserve to own and control all that wealth.
If you read a biography of Jobs, you'd know that Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy when they invited Jobs to take the helm. This was after a series of CEOs, each one more clueless than the previous at how to run the company. With the same company, the same workers, the same everything, Jobs reorganized and reshaped it and thereby took it to a trillion dollar valuation.
That's creating wealth.
Jobs also did something similar with Pixar. Maybe reread what he did at Pixar? It was Jobs that made the difference and created the wealth.
Do you really think that you (or I) could have replaced Jobs and created the same amount of wealth that you attribute to everything but what Jobs actually did?
Not a chance.
BTW, look at the history of the United States. If you believe wealth is transferred, not created, where in heck was the wealth today back in 1776? Who the heck was it transferred from? Did it randomly somehow fall out of the sky?
If you still cannot see this, start your own business. It will soon be very apparent how wealth is created.
I know a few categories falling under this "richest 1% of the world’s people": entrepreneurs, highly paid professionals and politicians.
The entrepreneurs invested in or built from scratch organizations able to deliver an incredible amount of value to our society in the form of products, services and jobs. These organizations, called businesses, are the unsung heroes that differentiate our lands of plenty from the hunger and cold of countries suffering under communism.
The professionals (doctors, lawyers, programmers) worked in such organizations and added significant value ensuring their success in the market place.
Finally, politicians managed to convince a sufficient number people that only they can solve their problems and thus got themselves elected into positions where they control significant flows of money and/or influence.
Of course, there is a term called coercive monopoly. It exists especially in large infrastructure projects where the startup cost is tremendous so only government, or a single entity without the possibility of competition can enter.
Groceries are not one of these. If you have a problem of high grocery costs, there are many better ways to tackle that other opening a government owned store. But it does make for a great photo op.
That's not how it used to work. That's still not how it works in my country. I buy my bread from a specialized shop, my cheese from another, and my fresh produce from yet another. I know people who only buy their meat from a butcher (I do it sometimes, but not always).
I understand your point of view. But in cities of all sizes, it's easier to not have to do that. For example in NYC, a medium size city, you can easily go do your shopping in multiple places, and not at the same time.
Economic viability isn't what led to "wide availability and inventory". No, it's imperialism. It's exploitation of the Global South. It's paying slave wages through subsidiaries in West Africa to cocoa farmers while making sure those countries stay poor, for example.
We also wage economic war on our our anointed enemies like Cuba and then use the inevitable result of that economic warfare as a reason why our system is good.
> Won’t it just cause neighboring stores to close?
Hopefully they kept all those profits around from the time they price gouging consumers in the name of “supply chain issues”, “transitory inflation”, “bird flu” etc. I still remember all the headlines about bird flu and how egg prices were doubling because of it. Turns out the egg production barely dropped and it was all a ruse to make more money.
You can't conclude it was a ruse without knowing the elasticity of egg demand!
This is ultimately the kind of thing that worries me about a municipal grocery store. Will voters allow it to respond in rational ways to market conditions, or will they expect the city to go out and extort some egg suppliers when market prices rise above what they consider reasonable?
It could potentially be a ruse by egg producers. Certainly there's reason for suspicion. But darth_avocado's claim was that grocery stores were in on the ruse and must have extracted huge profits from price gouging consumers. I think that's obviously false. You'll note that in the jury case the plaintiffs were themselves megacorporations, and substantially larger ones than the producers they were suing at that.
I don't blame consumers for deciding they don't care about the underlying market structure and just want cheap eggs. But you can't run a store on that basis, and if the city feels like it has to there'll be problems.
He won by not being a capitalist. He campaigned on doing something to actually meet the basic needs of the people who elected him. This is the cost of that promise. This will force them to compete on those terms instead of directly on money.
Who knows, let's try it and see. I've heard all my life about how new ideas are potentially not economically viable, so we keep trying old ideas which proven not economically viable. My feeling is that the economy is such a large, chaotic, dynamic system that most people, including experts, have no idea what is theoretically viable or not viable. So making decisions based on "my first order analysis is that this is not economically viable" is misguided. You have to try it first and see how the system actually responds.
Oh no! Struggling Americans will be able to buy food cheaper! What will we do?
Also, if anyone has any reservations about a government run grocery store, go ask your representatives to come out against military commissaries. I bet you will not be able to find one active politician who will try to remove that. You know why? Because government run grocery stores work. End of story. Period. There is no discussion. You are wrong if you disagree. We do this. It exists. It works. And people love it. Try to find one politician that will end that service.
Yes. They will be subsidized, just like other food-based welfare programs.
As for the rich, is this really your concern? A few rich people getting some cheaper groceries is so bad that we have to deny poor people from getting affordable food? Why do so many Americans hate poor people? You know there's literally trillions of waste in agriculture, military, pharmaceutical, oil, etc... subsidies and that's just the tip of the ice berg if you examine the tax code. If you're deeply concerned about rich people gaming the system, why don't you start in those places and then when we figure that out, we can worry about rich people shopping in one of five total grocery stores.
Rich people hate being seen with us poors. Just look at Coachella, they can't even do it for a weekend. Really, that's enough to keep them out. You seriously think they're going to give up Trader Joes and Wholefoods to save 50 cents on their beef?
In some neighborhoods there are only luxury grocery options.
Groceries also form cartels as the other commenter mentioned. The biggest grocers in Canada did it for many years until they were penalized for it (though it’s likely still continuing in other ways - the same players are now under investigation for selling underweight meats)
The estimated cost to consumers from bread price-fixing was $4-5 billion
It’s about supply and demand. Luxury grocers provide a shopping “experience”, where low cost grocers do not. In a luxury neighborhood it would make sense the shoppers are looking for experience more so than low cost.
What’s a ‘luxury neighborhood’? In any large city, most central areas are generally a bit of a mix; “this is only for rich/poor people” is more of a suburban phenomenon. If the shops are only catering to the high end, a problem can develop.
(I am less sure why this happens to such a great extent in large US cities vs elsewhere, vs more of a balance of shops, but it does seem to.)
So it may just be that where they are from, the concept of “luxury neighborhoods” which do not need to cater to the poor and disadvantaged populations does indeed exist, due to segregation factors
The neighborhoods I'm talking about also have many people living in poverty or near it. Looks like you live in Israel which is perhaps less integrated / more segregated than Brooklyn (I don't know though, I haven't been to see first hand)
To anyone who espouses these claims that the government isn't capable of anything or that it's somehow a moral hazard I just have to ask: how's that working out for you in particular and society in general? Does it feel like things are going well?
What we have now is the result of unfettered private control. Private companies collude to raise prices and lower wages. The standard of living in real terms has been in decline for over 50 years. Education, medical, housing and food costs continue to spiral. Where we do have publicly owned alternatives, such as with municipal broadband, those publicly-owned alternatives are always far better.
Are we going to make the same argument that EPB in Chattanooga is somehow a moral hazard and has an unfair advantage to Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Spectrum?
Let's just say that it's true that they do. Why is that a problem? Why is it good that billion or trillion dollar companies can charge higher prices than the government can so their owners can buy another mega-yacht at the expense of the people who depend on that service? Because that's what's going on now.
You sound extremely privileged and frankly out of touch (not uncommon with the HN demographic).
Do you think working families in NYC don't deserve the same monetary relief that massive corporations get with their own welfare programs? Why should trillion multinational companies take our public money to subsidize their businesses and we can't do the same for workers?
Why do you prefer helping non human entities (corporations) over literal humans?
Correlation != Causation. Sitting this close to a mint plant gives you a dose that is way to undiluted to have any effect. Now if you were to sit roughly two kilometres away with a gentle breeze going from the plant towards you... (but make sure that there is not anothe mint plant on the path of the wind.)
The bus supposedly only had Israelis. Israel attacked a neutral country Qatar with a missile to eliminate some supposed enemy agent to a civilian building, so I don't think they have any problems with this.
It's not oblivious. It's more willfully ignorant. Even that is not right. Most people are just so anti-America and anti-West that they side with actual despots and choose to believe strange things. If we send 10,000 bombs to Iran and lose an F-16E and have to search for a pilot for a few days, these people believe this means Iran has won the war. If China puts a balloon on our coast, these people believe China has defeated us militarily. I responded to a post the other day where someone was claiming Cuba could "easily" neutralize the entire U.S. Navy with a handful of drones or something.
> If we send 10,000 bombs to Iran and lose an F-16E and have to search for a pilot for a few days, these people believe this means Iran has won the war.
Is your objective just sending 10k bombs to Iran?
If your objective is death, then yeah, the US won. Enjoy the all that death, because seemingly it's all it got from the war. Double points for the exploded schoolgirls, perhaps?
It would confirm that the US is truly a vile country. Not to anyone's surprise, really.
In the good old days Netflix had "Dynamic HTML" code that would take a DOM element which scrolled out of view port and move it to the position where it was about to be scrolled in from the other end. Hence he number of DOM elements stayed constant no matter how far you scroll and the only thing that grows is the Y coordinate.
They did it because a lot of devices running Netflix (TVs, DVD players, etc) were underpowered and Netflix was not keen on writing separate applications. They did, however, invest into a browser engine that would have HW acceleration not just for video playback but also for moving DOM elements. Basically, sprites.
> Hence he number of DOM elements stayed constant no matter how far you scroll and the only thing that grows is the Y coordinate.
This is generally called virtual scrolling, and it is not only an option in many common table libraries, but there are plenty of standalone implementations and other libraries (lists and things) that offer it. The technique certainly didn't originate with Netflix.
Yes, tables and lists, since they have a fixed height per item/row. Chat messages don't have a fixed height so its more difficult. And by more difficult I mean that every single virtual paging library that I've looked at in the past would not work.
But they do have constant height in the sense that, unless you resize the window horizontally, the height doesn’t change.
For what it’s worth, modern browsers can render absurdly large plain HTML+CSS documents fairly well except perhaps for a slow initial load as long as the contents are boring enough. Chat messages are pretty boring.
I have a diagnostic webpage that is a few million lines long. I could get fancy and optimize it, but it more or less just works, even on mobile.
Exactly, browsers can render it fast. It's likely a re-rendering issue in React. So the real solution is just preventing the messages from getting rendered too often instead of some sort of virtual paging.
Dynamic height of virtual scrolling elements is a thing. You just need to recalculate the scrollable height on the fly. tanstack's does it, as do some of the nicer grid libraries.
Its been about three years but infinite scroll is naunced depending on the content that needs to be displayed. Its a tough nut to crack and can require a lot of maintenance to keep stable.
GP was mentioning that a solution to the problem exists, not that Netflix specifically invented it. Your quip that the technique is not specific to Netflix bolsters the argument that OpenAI should code that in.
I'm ignorant of the tech here. But I have noticed that ctrl-F search doesn't work for me on these longer chats. Which is what made me think they were doing something like virtual scrolling. I can't understand how the UI can get so slow if a bunch of the page is being swapped out.
They didn't actually name the solution: the solution is virtualization.
They described Netflix's implementation, but if someone actually wanted to follow up on this (even for their own personal interest), Dynamic HTML would not get you there, while virtualization would across all the places it's used: mobile, desktop, web, etc.
The biggest issue is that there is no native component support for that. So everyone implements their own and it is both brittle and introduces some issues like:
- "ctrl + f" search stops working as expected
- the scrollbar has wrong dimensions
- sometimes the content might jump (common web issue overall)
The reason why we lost it is because web supports wildly different types of layouts, so it is really hard to optimize the same way it is possible in native apps (they are much less flexible overall).
Right. This is one of my favorite examples of how badly bloated the web is, and how full of stupid decisions. Virtual scrolling means you're maintaining a window into content, not actually showing full content. Web browsers are perfectly fine showing tens of thousands of lines of text, or rows in a table, so if you need virtual scrolling for less, something already went badly wrong, and the product is likely to be a toy, not a tool (working definition: can it handle realistic amount of data people would use for productive work - i.e. 10k rows, not 10 rows).
Agreed - I've had this argument with people who've implemented virtual scroll on technical tools and now users can't Ctrl-F around, or get a real sense of where they are in the data. Want to count a particular string? Or eyeball as you scroll to get a feel for the shape of it?
More generally, it's one of the interesting things working in a non-big-tech company with non-public-facing software. So much of the received wisdom and culture in our field comes from places with incredible engineering talent but working at totally different scales with different constraints and requirements. Some of time the practices, tools, approaches advocated by big tech apply generally, and sometimes they do things a particular way because it's the least bad option given their constraints (which are not the same as our constraints).
There are good reasons why Amazon doesn't return a 10,000 row table when you search for a mobile phone case, but for [data ]scientists|analysts etc many of those reasons no longer apply, and the best UX might just be the massive table/grid of data.
Not sure what the answer is, other than keep talking to your users and watching them using your tools :)
Desktop GUI toolkits aren't less flexible on layout, they're often more flexible.
We lost it because the web was never designed for applications and the support it gives you for building GUIs is extremely basic beyond styling, verging on more primitive than Windows 3.1 - there are virtually no widgets, and the widgets that do exist have almost no features. So everyone rolls their own and it's really hard to do that well. In fact that's one of the big reasons everyone wrote apps for Windows back in the day despite the lockin, the value of the built-in widget toolkit was just that high. It's why web apps so often feel flaky and half baked compared to how desktop apps tend(ed) to feel - the widgets just don't get the investment that a shared GUI platform allows.
Almost certainly running some sort of O(n^2) algorithm on the chat text every key press. Or maybe just insane hierarchies of HTML.
Either way, pretty wild that you can have billions of dollars at your disposal, your interface is almost purely text, and still manage to be a fuckup at displaying it without performance problems.
OpenAI sites are the only ones that do this to me. I have to keep a separate browser profile just for my OpenAI login with absolutely nothing installed on it or it'll end up being dogshit slow and unusable.
Yeah just had this earlier today, I had to write my response in vscode and paste it in, there were literal seconds of lag for typing each character. Typical bloated React.
Sure it's possible but those are a handful of exceptions against the norm, when the general approach so easily guides you towards bloat upon bloat that you have to be an expert to actively avoid going down that route.
First, mcp, like cli, like api, is a kind of (user facing) interface, just not graphical. It still needs to be designed, just by different people with differing skills.
Second, textual interface can only go so far in terms of information ingestion. Trying to describe a complex relationship between entities can be extremely difficult with text. However, a good graphical interface will make complex information easier to digest.
So in my opinion, the moat will emphasize organization which knows how to plan good a custom experience, whether graphical or textual, and less where tables and forms are the main business
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