My experience matches yours. I found AmEx accepted maybe 50% of the time, if not less. But Visa or MasterCard were accepted 99% of the time, both big and small businesses.

I suspect you're right: it depends on the specific card/bank, not whether it's credit or debit.

I was just in Germany and lived on my credit card - not a single Euro used. I strongly disagree with this generalization based on extensive personal experience.

Strong disagree, and I used to go to that Wegmans regularly. It's fine. Solid market. Whole Foods is equally fine, and excels in some ways. Neither is obviously better.

Wegmans is obviously better than Whole Foods, and its not even close. You can much more easily buy normal food at normal prices at Wegmans than Whole Foods. Whole foods has very large, strange gaps in staples.

Whole Foods has always felt like Trader Joe’s - a great place to shop but few will shop only there - even for groceries.

Can you share some examples in gaps of staples?

In my experience, it's less gaps and more lack of mainstream brands. The example that comes to mind is ketchup. At Whole Foods I can get generic store brand ketchup or a variety of fancy ketchups that cost 3-10x as much, but they don't have any variety of basic Heinz on the shelf. This "mid-market" gap is common for virtually every product category.

That’s true, but intentional because of the focus on organic and avoiding certain ingredients. That is one of the reasons why Whole Foods is better.

I think I remember reading somewhere that 75% of the groceries at Walmart don’t qualify to be sold at Whole Foods. I thought Amazon was going to step back on this though.

I'm not OP, but don't go to WF looking for stuff like ibuprophen or sudafed.

True. That would be nice if they had more typical pharmacy items.

> The most frustrating part of Bazel is how shoddy the workmanship is.

Without commenting on the above statement:

> For example, Bazel throws away your analysis cache when you change flags that have nothing to do with what's being built or how, like flags that change what tests are run.

I don't think this is a good example. Bazel's analysis cache clearing is to preserve correctness in the context of a legitimately algorithmically difficult problem. The fact Bazel has this limitation is a testament toward its correctness strengths. I'm not aware of systems that have solved that algorithmic problem but curious if anyone knows any.

Also Bazel avoids that problem for most "flags that change which tests are run", since that subset of the problem is more solvable. --test_env was a notable exception, which was fixed (https://github.com/fmeum/bazel/commit/eb494194c1c466f7fd7355...) but not sure if it's in the latest Bazel release yet? But generally changing --test* has much smaller performance impact.

Also the Rockaways, which are famous for being remote and poorly transit-served.

I live in NYC and disagree with your assessment. Last I checked I'm a real person as are most people I know. Don't cast stones like that. It's unfair to other peoples' opinions and dilutes your points.

I think this discussion is about today. I don't follow your reference to old history or how that affects the general discussion?

It's kind of a running joke here in NYC how we'll watch some movie depicting the city as a dystopian wasteland, then we walk outside into tree-lined streets, coffee shops, overflowing sidewalk cafes, and people generally living and enjoying their lives.

That image is incredibly outdated and has become an increasingly tired cliche.

This applies equally to the outer boroughs. Poorer neighborhoods (in any borough) are scrappier, of course, than the rich areas. But they're just as full of life and vibrancy.

I really take your point on the media projection. It's relentless. And it really keeps an outdated image alive, especially in the minds of people who don't live here and can't directly contrast with their own eyes.

> That image is incredibly outdated and has become an increasingly tired cliche.

I agree, but I'm not that old and that's the image of New York City I grew up with because it was then true.

It takes more than a generation to overcome that kind of impression. I'm pretty confident that if you asked New Yorkers my parents' age what the South is like you'd get a lot of answers that were unpleasantly accurate in 1965. This is particularly true when a lot of political polarization is based on region and urbanization.

Yes, people don't understand the real danger in cities like NYC - gentrification! :)

Like everyone else here I'm having trouble parsing what you're trying to say.

You seem to be implying per capita is a bad measure of safety. But you're not being clear why. Can you elaborate?

Excellent point. I think you really get to the heart of the issue.

Different kinds of tests offer different levels of confidence at different levels of time and investment.

A fully integrated shop should think this through carefully and design their own comprehensive end-to-end process. Which feedback is most helpful at which point of the idea -> deployed product pipeline? What value does it offer to the larger process? Feed in org-specific variables like release timelines, team structure, customer expectations, money, compute resources. Use appropriate tools for each piece and remember the largest goals to keep the company reliably delivering whatever makes that company valuable.