great find. it might've been worth increasing the price though, to see if customers still bought them or not in practice. with a note on the table or menu explaining why the price increased.
I'm actually kind of surprised at how "low" the growth was from 2020 to 2021 considering overnight entire countries became dependent on Amazon for purchasing in some cases.
I'm in Canada, with the locks downs, curfews, etc my entire shopping experience since 2020 March has been:
- Amazon
- Costco
- GoodFood (Had before covid)
- UberEats (Twice because of work vouchers)
- Home Depot (soil & lumber to build a raised garden bed)
I think the number of people that changed their shopping habits is probably pretty small compared to those that continued to do what they used to. For one, things sold via Amazon are very expensive (especially liquids) compared to in store options and most people were and are stretched so they can’t just up and spend an extra 20%+ or whatever to get delivery.
yep... true for my family as well. While we bought some things from amazon fresh, 98% of grocery items were still purchased through local stores. Many adopted delivery model pretty early on.
as for non grocery items, there were pandemic related purchases for sure, but for my family, it was at Home Depot.
With that said though, I think the Q1 YoY revenue jump is still huge.
building in SF is all but illegal. related; "San Francisco Man Has Spent 4 Years and $1 Million Trying to Get Approval to Turn His Own Laundromat Into an Apartment Building"
> When Tillman said he saw his project as necessary so people like his daughter could afford to come back and live in the city, one particularly motivated activist said she wished his daughter was killed in a terrorist attack
Jesus. I thought Reason was being melodramatic but the less partisan Curbed was even more explicit:
> According to Tillman, the commenter asked him where his daughter lived and, when he answered Boston, she reportedly said that she wished his daughter had been blown up (presumably in the Boston Marathon bombing).
The numbers below are one year commodity price gains, as of today rounded to the nearest tick (view the individual graphs, 1 year timeframe as % gain):
Who should I believe, a government agency conducting a methodical survey of the country's economy, or some guy with a list of numbers that's possibly cherry picked?
But I don't because it literally takes an entire government agency to do it right. The incentives might be misaligned, but the BLS is a large enough entity that if there really were problems with their methodology, it would be publicized. Short of that, I'm more inclined to believe the BLS over a random commenter.
> But I don't because it literally takes an entire government agency to do it right.
It doesn't really. If you track your expenses consistently over the years (gnucash et.al.) you can trivially plot the increase in cost of living and the acceleration of that increase last handful of years.
That's fraught will all sorts of biases. What if your shopping habits changed? eg. you started becoming more health-conscious and started buying healthier (and more expensive) foods. The BLS accounts for all of that by measuring the price of a fixed basket of goods, which mitigates those effects. The same can't be said of your budgeting spreadsheet. Or maybe your area is undergoing gentrification and the discount supermarket got replaced with a whole foods. Your grocery spending might have went up 50%, but that doesn't mean it's a meaningful representation of what's happening across the country.
They're also anonymous, so you should assume the worst. This is especially true when the supporting evidence is suspect (ie. a bunch of arbitrary picked numbers). On the other hand the BLS's methodology is documented (https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/), so I'm willing to give them a pass even though their incentives might be skewed.
>(what would it be?)
their beliefs? "agenda" here doesn't have to be something nefarious. an anti-vaxxer's agenda is anti-vaccine, but that doesn't mean they're scheming to get everyone infected.
> if your father doesn't have a precious gem mine in Africa
“This is a pretty awful lie,” Elon tweeted. “I left South Africa by myself when I was 17 with just a backpack & suitcase of books. Worked on my Mom’s cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan & a lumber mill in Vancouver. Went to Queens Univ with scholarship & debt, then same to UPenn/Wharton & Stanford.”
In a follow-up tweet, Elon said his father “didn’t own an emerald mine & I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt.”
His mother Maye responded on Twitter in December 2019 in defense of Elon.
“To add to the truth, we went to Boston Chicken in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving because we couldn’t afford a turkey. And we spent three weeks making our rent-controlled apartment livable in Toronto,” Maye tweeted.
> “We were very wealthy,” says Errol. “We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.”
Elon is cherry picking some true details to paint a misleading picture. I'm sure he did work in that lumber mill, and living with his mom at times of his life might have been a financial struggle. But the basic point, that he started out in business with family financial resources that the overwhelming majority of humans will never have, remains true.
If you pay close attention, Elon does this form of deception by selection quite often. It's one of the things that switched me from cheering him on for tesla, spacex, to now more critical and guarded.
>But the basic point, that he started out in business with family financial resources that the overwhelming majority of humans will never have, remains true.
What does all that matter if you leave home at 17 with access to none of it? I'm not saying that's true, but it's what Elon implied and wasn't covered in your explanation how how his rebuttal is deceptive.
I myself have no doubt that he has his parents to thanks in large part for his success. But I would pin that on genetics rather than direct connections in his case. Personality traits like grit, intelligence, and ruthlessness are quite heritable, correlate with getting rich, and I think people forget about that when getting worked up about rich people's kids succeeding disproportionately.
Well I mean Errol quite literally funded his first company.
But also, Errol had a very successful engineering business. There's no question that was a huge influence and advantage to Elon. He got an informal exposure to engineering at home that would be better than the universities available in some impoverished places.
The evidence for grit is nonexistent. What correlates most strongly with successful entrepreneurship is having upper middle class or better parents. This is because they provide a better education, literal seed funding, and if nothing else, allow someone to take more risk knowing they won't end up homeless.
Obama's campaign manager said that Facebook flat out told them "we're on the same side" when they allowed them to abuse the same API Cambridge Analytica did.
There’s two ways to look at donations from companies. When you donate to a political campaign in the us you need to write down your employer. So one way to look at it is by looking at where eg all the donations from people employed by Google went (big surprise: democrats, but also, the kind of democrats who have safe seats and policies to rein in big tech companies).
Another way to look at it is to look at the PACs run by tech companies. These are paid into by employees (often they may sign up to give some small amount of their pay automatically, and then forget about it), but they tend to make donations in the companies interests (mainly to an assortment of politicians with an aim to be balanced in some way) and do not lean massively towards democrats, or even towards politicians that align with the companies’ stated values (I’m talking about values that tend to be pro-immigration or pro-lgbt for example here). Two big tech companies that don’t have a PAC are Apple and IBM. Microsoft has one that disappears for a few months when employees start complaining about it (but it doesn’t ask for its donations back from politicians which it can do with likely success)
It's a little misleading to quote that without the context. The "98%" number is referring specifically to personal donations by the CEOs of tech companies (out of those who donated politically to someone at all) in the 2020 presidential election, not to political contributions from the companies they run.
https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/13875210431207587...
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodities