Something about comparing the US to other rich nations rubs me the wrong way when, in my opinion, servicing a country as large as the US is very different from servicing a small island like the UK. The post talks about difference in margins and regional squeezing, etc. However, how much of the cost difference comes from transporting the goods? The post also mentions how large stores are, and how large of a selection there is, in US stores. That seems like it'd drive up the cost, but I don't hear Americans complaining about too many options. Honestly, I think it's an achievement that an American can eat as healthy for the same price as the French, they are very different countries geographically!
The link above will give you thumbnails that you can view in browser.
I'm considering making a taxonomic tree (and then forget formal phylogeny and include the varieties) with the thumbnail images. Similar to another pet project of mine.
Built off of NCBI E-Utilities, this currently only works for citations found on PubMed. I would love to find a way to make this more general, have it work for Google Scholar or the like, but I don't know of any free API access to larger citation databases.
Blood Meridian (or The Evening Redness in the West) by Cormac McCarthy. Quickly became my favorite book after reading it a second time. I've never read a book with more effective language.
This is a tangent, but the "utility monster" scenario only makes sense if the utility gained from an activity remains the same with how many resources are put into it. This doesn't make sense with how people actually work, almost all goals or resources or pleasures have diminishing returns, or homeostasis. Do negative feedback loops exist in this philosophy? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the point.