Sounds like an opportunity to open grocery stores.

So when it's not happening as readily as we expect what do we do next?

We just sit back and watch as the invisible hands of capitalism cleanse themselves of our existence.

Aldi is always looking for property

I suspect in a lot of those places there is only the one supply chain.

UNfI is the big distriubor, Kehei is second. Both serve essentially all grocery stores.

As an outside observer, hasn't Thiel's Zero to One has been treated like a gospel basically since it's publication in 2012? Aiming for monopolies and total control has been part of the strategy for a decade now.

No. Lots of us founders recognize that ecosystems create wealth and opportunity. Monopoly destroys it.

It works for one person on the short term but erodes society and all future opportunity.

Ecosystems are what built SV dispute a few selfish monopolistic pricks.

When did SV ever actually do what you're claiming? Need to see some evidence of this claim before taking it as true.

From my observations, SV just had good marketing and PR during the 2000s - 2010s.

Probably sometime around the early 1800s

Malcolm Harris wrote a book “Palo Alto” about how this culture took root in SV long before it was called Silicon Valley: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/10/palo-alto-book...

I don’t agree with this at all when you look at how much founder reinvestment in other younger founders has driven the ecosystem over generations.

Are a few hand-picked winners from VCs hand-picking the next generation's winners _actually_ creating any sort of social prosperity?

the fact that this is credible should scare every entrepreneur. If you cant compete on an even playing field because some people have direct government involvement in tipping the scales we are neither a free market economy nor a democracy.

Since the beginning of the year - USA is just a shell of market economy. Small government indeed…

Also some say it’s “flawed democracy”, IMHO - for last ~3 decades (or even more) it’s just a charade of democracy. Probably soon you won’t even have that.

First-past-the-post two party system, bizarre primary elections, electoral college, land votes instead of people (how many senators are from california and how many from wyoming, they also say it’s “to balance the tyranny of majority”), abhorrent and disgusting gerrymandering (so states could also force tyranny of the minority in congress too :) ), voter suppression (voting on Tuesdays, employers can control if you can go vote that day, voting booth count is getting smaller, voter registration shenanigans in marginalised communities), etc.

The fact that in US you can win the most powerful seat in the world while not even voted for by majority of its own population is properly ridiculous. Yes we all heard about historical this and that but that doesn't matter, thats not a democracy at its core and at the lowest, most important layer of building a resilient democratic society.

Then on that questionable base you build a shaky empire that is supposed to work if people behave nicely. It works till somebody comes around who doesn't care about that and it all falls down. Lets not forget current government was voted by +-half of US population, for second time. Nobody should be shocked by direction its taking again, maybe surprised by intensity of it but thats it.

I am a minority in the fact that I openly welcome the visible consistent hostility of USG towards whole Europe and Ukraine conflict when russia attacks whole western world including US and our philosophy of existence, as much as it can (luckily for us not that much). We are waking up from our deep comfy slumber, not in ideal fashion but we already have a bigger combined military than US has in many, for us the most important aspects (since we don't want to drag ourselves to remote wars unlike you guys so ie aircraft carriers are rather unimportant).

Green deal will be soon gone (good idea in vacuum but not in world where literally nobody else cares about it and we just destroy our economy and future trying to make our 10% part count), social services will get cuts to bring them to more sustainable levels based on unavoidable demographics and more focus on more practical and military manufacturing, like it or not.

I also take issue with the electoral college system, but to claim that a representative democracy is not a democracy based on the intermediary representation seems like a fairly hollow concern.

My bigger issue with regards to how democratic we are would be more related to campaign finance laws, corruption, and the immense power wielded by those in charge that can be pointed at political challengers if the politician is so inclined.

It's not a democracy to the extent that it has systematically unequal representation. That's not a problem of “intermediary representation”, its a problem of both the system of executive election (more of a problem for the US than it would be in many other systems because the US also has an extremely powerful executive branch) and the system of apportionment of the more powerful house of bicameral legislature (having a less-democratic upper house is not uncommon, but having it still be functionally more powerful is, and having that simultaneously with it being as far from democratic as the US Senate is even less common among things that pretens to be representative democracies.)

The electoral college system wouldn't be nearly as bad of a system if you couldn't just rearrange some borders and suddenly change the results.

Unless I'm mistaken, electoral college representatives are assigned based on state borders and individual state laws - usually either winner take all or proportional. The electoral college itself can't be gerrymandered in the same way congress can.

Electoral college representatives are currently elected on a statewide winner-take-all basis except Maine and Nebraska, each of which assign two electors (corresponding to the votes due to two Senate seats each state gets) based on the statewide winner while assigning the other electors based on the winner in each Congressional district.

So, in those states only, electoral votes can be gerrymandered in exactly the same was as Congressional seats, because they are exactly the same districts. (Of course, both states are small enough that the gerrymandering opportunities are fairly limited, and would have limited impact on Presidentual elections, as Maine has only two CDs and Nebraska only 3.)

We also pick all our other leaders directly.

The US has never really been either. At its core, the US has always been an oligarchy with the veneer of democracy to keep the pleebs in check.

Any country that has only ever really been able to choose one of two political parties who both represent the interests of wealthy elites above all else can't really call itself a "Democracy."

this is the end of socially acceptable political norms as we know them

Worse, a redefinition of what "socially acceptable" even means.

"Hold my beer", said an even more arrogant American.

Americans do not like when someone uses the words "fascism" and "oligarchy". It's jarring to think that is even possible in the United States but a) we are here and b) the two have traditionally gone hand-in-hand.

The Americans that react most extremely to those words are generally those that don't realize it's actually what they want.

They just know the words as derogatory, without realizing that they represent the world as they think they'd like it to be.

That, is very Russian. They are "fighting the fascists" though they are.

Not surprising that the same people have special affection for Russia and their dictator. It's a role model.

I didnt read it, but keep it up.

It seems eventually that particles will be seen as resonance points in a wave and not really discrete objects.

Wasn't it always somewhat obvious? That we and our instruments are only taking a snapshot of some continuum?

It’s one of the valid formulations of quantum measurement! However you can also look at path integral forms which produce identical predictions and still use real particles.

I’m not up to date on how folks square weak measurement with path integral formulations.

Gross. Why do this? Making AI undetectable is a short sighted decision that will undermine people’s trust in everything. It would be better to be honest and authentic about things that are created by AI.

Wasnt he a philosophy major and lawyer? So he should know bad arguments like hasty generalization or false choice. I would argue that creating a survaliance state would increase china's likelihood of "winning", why would people choose the US or western values if they are essentially the same?

He knows. He also knows a lot of people will fall for it.

Awesome. I think this is exactly the right approach for so many use cases. HTML is perfect for so many things.

I’ve used grape in the past and it is really really useful so I am excited to see this in action. It’s interesting to see the transition from the drag and drop era to the semantic vibes era. So does this essentially let me bridge the gap? Vibe code but fix the code when the LLM predictable craps the bed?

Yeah, that's the idea here. You can vibe code, and then the usual places where folks get stuck, you can jump in and use the drag and drop.

1. You can’t take someone’s property with out due process of law. There has been no showing that they violated that obligation. 2. The constitution has supremacy, so you can’t violate someone’s first amendment rights in service of FCC regulations.

In fact there is a more than credible argument that criticizing and mocking politicians is an essential public service.

To be fair to the executives. The main regulator that could essentially issue the corporate death penalty, the FCC chairman that can revoke their license to operate, literally said “we can do this the easy way or the hard way”. That’s a Dirty Harry or goodfellas quote. So much for “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the economy”.

Alternatively, perhaps it is the duty of the executives to defend their company, its viewers and employees, when confronted with unlawful and unreasonable government demands.

If only they had a little money to fight back with.

Unfortunately, Disney is just a small bean startup, there's basically no way they would be able to hire good enough lawyers and weather the storm.

I totally agree with this but look at that statement. A company needs to fight the full force of the federal government, with an executive that has demonstrated no respect for the rule of law. That is insane. Every one needs to fight back but the federal government can stay wrong longer than you can stay solvent.

You really don't have to be fair to the executives. The FCC absolutely can't do shit about Jimmy Kimmel, and would lose the procedure if it ever came to it. Instead, they immediately bent the knee and decided that loyalty to the nascent fascist regime was more important that standing up against the most clear cut and unjustifiable attack to free speech in a long time.

FCC can decide to not let the $6.2 billion Nexstar acquisition go through. Kimmel is just part of the bribe

The people in charge of approval at the FCC are on this public comments submission page:

https://www.fcc.gov/transaction/nexstar-tribune

'We find it's fine to waive the rule that limits large media company mergers in order to protect speech because this Nexstar merger will in no way impact speech in the US'. -The FCC in the coming months

Also because some people don't seem to know this, the government can't murder a man even if he was already dying of cancer.

I totally agreed with you. But mafia tactics work because they are terrifying. My point was this is unprecedented in American history and people are scared.