Alternate title: Amazon just got a deal on 431 pieces of property in premium, high-salary areas, with ample parking and established customer bases.

Oh. And some high-end food, and a robust supply chain that can easily compete - ethically - with Walmart's scale. (Which is not an ethical supply chain.)

Buh-bye Walmart.

Dude. Amazon and Wal-Mart are fucking winning. Their market share makes them fucking goliaths and other companies are trying their best to follow their examples from everything from employee management to distribution.

Speaking of, Wal-Mart gets a rating of 3.1. If there's a baseline for retail/grocery, I'd call it that. Between you and me, I'd call that generous.

Retail and grocery often has a high turnover rate these days when it comes to grunt workers, so you don't have a lot of people who know how things have changed. You talk to people in a lot of companies that have been there for a while and they'll say "Oh yeah, about five years ago, we had 6 managers in our store. Now we have three. We also have a third of the number of full time employees now because they don't want to pay for our healthcare" or "Oh yeah, every year they give us less and less bankable hours. We're down to about 45% of the alloted labor that we had six years ago" or "My health insurance wasn't great, but it was alright. Now it's a joke" or "Before Obamacare, I used to be able to work 35+ hours a week but now I'm lucky to get 15 and I haven't seen overtime in years."

Go to a Wal-Mart Worker in an at-will state. Dare them to walk by their boss and whisper the word "union." They won't fucking do it. They have a better chance of losing their job than you do of spitting into an olympic sized swimming pool and hitting water.

People are getting laid off, hours are getting cut, everyone is losing their healthcare, wages are going down, stores are closing, and it's all because these companies are worried about short term profits and short term share values and they don't give two shits about the lives that get ruined over in the process.

No, fuck this sociopath. She needs to be in jail and therapy for a very long time. Either way she needs to be removed from civil society so that the rest of us can live a bit safer. She got her jollies by grooming a depressed kid to where he killed himself. He tried to get out of the garage and she CALLED HIM A PUSSY AND DEMANDED HE GET BACK INTO THE TRUCK. Then laughed over the death of a human being with her friends.

The full text logs ended up on 4chan when this dropped. They were worse than I thought they could possibly be. Fuck this kid; nothing about what she did was anywhere near 'normal' in a world I want to walk around in.

I read some of them today for the first time and they were worse than I could have imagined. So much manipulation. Pure craziness and evil. If it brings the people who actially cared about him any solace to see her in jail, then I'm okay with it.

Spending some time with the fam, I got some help with coding today:

Before the Reformation, almost no one believed that socially necessary labor was an ennobling activity. After the Reformation, almost everyone did.

In no small part because an idle gentry without prospects for meaning or avocation was the ultimate cause of the Crusades.

As to the quote, I've never met this "everyone." I've seen troubling signs that "employment" is about to suck even harder but that's a different thing. Both the Chinese and the Ottomans rejected automation and mechanization because they had enough idle serfs that employment mattered more than efficiency.

Believe it or not, there's a middle ground between an autonomous Uber and a palanquin. History is the task of finding it.

They were trading at 36. They were bought for 42. Amazon paid a $4bln premium for an organization that is actively closing stores and scrapping expansion plans. Whole foods profit is down 50 percent, to $90 million a quarter. Hellofresh is an unprofitable company in an unprofitable segment, but it’s the biggest threat to Amazon Fresh, which is not only unprofitable but also overpriced enough to make Whole Foods look like Grocery Outlet.

If I had razor-thin profit margins, I'd sit this one the fuck out and let the irresistible force and the immovable object of "retail apocalypse" and "impending tech bust" crush my competitors. But if Amazon doesn't spend every spare dime they have, their shareholders will start getting used to non-zero dividends and that will be the fucking end of the company.

Walmart? Walmart is the Retail of Last Resort. Their business model prepays for abandonment of facilities as soon as the tax breaks sundown. And they remain the place that when you have to go there, they will sell you what you need.

This isn't even vaguely about Walmart. This is like that time they bought Daipers.com because it was easier than competing and because they had cash they needed to burn. Do not celebrate this as strategic brilliance; this is further metastisism of Amazon's monopoly - or-bust business model.

"they bought Whole Foods to better compete with Walmart." Listen to yourself.

My wife used to run detox courses. She used the 10-day Metagenics plan. I did it once. It sucked pretty hard, and there was no shortage of protein on that one. I will say this: I pooped up stuff that I"m pretty sure I ate in the Clinton administration. But in the middle there's like three days where you're on protein shakes and cruciferous vegetables and that's fucking it.

When I finished my ten days I had a cup of Maxwell House and a breakfast burrito and it was the best meal evar.

...try it. Write back. Lemme know how it goes.

Something to keep in mind about Hugelkultur is it's championed by Sepp Holzer, who is not a member of the science-based community. His largest claim to fame is turning a 100-acre conventional farm into a 100-acre permaculture farm, thereby slashing its yields by about 80%. Something else to keep in mind is that Paul Wheaton is... a flake. He has a youtube video in which he threshes grain in a Home Depot bucket with a cordless drill and some zinc-plated Chinese Home Depot chain... and a podcast in which he castigates some poor cottage-industry canning company husband-and-wife team because the plastic lids of their jars might (might) contain "chemicals" since they're only "food grade" and the couple didn't investigate further than that. He also champions rocket-mass heaters as the way to provide cheap warmth but when he needed to heat his apartment he set a 100W bulb over his head and bought a heated mousepad.

I'd say do one raised bed, then do another raised bed with a log under it and lemme know how it works. This stuff is dear to my heart and quite important but there's an awful lot of woo and not a lot of science to some of it.

If people are reading the Great Gatsby 100 years from now via electronic contact lenses, FS Fitzgerald should be just as pleased. His creation is still being consumed and the consumption is still just as valid imo.

I just finished the audio book of Brave New World and though it wasn't as satisfying as reading it, it still had a tremendous impact on me. It' still staying with me these (now 3) days later. It's about the content not the modality.

So many issues with this statement.

I have a resolution to realize that when technology is making me feel uncomfortable, and when the world is becoming a place that I don't recognize, -it is me. I don't want to end up singing the same tune that has been sung for centuries, and looking like a grumpy fool.

There's a difference between being a luddite and having legitimate concerns, so don't doubt yourself so easily!