I wish I could take credit, but those quotes are all directly from the linked article! I felt the comment I was replying to was incorrect about the content of the article and wanted to clarify. Truly they did write a good piece worthy of recognition, though.

Not really, if you read the article in full.

In our analysis, only three per cent of the over 200 explanations for food price changes point to grocer actions or other agency in the private sector as driving price increases. This reflects a tendency to portray food prices as erratic and overwhelmingly opaque.

Other issues — such as the over-reliance on fossil fuels across the supply chain — also go unmentioned.

It’s really shitty wording, but they’re basically saying “of the 200 proposed causes, only 3% of those proposed are about grocer decisions” rather than “grocer decisions make up 3% of the cause in rising costs”.

In the rest of the article announcing the report (it isn’t released yet), they pretty clearly call out anticompetitive behaviors and price fixing:

These reports also rarely consider the decisions that grocers and other private sector entities have on food prices. Increased consolidation and concentration in the grocery sector is a structural issue that deserves scrutiny.

The bread price-fixing scandal a few years ago showed how a lack of competition enables price manipulation and hurts consumers. Canada’s Competition Bureau recently announced they are launching an investigation into the owners of Loblaws and Sobeys for alleged anti-competitive conduct.

In the United States, there is also strong evidence that the private sector has been profiteering on supply chain issues and inflation. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission likewise recently found that big grocers used the pandemic as a smokescreen to pad their profits at the public’s expense.

The underlying thesis of the article is basically “people keep asking why food is expensive but all these reports are unscientific and all but 3% of them neglect things like price fixing and monopolies”.

What we need is a new approach. Food is a human right, but a unique one in that we rely on the private sector to provision it. We should expect a higher standard than with other consumer goods, and the private sector has arguably not earned the benefit of the doubt given their history of price fixing.

One positive step towards generating trustworthy evidence about food prices would be to incorporate transparency measures into the code of conduct the Canadian government is developing with grocers. This could include third-party audits, open data-sharing and a clear breakdown of what’s driving price changes — from the farm to the shelf.

The article authors (and report authors) are very based.

Yeah, it’s kind of a measure of randomness for LLM responses. A low temperature makes the LLM more consistent and more reliable, a higher temperature makes it more “creative”. Same prompt on low temperature is more likely to be repeatable, high temperature introduces a higher risk of hallucinations, etc.

Presumably Google’s “search suggestions” are done on a very low temperature, but that doesn’t prevent hallucinations, just makes it less likely.

Depends on the temperature in the LLM/context, which I’m assuming google will have set quite low for this.

You know if these single issue voters could read, they’re be really mad at you.

You’re completely right, and I find the fact that this needs to be explained very funny. Ancaps and ancoms are so wild to me conceptually - they want someone to enforce their will on others but hate the idea of a government. Both get really whiny when they realize that democracy doesn’t mean “we get what we want” but instead means “we get what the plurality of people around me want”. Sucks when you’re a minority opinion, even if it’s the “right” opinion.

Majority of lemmy users are US based, and the overwhelming majority are western. Similarly, the majority of lemmy users are pretty leftist compared to the average citizen.

It shouldn’t be surprising that we’re not hearing much about bad stuff happening in China. And that’s not even accounting for the difficulty in getting trustworthy information out of China.

If you want examples of semi-recent stuff from China that largely got passed over, take a look at the civil unrest regarding the apartment fires during China’s COVID lockdown, the forcible repatriation of Chinese citizens abroad, suicide rates in major manufacturing hubs, the huge economic hits in real estate and public/private transportation infrastructure, etc.

There’s a lot going on that we simply don’t hear about because people tend to share what relates to them.

Incredibly based scientist

Ok, I make this comment in complete good faith as an urban cyclist from NA who desperately hates the modern car industry…

Why not storm the VW plant or an ICE car manufacturer? Going after car manufacturers is kinda based, but from what I can tell the main problem with Teslas is build quality and the scam of FSD, not anything particularly environmental. Is it because they sell their carbon credits to other auto manufacturers, bypassing the point of them? Or is it because they’re cars and encourage unsustainable growth patterns inherently?

Wouldn’t shuttering an ICE factory be better than shuttering an EV factory, even if neither are good?

I agree. Sadly, I think it’s poorly implemented right now.

I’d have to find the news article about it, but I’m pretty sure this program exists already. I think an external study on the program shows that the Northwest Company is pocketing something like 60% of the subsidy for Northern grocers and only passing on 40% of the value to lower consumer prices. I saw this article perhaps 6 months ago? Let me go looking.

E: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/rising-food-prices-canada-north-1.7122481

From this article, I got the numbers backward: 60% goes to consumers but 40% goes missing.

Igor Shushko should not be trusted for OSINT. He has claimed repeatedly that the FSB was going to stage a coup, etc. since the beginning of the invasion. He also just makes stuff up pretty frequently.

He’s in the “completely ignore” category in the OSINT community.

Revenue was up 4.5% and profit was up 10%… so they cranked up their margin, nice. Greedflation indeed.

Would love to see the same figures for Sobeys/Safeway and others, cause I swear their veg has doubled in price in 3 years.

Yes I started running a Stay in Tarkov server last night for my friends. Pretty easy setup and while there are some minor bugs, it’s pretty good!

Bye bye BSG, I held off on SPT for a long time to support you… but no more.

Yeah, the US military has been built since WW2 explicitly with the intention of being able to fight in Europe and in the Pacific at the same time and win both.

Ukraine has basically just gotten ammunition + existing older US equipment, it’s not like we’re draining our military capabilities supporting them right now.

The monetary supply thing in particular is why using bitcoin or any other externally managed currency as a national currency is typically regarded as a bad idea.

And also the above statements get much more complex when dealing with multiple currencies like with Russia where despite it issuing the ruble, it can default on USD debt because the ruble/USD exchange rate is such shit.

Monetary policy is very interesting.

That’s not really what “national debt” refers to… national debt is literal borrowing: “hey who wants to buy some bonds from my national government so we can invest in our economy?” Someone buys those bonds with the expectation of getting the invested amount + interest back.

What you’re talking about is most closely represented by “reparations” which is money owed by an aggressor to a victim state, and is only enforceable really by a stronger third party or by the aggressor losing the war.

As to why cities don’t take on debt the same way: they do take on millions of dollars of debt for infrastructure, but usually they’re loans from the federal government as opposed to bonds. The difference between city debt and national government debt is the national government controls its own monetary supply, meaning is defacto cannot default on its bonds. Cities can default on their loans, but typically the lender is the higher level government anyways so the repercussions tend to be political only. That’s why worrying about “the national debt clock” is typically not meaningful, but your city borrowing 300 million for a new highway definitely is.

I honestly think it’s the internet as a whole that’s done that to us.

You used to be able to not know things, but now I’m expected to have encyclopedic knowledge of every factor going into any individual choice I make as though I’ve gotta min/max my life. I think the expectation that everyone needs to have an opinion on everything because “the information is available, just Google it!”, combined with the fact that we have a limited rate of knowledge consumption and limited bandwidth has led to people just skimming information. Shortest path to having an “informed” opinion on every topic, because God forbid you don’t know something online.

I think in order to increase our media literacy we must return to partial ignorance.

Wait did beehaw fall off? I have two accounts, one here and one on beehaw. I actually made my sh.itjust.works account because beehaw defederated from some instances with communities I wanted to keep and now I use both semi regularly. Mostly lurk though.

Loving that the only dude who posted valid legal precedent in the same jurisdiction is getting down voted.

And then Lemmy users will complain how ass Reddit is for exactly this lmao.

I use ps -aux | grep $EXECUTABLE

Military aid packages are typically reported in USD (“10 billion in military aid”) but usually involve the direct transference of equipment (logistical or frontline) to the foreign country. Usually those countries are existing allies of the US (or at least friendly) and are probably already buying NATO/US gear.

I’m relatively confident that the US doesn’t typically give USD earmarked for US manufactured weapons systems.