> My understanding is that saffron grows almost anywhere

As in it grows in a farm, outside, under the sun, in Norway?

Otherwise, Banana, coffee and Mango can also be cultivated anywhere in a controlled/enclosed environment.

Saffron comes from crocus flowers. Crocus is an extremely common plant, you can probably find bulbs for sale for it in ever big box home improvement store in the US during the spring

Close but not quite correct. Saffron comes from a specific Crocus plant named Crocus Sativus aka Autumn Crocus (because it blooms in Autumn). It’s easily mistaken with the other Crocus flowers. They require different climates. I can’t be sure (don’t live in US) but I would be surprised if they sell Saffron flowers in such stores as it wouldn’t make much sense for gardening, especially if want to have spring flowers.

Indeed, and they're well suited to northern climes. Here in the upper Midwest, they're one of the first things up in the spring, often poking up through the snow.

In the Netherlands and Flanders the week-long school break in late February/early March is called the Krokusvakantie (crocus vacation).

It's growing in our back garden which freezes solid every winter. In fact the crocus is very hardy - it grows on a path which we walk over every day.

(I still buy saffron in the shops.)

People commonly mistake other Crocus family flowers with Saffron's. Are you sure it's Crocus Sativus? Crocus is common and the flower looks very similar to Saffron's but it is not that. When do they bloom? If they bloom in Spring (which I suspect they do, they are also common here in Germany) they are not exactly the same plant and they have different requirements.

Grows outside in people's front/back yards. People grow them for fun. Farming wouldn't make sense.

Not Norway but there is a place in Switzerland, far up the in the Alps, very proud of it's saffron traditions.

Would auto-joins be better in production envs?

> harvesting money every quarter

How? Who pays for their stuff when most of the people are out of work. Sometimes people forget that the workers are also consumers. You may displace some, but to replace all, blue and white? Not that easy.

>How? Who pays for their stuff when most of the people are out of work.

The idea is that you sell your stuff to people who are employed in other industries/companies that haven't been so successful at automating all their employees out of a job.

At Samsung, for instance, the workers are not the main consumers: Samsung is a huge exporter, and most of their customers are outside of Korea. Even if all their current and former employees suddenly decided to stop buying Samsung products, it wouldn't even be noticeable in their balance sheet.

What you're describing is a situation where all the companies have managed to eliminate most of their workforces, which has never happened. If it comes even remotely close to that point, societies will be forced to change their economies somehow, perhaps with UBI.

This is the theme of the "Twenty-fourth Voyage of Ijon Tichy" by Stanisław Lem. Goods are mass-produced but no one has income to buy them. In the end they asked AI to find the way out of this deadlock. The AI found the solution of crushing them all and arranging their remains in visually aesthetic patterns. Funniest part is that they voluntarily went along with this plan because they could see no other.

The whole "Star Diaries" series is such a gem. Many stories are exploring this question of "what is the endgame for societal trajectory X" in a form of some remote planet that Tichy visits on his trip.

That “police” in “police state” is a different concept than the police you know of.

> Come back to this comment and in 10 years. See what speed competitive markets are at

The promised Utopia which for one reason or another will never come to be. This world where monopolies are not a thing anymore and all that’s there is pure clean competition is, just a dream.

> "Our culture" really means "the ways in which we've become accustomed to doing things (because reasons), and which we believe everyone else should recognize as an entitlement for us."

This could be the laziest definition of culture that I’ve read so far.

It's a translation of the word as used in context.

I suppose I could have added "Here," to be more clear that it's not a definition.

Right, this could be the laziest translation (to English?) of the word culture in any context, that I’ve read so far.

There, I fixed it.

Today's Pearls Before Swine comic is relevant concerning "translation": One of the characters has a "magic translation box" to translate "politicianish" into "the truth." I did something similar in my original comment above.

https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2024/05/05

"Laziest" — you misspelled concise, right? Or I guess you meant succinct.

What would an automated lab look like?

About that:

res, _ := some_func(…)

Sure, you can do that just as much as you can do "try! some_func()" in other languages.

But it's obvious that you're doing something naughty when you do.

You’re right. But that’s my point. You can “ignore” the error and Go doesn’t force you to do anything that about it. I’ve seen this in production code. Also I’ve seen people just checking the null-ness of the return value, ignoring the error. And that brings me to my point, which is, it’s all about good programming practices, whether it’s Python or Go.

edit: combating the overzealous auto-correct

Both _can_ be true. They may be price gouging.

Price gouging is not a real thing unless the business has a monopoly.

That and Saturn and Uranus align on 30th December.

I believe this is where we’re headed. AI replacing much of the software itself. You don’t need a website to manage your rental properties, another one for ordering food, etc.

However it’s not as imminent as “just fine tune it on personal data”.