Last time I wrote a question - probably a couple of months ago. Last time I posted a question .... aaaaages ago.
By the time I get sufficiently frustrated to contemplate asking a question, I find the clarity that comes from stopping and trying to clearly lay out a question usually results in my figuring it out just before I hit post.
It did not. As I say, it was a few months ago, it may have been updated. At the time though, I could select a store and it appeared to populate from a single inventory for the relevant chain.
Still, fingers crossed that gets/got fixed, the idea of the app is good.
I tried the app out a few months ago. Good idea, but at the time it was basing product availability on the chain rather than the store - i.e. it would tell you that any product available at the larger Countdown's was available at all the smaller Countdowns, which is very definitely not the case. I'm assuming that's the sort of thing they'd need help from the supermarket chains to fix.
Just to clarify, are you suggesting that people can't drive 30, 40, 50 kms, park in a building or around the corner and walk an extra few meters?
I tried. Going through that loop convinced neovim is not an ide. It's a means by which someone who wants to build an ide can build one.
If you're one of those people who doesn't want to build an ide, like me, it's not for you.
This has been getting to me for a while. A couple of months ago I stumbled across the gemini protocol - the extension of gopher. I haven't done much in that space as of yet, and I'm not suggesting it's a salve for all the problems talked about in the article here, but I have found it is somewhat of a balm for the soul. A different attitude, to the internet and to a limited extent some of the software.
Extending that mindset into even a small fraction of software development would be refreshing.
Remember kids, if you see someone stealing food or toiletries, no, you didn't.
That, is excellent customer service.
The product is doing it's job. They're not bugging you trying to up sell something, or overcharging when their plan changes and leaving you on the old one. And you never have to talk to them, that, is some top notch customer service right there.
Not up to pie award standards, but I made myself some steak and kidney pies on the weekend. Finally got the pastry so that I can pick it up and eat it properly. Quite happy about that.
I tried it out a few months ago. If I recall correctly, for a beta version it was excellent. It was still missing a few things which were deal breakers (I think working on a remote system wasn't an option?), so I'm not currently using it. I imagine it's only got better, and I should probably go have another look at it.
You don't have to be a country to sell GMO free produce.
By market, I meant the market for a product, not a physical place - the market for milk powder vs the market for premium ice cream for example.
I wouldn't say any day, but it will happen. Fonterra ignoring it demonstrates a lack of foresight - illustrating one of the reasons we're bad at capitalism.
Don't know the percentage of the top of my head, but milk powder (or casein derived from milk powder) is used in paints, paper manufacturing, textiles, it's used a an ingredient for a whole bunch of things in labs, packaging, an additive to some plastics, in some places an additive to concrete, it's used in cosmetics. Whey is used to produce industrial alcohol (Fonterra used to make this, don't know if they still do). It's got a lot of non-food related uses.
And even in the food industry, corporations like Nestle aren't going to care where it comes from when they're using it to adjust fat or protein content in the vast majority of their foods.
We might have been the only country. There would have been a tonne of other companies not from New Zealand competing in that market though. I odn't think we're going to agree on that though so ... moving on.
There being nothing differentiating Fonterra milk powder from any other milk powder is entirely my point - if they could have moved their production to premium markets, they would have. They haven't, which suggests to me that they can't. So at least we agree on that :)
The milk in a vat thing, it's been around in some fairly primitive forms for several years, it's been very interesting watching it develop.
https://phys.org/news/2021-01-yeast-cow.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/03/12/precision-cultivated-dairy/
There's a bunch of companies - Perfect Day and New Culture in the US, Legendairy Foods in Germany. Remilk in Israel. If there's not someone, somewhere in amongst all that planning on ramping up produce milk powder for industrial uses, I'd be very surprised. As I say, companies who use milk powder in their industrial processes, literally do not care if it comes from a vat or a cow. Short term not so much. Long term, I don't see how this doesn't screw Fonterra if they carry on as if it was nothing.
While Porsche might make a shit-tonne of money from a eye-watering markups to appeal to people with more money that taste, their costs are spectacularly high, and they employ large amounts of highly competent engineers (the car companies at least, I doubt Louis Vuitton does) and marketers to make a premium product. Advertising the production of our agricultural sector as non-GMO was never going to turn in into a premium product. My assumption is that our produce is looked up favorably in foreign markets, as good, but not necessarily premium. Some of it is marketed as premium, but trying to upscale our entire agricultural sector to that level would I suspect, fail magnificently. You can bring together the people needed to do something like that at a company level, but at a country level - I just don't think there's a sufficient number of highly competent people to be able to do that.
And we wouldn't have been the only ones appealing to that market. Gambling the entire agricultural sector on being able to dominate that tiny sector would be incredibly dangerous.
I don't disagree that we're awful at capitalism though.
My current pick for illustrating that would be Fonterra - it's my understanding that the vast majority of Fonterra's exports are milk powder bound for a spectacularly large range of industrial uses. Overseas, there are companies slowly ramping up the production of milk grown in vats using GE yeast. Produces milk powder with a fraction of the resources a dairy farm, with a fraction of the environmental costs. Companies who use milk powder as part of an industrial process don't care whether it came from a vat full of yeast or a lovely open air dairy farm. And as best I can tell, Fonterra doesn't think this is likely to cause any problems. Fonterra could try and move all of that production to premium produce for the consumer, but if that market existed, I would have thought they would have already done it. I don't think the problem here is that they are selling to the wrong sector or not marketing their produce as well as they could - I think it's that we produce too much milk. We pile all of our eggs in one basket and then insist that that's not a potential problem.
I think the point of it (or one of the points) was that that market of of people who would pay a premium, was way, way smaller than everyone used to think it was.
Self reporting - essentially asking people if they would pay a premium, enough people always replied that they would, to make it seem as if there was a sizeable global market that would pay the premium.
If I recall correctly, wihen push came to shove at the till though, their work suggested that that global market, was tiny.
A few years ago I sat in on a talk from a chap by the name of John Knight, who was at the time an economics prof down at Otago. He'd been doing some work with people in Europe, and they'd come to the conclusion that, people usually say they would prefer to buy non-GMO foods, but ...
- If all the prices were the same, people tend to buy non-GMO foods.
- If GMO labeled foods were cheaper, and other customers were present, people would tend to buy non-GMO foods.
- If GMO labeled foods were cheaper and no other customers were present, people tended to buy the GMO labelled foods.
I think that was the rough summary. Not sure how much further that research went, but I thought it was interesting. I ... think this was it - https://www.gefree.org.nz/assets/Clean-Green-Book-email-11.pdf
I don't know that I was ever entirely convinced that there was huge potential for charging a premium due to being a non-GMO country. For a whole bunch of other reasons though, fully on board with your summation: "We suck at Capitalism" :)
There's even a name for this - Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.
At this stage in human history, a community or forum where all are welcome is impossible. If one leaves a forum open for those who are intolerant, then the forum effectively becomes closed to those that they are intolerant of. It's not a problem with forums or how communities are managed, the problem is humans being humans. Maybe in a thousand years time or so ...
At best communities get to choose what they tolerate. I've found in the past that those who demand tolerance of fairly toxic views, fail to remember that tolerance isn't, nor should it be, unlimited.