Remember when the petroleum industry sold us disposable plastic bags as a way to “save the trees”?

SYAC: In the article, Altman doesn’t explain anything regarding what led to the board doing what they did, and asserts that he will wait for the new board to conduct an investigation.

If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, you can toss your vault into iCloud Drive. If you’re technically proficient (and brave) you can write a cron to sync into whichever service you want via a local machine.

In addition to iCloud, I have a one-way sync (rsync) which functions as a poor man’s backup to get all my files into Dropbox; lots of stern warnings from Obsidian not to use Dropbox.

May I offer that it really depends on your note-taking style? I’ve been using it since July having come from linear note-taking on Cornell NTS. It’s way faster and much more interlocked once you get past the slight learning curve.

That book, along with Brave New World have shaped me so deeply. I’ve read 1984 periodically and each reading reveals so much more than the last because I have new mental lenses each time.

Definitely pick it up again and give it a punt.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four

That’s so kind, thank you! I am studying economics and the discussion helped reinforce a lot of fundamental learning.

Reviewing the article, it describes Loblaw, Sobeys, and Metro as the “three largest” firms accounting for grocery conglomerates, which implies there are other firms in the grocery industry up there. Since there is more than one parent firm, this describes–at worst, an oligopoly. Oligopolies do exert control over prices by virtue of the few suppliers in the market, but their price-setting isn’t monopolistic.

To the first point you’ve mentioned, my argument is towards support of price-discrimination, and not monopolies. The article does indeed demonstrate third-degree price discrimination (same product, different store/market segment, different price), but I did not try to connect these two.

To the second point, the reason for there to be an oligopolistic market is the natural result of an industry that has the kinds of barriers-to-entry that a grocery store seems like it might have: the substantial investment required to purchase the initial inventory, the real estate, and the labor costs.

With respect to Canadian consumer protections, I have no input.

There are some arguments and scenarios which support price discrimination, OP’s article is a prime example. Price discrimination encourages firms to sell more output (at all levels), which enables more customers to purchase goods at each of their willingnesses-to-pay. The natural consequence is, yes, the producer captures more profit. This seems ideal if we are to accept the theory of a capitalist economy.

Monopolies do exert a great deal of control over price and therefore price discrimination to the detriment of the market, but reasonably competitive firms also have some influence over price in ways that are supplemental to the market.

Because of third-degree price discrimination (not discrimination with the negative connotation).

Adding phrases to become law which have nothing to do with the scope and intention of the overall bill, and are generally wild additions that have no hope of passing on their own.

Sometimes they’re added to intentionally bog down a bill so it won’t pass. The riders are used as a sort of narcissistic bargaining chip in political “negotiation”.

I have run my own PiHole previously. Then I wanted Ad blocking on my phone, so I also setup OpenVPN that ran alongside my PiHole so I could get ad blocking anywhere. I travel often, and then we moved, so I never got it set up again, at the same time I discovered AdGuard could be configured on both home networks for network-level blocking, but they also have device profiles for iOS.

I haven’t had to fuss with PiHole now in years.

If you are happy to do the administration of a PiHole, and the scope it provides, it’s good. I didn’t want to have to fuss with it anymore.

AdGuard! They even have installable profiles for Apple devices, so I get ad blocking even on mobile!

mb, DDNS. nvm