https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day

Or similarly there's the story of the Lykov family, who lived life cut off from humanity for 40 years but still somewhat understood what the new, moving "stars" in the night sky must be: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus...

Edit - Plus, this quote: “What amazed him most of all,” Peskov recorded, “was a transparent cellophane package. ‘Lord, what have they thought up—it is glass, but it crumples!’”

“Pokazukha” is more of a modern term (modern as in, i dont think it even hit the 80 year old mark) and is a bit more generic (refers to “showing off” or “for show” in general).

“Potemkin supermarket” is a reference to “potemkin village”[0], which has been around as a term since late 18th century, and it is a bit more specific (refers to a construction that provides a false facade to a situation, with the origin of it being an actual fake village constructed to impress the empress).

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

Both are valid terms in russian language. But “potemkin x” is in the same league as “schadenfreude” in terms of usage in foreign languages, while “pokazukha” doesn’t really have any spread or presence in languages outside of russian language at all.

Only ever saw it in english in this thread and, a couple of times, in r/NCD threads (because they just love using random foreign words of the day there, like “pokazukha” or “smekalka”; to their defense, they are almost always used correctly lol).

Agreed, you would. Potemkin X is not a russian language word or saying, it is more like a “obscure historical event idiom” that has no attachment to a particular language at this point. And that changes how often you would hear it used every day. I would guess absolutely any native russian speaker would know what “pokazukha” is. But with Potemkin X? Yeah, less likely.

I think I got a perfect analogy with another idiom to describe what’s going on here using an example - Sisyphean task (and its modern english equivalent “beating a dead horse”). If you try to get your point across to a native english speaker, I bet you would also have a much higher success rate using “beating a dead horse”. Try doing it to a native russian or italian speaker, and they would be confused. But if you try “Sisyphean task”, I bet you would have a much higher rate of succes in that specific case.

Not sure about other languages, but “beating a dead horse” idiom doesn’t exist in russian at all, despite it being used way more often than “sisyphean task” in english. While “sisyphean task” actually exists in russian.

Same with Potemkin X and pokazukha, but flip the language to russian. Both are used in russian language, but the native slang word for it (pokazukha) is way more frequently used in daily life. However, Potemkin X is an idiom that, while transcening the languages and international borders, isn’t used as frequently in real life as the original language analogues. But outside of those origin languages, no one would really use or know of those analogues.

Which is why it is kinda funny to see people trying to make “pokazukha” (aka flexing) or “smekalka” (quick-wittiness) into a “real” english word, given none of those are unique words describing something that isn’t already described well in most languages. As opposed to “schadenfreude”, which doesn’t have a perfect analogue in other languages, so it makes sense that it would widely spread and get adopted beyond the origin language.

TLDR: chart with two axi, one is popularity outside of the origin language and the other is usage in everyday life in the origin language. Potemkin X and Sisyphean task max out the first axis and are below average on the second axis. Pokazukha and “beating a dead horse” are very low on the “outside of the origin language” axis, but are high on the “everyday usage in the origin language”.

P.S. I am aware that “beating a dead horse” exists pretty much unchanged in German too, but that’s an edge case that doesn’t really change the overall idea.

That's not my experience of American supermarkets in North Carolina when visiting on business ten years ago. Even in supposedly upmarket supermarkets like Harris Teeter the fruit and veg was really not very good and the selection of cheeses (and other dairy products) was downright poor.

Going from this to a country where any random supermarket would have chicken, several cuts of beef, several cuts of pork, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, onions, several sorts of cheese and was not at risk of running out of any position would have been a shock.

In many ways American markets have fallen behind relatively poorer countries in variety. Most of what is sold are monocultures and packaged foods. The selection of fresh produce (or any produce) is often disappointing.

But I live in Texas now, home of all the cattle, if you believe the marketing. And I can't find 7-steaks unless I go to a Mexican meat market, because the DFW area is so bourgeois nowadays that the steaks simply don't pass muster for the local market. Hell, I'm more likely than not to end up in a Mexican market simply because the produce is better and cheaper.

Same with beef shank. Osso bucco is traditionally made with veal shank, and oxtails are all the rage, but I can't find beef shank unless I go to an HEB. Most places don't carry the cut. And if I couldn't find beef shank, I could always go with beef neckbones, but uh... HEB is the only place around me that sells that either.

You can go to a butcher but they're less common than a regular grocery store. Also, butchers usually have less selection since they're a smaller operation.

EDIT: i live in Dallas, Texas and "HEB" is just another brand of grocery store so "having to go to HEB" just means having to go to the grocery store.

That’s curious; I’d have thought you’d have more selection since the butcher is, y’know, doing the butchering, so any cut is possible. In the past if I’ve needed an “exotic” cut, the butcher would be where I’d go.

Different stores, different clientele.

also, complaining that you can't find Thing unless you go to a Mexican meat market is a weird way to boast that your area has specialty grocery stores.

But unlike a supermarket, you can just ask a local butcher to save you some of whatever off-cut the next time they're trimming it. Normally they'd just throw it away.

That might be possible in some supermarkets.

Yeah, I was going to say, it's worth asking.

I avoid fresh produce at Walmart as well, mostly in that the selection usually kind of sucks. There are more and better options around. As to Butchers, there isn't really a dedicated one near me, have to drive halfway across town. But a local grocery chain does have Butchers, but special cuts usually take a few days to get in.

I've never heard that term; does it refer to mirepoix?

I guess I’ll know now what it means to miss New Orleans when I leave. And here I was worrying about not being able to find collards and turkey necks.

Independent butchers aren't all that uncommon. Though, for example, my town has 3-4 grocers that sell meat without having a counter (but I expect you could talk to the butcher at a couple of them), a grocer that does have a counter, and then a couple of independent butchers.

In that not-overly-large shopping complex, there are two supermarkets (one of which has loads of European smallgoods, like 40+ types of cheese) and also: independent greengrocer, butcher, fishmonger, bulk grains store, bakery chain, etc. Used to be a poultry-specialist butcher too. Most shopping centres I can think of here will have an independent butcher, plus more separately outside those. There'd be dozens of butchers in a city of about 1 million.

https://www.lamichoacanameatmarket.com/en/our-company/

It gets even worse if you look at packaged stuff. “Look, twelve brands of coffee!” but actually it’s three because some of them are owned by the others, or by the same parent company.

I don't think so. People don't realize how bad it was in the Soviet Union.

There's a story of two hockey players that came to the NHL. One went to the grocery store, he was completely taken back by how much was there, especially meat. He thought it was a mistake and didn't want to miss the opportunity so he bought it all up. He called his friend who also recently defected to the NLH, and his friend said "Same thing happened here!"

It was also not uncommon for Soviet residents to queue up for whatever anyone was selling when it became available — Size 14 galoshes that will not even close to fit you? Get in line, buy as many as they'll sell you. You can sell/trade them later for something else.

I've also been in situations with live hyperinflation, like 10% per week. The strategies people came up with to deal with that were also amazing.

In the modern western societies, most people have literally zero idea of how far (or fast) things can go off the rails, or what that looks like.

It is a great privilege to live in such profound blissful ignorance, and it is not appreciated.

I don't know if it's because I have experienced it, but 10%/week inflation doesn't sound anything near as bleak as "basic necessities are only available every other month".

Edit: Six months of 10%/wk hyperinflation, I meant, not that some crazy hyperinflation is going to hit you personally within six months.

if the necessities just aren't there because, oh I don't know, you took the farms from the farmers because they owned land and owning property was deemed evil, and then the crops failed[1], then they just aren't available and it doesn't matter how much money or gold or any other commodity you might have to exchange for them

1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

you can probably objectively calculate the relative importance of pre-capitalism serfs and post-capitalism serfs by volume of political discourse and online discussion and citations - the peasants are precious right up until we get them to adopt capitalism, and then they can starve to death after getting their hand ripped off in a mill while we ship all their potatoes off to india.

it's sort of like the abortion thing, where fetuses are the most precious thing in the universe until they're yeeted through a cervix and then they can starve to death on the street corner.

Anyway, it's just a weird argument in general. Authoritarian systems are bad, of course, but authoritarianism cuts across planned-vs-market economies, and the hallowed corporate boardroom is the epitome of central planning. What matters is not markets vs state charter, but being allowed to fail, and without it (say) Boeing is no different than the stuffiest soviet OKB, despite the fact boeing is a "free market" company. And when these arguments eventually devolve into people citing the dead nazis who died attempting to annex other countries as "victims of socialism", well...

and again, you can say "tu quoque" all you want, but if a practice is so widely accepted as to be unremarkable then it's unremarkable. And the victims of capitalism are never brought up quite as readily - there's no PR machine spinning for the dead irish peasants, or someone who dies of a treatable chronic illness, or who spends their life in an american gulag for a trivial offense, etc. We got plenty of authoritarianism here too, and it sucks here too, but that's not the angle people bring it up in... literally ever. It's just our elites winding us up against whatever elites our elites are opposed to this week.

The fact of the matter is that as automation displaces not just physical but also intellectual labor to greater and greater degrees, we are going to have to move away from the idea that people's intrinsic value is only what they contribute to the economy (market or state). Non-authoritarian socialism is pretty great and yes, I'll happily take the ticket to Norway and leave you alone.

WRT authoritarianism, govt have a monopoly on violence that individual companies will never have.

In both famines, there was a refusal to intervene to alleviate the famine once it had begun, and in both cases that was unequivocally a deliberate choice of the British/Soviet leadership.

Further - there are many cases through history of companies steering the state violence, from Colonial India to Blair Mountain to Aaron Swartz.

The broad point here is that the Soviet Union is constantly used in our Western discourse for our own brand of whataboutism.

Our systems fail people constantly and brutally. Our supermarket shelves are stocked, but most of the Anglosphere is in the grips of an unprecedented housing crisis.

There’s absolutely lessons we can learn from the Soviets in housing policy, but we won’t if any mention of them ends up reduced back to their worst failures. They didn’t get their shelves stocked by talking about MKUltra or smallpox blankets all day.

You can argue that the grass is greener overall, but there’s still dead patches all over our lawn. That’s the broader point.

Either you're being deliberately dishonest or haven't read enough of the details. Yes, there is debate on what percentage of that gargantuan human tragedy was started by tyrannical incompetence and how much of it was done through deliberate vengefulness by the Stalin government, further moved forward by local initiative, but virtually all experts agree that at least deliberate indifference allowed things to grow monstrously and prolonged them too.

The leaders in Moscow (especially Stalin) and local commissars could soon clearly see that the collectivization policy was practically extinguishing all human life in the Ukrainian countryside, yet they continued to pursue it and even block all avenues of escape, while at the same time exporting grain they'd confiscated from people who were by then dying in their millions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

The British East India company’s operations are another example.

I'd only change 'never have' to 'almost never have' and most probably won't again.

The expansion of government sponsored enterprises with organic police forces is concerning however. Examples in my mind are school districts, transit and other agencies without law enforcement as a core component or competency. To the extent that those forces are bound to the proprietary interests of the enterprise, the bounds of the monopoly are blurred.

The monoculture of potato was solely due to the tenant system imposed on Irish subsistence farmers by the British ruling classes. Ireland remained a net exporter of food during the famine. The supposed 'charity' mainly took the form of workhouses - which were effectively Hospices

https://irishworkhousecentre.ie/

One incredible exception was the Choctaw Nation who, fresh off the trail of tears, were so moved by the plight of the Irish peasant that on March 23, 1847, they donated $170 for Irish Famine relief. This was at the height of “Black 47,” when close to a million Irish were starving to death.

To put it simply, Malthus' theory states that famine is caused by overpopulation. Thus the British, by their own basis of justification, deliberately reduced the Irish population. The people targeted were deprived of culture, security, health, and life. They were targeted for reasons of ethnic and cultural intolerance. Ergo constituting Genocide.

The alternative? The aforementioned Workhouses or the aptly named 'Coffin Ships'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_ship

> The oldest – and in pre-modern societies, by far the most common – form of rent/tax extraction is extraction in kind, where the farmer pays their rents and taxes with agricultural products directly. Since grain (threshed and winnowed) is a compact, relatively transportable commodity (that is, one sack of grain is as good as the next, in theory), it is ideal for these sorts of transactions, although perusing medieval manorial contacts shows a bewildering array of payments in all sorts of agricultural goods. In some cases, payment in kind might also come in the form of labor, typically called corvée labor, either on public works or even just farming on lands owned by the state.

...

> if you want to collect taxes in money, you need the small farmers to have money. Which means you need markets for them to sell their grain for money and then those merchants need to be able to sell that grain themselves for money, which means you need urban bread-eaters who are buying bread with money, which means those urban workers need to be paid in money. And you can only get any of these people to use money if they can exchange that money for things they want, which creates a nasty first-mover problem.

> We refer to that entire process as monetization – when I talk about economies being ‘monetized’ or ‘incompletely monetized’ that’s what I mean: how completely has the use of money penetrated through this society. It isn’t a one-way street, either. Early and High Imperial Rome seem to have been more completely monetized than the Late Roman Western Empire or the early Middle Ages (though monetization increases rapidly in the later Middle Ages).

...

> The irony of all of this extraction is that while it is often nasty and predatory, it can have some positive long-term effects, because the extra food that the farmers are being effectively forced to produce moves through either state-redistribution or market mechanisms to an increasing population of specialist non-farmers who in turn provide benefits for the broader society, sometimes including the farmers.

> Metal tools, improved plows, large mills and bakeries would all be impossible without specialist smiths, wood-workers, architects, millers and bakers, for instance. And those merchants, moving food around from where it is common to where it is scarce can – if there are enough of them and trade is sufficiently unrestricted by things like wars – serve a valuable stabilizing role on the otherwise wildly destructive volatility of prices for things like food and other essentials. Moreover, specialization and trade encouraged distance travel, which might bring foreign disease, but might also bring new agricultural technologies.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they...

[0] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/02/indoor-plumbing-st...

Finland had close enough relationship with the USSR that for the duration of the cold war, there were constantly some Soviet students and research scientists doing exchange programs in Finnish universities. When they first arrived in Finland, they were assigned a translator/guide whose job was, among other things, taking them grocery shopping. Because if they did that alone, a lot of them would end up buying their fridge full of meat. Because "meat days", meaning the day the local store happens to have meat, just were a normal thing that everyone adjusted to in the USSR.

Actual Russian reactions: 1. even the poor own trucks?! 2. they have special food for .. cats?!

Being a teacher here is definitely a mission, not a career. You just have to have a "sponsor" to participate (often this means husband), you can't just live on your salary.

Aldi has carts you put quarters in, and Mr Carlson tried to play up seeing the same thing in Russia like it was some kind of brilliant Russian innovation.

It was truly bizarre. So weird how far that guy has fallen, much like the also once-respectable Giuliani. Back in the 2000s or 90s, he used to just be the dorky bowtie guy on an old CNN show about a rightist and a leftist having a civil and friendly debate, if I recall. Now he's... trying to hang on making a living by... shilling for Russian despots and for Snu brand sniffable tobacco (really). It's pathetic.

"Why Tucker Carlson Pretends to Hate Elites"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RNineSEoxjQ

He told me his grandma cried the first time she entered an American grocery store.

It was interesting to hear.

Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.

This is fine and a good exercise (like a gratitude journal). The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political complaints, which may be well-founded. Like...

> Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.

Like this?[1] I don’t know what extremist means here but there are real political problems out there, and some of the solutions are “extremist” (like e.g. some of the solutions to climate change).

Violence is less debatable and should be reserved for when it it truly necessary.

[1] If you make vague gestures I in turn have to guess.

Being properly represented in a democratic system is not the same as being able to vote for someone.

Arguably, the American revolution wasn't even necessary. A lot of people died as a result. England would have potentially ended slavery decades earlier if the US was still a colony. Canada and Australia wound up in roughly the same spot without a revolution (though possibly as a second order effect of the American revolution).

This underscores the problem with generalities. I know of some applications that would be considered high-speed (both literally and figuratively, since they are related to rocket testing) that still rely on FORTRAN. So I think your statement needs some qualifies (what kinds of jobs?)

The word means two different things, depending on your side of the spectrum.

Are you aware of some mainstream liberalism that didn't kick off with guillotines or muskets? Then make it clear.

Don't forget: the status quo is what got us into our various pickles in the first place.

It's a tell that you conflate political complaints with extremist violent rhetoric.

The poster you're replying to has so far merely provided you with an opportunity to clarify or expand on what you would consider "extremist violent rhetoric".

We're all pretty curious people here, and I would say reasonably opinionated, so I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to ask you to clarify your position.

We're not going to get to the high level of discourse we like and expect in this space without a bit of curiosity and generous assumptions to our fellow posters =)...

Specifically extremist, violent, political[1] rhetoric is subsumed by political complaints in general. So if you mean conflate as in draw an equivalence then that is clearly a wrong inference on your part.

[1] This adjective wasn’t in your original comment hence my guess.

(Yes, good faith/charitable interpretation can lead to misunderstandings when some things are left unsaid. No, I don't think maximum nitpickiness is the answer to that.)

Not all violent extremists are focused on tearing down the modern technological order. ISIS, for instance, is only interested in the end of modern morality, but (evidently, based on their PR/recruiting arm) have no special qualms with modern media technology, industrialization, etc. The Red Army Faction was only opposed to the modern (at the time) government of Germany and a poorly defined concept of capitalism. But there is a specific kind of violent extremist who thinks that computers and mass production and factory farming are the problem. And I understood the GP to be referring to them.

If you think I'm talking about the Israel / Palestine thing. It was not what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the US specifically but it also applies to other nations with strong personal freedoms, rule of law, and general economic prosperity. Advocating for revolution in such places is very dumb.

> Extremist violent rhetoric encompasses communists and fascists and anyone else willing to kill people to tear the system down.

It seems that at the end of the day you are not against anyone willing to kill people to tear the system down.

The fact that would amaze Franklin is that only about 1% of Americans are farmers.

Franklin would be amazed at how little of household budgets could go to food now.

People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like.

It’s like a running gag that my father complains about supermarket tomatoes, but after travelling through rural places in Eastern and Southern Europe and a little bit in Central America, I totally get it.

Grow your own and the difference is extreme between that and a mealy, flavorless storebought

Remember when toothbrush advertising demonstrated how the brush was so soft it wouldn't affect a tomato, let alone your gums? That demonstration makes no sense now.

Stuff is often in season in the US, and at that time, it's generally good in the supermarket. Then there's when it's not in season.

Contrast green beans shipped from 1500km away on a boat, arriving 2 weeks to a month later at the store, kept "fresh" by all sorts of waxy residue, and other "agents" sprayed on them with .... green beans canned within 2 hours of being picked.

Where I grew up, in a rural area, we had a local canning plant. They'd get farmers to plan to harvest on a schedule, and they'd literally be canning as the farmer drive trucks up with produce. No joke, they were canned within 2 hours, often faster, and that's how it's done these days.

Which has more vitamins? Which has more nutrition? I'd lay a bet that the canned stuff is far better, far better than something that has artificial stuff sprayed on it so it looks good (artifical 'wax', and various chemicals to keep it "fresh"), and spent weeks getting to the supermarket.

Oddly, I've seen people dump out the water in the can. What? That's where a lot of vitamins live!

Food just tastes better in other countries.

This should be corrected to fruit and vegetables taste better in regions where they are grown. Which is obvious, because picking them before they are ripe and transporting them thousands of kilometers for days or weeks is going to yield a less tasty fruit or vegetable. Also, plants bred for longevity of their fruit will obviously not be optimizing for taste.

Personally, when it comes to fresh produce, I'd rather only be able to eat mostly what can be grown in season somewhat close to me (which would include greenhouses), rather than be able to get anything all year round and having it suck.

You really have to define what you mean by "supposed to taste like." As in "supposed to taste like what occurs in nature without human intervention" is very different than "supposed to taste like after humans have spent generations cultivating them to be the sweetest variety" which is different than "supposed to taste like when they are cultivated to optimize for logistics."

I suspect what you're referring to with the tomatoes is the last example, because they have been grown and picked to best withstand transit.

Where the problem lies is the changes made to fruits and vegetables to make them last the long journeys that they have to make from places that have longer growing seasons or cheaper labor.

Try a locally grown heirloom tomato in the summer in the American Midwest and you’ll get a phenomenal tasting fruit. More interestingly, try a bunch. It will be hard to say what a tomato is supposed to taste like because of the variety in flavors that come from location and breed.

Americans shop with our eyes, not our mouths.

Of course, from technology and "globalization", I think the abundance of American supermarkets would still have occurred, but this has been optimized at the expense of human rights and wages of people throughout the world.

Worse, they mocked it and still do with terms such as "banana republic". They haven't even learned any better.

It entirely depends on how many externalities are created as debt to the future in order to ship blueberries around the world. Internalize those externalities and the grinding force of the market will eventually eliminate or mitigate them.

The future we should all be striving for is one of extreme abundance for everyone, not forcing everyone into hair shirts.

In the end fuel costs money so more efficient logistics is often good for the environment. Buying local makes a lot more sense if you live in a farming community than a port city.

This is where the last mile problem comes in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)

Now, growing enough of one thing to be able to sell it to turn a profit might have "greater externality" but even that might not be true depending on the methods used. There are composting farms where people bring their refuse - specifically "anything that was alive recently" can go in the compost, and this will provide nutrients and soil amendments in a sustainable way to that farm, which can then provide nutrition to the community it serves.

You can't feed the planet with a small, self-sustaining farm. But this idea that it's a net negative needs to DIAF.

Look at the price to ship something.

The cost of fuel burned can not be greater than the shipping cost, and it is probably much less.

* the cost of cleaning up all the carbon we’ve spewed out

* the cost of fossil fuel subsidies

* the political cost of doing business with oil producing countries, many of which seem to be fairly hostile

Look at the price tag on the blueberries. That is the cost.

The opportunity cost is that the money could have neen spent on something else.

The great thing about a free market is that if you think resources should be allocated elsewhere, you can do that. Your labor is your resource.

I find greenhouses to be wonderfully environmentally friendly, and do not understand why someone would object to them.

We're absolute garbage at including externalities like pollution or long term effects into prices. Look at incredibly cheap plastic. It's a massive danger to everything yet a plastic bag costs cents.

Concepts like cost and value are much deeper and richer than economic cost and economic value.

Think about how this standard of living is enabled by centuries of colonial exploitation, mortally dependent on continued extraction of non-renewable resources, and propped up by an insanely profitable military-industrial complex.

If you're on the outside, watching fools burn it all so they can drown in excess they don't appreciate.. yes, the rhetoric is bound to get violent.

It's a classic leftist narrative that gets very foggy on the facts when you dig closer to details. Modern prosperity and modern market economies are definitely not based on centuries-gone colonial extractive empires and while extraction of non-renewable resources is still big in the modern global economy, it applies to the needs of all states and societies, not just the apparently evil capitalist west. Or do you think the USSR and its socialist cousins along with the majority of countries that used to be European colonies all live in harmony with nature, eschewing all possible attempts to modernize through resource use?

As for the military industrial complex, pray tell, of which country? Tangibly benefiting which countries and by what mechanisms to make it so "insanely profitable"?

> Modern prosperity and modern market economies are definitely not based on centuries-gone colonial extractive empires

All the wealth and resources plundered from colonies over centuries enabled the European powers to maintain power and more easily develop technologies on which this modern prosperity so relies. One entire continent, unimaginably wealthy in a broad variety of resources, was taken over just in the most recent history.

> As for the military industrial complex, pray tell, of which country? Tangibly benefiting which countries

Mostly the US today, benefitting primarily the US, and by proxy many of her allies. War is extremely profitable: taxpayer dollars pay for materiel which you immediately destroy, the demand/supply ratio is fantastic. The sustained violence guarantees access to the energy resources required to continue this strategy -- the rotten mess in the ME over the past near-century being just one of the more glaring examples.

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson

Well, aluminum was supposed to be luxurious and everything... But I think before that they'd pick a piece of plastic packaging and be without words to explain their marvel.

Modern sheet plastic packaging gives the impression of a soap bubble that we've somehow frozen in time and made solid.

And, as you say, things like out of season fruits and vegetables or the variety of things like spices and teas would be largely unavailable outside of maybe specialty stores in the largest cities.

[1] https://www.historydefined.net/splinter-free-toilet-paper-di...

Modern American supermarket would blow the minds of anyone from the Warsaw Pact countries ;), up until probably mid 1990's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBA41QgIty8

Not literallly in the cartoon sense.

Because there were 3 different prices on that price tag. The price, the one if you have the card, the one if you have the app or some other deep magic. (They were not stupid - presumably they could understand on their own the additional price per unit - but most likely not which price this was based on and why...) What a world we live in /s!

Those supermarkets are a product of a far more modern and culturally specific consumerism, which is not so innate as you might think. Many of us have been raised into and it's been gradually exported around the world, but it's the food equivalent of free to play MMO -- overstimulating, manipulative, confusing, and in many ways far divorced from the far more universal basics of buying food to cook and eat.

It's really hard on the teeth long-term, IIUC.

I think there are two aspects to this. I think anyone who's ever been to a food market in the history of time would conceptually understand it's possible to have a bigger market, and perhaps even a faster horse or mechanical bird to bring the items there. Commerce bringing you items from the other side of the world is millennia old. So I think it would be more of a case of "how did u mad lads actually pull this off", rather than a true mind-blown situation.

True mind-blown'ness I think comes from other examples he brings up, like GPS, and making items apparently hover a hundred miles above the earth and transmit information from above there, instantly, silently and invisibly. That's supernatural stuff, and the realm of the holy or the uncanny. You can't go back very far in time without talking about that stuff getting you accused of heresy / talking to the devil.

Air conditioning, satellites, and CAT scans are just too far beyond imagination that I don't think it would be fully appreciated.

Maybe 80% of US Americans now have access to a larger variety of fresh fruits than even most nobles had 200 years ago, and it's not even a big deal to us.

Project that kind of progress another 200 years in the future... it's hard to imagine how that would even look like.

Tea, earl grey, hot.

I don't think folks, at least not the well-off, would have a hard time understanding any of the varied payment methods we use today, since they'd been doing conceptually similar stuff[0] for centuries by the mid-eighteenth century.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_letter_of_credit

Come to the US and drink all the raw milk you like. Note that we don't have universal health care here, so bring lots of cash.

Just looking at the number of houses and the number of homeless is itself deeply misleading for what should be fairly obvious reasons. If someone operated a model simplistic enough that concluded there should be no deaths of dehydration in Africa given the flow rate of the Nile river is more than sufficient to hydrate them, you would call said hypothetical person intensely dim for believing that conclusion or model of reality. Yet when it comes to housing suddenly that incredibly over-simplistic to the point of being idiotic model it becomes a political rallying cry.

Why build more housing when it would only work against the value of your own properties? Why give out free food that's "spoiling" when you risk getting sued for potential food poisoning?

Rules are made up in the name of "safety", and they pass because yes there's an element of truth, but what goes unsaid is that much of the time it's maintaining the status quo and blocking competition.

Mate, the 7-Eleven Big Gulp, the Walmart 5-gallon bucket of Snickers and the giant Costco bulk bag of peanut butter M&Ms blows my present day European mind, let alone someone from 1900.

There are a lot of great chocolate makers in the US.

Ghirardelli are decent, but I've been relatively hard-pressed to find decent American chocolatiers otherwise. In general, European chocolatiers are in a different league.

I find European chocolate tastes sickeningly sweet, so to each his own.

I don't think it does taste like vomit, but it does smell like it.

Walgreens/CSV literal buckets of medicine like Advil and whatnot were some of the scariest things I've seen, and worst of all, people DEFENDING them.

Hints: any medicine expires, any medicine has side effects. I understand that there are some contexts where selling literal kilos of medicine are valid but MASS selling is just stupid. Nobody, not even somewhat large families, should be popping even Advil such that they need to consume kilos of it within the 1-2 years until it expires. And Advil was just an example, I saw those buckets for stronger stuff with more side effects. Medicine should be used like a laser, only where it's needed and sparingly.

And if many people really need to be popping even Advil like candy, it's a symptom of healthcare system failures.

See, sometimes silly things hide much deeper problems, and just because you're immersed in the culture you can't see it.

This whole "too many painkillers are prescribed" thing really annoys me. It leads to cancer patients suffering because of the risk they could become addicted. So f-ing what?

Anyway, it's a cultural thing, other countries seem to be able to manage this at comparable levels with a fraction of the spending and without chucking these into every store:

https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/walgreens-ibuprofen-200-mg... (1000 pieces)

Instead having something like this:

https://moncoinsante.com/mcs/en/ibuprofen/3173-nurofen-200mg... (30 pieces)

I'm trying to figure out consumption rates for the first one. I think Ibuprofen should expire in max 2-3 years after it's opened, so that would be... 700-1000 days. That's at least 1 pill per day for the entire period.

I'm not against them being available per se, but last time I was in a CSV they were all over the place (and other similar ones with huge quantities numbering in the hundreds, at least), which means that there is demand and widespread usage like that.

I highly doubt most people buying them are using them correctly (either overdosing, taking them when they're not actually needed, or taking them past their expiry date).

The progenitor of the Folse family in particular cleared the land, then became ill with malarial fever all summer, and then a hurricane flooded his property. 2 years after his arrival, he managed to harvest an entire 7 barrels worth of rice, which he had to hand-transport from the Hahnville area of modern day St. Charles Parish to New Orleans for sale.

One of the reasons the people there had such good relationships with the local native Americans (and why Creole Louisiana is such a melting pot to this day) is that they didn't have time to focus on procuring meat, so instead they would trade their crops with the natives, while the natives went hunting for meat and taught the children how to hunt, too.

Show them all of these wonders - then tell them that this is where poor people shop.

Although I was fascinated by some elements of this story, it was actually abandoned incomplete last September and it's unlikely to ever be finished, so you may be disappointed by that if you get into it.

(Some people who play Pathfinder also complained that they didn't feel the characters were faithful to the originals, which I can't really evaluate.)

¹ A quote from Shaw's version of Joan of Arc, which is pretty thematic, although the "He" in question for the title character of this story is a particular god from a polytheistic pantheon.

Right now containers ships have (largely) stopped transiting the Suez Canal, passing the Horn of Africa instead. Adding weeks to their transit time. This is a mayor disruption and, while freight rates are once again rising, no one notices. Goods keep flowing, stores are stocked.

I work in logistics, so I'm somewhat biased, but to me it's amazing how robust supply chains really are

Yes, the internet is predictable in a sort of “yeah I think people will eventually all want to be able to communicate with each other easily.”

But if I said to Benjamin Franklin — the ambassador to France during the American revolution — that the internet only works because every country in the world agreed to do internet the same way, he would’ve said “fuck you, no way”

The doors automatically open for you, the interior is nicely arranged, everything is brightly lit, and food is chilled, refrigerated and frozen.

Also, cold coca cola.

I agree with you on the other points but this. People too often try to make the present look better by hyper focusing on bad things in the past.

Bread was sometimes adulterated with sand or sawdust, but it was not the norm.

I don't think that a past peasant (who would bake his own bread and eat it fresh out of the oven) would be impressed by supermarket bread. People who think sliced bread is good have never tasted real bread.

I was mostly surprised at the ridiculous size of the mall footprint (no wonder they need to put these in the middle of nowhere and require cars); of the variety of things (like the parent comment mentioned); the variety of the same thing (30 different types of frozen pizzas), of the packaging (especially Costco holy shit, some package sizes are what some supermarkets where I live have on display).

It is very convenient and impressive, but I have mixed feelings about the trade-offs, like needing a car to get around and carry larger quantities of groceries (though I’m unsure whether big box stores or car dominant culture came first or maybe hand-in-hand), the majority of food choices on offer seem less than ideal for your long term health (lots of packaged and processed meals, junk food), and lack of origin or locality of goods (though farmer / wet markets do exist for that).