That's true, the Costco model persists in the era of Amazon, somewhat surprisingly. But they're so aggressive on delivering value to their subscribers (and not by making a Netflix competitor no one wants) that I suppose any good company like that can succeed on a business moat of literally "well-run" "focused on the core mission" "history of consistency" "good ethics" because I guess it's hard enough to emulate those values at scale.
Amazon has clearly opted to go with the value extraction model. They're the polar opposite of Costco. For me, Amazon's retail image is now of a vendor whose goal is to make a commission, while shifting all liability to other unknown vendors. I have no idea what I'm getting at Amazon.
On the other hand, at Costco, I know there's an organization that will stand behind the products it sells, even if they aren't the manufacturer, and they take care of their employees, so I feel more confident the employees are more invested into the products as well.
When Amazon opened up to third party sellers, the floodgates opened. For many products it feels like buying from Aliexpress but with faster shipping and higher prices.
Most of my Costco purchases are consumable goods -- fruits, vegetables, meat, and other produce. Things that I wouldn't even consider Amazon for. That gets me in the door, and, from there, it wins again over Amazon for convenience since I am already there. They have an excellent return policy and the employees genuinely seem happy and I know that they are well compensated and have health care benefits.
Don't get their bananas, though, they go from green to brown, completely bypassing yellow. I'm pretty sure that they are getting too cold at some point in the supply chain.
>Don't get their bananas, though, they go from green to brown, completely bypassing yellow.
The same goes for their avocados. I'm not sure what the problem is, but they're pretty lousy in my experience. Trader Joe's seems to have the best deal on these that I've found, and they seem to last a long time too.
It’s hard to imagine anything worse than a real cig with regard to the wide scale negative effects it has on nearly every system in the body. Maybe inhaling plutonium. :)
The most harmful part about cigarettes is inhaling byproducts from something burning. I'm even mildly allergic to pretty much every vape product, and I'd acknowledge that provided there is nothing toxic in vape juice, it has to be much less harmful than smoking - simply because of the lack of combustion products.
The community will just do a blockchain snapshot of balances at an agreed upon block and start a new distributed ledger with quantum resistant encryption
What do you do with old coins? Satoshi's one for example? Or lost coins that nobody has the key for?
Do you set a threshold day, after which all unclaimed coins are just marked destroyed forever? If not, how do you know someone claiming some coins didn't use a quantum computer to get the key?
>What do you do with old coins? Satoshi's one for example? Or lost coins that nobody has the key for?
If those coins hasn't been touched for decades, despite widespread announcements of pre-quantum cryptography (presumably it wouldn't happen overnight), it's safe to say that nobody is going to claim them.
It's easy to add a quantum resistant algorithm, but as it's much more expensive to verify and takes more block space, the transaction fees will be much higher. Transitioning is a huge political problem as well.
People just add flags in their mining protocol that only trigger when a threshold is reached. The last Segwit changes needed a percent change of closer to 90% just to trigger the next change.
We are only assuming that consensus would be reached quickly given the scenario presented. It would be irresponsible to design it to need simultaneous action. People would have to considering to stop using the bitcoin network for X,000 blocks while consensus is being reached, and only until it is reached.
I don't want to pay my insurance deductible... Many people "worse off" than me pay nothing and get to go to the hospital no problem... I'd be much more interested in everyone paying a reasonable amount like it was decades ago
> Many people "worse off" than me pay nothing and get to go to the hospital no problem...
Those people are absolutely paying a cost; having to make healthcare decisions based on money, bad credit when you can’t pay the bill, job insecurity because you’re sick or injured, incessant (and often overtly insulting) debt collection calls/mail, and of course that perpetual gnawing anxiety that arises from knowing that all of these costs you’re paying for being poor are making you poorer.
I’m sorry you don’t like paying your deductible, though.
> Many people "worse off" than me pay nothing and get to go to the hospital no problem...
This is terribly misconstruing the facts. They get to go to ER treatement only, no midterm care. The problem is if they don’t pay, their credit record is heavily penalized. This may seem like nothing but for someone with out money or means it spells a quick down hill slide to homelessness. No problem =/= homeless
FYI the #1 cause of home foreclosures in the US is medical bills
When you're broke, you're broke. Just because you have health insurance doesn't mean you can afford to use it. I had better healthcare as a homeless person than as a massively indebted recent college grad with a health plan through work.
How did you have better healthcare as a homeless person than through your employer? Like what were the numbers (e.g., monthly cost, deductibles, prescription cost, co-pays, and coverage). This is hard to believe.
If you're referring to EMTALA requiring emergency rooms stabilize all patients, (1) EMTALA applies to everyone, and (2) EMTALA is not healthcare.
Medi-Cal was free. Basically everything covered on Medi-Cal was free, or super cheap, and it covered a lot. While on my health insurance plan provided by work, the job where I wasn't making enough money to save or meet my deductible, I got into a bicycle accident & ended up with a $50,000 USD out-of-network hospital bill.
In case you don't know, one of the reasons that some chronically homeless people don't have healthcare is that many don't bother to get it. There's guy in my neighborhood that told me he hasn't gone (but probably should go) to our local government to get his $100-ish/month, food stamps, and healthcare. Also, he ends up in a local emergency room because someone calls an ambulance when he's drunk, passed, and shaking out on the sidewalk. I've called an ambulance a few times for people in that state myself. He also ends up in the emergency room because he routinely gets assaulted while sleeping on the street because there's are not enough shelters for him.
When we first met, my wife was still in school, and I had been working in computer stuff for about 10 years. I had good benefits, and thought that medical insurance was a solution to a big problem.
Then watched as my wife tried to get treated for some routine stuff. Not available via the campus clinic, and yet her student "insurance" was not accepted anywhere else within 150 miles without a "co-pay" that was larger than the cost for uninsured patients.
The situation only got worse when we were married later that year. My insurance would only apply after she had sought coverage through her school plan.
We called it "anti-insurance": a form of coverage that, when encountering actual insurance, annihilates it in a violent explosion of virtual particles and real paperwork.
If you don't want to pay then don't pay no pay. The people who pay nothing have a higher insurance deductible than you because they have all these chronic health problems and they have the expensive medications that they have to take... healthcare isn't cheap, even for the people who live in socialism
Maximiliano seems like a relatively normal Spanish given name, and since Spanish speakers are a growing demographic with higher fertility rates than the US baseline, that's not too surprising. Unless there's a fad of Anglos deciding to name their kids "Maximiliano". That would be weird.
Yes - I found this a couple months ago when I needed to do a pathfinding feature for a client, and I thought the same thing. It turns out browsers can do A* fast enough for live pathfinding on a fairly complex graph during mouse drag, which I wasn't sure about when I started.
In any case, playing with this visualization helped me poke holes in some of the simplified approaches I had in mind.
