Yeah. A naive response would be “isn’t UPS big too?” But the shipping is only part of retail logistics. When you also control the warehousing distribution, and can back-feed logistical availability data all the way to the retail interface to affect what people buy in the first place… you have power that no fleet of trucks alone can overcome.

Yeah a few days is nothing. But two weeks is disturbingly common. And lack of any predictability is rampant.

Can only assume the cheaper option is the higher volume option that will have better leverage from economies of scale. Lower price is usually where that surfaces but I can easily see it surfacing as more flights and faster delivery if the route is just right.

Fucking hate all of this. With payments online getting easier I’m finding it more convenient to order from small websites again and stop using Amazon. But when it comes to shipping, things are really not getting any faster or easier. While Amazon is always a day behind their promises, they are usually much faster than anyone else.

I wish it were simply a matter of time and finding a few hours. I can do that. But the confounding factor is that while the internet makes information easily available, the downside is that the internet makes information easily available. The typical experience of trying to research any ballot measure is that you’ll find 40 different sources of information about it, all openly biased and directly contradicting each other.

Ultimately, many ballot measures are complex initiative proposals which need to be reviewed and approved by qualified professionals over weeks or even months, with multiple revisions being part of the process.

I don’t know how to evaluate building project plans and I really never will. Even assuming I have 3 hours for ballot research, there can be dozens of measures every time.

In California where we are faced with numerous complex ballot measures in addition to candidates, it’s very hard to get to the polls feeling completely informed about everything.

There comes an uncomfortable moment where you need to decide if you’re going to just not vote for certain things because you don’t know enough, or if you’d rather make the best hasty decision you can. In that latter case, I believe people are vulnerable to all kinds of bulllshit influences.

One influence I often go by is what people I know voted. I have a couple of friends that make it their business to be super informed, and I know we share values. I’m happy to give them my vote in that case rather than waste it.

Sometimes the ballot measures really are impossible decisions. One side says they’re raising money for schools that’s desperately needed for essential safety upgrades. Opponents say there is no details plan for how the money will be spent and the same group already did this just two years ago so where did that money go? How is a private individual supposed to penetrate things like this?

“Money for schools” and “allow new housing construction” are usually automatic approvals from me. I know there will be NIMBY naysayers and budget hawks complaining, but I think we need everything we can get on those two fronts.

How did they know at any given point that it was still there? Wouldn’t they have to interact with it to be sure, causing an explosion and annihilating it? The explosion would be incredibly small with just one particle. Is the lack of explosion their only evidence that they had contained it? I’m stumped as to what it actually means to have one particle like this. How can you even know what temperature it is without interacting with it? And how do you interact with it without destroying it?

The sentence that comes to mind is “both of their names are Trevor.”

For your question, this conveniently reduces to “their names are Trevor.”

So there’s your answer.

Do you want to suggest a measurement scheme in which underground building is cheaper? As is I don’t understand your point.