Productivity has outpaced population growth for some time, and the largest obstacle to the full-fledged social stability that would guarantee ubiquitous "food on the table" (at least, in the West) are people like you, who advocate zealously for artificial scarcity based on a mistaken or emotional sentiment.
Anyway, "consumer freedom" as we know it is a facade, with a handful of conglomerates owning most of the brands you know, a few large investment funds owning the conglomerates, and a few factories in Asia supplying many of the parts and products that nominally Western brands sell. The choices aren't meaningful and the costs are higher because we try to maintain this appearance of choice (hence, Temu).
How willing are you to farm for your own food, or let someone else decide what's worth eating? How willing are you to order other people what to do without taking those orders yourself? Do you think that you're going to be the one in charge in a world where someone gets to decide we have enough different kinds of cereal? There are places where you can live like that right now, most people don't like them.
And if you think I'm whatever cultural archetype you hate that keeps things this way, just know that my life sucks too and I'm giving up a lot to just try to make it better for other people instead of moseying along hating what I do and how powerless I am. But pretty quickly you realize people hate that even more than they hate their own suffering, nothing you do will ever be good enough for them because they just want to be miserable and make it someone else's fault - if they take any responsibility for it, they have to admit that it's not going to just change for them.
Nothing is actually stopping you from making your own music, nobody has to listen to it though, unless you make them. But it's your only choice if you don't like the music you have already. Just get ready for people to tell you they don't like it.
I'd wager (heh) a bit of both. The distinction isn't that the affluent neighborhood gets to make its own decisions or be cared about by large corporations whose presence ostensibly enhances their quality of life, it's that poor neighborhoods don't. The reason the latter have these socioeconomically deleterious establishments is the same reason they don't get grocery stores or gyms: the people making the decisions don't see them as customers to serve, but as marks to exploit. And suddenly we're back to the notion that privilege isn't necessarily having it "better," but sometimes just having what most would consider the dignified standard.
The web is bloated. Costs have exploded because what used to be done in a few megabytes now takes hundreds. You COULD host much of the modern web for much, much less, but you'd actually have to get your webdev house in order.
The way out is mostly antitrust and regulation of the private data market. But too many portfolios depend on the status quo; the way will be opened once the AI bubble pops. The Chrome lawsuit was the jab before an AdX haymaker is thrown just as the arena lights go out.
>When OP searches for Midjourney as a Midjourney user, Google’s algorithm infers he might want to consider an alternative because why would an existing user search for the product they’re already using.
That's insane. Someone searching for something they've searched for in the past is looking for stability of the search results; they're trying to get back to where they've been before. If they wanted different results, they'd change the search query.
Is this the "logic" behind Google and Youtube search results being different each time a query is run?
The town where you can see the banana prices on the shelves, if not online, and where there's a collective refusal to pay (perhaps through an organizer payer) if the price is too high.
Oh, well that's BS. Urgent care clinics have proliferated like crazy over the post decade or so. The supply to fill the vast majority of urgent medical needs which hospital ERs used to have to carry alone is there. But it's true that that supply often goes unused. Why? Because ERs HAVE to tend to and stabilize patients when they present; UCCs can turn you away if you can't demonstrate the ability to pay.
The problem is not restrictions on medical facility construction, it's inefficient use of what we already have.
In general, America has an issue with defaulting to "building new", as if we have an everlasting greenfield, rather than careful provisioning of the already overbuilt infrastructure base. Capitalists love being freed of prior obligations, with no regard for how they contribute to an even more unwieldy set of obligations in the future. Enough. You can't just do as you like. Help solve the actual problem.
Yeah, that one actually fucked us over rurally. Local healthcare system wanted to put up a new greenfield hospital facility, was turned down for the CON by a challenge from another hospital 30 miles away. They wrenched demands out of the facility to get the CON approved with modifications that basically took away all of the “hospital” from it and basically made it “fancy block of specialist doctors” instead.
Rural/urban split. Many cities instead contend with local politicians who want to put a feather in their cap by giving concessions to developers to build new, expensive facilities (instead of, say, driving that money into actual healthcare or the rehab of existing facilities). What will happen is that the taxpayers will give millions to have a greenfield facility built, and around that time, the older local facility (likely to be servicing poorer residents or those without transportation access) will get shut down. Expanding building doesn't fix this dynamic, it makes it worse.
Yes, BS. Because, as I said, regulations have not stopped the establishment and proliferation of the urgent care clinics that would be intended to reduce the load for hospital emergency rooms. Such facilities do not need a CON if affiliated with an existing hospital or practice. They essentially function as extensions of local ERs for non-critical needs - or, they would, if they were forced to see patients regardless of demonstrated ability to pay, as ERs must. To fix that, you need MORE regulations, not fewer.
Slightly more than half have CoN laws and other states have a number of restrictions of facility construction that complicate building smaller clinics.
If the US were to engage in long-term thinking, we might come to dangerous conclusions like, "Having a permanent racial underclass of perpetually-exploited and dissatisfied residents is a bad thing, and maybe we should train/pay the ones that are already here, inculcating them the righteousness of the American project, rather than constantly importing workers because their lack of direct experience with our country's institutions as they currently exist makes them easier marks." It would devastate the poverty-retail-financial-service complex.
The funniest part is our current admin's inadvertent exposure of this situation. Tinfoil hats on, but I hear tell of difficulties in the subprime auto-lending space because so many of immigrants who were targeted for those loans either stopped making payments because they're too afraid to go to work, or else self-deported with their cars. Lender bankruptcies are in-process, which is probably not good for all of the derivatives that are about to go to zero in sympathy. So much for consumer strength, and completely avoidable if not for our insistence on squeezing our least for every last cent.
>The issue is that the US is (and has been for some time) mired in short-term thinking. The short term being how to win the next election, not how to solve problems. Of course, now, the problems being solved aren't really ones that people want, unless you are rich already.
If you're going to get smart, at least pay attention.
If you think that that comment is about Trump, rather than simply mentioning him as part of a larger point about American society, you might cure your boredom by focusing on enhancing your reading comprehension.
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