I bake bread at home nearly weekly, it goes stale and crumbly in about 3 days at room temperature and moldy by 7. I bought some pita and didn't use it all up. It was still soft, pliant, mold-free after 2 weeks. I tossed the thing, never going to buy it again.
If you added preservatives to your bread it wouldn't stale quickly either. Add a small amount of white vinegar to your bread and it will stale much less quickly.
The question is what kind of preservatives. Formaldehyde is a preservative. Acetic acid is a component of long-ferment lean dough such as sourdough, and an insignificant component of short-ferment (~2 hours) enriched dough, such as sandwich bread. It will not help with enhancement and preservation of texture, in this case the gelatinization of starch in the finished product.
Unless you're suggesting that the pita bread you threw out was preserved with formaldehyde, there isn't much of a question here. Taking issue with bread keeping its freshness is in-and-of itself no bad. If you have issue with a specific preservative, perhaps discuss that specificity.
Let us go back to the beginning. Are you saying home-bake bread which molds in 7 days is comparable to store-bought bread which does not mold in 7 days. OK then, in which we have nothing to argue about. I have no scientific source to cite one is better or worse than the other. By all means, buy and consume bread that does not mold for a long time. That sounds good.
Sun had few paths forward, with Linux + commodity hardware, what were they going to do, keep selling the OS and support contract at a price fewer and fewer were willing to pay? Sun had a suite of IDE and compilers that at one time sold for thousands of dollars per seat, the compiler was optimized for the architecture, but gdb was free and can get you code that runs just as well, unless you're under a benchmark. They were also under pressure from the OpenSource dev tools that were getting richer for GNU + Linux. Now that Solaris is practically dead, and RHEL is a subsidiary of IBM, given the dev and support state of CentOS and RockyLinux, I wonder if the community ever regret the loss of what could have flourished as another branch of the *nix ecosystem.
And if you travel farther west on 70, you'll eventually reach Wheeling, WVA. At one time its position on the Ohio river and near railroads made it a transportation hub, it made money in iron, textile, and logging - they used to float logs down the river. The vestige of wealth is still visible in its architecture, beautiful brick homes, ornate porches, windows and roofs. It's this glimmer into this past, not so far in the distance, that is so sad to witness. A lot of the town has fallen into disrepair, not slum exactly, but heading there. There is a central market building with some kitschy arts and crafts, and food stalls that supply tour buses. The buses come for Wheeling Island Casino, which has one of the last two remaining greyhound racetracks in the US. There's some attempt at preserving the historic buildings and downtown. People keep leaving, and the tourist attractions are more of a detour stop than a destination point. There used to be a pie stall - best pies in the US, handmade, fresh ingredients, $15, baked to order by a retired teacher. He sold the shop, his kids didn't want it, it was too much work and they made more money doing other things.
I drove by Wheeling on my way to Texas from Maine. Literally looked like a city that was one great but is now dying. Very sad stuff. Apparently they are revitalizing downtown though.
CTRL-F Gibson, the tech and root parent comment eerily reminded me of Fragments of A Hologram Rose. We're closing the gap between fiction and reality. The short story was written in 1977! Gibson was prescient about so many things.
"He bought an ASP cassette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the sold purpose of taking a nap and his morning's exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The microfiche laminate in the cassette's transparent case explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn't been able to sleep without an inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible."
Her books were unexpectedly popular, drawing rabid fans and equally virulent critics. J-F-Christ ten thousand words to set the scene, soft focus, travelogue, have tea, visit the home, and more, to say only that. J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon and many others managed to continue to write undisturbed. They also don't invite reporters into their homes for interviews.
Now there's a Google response, and a response to that response. I love it when journalists bring the receipt. Is it even deniable that Google search is terrible now? Remember a time when there was not anything close to Google search, and Bing! was a joke? I never thought I would switch, but my daily driver now is Bing+CoPilot. I've run the same search on both Google and Bing and the results are mostly better on Bing, with the majority of crud still in the result of both, but the better, more relevant results, are on Bing.
I had a minor conniption when I slowly realized that all stores would be closed between 4PM on the 24th through 6AM on the 26th. OH MY GOD what if I ran out of milk, or something I stupidly forgot. Then I got a hold of myself and looked in the fridge and pantry - whatever it was, it could wait, there are plenty of substitutes. I feel that we Americans are over-acclimated and conditioned to want and get the specific thing and quickly, we're eroding our ability to adapt, be inventive, think different. It's very convenient here, then I spend time in Europe and I was always surprised to rediscover that most shops close after 6, you can show up in the middle of the day to a shop and there will be a sign saying they're closed for 2 weeks, or back in 2 hours. It was perplexing to try and find a Paris restaurant opened Sunday evening, because why wouldn't you be opened for diners on the weekend? That's when people go out, is it not? Not sure if I would make the trade, there's something to be said for the convenience of being able to shop outside a very strict window of retail hours.
Sun Microsystems used to give employees the week between Christmas and New Year off, it was called Winter Break - probably a relic of its academic roots. It was its own thing, you didn't need to take PTO for it. I wonder which large employers still do this. All bets are off if you're doing billable hours. Retail is its own creature, though, you need to be open to make sales, so Patagonia is an outlier in their class.
IIRC it was a relic of their background as a hardware manufacturer — if everyone was off for a week at the same time, they could shut down entire lines, thus saving on the baseline costs of running their manufacturing processes.
I bought a copy after graduating, having seen the serious-looking tomes on the shelves of many TAs and serious people. I was not a very good programmer and I thought possession of this thing would confer a magic aura that would make me look smart and maybe within its pages were incantations I could learn that made me deserve the appearance. I ventured probably past the first 25 pages. This volume and books like it are not for me, I just want to know how to do things, and a deeper understanding for me comes from doing and breaking stuff many times, over time.
Am I missing the obvious here, a smart and nimble company can corner this market by lowering their price by X. They would have to give up X per unit but they make it up by (volume * lower_price). Isn't that how the market is supposed to work? Like if I want all the business and there's not an obvious differentiator I will compete on price?
That's not how it works because there is no volume. You can't provide more supply if there's no supply to provide. Each building has a fixed number of units and the management for those buildings are trying to maximize the value they get out of each unit. Most cities have a mostly inelastic number of units and population grows every year, so you can pretty much charge whatever you want and people will pay it since there's no alternatives.
Why doesn't someone just build a new building? Mostly they will be blocked by NIMBYism. NIMBYism is a near universal philsophy, to the point that renters who would benefit from this are typically NIMBYs too. Sometimes they're the loudest NIMBYs, It will be pretty much impossible to build anything new until the state takes control of building away from localities and forces them to allow building.
This assumes vacancy is at 0%, for cities like SF I can see this, but do all cities have near 0% vacancy rate? Genuine question, I don't know. I would offer at lower price and have all my units filled.
Typically the price fixing part is one small feature of a large software suite, and deviations require written justification submitted to the provider (with the implied threat of losing access to the management software).
