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Announcing my first book, with my style of longform narrative journalism and philosophy @wwnorton. It's about the clash between governing by top-down rules versus discretionary decision-making, in law, in sports, in the household. Pre-order now. wwnorton.com/books/fewer-ru…
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Oh man, I think I just felt the force of thousands of free market economists simultaneously climaxing from this.
Walmart and Kroger are quietly rolling out an internal store technology across America that could either modernize retail or bankrupt the middle-class family budget.
Starting across thousands of locations heading into 2027, traditional paper price tags are being ripped off grocery shelves and replaced with cloud-connected digital screens. Raise the price of bottled water by 20 percent the second the afternoon temperature hits 90 degrees. Surge the cost of ground beef, milk, and sandwich bread between 5 PM and 6 PM when exhausted commuters are rushing home from work. Drop prices at 10 AM on a Tuesday, then hike them right back up the minute the after-school crowd walks through the sliding doors.
Every price change happens wirelessly in seconds from a central corporate dashboard. No store employee has to touch a single shelf.
Walmart has already signed a massive deployment deal with VusionGroup to wire 2,300 American supercenters with EdgeSense digital shelf rails by 2027. Kroger is expanding its own Microsoft-backed system called EDGE across hundreds of supermarkets. Over 60 million digital price tags are already blinking on US grocery aisles right now.
This is not supply chain inflation. This is Uber-style surge pricing built directly into the shelves where Americans buy baby formula, eggs, and medicine.
Last week I sat down for coffee with a former retail pricing director who spent 14 years building supermarket margin algorithms before leaving the industry. What he shared over the table completely changed how I look at a grocery aisle.
"Retailers just turned static shelves into live stock tickers. The question is not whether grocery chains will use instant price changes, because they already spent billions installing the hardware. The question is how much extra money a family of four will lose every week simply because both parents work until 5 PM and cannot shop during off-peak hours."
Here is how the digital grocery pricing system actually works, how it tracks you in the aisle, and the exact phone settings and checkout playbook you need to beat it.
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John Locke is overrated across the board for all of his philosophy, including his political philosophy. We teach him because he’s influential and easy, but as my early modern teacher said, his thought is neither clever nor particularly deep.
Who is the most overrated political philosopher of all time?
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Today I’m thinking about all my vegan friends who must feel so conflicted about that “Pick Another Protein” ad.
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Encore episode of most controversial Hi-Phi Nation episode ever released, angering the Tchaikovsky Society. Re-follow the podcast for its upcoming new season! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…
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Ezra Klein has this theory that if you win at Twitter in year n, then you will lose the national election n+4 years later.
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Hi-Phi Nation retweeted
CFA: ’00s Alternative and Philosophy
Abstracts due Nov. 16 for a collection of essays about all things alternative rock in the 2000s.
philevents.org/event/show/152…
Abstracts due Nov. 16 for a collection of essays about all things alternative rock in the 2000s.
philevents.org/event/show/152…
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Hi-Phi Nation retweeted
Es pot fer un programa de filosofia sense que sigui un absolut conyàs i amb un rigor extrem, com en el cas d’aquest episodi sobre la percepció sonora. Congrats, @HiPhiNation @ProfBarryLam @Slate
podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast/hi-…
podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast/hi-…
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Jean-Luc Picard was a more important role model for me growing up than any real life man.
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Philosophy twitter have buried the lede from Fine and Rosen..."the research culture in philosophy is notably inefficient: either journals are publishing a great deal of bad work, or the good work they are publishing often has no impact...philosophy sits at the extreme.
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On the bright side, it looks like those 11th years finally finished.
Humanities dissertations have fallen by 49 percent since 2015, compared with a drop of 4.5 percent in the social sciences, according to a new analysis of nearly 445,000 dissertations in these two fields over 65 years. Explore the data: chroni.cl/4yxUZ4S
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Philosophy of Language 101-Implicatures Gone Awry: Store with toy bird that is not for sale puts a $15,000 price tag on it as a joke, because they assumed no one would consider buying it for that price and would therefore conclude that the tag means it’s not for sale.
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What are the odds that inserting a criminal case right into the middle of America’s culture wars and partisan politics is going to turn into justice for the victim? Or the alleged perpetrators? Or Cornell?
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I was interviewed longform about the ideas expressed in the Boston Globe piece, so I elaborate, with stories, evidence, and charitable reconstruction of why administrators feel the need to acquire more software. I also introduce the "assessment-industrial complex."
Raise your hand if you've spent hours in front of a screen completing new administrative tasks at your college. That busywork has name. It's called "Bloat 2.0" chroni.cl/4z28VF0
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Malcolm Gladwell observes that city of LA has the same population as Berlin but Berlin has >18,000 police officers and LA has 8,500.
But Los Angeles already spends double per capita on its police department as Berlin. If LA staffed LAPD at Berlin levels, it’d bankrupt the city.
But Los Angeles already spends double per capita on its police department as Berlin. If LA staffed LAPD at Berlin levels, it’d bankrupt the city.
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“More people are in charge of standing in the way of the educational mission than actually facilitating it.”- Me in the Boston Globe today. @Tyler_A_Harper @anecdotal
globecollegetown.substack.com/p/higher-ed-ad…
globecollegetown.substack.com/p/higher-ed-ad…
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