This could be said about any commodity. Like because of gold hoarding banks/individuals driving up the demand rest of the society has to pay high price of gold for jewelry.
You're right, that's a moot point: it all boils down to unnecessarily, unreasonably transferring wealth from later adopters to earlier supporters (left holding the bag) in what amounts to very unsophisticated "investing" - whereby buying a stock of a company or say gold is buying for something very specific, contextualized, with annual reports and laws in place to attempt to lead to integrity within those organizations; not an apple to apple comparison that people consistently try to make.
I'm using MacOs/OsX since Lion, and I can say that it was very stable (even on my Hackintosh) and I observed stability issues increasing with all the following versions (on real Apple HW) and I'm on the same ship as GP never upgrading to newer versions until at least 6 months pass.
Sorry to say this, but the name "synth" is terribly misleading and generic. Word "synth" is used widely for electronic musical instrument "synthesizer".
I'm not native english speaker and I'm wondering if this is the correct use of the word "hardly". I expect that to mean "not" or "almost not". "hardly hit" would mean "hit very little". Or am I confused?
One more general-purpose thing I miss very much is filesystem. Really what is a good option for a usb disk filesystem which you would like to use on Mac, Win and Linux? Seems to me that without using Paragon/Tuxera/etc. you're screwed.
Agreed. For sharing a filesystem, I assume the best you can do today is probably FAT32 (or whatever the latest of that family is), which is not great.
Why can't we get people from major tech companies together and have them develop a good on-disk format which supports the features we all need, and then everybody can go back and write their own implementations? Like we do with Unicode, or IP. And like we should do for many other features.
For all the talk about the importance of separation of interface and implementation, operating system designers really suck at it.
The modern answer is exFAT. August last year Microsoft opened up the specifications, and pledged that it won't be patent encumbered[].
How well an operating systems has a separation of concerns between interface and implementation really has very little (unfortunately) to do with business incentives. Even if the Linux kernel had perfect separation of concerns, there's no way to force Microsoft or Apple to support it in their products.
Amazingly, the web folks seem to be doing OK on this front. They often manage to miss the xkcd#927 trap. What I see (admittedly the simplified public version) is more like:
- Here's a standard that kind of works and everybody is using it.
- Hey, we invented this cool new thing that isn't part of that standard but people seem to like it! (XHR, Canvas, ...)
- OK everybody let's put that into the standard as well so we can all agree on how it works. Thanks!
There was no way to "force Microsoft or Apple" to make a web browser, either, and yet they both did, and made it part of their operating systems.
FAT32 is too modern in some cases. I had to fall back to that recently to use with a fairly recent commercial photocopying machine (of the kind that can do full color, A3 paper, staple and fold outputs, etc, so not bottom line).
And I think that, “For sharing a filesystem” nowadays your best option is ”the cloud” for most people.
UDF is secretly well-supported for read/write across devices. That said, exFAT or NTFS seems to be the right option nowadays; NTFS-3g works well on Linux, there’s various options for macOS (not perfect but oh well.)
If this is all true, I wonder why a kg of pepper/cucumber (or any other vegetable for that matter) costs very close to a kg of chicken/pork etc. Shouldn't the additional complexity/resource intensiveness of meat production be reflected in the consumer price?
You’ve asked a local question globally. In my home country, meat is much more expensive than cucumbers.
In the US, grain production (and actually farming in general) is highly subsidized, such that you can’t infer much about the cost of growing food from the prices you pay for it.
I don’t know where you are, but the answer is probably local to you.
Where I live, per kg, chicken is about 5 times more expensive than cucumber.
But in some countries, fresh fruits and vegetables are considered a luxury item. It is especially apparent in Japan, where you are only able to buy top quality vegetables with a flawless appearance and a matching price. Everything else goes to the food processing industry.
It should but as you deducted yourself, that is not the case. I suspect they force the profit margins of vegetables way up somehow. I'm sure they've done a lot of research and experiments and concluded that:
* People are willing to pay x for a pepper
* People do not consume significantly more peppers if the price is lowered
* People are willing to pay y for a kg of chicken
* People buy significantly less chicken if the price goes up much higher
TL;DR it's about price vs volume vs profit margins, and I'm sure they continuously hover around an optimum for these products.
Meat farmers don't buy cucumbers from the shops to feed to their animals. You'd need to compare farm gate prices of the kinds of low-grade grains used in animal feed.
In any case what you say isn't even true: At my local supermarket cucumbers are £1.80/kg, while chicken starts at £1.95/kg for super-cheap chicken thighs with bone-in, up to nearly £20/kg ("Sainsbury's Norfolk Black Corn Fed Free Range Chicken Fillets" in case you want to know), the average being around £5/kg. There are no pork products at all below £4/kg.
YMMV of course, doesn't mean that what I say is not true, neither I'm saying it's the same for all countries. In my supermarket (central EU) a kg of pepper is 3-4 Eur/kg, chicken breasts without bone are cca 4,50 Eur/kg, whole chicken is 2 - 3 Eur/kg. Not mentioning pepper is supposedly 94% water. I'm definitely going to be fed more times buying 1 kg chicken instead of vegetables.
Fresh vegetables are great but yes, mostly water. Beans, rice, lentils, grains (in dry form) cost less per kg than chicken, don't need refrigeration and will make many more meals.
As somebody who's also from the central EU, it feels like you are low-balling that price there. You would have to look really hard to find chicken breast as such a low kg price because the average is more like 5 €/kg usually higher [0].
Personally I wouldn't even buy such cheap poultry because with a price like that you can be very certain these animals must be farmed in rather "optimized" conditions. Just like with eggs or milk, these are items I'm willing to spend a bit of extra money to support better and more humane practices.
Trying to do the same with meat is very expensive, did it recently ordering turkey breast, ended up paying 8€ for 400g, thus I reserve it for special occasions.
In that context, your comparison between peppers and chicken breasts is also not that good. Peppers are a very bad vegetable source of proteins, to replace chicken breast one would eat something protein-rich, like beans and those happen to be dirt cheap pretty much everywhere, particularly when buying them in bulk and dried.
Seems like central EU is a very vague term. I meant Slovakia, you probably meant Germany. I don't really low-ball the price, I checked one of the supermarkets current weekly offer, 1kg Chicken breasts (standard quality, respected manufacturer) this week 4,29 E. [0]. You might argue that this is a special offer, but we have similar offer all the time in one of the different supermarkets around.
Your point with beans etc. is valid though. Just the fresh vegetables are very expensive here and feels almost like a luxury item.
