The sad thing is, people in rural areas that depend on places like Dollar General, and are getting fleeced blame everyone but republicans and they are usually in red areas
I live in a rural area with a Dollar General about a half mile from my neighborhood. For staples, it’s honestly fine. You want a 6 pack and some hot dog buns because you missed it in the Wal-Mart run the other day (15 miles away), it’s great!
You’re not getting fleeced and if you are, the gas savings alone more than make up for it (0.65 per mile per the IRS.)
For folks who depend on the local DG for, idk, clothes and household goods it might be much worse, I don’t shop for those there ever, but on staples it’ll do, especially given the density of stores compared to major chains.
Being in a shopping rich area, I have some luxury of choosing what I get where. DG is a good option for a small list of items, about ½% of my shopping.
But it'd be awful if my best shopping option was 15mi away.
Having moved from a shopping rich environment of some 30 years to a very rural setting, I was innately trained to hate on Dollar General by my 15 years on HN. In reality, it’s a trade off. Nothing more, nothing less. Whereas before you might have fallen back on a country-store with a small kitchen and minor staples (eggs, cheese, milk) next to the RedBull most folks now have a wider variety of options at a price point comparable to or better than that filling station. All the better, DG has rolled out their “Market” concept with fresh options as well.
At this point I’d love to see a conversation about price points and convenience of a Japanese conbini as compared to a Japanese supermarket on HN. Far less politicized and denigrated I would hope.
> But it'd be awful if my best shopping option was 15mi away.
In much of the rural US, 15mi away is having your good shopping close by. A lot of areas make due with their "best shopping option" being well more than 15mi away.
Yes 15 miles for good shopping sounds pretty nice. I'd say I've got it fairly good for being rural - only 23 miles to the nearest Walmart. That town isn't really great shopping though.
The concept of "small convenience store near me" isn't the problem. The problem is that these stores are actively engaging in outright fraud. People who shop there are absolutely getting fleeced regardless of how much gas they burn getting to the store that's regularly ripping them off.
Having a small nearby connivance store and not getting scammed is an option. If the ability to get beer and hot dogs buns without having to drive to a larger more distant store is really worth the higher prices customers are getting fraudulently charged at the register, then these stores can just stop lying to customers and post the accurate prices.
If the laws were meaningfully enforced this is exactly what would happen. These stores would either comply with the law and stop committing fraud or they would be shut down, their CEOs would be sent to prison, and competitors willing to follow the law would step in to fill the need the market has for a small shop that sells beer and buns to rake in that profit for themselves.
Your article lists a few instances of target in an area failing at rates like 9% or 2.67%. The Guardian article shows dollar stores all over the place caught thousands of times and getting error rates like 76% 68% and 58%. One dollar store in Utah was caught cheating their customers in 28 inspections in a row! Maybe the News & Observer could have dug deeper into the Targets in your area and found violations of a similar scale, but they didn't, so from the information we have these are extremely different circumstances.
If Target (or whatever the hell a Sheetz is) were ripping off their customers to the same extent that these dollar stores have been doing it then they should also face meaningful consequences for that.
Don’t even get me started on this. I recently been shopping on eBay for some DDR4 memory. You may think - who’d need this dated stuff besides me? Yet 16Gb 3200Mhz is at least 60$. Which is effectively the price you paid for DDR5 6000. Crazy, right?
For a while with bitcoin, it seemed GPU investing was almost a thing.
I just checked, the kit I bought in February was $270, today it is showing up for $1070. Woof. Now I have to decide if I should keep it on the off chance I do get around to that machine or dump it while the getting is good. Then again, who wants to buy RAM of unknown provenance unless they themselves are looking to scam the seller.
Recently sold a condo I had in NE California. When I first bought there ~8-9 years ago, a town near by had old railroad cabins for ~100k or less. As the housing / migration boom to Reno took hold, those cabins are now in the 2-250k range. The median income in the county ~40k.
The town I was in saw prices for something that was ~175-200k 7-8 years ago peak at around $425k in 2023/2024 and now "cratering" into the low to mid $300ks. Median income hasn't changed, just people with 2nd/vacation homes and wanting to offload them due to the economy.
I think there is a slight modification to this, at least for me, there are things tech related for me I want turnkey - I've used MacOS for years because I want a unix system with a decent GUI that I don't have to manage (the fact that the machines work well is a nice addon). I've got a synology, it works.
I don't have unlimited bandwidth or time and want to continue the tinkering phase on things that interest me rather than the tools that enable such.
Part of the problem with the way India wants to be seen is those that go to IIT, etc., get into white collar jobs that elevate them well above the norm in India want to ignore the rest of the country. Abject poverty.
The US has severe issues as well, but many countries that want to be seen for their techonological advancement want to hide the less successful parts of their communities.
One concern the post brings up - single point of failure. Yes, in this case, blah blah big company microsoft blah blah (I don't disagree, but..). I'm more worried about places like Paypal/Google/etc banning than the beast from Redmond.
Self hosting, it's still a single point of failure and the article arguing "mirroring", well... it allows redundancy with reads but writes?
I think it’s a fair concern, e.g. forgejo is a simple directory on disk, with an option to make that into an S3 storage. It really is a no brainer to set that up for as much resilience as necessary with various degrees of “advanced” depending on your thread model and experience. The lack of a FAANG/M in the equation makes it even more palatable.
Redundancy for read access to the source code is a concern for Dillo. Some years ago, the domain name registration lapsed, and was promptly bought by an impersonator, taking the official repository offline. If it hadn't been for people having clones of the repository, the source code and history would have been lost.
How do people find your online project and know it's you (instead of an impersonator) without relying on an authority, like GitHub accounts or domain names? It is a challenging problem with no good solution. At least now the project is alive again and more resilient than before.
I found the banning comment to be odd. That said, all it really takes is a policy change (something that I see as far more likely in Microsoft's case) or simply a change in the underlying software (again, somewhat likely with Microsoft) for the platform to become unusable for them. Keep in mind that Dillo is a browser for those who can't on don't want to fit into the reality of the modern web.
First used Waymo in Phoenix. It was a decent experience. The funny thing was watching it handle parallel parking. I mentioned it to the wife - self driving with parkinsons.
This last weekend, we were in the city (San Francisco) and literally drove by a Waymo trying to park and the wife started laughing - "you are right".
No, but working at a company that was founded by a bunch of former gov employees, the coverage is mostly ok and some having to manage the refusal bs. What was new to me - a gap that went employed -> consulting -> employed - (same company family) - how damn expensive top tier coverage for a family of three really is - $3700/mo. Insane.
'Nobody’s actually run this in production' - the majority of people who work with postgres don't talk about it or gloat about it because it's a tool that works - including it's addons.
Yes, young engineers get all hot and bothered over the most recent tools but - they have no idea how things work and run.
I worked on a project that wanted to use a hot and frothy vector database. The issue - ok, where are we getting the 1/4-1/2 time person to manage it? Product engineers - derp? what? People who live in node and python cutting edge don't really think about the actual production implications of their choices.
