2 ms·
Remember Kozmo.com? I do. For those who were too young for the first Internet bubble, Kozmo.com was a company that was a delivery service for convenience stores
by imgabe 6y ago
Remember Kozmo.com? I do. For those who were too young for the first Internet bubble, Kozmo.com was a company that was a delivery service for convenience stores. It was great! You want a candy bar at 3am, just order one and someone will bike it right over. Rental VHS tapes? (this was long before Netflix even mailed DVDs) No problem. Pack of cigarettes? No need to leave the house.
It was fantastic and convenient and everyone loved it. Unfortunately, it was also wildly unprofitable so it went out of business.
Yes, it can be very nice to enjoy things that burn through more money than they generate, but those things simply are not going to last, no matter how much you like them. No matter how much they are a "pattern of life". That which cannot sustain itself, dies.
> You know what else is subsidized? Farms. Should we stop paying for them?
Not a valid comparison. Farms get subsidized to prevent supply and demand swings from creating price shocks and people starving to death. Not because growing food for people to eat is a fundamentally unprofitable endeavor.
- drewcoo 6y agoThe Heritage Foundation claims that farm subsidies are not for national security.[1] From this we can conclude that the purpose of farm subsidies is almost certainly national security. Which is a good thing, because farm subsidies fail to prevent hunger as you claim.[2] Om the other hand, it seems to be less for security than as "socialism for the rich"[3] given how the money is funneled.[4] [1] https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/farm-subsidies-vs-national-security https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/farm-subsidies-vs-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_for_the_rich_and_capitalism_for_the_poor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_for_the_rich_and_cap... [4] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/farmers-got-billions-from-taxpayers-in-2019-and-hardly-anyone-objected https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/fa...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]