Questions for John Mackey

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Fortune had a number of questions for John Mackey, head of Whole Foods, but this one hit home for me:

We’ve heard that some people go after real estate in neighborhoods where a Whole Foods is slated to open. Have you studied your impact on the real estate market?

We haven’t commissioned any studies, but I understand that when we opened in Chelsea [in New York City], condos above the store went up 10% in price on the first day. I can look out my window in Austin, where we have our flagship store, and people are building condos all around. The joke is that we could have made a lot more money just buying up real estate around our stores and developing it than we could make selling groceries. That’s one reason we have a lot of landlords aggressively [trying] to get us in as tenants. In Miami and Sarasota, for example, we will have condos built nearby as part of a mixed-use project.

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Bob Sykes: That’s 1.8 g hydrogen per gram catalyst per hour. The economics of this process are silly.
McChuck: How long before Congress mandates corn methanol production?
T. Beholder: Jim says: No offense, but literally what the fuck are you talking about? Well, what was so special about Homo Sapiens Foo that they should become The Next Big Thing on the planet? At first, they are just another bunch of naked primates, with inherent disadvantages of big brain (needs more food, and not only glucose) in big head (leads to more fatalities by birth). So there seem to be 3 big thresholds to clear: 1. Manifest enough of advantages over the next bunch of monkeys to consistently...
T. Beholder: And back to UAV… The other side of screwdriver shacks is easy technical deniability, that falls short of plausible if anyone not happy with it is paying attention. See “The myth of ‘Ukrainian’ drones: What’s really behind the production chain” on RT https://www.rt.com/news/ 638518-myth-of-ukrainian -drones/ (via Simplicius https://simplicius76.sub stack.com/p/serious-esca lation-russian-mod-impli es )
Jim: T. Beholder: “Once it hit tool building stage, evolutionary pressures simply had very little effect.” No offense, but literally what the fuck are you talking about?
T. Beholder: Wanweilin says: …and yet we remain human after millions of years. Biological advantage of sentience can be expressed simply as “upgrade from adaptation only via slow hardware evolution to much faster software evolution”. Evolution of memeplexes via mutation and branching off (ethnogenesis) is a replacement for evolution of subspecies via mutation and branching off. Once it hit tool building stage, evolutionary pressures simply had very little effect. Which is why humans remain mostly good...
Jim: That is a technical way of saying it works just as well as the most expensive, high-tech catalysts. That is a specific expression of a general phenomenon.
T. Beholder: Jim says: LLMs now provide (a) and (c) It also provides (b) to some of the Pointy Haired Bosses, if as a mixed blessing. In that the big downside is having much fewer subordinates involved in BS production, but the upside is perfect excuse for a purge and then having much fewer potential backstabbers.
Jim: LOL.
Isegoria: Well, we certainly haven’t ascended to become beings of pure energy.
Wanweilin: …and yet we remain human after millions of years.
Jim: For the avoidance of doubt, that is a jab at “people” vibing the progress of their codebases by lines accreted.
Jim: T. Beholder: “For one, let’s remember that more powerful computers did not help to write and optimize a better code, but rather allowed greater inefficiency. Thus lowering standards for software to the levels that would be considered absurd but a few years earlier. The Daily WTF found IIRC embedded Java machines whose only purpose was to perform simple arithmetic operations with string constants.” The objective functions of that code were and are: (a) something that looks like it works...
VXXC: Strangely enough, when one returns to our common roots of armed raiding combined with presently energy production dominance, and we covered the insurance angle via DFC Chubb, how odd the success when one has a country not a global market… and doesn’t want the blasted ground. I refer to the present matter of the Pirates of Persia and their Boomer resistance allies.
T. Beholder: He is almost certainly wrong on LLM keeping the verbal lawns shapely. For one, let’s remember that more powerful computers did not help to write and optimize a better code, but rather allowed greater inefficiency. Thus lowering standards for software to the levels that would be considered absurd but a few years earlier. The Daily WTF found IIRC embedded Java machines whose only purpose was to perform simple arithmetic operations with string constants. So instead it’s one more way so-called...
Jim: The legitimacy of the American regime is drawn from the Constitution accepted by the Founding Fathers in 1789. Did the Founding Fathers intend to arm Blacks, Mexicans, traffic cops, women, enforcers of divorce “court” orders, SWAT, Israelis, or the institutional progeny of slave patrol against normal white Americans? The Founding Fathers dueled. Do the American Bar Association, National Judicial College et al. have any right to prohibit normal white Americans from privately settling...
Gaikokumaniakku: “Vannevar Bush once said that the unity of decision under a totalitarian regime was a recipe for making colossal technological mistakes, whereas the prevalent confusion of decision-making in a democracy was more efficient. He could not have anticipated the tortuous system of procrastination that characterizes modern American defense procurement.” I used to quote William S. Lind, who used to compare American defense procurement to Soviet defense procurement. Any sufficiently corrupt...
Gaikokumaniakku: Note that obviously non-white wrongdoers are often documented as white in order to throw off official statistics.
Jim: I, an AI enjoyer, have been assured by my fellow AI enjoyers that quantity of lines of code has become a relevant metric at long last. I look forward to computers obeying my every whim. May the imminent godlike superintelligence have mercy on our souls.
Jim: In any case, never listen to a woman purporting to speak in authority on the raising up of boys. The sensitive young white teen was born to go to war. He should be set loose upon Africa, the Middle East, India, and elsewhere with a Toyota Hilux, some automatic weaponry, and a gas and ammunition ration, provided only that consorting with the local fauna be punishable by death.

Isegoria

Questions for John Mackey

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