In software (and business in general!), innovation is expected. If you built a building in San Francisco that couldn't handle a relatively minor earthquake you could argue it would be a 'stress test'.
If you’re right that AI’s impact on business is akin to a ‘relatively minor earthquake in San Francisco,’ a lot of investors are going to be really fucking bummed out.
Apple Card can also sometimes offer 3% like at Walgreens and you can also get 6 months of free Uber One.
Another benefit of the Fidelity card is they reimburse your Global Entry or TSA pre check.
It’s not a bad idea to have both cards because the Apple Card is 1% with the physical card so having the Fidelity card with you for places that don’t accept Apple Pay is a good idea.
Anyone who's ever had to pick up a prescription at a Walgreens will tell you that 3% doesn't begin to make up for the incredible shit you have to endure there. It's like being placed on hold indefinitely, only you have to keep standing in one spot while people sneeze on you, all while guys with backpacks come in and steal everything that isn't locked up. And if there's something you want like antacids or razor blades, it probably is locked up too, so spend another 15 minutes finding an extremely miserable employee to unlock those cabinets, then wait another hour in line to check out.
I remember visiting the Soviet Union as a kid and it's weird to watch Americans adopt the same passive, drained and resigned faces standing in lines at a Walgreens as Soviet citizens did waiting to cash bread tickets.
It’s very location-dependent. I live in a very dense area with many Walgreens and competitors and they’re all about the same. When you drive out into the far suburbs or country, they’re not as bad.
Good independent pharmacies are the only way to go, IMO.
In my area of Portland, all other Walgreens shut down and all the CVS and Rite Aids shut down in the past few years - post Covid - because the shoplifting and almost weekly armed robberies were so rampant. It's frankly amazing that there's still one Walgreens open, but going there is kind of like walking into an insane asylum. Not that it's dangerous, just incredibly dystopian. The workers are traumatized and miserable. Every single item worth more than $5 is locked up, and even so, there are thieves with backpacks strapped to their chests roaming the aisles, literally every time I go in there, grabbing anything, while the employees just ignore them. Recently I went in to buy Mucinex. I found it in a locked plexiglass cabinet, in front of which was a junkie who was sitting on the floor with no shoes, his nose pressed to the glass, studying the boxes of Mucinex. I had to spend 10 minutes finding a worker to open the cabinet while gently moving the junkie out of the way.
This quarter of the city (inner Southeast) is down to basically 5 pharmacies serving a very densely populated 10 square miles, four of which are in supermarkets (Safeway or Fred Meyer... both terrible). Only one Walgreens is left.
There is a locally owned, independent pharmacy that's owner-operated, about 3 miles away from me, and I've started driving to it. It's the only one in Southeast. The Walgreens is only 5 blocks away from my house, easy to walk to, but I've decided it's worth getting in my car and sitting in traffic to get to the independent one.
I don't believe any card would mean "no fees" as "no late fees". It would be insane. I mean, I just take their money and never pay back and they are fine with it? Doesn't sound possible. I think they mean "no fees for regular usage" - like, annual fees, etc.
If you just never pay you'll owe a bunch of interest and they'll eventually send you to collections... the same basic process as for a normal card but just without the fees stacked on top.
Had a lot of experiences with very early-stage startups (including co-founding a YC company, and joining another as a founding engineer), seeking to work someplace more mature.
I often hear this and am confused; not only are things like 'object soup'[0] possible and straightforward (putting things in collections and referring to them by indices), I never concretely hear why a graph or doubly-linked list becomes uniquely difficult to implement in Rust (and would genuinely be curious to learn why you feel this way). If you needed such data structures anyway, they're either in the standard library or in the many libraries ('crates' in Rust-lingo) available on Rust's package registry[1]---using dependencies in Rust is very straightforward & easy.
- From the perspective of e.g. C++, I don't think it's reinventing the heap. We often prefer to use indexes into a std::vector or similar, even when putting everything in std::shared_ptr is an option, because the dense layout of the vector gives us the blazing fast cache performance we crave. It also avoids memory leaks from reference cycles.
- From the perspective of e.g. Python, yeah it's reinventing the heap. Unless you need to serialize the whole collection into JSON or something, it's much less convenient. But (almost) no one uses Rust instead of Python just for the convenience. (There are dozens of us! Dozens!)
One of the reasons to reach for a low level language is to have control over tradeoffs specific to your use case instead of using some pre-packaged option. Data structures are a very good example. Generic data structures like those in the standard library will likely suffice for many use cases, but a low level language must give the user the control to write their own. It’s just table stakes for this type of language.
Thankfully, rust does give you that level of control, you can write your own doubly-linked list implementation if you want, and you can pick your safety-overhead tradeoff.
Not sure about Rust std. But on cpp I heard a lot low-level companies avoid using its standard library since it is too bloated and optimized for too many cases.
Democracy is a system of government, not an economic model. You could easily argue, simultaneously:
1. Capitalism has failed in those countries, even if in different times and places one could say capitalism has succeeded
2. India and Mexico have major issues with their democracies—if a democracy is a system of government in which the citizens of a state hold collective power over their government, then there are many obstacles preventing either country from having a well-functioning democracy.
I can sympathise with your feelings that the current global status-quo is failing many people—I would agree—and I would argue India and Mexico are great examples of how unchecked capitalism and authoritarianism are causing an active erosion of democracy (and standard of living) in those two countries.
> Democracy is a system of government, not an economic model.
For the longest time, "Democracy" the political system was bandied about to be the primary precondition for economic progress.
The thinking was, that when people (countries) have democracy this somehow "empowers" them to become economically successful.
This reasoning was fairly prevalent, after all, the U.S., the showcase of democracy, was such an economic powerhouse. Worth noting as well is that democracy was normally peddled with economic liberalization, free trade, etc.
After China's rise however, the idea that democracy is a necessary for economic prosperity has more or less been debunked. China has demonstrated that democracy is not a precondition for economic prosperity.
Now, developing countries are faced with the question, what political model should be followed? If economic prosperity is the objective, the Chinese model seems to be promising. On the other hand, what does democracy have to offer? Looking at the U.S. as the showcase of democracy, what does the U.S. have that a developing country would find worth emulating?
> For the longest time, "Democracy" the political system was bandied about to be the primary precondition for economic progress.
I agree with you. I think that mindset has a fundamental misunderstanding of the root cause of economic prosperity.
Economic prosperity comes from liberty. Democracy and liberty are two very different things. For a long time, they were treated as roughly equivalent.
China figured out that economic liberty, coupled with state sponsored abusive labor conditions and few ecological restrictions, can effectively compete with "democracy" where people are able to vote to regulate labor markets.
In the face of this, Democracy is a weakness. After all, how can a Western economy that's voting itself (for example) four day work weeks and great work/life balance benefits compete with forced labor in the short term?
I think it competes well in the medium to long term, as economic systems that maximize liberty seem to mostly win.
China can compete in this method because they have 4 times the population of the US. And even so in aggregate they are still clearly in 2nd in the global hard power race.
Scarily for china their demographics look horrific through the rest of the century while America will likely continue growing due to immigration. By 2100 it's projected they could have less than twice the population of the US. Will they still be competitive then? Will any of the asian tigers besides Japan & SK escape the middle income trap?
