This is a funny statement in that California has probably the best agricultural produce on the planet. If you were in say Texas or Georgia - you could be forgiven for your statement.
Bay area produce is unparalleled - Tomatoes, peaches, figs, strawberries, etc.
More organic growers if thats what you care about - high quality growers. There is also massive commercial growers doing high volume low cost but you do need to know where to look.
That's funny specifically about peaches that you call out Georgia. Also, I am in Texas, and some of the best peaches I've had are from East Texas. Not really sure why you picked those two states. Sounds like you haven't been to either and are way out over your skis here.
I visited California a month ago and had some of the best strawberries I've ever had for $4/quart off the side of the road near Bakersfield (best I had was Oshii berries before they started to sell to grocers, but that was at luxury fruit prices).
The Sunnyvale farmers market was a different story though. Two of the vendors gave out samples. One of them tasted like Safeway strawberries. The other gave out these small strawberries that were really sweet, and this vendor had a lot more business even though their berries were $1 more expensive. However, the ones that the vendor actually sold were much bigger than the sample strawberries. I was suspicious, but bought them anyways. Sure enough, when I tried them, they tasted like Safeway strawberries. My takeaway from this experience is that America sells bad produce less so due to supply reasons and more so that Americans just have poor taste in produce.
> My takeaway from this experience is that America sells bad produce less so due to supply reasons and more so that Americans just have poor taste in produce.
Or maybe you don't generalize about an entire country based on your experience in one small city.
See my other comment: in 20+ years in the Bay Area, compared to 25 in SW Ontario (Canada): the BEST peach I've had in 20+ years in the Bay Area wouldn't even make it as "a good one" of the bunches we had every summer in Canada. Not sure where they came from, but from personal experience, Bay Area peaches suck REALLY hard. I've WANTED to find some good ones, because I miss them, and they're always super hard or already rotten.
I live in NorCal and agree with you that we have great produce, but it's a little weird to single out Texas and Georgia (the latter especially on an article about peaches!). There's plenty of good produce to be had in both of those places, though I'm sure quality varies across a state as large as Texas (just like it does in California to some extent).
California maybe has best produce in the US, but far from the best produce on the planet. Not sure how you came to this conclusion. The Mediterranean region is uncontested #1. The cuisines of the mediterranean are so good because the produce we had here was so good, not the other way around.
I mean you are destroying an entire forest that grows food, of course people are incensed, they are funding the destruction with money paid from taxes. Food is already bananas expensive. And it feels so terribly inefficient to just rip and replace.
I fully understand that there is processing and logistics problems. This is not a misunderstanding of economics - its a wild misallocation of resources, and massive destruction of crop.
Have a banner year of peach sales in California for super cheap... market corrects for its past mistakes.
I mean, we already have one company going bankrupt in part because they are unable to sell enough of their production to cover costs. Your plan would just cause more peach producers to go bankrupt.
Tokens cheaper? I don't think that seems to be the case ... VC funded tokens were there to build user base and token price will go up as they eventually switch from growth to profitability.
I wish I could place a lot of money on the opposite side of this bet.
I don't think many realize how could the cheap, alternative models are becoming. I prefer SOTA models for key work, but I can also spend 10X as many tokens on an open model hosted by a non-VC subsidized provider (who is selling at a profit) for tasks that can tolerate slightly less quality.
The situation is only getting better as models improve and data centers get built out.
Yes, but how cheap is it to run four at the same time? It’s tough to run one good model locally, but running four at the same time which I commonly do with Claude and Codex just doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon.
I'm referring to hosted models such as via OpenRouter or from the model providers' own services.
I think everyone making claims that inference is getting more expensive are unaware that there are more LLM providers than Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
Fair - there are bets both ways though I wouldn't consider it to be a certainty. That revenue drive on this AI build out is going to be real and multifold.
It will take a few years until scheduled data center construction finishes, and together with software optimizations that may come up in the meantime, it may cause a significant decrease in token price.
Irrelevant comparison. Completely apples to oranges existence. Its almost as if is a different species if you take in education, culture, health, food, society, knowledge etc.
That's effectively what all the 99% or 1% prediction markets are: a bet that an asteroid will destroy the planet or that the Rapture will occur or that we'll all upload our consciousnesses into computronium or whatever is not actually a bet that those events will happen (and that the site and enough of the economy will survive to allow you to collect and spend your winnings), it's a bet that the market will resolve incorrectly.
That'd be easier to game than "will somebody run onto the field in the next $sports game". Just bet yes and bring a hair dryer. Make sure somebody posts evidence to X so you can cash out
If the yes side is heavily favored because it's a "sure thing" then there will eventually be people who bet no and hire guards (or go themselves) to defend the weather sensor from the hairdryer-wielders.
Eh, they were kind of bailed out in that uninsured deposits were made whole. Not saying they shouldn't have done it (fighting contagion is like fighting fire, earlier is prob better and potentially cheaper in the end if your confidence bluff succeeds) but "bail out" is a flexible enough term that electing to cover uninsured deposits at the expense of uninvolved parties feels like it qualifies to me. Plus it has some of the same smells as other bailouts - weighing moral hazard vs systemic risk.
“They” in your sentence is not SVB. Depositors who put money in an accredited bank should not have to worry about bank runs. Risk free banking for depositors is a cornerstone of the US economy.
There’s also no moral hazard here - the shareholders, equity partners, and debt holders were correctly wiped out.
It can be both and I don't know how much I would trust the USG as the canary in the coal mine given their technical readiness typically seems low across most institutions in that they are probably more exposed because they haven't shored up their systems.
Yes, indeed it does. I didn't feel this way until I worked for a YC-backed startup tho. I mean, YC is the first to admit that not everything needs to be VC funded and some things just aren't good fit for that funding model. I think a code editor is one of them.
> I mean, YC is the first to admit that not everything needs to be VC funded and some things just aren't good fit for that funding model. I think a code editor is one of them.
Fully agree. I also feel like a lot of companies do not need to be on the stock market, especially if they're reasonably profitable, feels like the stock market is where you go to let go of more of your company just to get rid of the VCs whom you owe a lot of money to.
I remember when I was learning about entrepreneurship in college I was baffled by their insistence of an “exit strategy”. The idea just seemed so foreign to me. See I naively thought the point of starting a business was to do the business, not to not do it and sit next to a pile of money instead. Silly me.
Bay area produce is unparalleled - Tomatoes, peaches, figs, strawberries, etc.
More organic growers if thats what you care about - high quality growers. There is also massive commercial growers doing high volume low cost but you do need to know where to look.
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