I do everything from coding to writing presentations or documents and any other business related tasks on my little 9 inch 3 year old Asus Transformer Tablet. Sadly gaming is the one thing I see a lack of on my android tablet, most games require the internet to work and want to suck my wallet dry nickle and diming me. I tossed my laptop as anything other than a video playback device when I'm at home (instead of using a TV), so I can watch something while doing other tasks on my desktop... Most of which is gaming really. I don't think the Surface 3 Pro is going to redo my thinking on use cases for a tablet, the only thing it might add is gaming, but that is best with a keyboard+mouse or a controller and I may as well just use a desktop for that price instead.
I doubt congress would manage better, in fact I can practically guarantee that any legislature on regulating telecommunications would looks worse after congress is done with it. After all many lobbyists write the bills that their paid congress critters then present as their own. Most never even read what they submit. To many big words and such for them it seems and to many babies to kiss to keep their cushy jobs to do that sort of work themselves.
Except that the consumer ISPs are the ones who should be paying and certainly Netflix was already paying their ISP (Level 3 primarily) for the bandwidth they needed. The problem here is that the consumer ISP customers want what is on the other end of Level 3's links and Consumer ISPs don't offer anything except end users that anyone else wants.
The problem is large consumer ISPs can through the weight of having all the consumers in the face of other entities like netflix and force them to pay even though there is absolutely no reason to. The traffic is decidedly one sided and it's all requests from Comcast and other consumer ISPs for data held on other networks by other companies.
I find it hilarious that they can manage to say they are innovating now on broadband. My service has gotten a faster quoted speed maximum download bandwidth over the years, but isn't even half of what you can do with DOSCIS 1 and far less than what other areas can get with DOSCIS 3 (which is actually the level supported by their provided modem). DSL is even weaker with 1 MB/512k DSL being the only competing service offered by verizon for $10 less a month than my cable internet (20x slower for $10 less a motnh, hmm that's some crazy numbers). DSL in my area doesn't even count as broadband with the FCC!
Broadband has been stagnant already for years in large swaths of the US with only big cities in areas with lots of money getting good internet service. I live just outside a city of 150k people and they couldn't give a rats ass about us. Their are no 'upgrade plans' now. And becoming a common carrier will not effect any rate of upgrades that don't exist.
The republicans actually said no because they insisted it was congresses place to handle the matter and wanted less stringent rules that what wheeler was proposing. It was a matter of three saying 'this is enough for now' and the other two saying 'this is not nearly enough to help or telecomm overlords'. So don't go congratulate the republicans on their sense.
This was not a partisan fight as some sources make it sounds. It was both sides wanted to help their 'friends' and screwing over the american people along the way.
See this depends highly on where you live. No one in my extended family gives cell phones to kids until they can buy one themselves and my older relatives my parents age often don't have cell phones at all and the ones that do certainly don't own smart phones.
I need Internet access to pay my taxes (my state no longer makes a physical tax form you can mail in) which certainly is a need as the alternative (not filling taxes) is illegal. It's also the means of communication with my current employer (who rarely calls me) and most potential employers. Having internet access in general is very much a need and not simply a want as I would not be a functional member of society without it.
They often do have a functional monopoly on 'broadband' as defined by the government. In my case I'm in a Time Warner area that may or may not become part of Comcast when they merge (and I have no doubt they will get the ok). My other options are 1mb/512k ADSL (which is internet access, but not 'broadband') from Verizon or 3G internet access from a number of cell providers (4G does not currently exist in this market of over 100,000 people) which all have considerably low caps that make them nonfunctional as primary internet sources. I probably could find satellite internet as well, but for extreme prices and limited capability that is even less 'broadband' than my other options..
So yes, I could have 'internet' from other people (most of whom are equally offensive)... But that is not a choice. I'm positive if Level 3 did shut the links to Comcast off that Verizon, AT&T, and at least three other providers would be turned off at the same time and that would cover 90% of my options.
I need internet for streaming media, general internet access, email, cloud storage, and gaming. Only one company allows me to do that effectively and even if I did switch to a worse service I'd lose the ability to do some of those.
Well resources abound in this system, though the asteroid belt is easily the biggest collection of 'easily accessible' materials. Setting up manufacturing in the belt (probably on Ceres, which has water for both oxygen generation and more conventional purposes) or in and around Mars (which is the closest to the belt). Ceres is a great place from a lot of perspectives though. Within 'easy' reach of raw materials, has a low gravity (helpful in transportation), access to massive amounts of water for food production. The problems are ferrying the people and starter materials to Ceres to set these systems up. That is where the initial expense falls.
I was using the rovers as my example of unmanned exploration. Daily updates with months to move a few km is exactly science at a slugs pace. Sure we've worked near miracles with what we have, but this is incredibly slow science and if we continue this tract then we will take decades to accomplish what we could with an on-site or at least an in-orbit team doing the same work in a fraction of the time. See something interesting? Redirect it in seconds. Want to get across the surface in a day rather than a month? Sure, we are in real time communications range we don't need to create significantly better AI or do 'daily updates'.
And comm range to Pluto is not 4-7 hours, that's the time light takes to get there. Radio is slower than light even in a vacuum and you sure are not using a laser link to Pluto... The system to send a coherent beam of light 4-7 light hours would be huge and require tons of power. So in reality a mars style rover on Pluto would get sent a message form Earth that would take roughly half a day to get there, then it needs to process the command, then it sends another transmission back with the same time lag. So a Pluto rover mission would require at least two days realistically for a single 'cycle'.
True to some extent, but with transmission and travel times factored in science becomes a very drawn out thing the farther we go. At some point having a 'rover' in say, the Oort cloud or on Pluto, is just to inefficient and humans will need to be closer or it will be the grand children of the original scientists analyzing the results of the vehicle launched by the grand parents. In this example it can take up to two decades to reach Pluto alone and even light can take 4 to 7 hours to get to Pluto from Earth. This would imply that we would send a command to move an inch or two and the next day get a response about that movement. This is science at a slugs pace. If we could just move the humans to the orbit of Pluto we now have real time science and the research can be sent back to Earth at a more sedate pace without issue.
Things like ISS were meant to make things like our life support more robust and show us ways to enhanced recycling and other capabilities to extend resupply. Sadly with extremely low priorities because of the expense to run these programs they have never advanced beyond baby steps.
Personally I can see why we favor unmanned missions, but I believe we need to reignite the spirit of exploration and actually fund manned space travel for research and development.
"The Soviet Union got us moving then. Perhaps Russia will do the same now."
Back then those in power and the people in general cared that the Russians could do something we could not. That is no longer the case when it comes to space. Most people don't understand why space is important at all outside of things like satellites that provides communications around the planet.
I was just watching some BBC stuff about labeling food and they said specifically that while some companies did use this system, it could not be mandated because of EU policies on it. So a company could chose to use a color coded system with readable information or not at their discretion. There estimate was that no more than half of companies were using the system.
So saying 'the UK has this system' is not entirely accurate.
Seeing as how I cannot actually do simple things like paying my state taxes without the internet these days and companies certainly don't even want to mail me a paper bill... Then yes the internet is a need.
Actual non-diet industry research using tests with mice has shown it is heavily processed foods with about equal amounts of sugars and fats that cause issues. You can live quite easily and not get huge on high fat foods that are not processed. You can also live on a high sugar diet on foods that are not processed. Though either one is not a good long term choice. Our bodies are designed to eat certain amounts of both.
Tests on rats shows they will nearly OD on something like cheese cake and yet high sugar foods are simply nibbled on and high fat foods are eaten in moderation.
So no. Eating 'lard' itself is not going to do you severe harm.
Because Lucas has already been leaning to these things? And with the cart blanche from this we have every faith that Disney will go the extra mile.
Besides there were some great stories in the EU (among some not so great or even bad). Just throwing the baby out with the bath water can only mean bad things...
For Pennsylvania (the state I live in) Full Time is 30-40 hours with overtime required after 40 as an hourly employee. However for benefit purposes benefits are rarely paid for less than 35 hours per week of work. This means most jobs will be 35-40 hours/week (full time) or sub 30 hours/week (part time) with nothing really in between.
I have worked full time with benefits in my state quite extensively, as well as multiple times below thirty hours a week without benefits. Part time has always sucked and my state is one that has not increased medicare to match the minimum federal aid levels for 'obamacare'. So I know several people working part time now that cannot get health care form the state and also do not meet the minimum for help from the federal government. It's a horrible position to be in.
I think it highly depends on what those of us in this discussion think of when we say 'IT'.
Personally I've been a network engineer, a systems administrator, a network administrator, had various titles with the word 'support' and 'technology' in their names, etc. When I think 'IT' I think of those jobs and they are a lot like playing doctor most of the time as I get a list of symptoms and need to solve the underlying problem or at least treat those symptoms if I cannot find an exact cause. Otherwise it's about new projects when not trying to fix issues cropping up with old ones. I rarely need to code anything (and so those skills are fairly out of date), but I do need strong written and verbal skills as well as problem solving ones because I deal heavily with business people and administrators who don't really speak the 'lingo' (though they often think they do).
However plenty of people hear 'IT' and think 'programmer'. Programmers do heavily deal in mathematics with a good mix of problem solving skill needed to handle debugging code. In fact I wish more new grads got a lot of debugging experience while in school or any other practical application of programming. I usually see way to much theory and people who have not a clue who to apply that theory in any practical way.
Things like this always annoy me. Someone has decided either that you don't know your job or that they need more layers of bureaucracy. In my experience it is usually because they think you don't know your job as a system admin. Do I really need a 'paper trail' or make work for things I'm already tasked to manage the risk for? And why would a group of business people (generally) think they are somehow better at mitigating IT risks than the IT person?
Part of what they are supposed to be paying me for is to know that if patch X breaks on the test server it is probably not a good idea to go live with it and I should also know already how to revert the changes in said patch if they have an adverse effect on a live server when they did not on the test server.
Things like this were they feel a need to micromanage things they don't really understand just annoy the heck out of me.
Not just that, but from what I've seen in other news bits... The consumer side ISPs want to charge their customers, Netflix, and Netflix ISP... So they are being paid triple for the same bandwidth. How exactly that is supposed to be 'normal' is left up to the craziness of those saying such things.
While I mean that to be funny, the concept isn't. They will simply tailor their offers to better match your socio-economic expectations. Economics calls this price discrimination and it is about charging you as an individual the maximum they can get away with. And if your rate is to low to appeal to them you are excluded from buying at all.
You do realize that if they are ~97% accurate among their entire dataset (Which includes Asia, Europe, North America, and South America) that they can already handle some portion of the 38,929,319 'African American' population, the 14,674,252 'Asian American' population, 2,932,248 'Native American' population, 540,013 'Pacific Islander' population, 19,107,368 'other race' population, or 9,009,073 'two or more races' population just in the US right...?
Well much like me in IT, one guy was the 'maintenance guy'. We got along pretty well being in very similar situations. I have no idea if he is still there or not now, but he was also made into a manager. 4 part time (2 hours each night after school) workers were hired to clean the place. I know he was there for an even longer day then me and I'm not so sure he got paid for all those hours. I do know his 'work shift' was meant to be equal to mine, but how could he manage people he never saw and had no way to communicate with?
Both of us though were kept as 'full time hourly' employees and so got screwed by having to pay for our own holidays (school holidays for us were not given as regular time off, but we were required to take them as vacation days to be paid for them) and they absolutely refused any attempts to do things outside 'normal work shifts'. It is tons of fun to have to do server restarts, hardware upgrades, or anything effecting the network or systems during 'normal work shifts'.
Both of us had trouble pulling any money out of them for basics no matter how well needed (though there always seemed to be more money to offer the Chief Academic Officer as a salary). I was trying to keep 7 year old systems from the windows 95 era running when I worked there (Loads of fun with a Windows 2003 server running exchange as the domain controller which was purchased before I took over). The maintenance department was dealt with in a similar fashion.
Locally at least one grocery store chain has done just that. They said 'Screw the middle man' at least when they can get it locally. The went outside the cities and looked for farms growing what they want and paid 10-20% more directly to the farmers that chose to work with them, compared to what the farmers had been getting. They also worked with the farmers to provide transportation. It's a win-win for both parties, the farmers make more than otherwise and the grocery store (while still needing additional supplies to offset things not currently growable in this area) get much higher profits on those items they can get from local farmers.
They also get to advertise how they support local farmers and green farms. They have generally given Walmart superstores a run for their money and just in the local big city they are now dominating the chain grocers other than Walmart. Their are 8 stores for this chain in said large city, and about 4 for all other grocery chains combined as well as about 4 Walmart super centers which offer food (out of 8 Walmarts in the same area).
So based on this example, this can actually work quite well and the middle man does not seem all that much value added to either side of the transaction. Sure not all cities have a significant farm industry nearby, but where there is taking power from the middle man makes a lot of sense. For the record I live in northwestern PA. We grow grapes, strawberries, potatoes, corn, and other staple crops and we also have a large dairy industry in this area.
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I do everything from coding to writing presentations or documents and any other business related tasks on my little 9 inch 3 year old Asus Transformer Tablet. Sadly gaming is the one thing I see a lack of on my android tablet, most games require the internet to work and want to suck my wallet dry nickle and diming me. I tossed my laptop as anything other than a video playback device when I'm at home (instead of using a TV), so I can watch something while doing other tasks on my desktop... Most of which is gaming really. I don't think the Surface 3 Pro is going to redo my thinking on use cases for a tablet, the only thing it might add is gaming, but that is best with a keyboard+mouse or a controller and I may as well just use a desktop for that price instead.
I doubt congress would manage better, in fact I can practically guarantee that any legislature on regulating telecommunications would looks worse after congress is done with it. After all many lobbyists write the bills that their paid congress critters then present as their own. Most never even read what they submit. To many big words and such for them it seems and to many babies to kiss to keep their cushy jobs to do that sort of work themselves.
Except that the consumer ISPs are the ones who should be paying and certainly Netflix was already paying their ISP (Level 3 primarily) for the bandwidth they needed. The problem here is that the consumer ISP customers want what is on the other end of Level 3's links and Consumer ISPs don't offer anything except end users that anyone else wants.
The problem is large consumer ISPs can through the weight of having all the consumers in the face of other entities like netflix and force them to pay even though there is absolutely no reason to. The traffic is decidedly one sided and it's all requests from Comcast and other consumer ISPs for data held on other networks by other companies.
I find it hilarious that they can manage to say they are innovating now on broadband. My service has gotten a faster quoted speed maximum download bandwidth over the years, but isn't even half of what you can do with DOSCIS 1 and far less than what other areas can get with DOSCIS 3 (which is actually the level supported by their provided modem). DSL is even weaker with 1 MB/512k DSL being the only competing service offered by verizon for $10 less a month than my cable internet (20x slower for $10 less a motnh, hmm that's some crazy numbers). DSL in my area doesn't even count as broadband with the FCC!
Broadband has been stagnant already for years in large swaths of the US with only big cities in areas with lots of money getting good internet service. I live just outside a city of 150k people and they couldn't give a rats ass about us. Their are no 'upgrade plans' now. And becoming a common carrier will not effect any rate of upgrades that don't exist.
The republicans actually said no because they insisted it was congresses place to handle the matter and wanted less stringent rules that what wheeler was proposing. It was a matter of three saying 'this is enough for now' and the other two saying 'this is not nearly enough to help or telecomm overlords'. So don't go congratulate the republicans on their sense.
This was not a partisan fight as some sources make it sounds. It was both sides wanted to help their 'friends' and screwing over the american people along the way.
See this depends highly on where you live. No one in my extended family gives cell phones to kids until they can buy one themselves and my older relatives my parents age often don't have cell phones at all and the ones that do certainly don't own smart phones.
I need Internet access to pay my taxes (my state no longer makes a physical tax form you can mail in) which certainly is a need as the alternative (not filling taxes) is illegal. It's also the means of communication with my current employer (who rarely calls me) and most potential employers. Having internet access in general is very much a need and not simply a want as I would not be a functional member of society without it.
They often do have a functional monopoly on 'broadband' as defined by the government. In my case I'm in a Time Warner area that may or may not become part of Comcast when they merge (and I have no doubt they will get the ok). My other options are 1mb/512k ADSL (which is internet access, but not 'broadband') from Verizon or 3G internet access from a number of cell providers (4G does not currently exist in this market of over 100,000 people) which all have considerably low caps that make them nonfunctional as primary internet sources. I probably could find satellite internet as well, but for extreme prices and limited capability that is even less 'broadband' than my other options..
So yes, I could have 'internet' from other people (most of whom are equally offensive)... But that is not a choice. I'm positive if Level 3 did shut the links to Comcast off that Verizon, AT&T, and at least three other providers would be turned off at the same time and that would cover 90% of my options.
I need internet for streaming media, general internet access, email, cloud storage, and gaming. Only one company allows me to do that effectively and even if I did switch to a worse service I'd lose the ability to do some of those.
Well resources abound in this system, though the asteroid belt is easily the biggest collection of 'easily accessible' materials. Setting up manufacturing in the belt (probably on Ceres, which has water for both oxygen generation and more conventional purposes) or in and around Mars (which is the closest to the belt). Ceres is a great place from a lot of perspectives though. Within 'easy' reach of raw materials, has a low gravity (helpful in transportation), access to massive amounts of water for food production. The problems are ferrying the people and starter materials to Ceres to set these systems up. That is where the initial expense falls.
I was using the rovers as my example of unmanned exploration. Daily updates with months to move a few km is exactly science at a slugs pace. Sure we've worked near miracles with what we have, but this is incredibly slow science and if we continue this tract then we will take decades to accomplish what we could with an on-site or at least an in-orbit team doing the same work in a fraction of the time. See something interesting? Redirect it in seconds. Want to get across the surface in a day rather than a month? Sure, we are in real time communications range we don't need to create significantly better AI or do 'daily updates'.
And comm range to Pluto is not 4-7 hours, that's the time light takes to get there. Radio is slower than light even in a vacuum and you sure are not using a laser link to Pluto... The system to send a coherent beam of light 4-7 light hours would be huge and require tons of power. So in reality a mars style rover on Pluto would get sent a message form Earth that would take roughly half a day to get there, then it needs to process the command, then it sends another transmission back with the same time lag. So a Pluto rover mission would require at least two days realistically for a single 'cycle'.
True to some extent, but with transmission and travel times factored in science becomes a very drawn out thing the farther we go. At some point having a 'rover' in say, the Oort cloud or on Pluto, is just to inefficient and humans will need to be closer or it will be the grand children of the original scientists analyzing the results of the vehicle launched by the grand parents. In this example it can take up to two decades to reach Pluto alone and even light can take 4 to 7 hours to get to Pluto from Earth. This would imply that we would send a command to move an inch or two and the next day get a response about that movement. This is science at a slugs pace. If we could just move the humans to the orbit of Pluto we now have real time science and the research can be sent back to Earth at a more sedate pace without issue.
Things like ISS were meant to make things like our life support more robust and show us ways to enhanced recycling and other capabilities to extend resupply. Sadly with extremely low priorities because of the expense to run these programs they have never advanced beyond baby steps.
Personally I can see why we favor unmanned missions, but I believe we need to reignite the spirit of exploration and actually fund manned space travel for research and development.
"The Soviet Union got us moving then. Perhaps Russia will do the same now."
Back then those in power and the people in general cared that the Russians could do something we could not. That is no longer the case when it comes to space. Most people don't understand why space is important at all outside of things like satellites that provides communications around the planet.
I was just watching some BBC stuff about labeling food and they said specifically that while some companies did use this system, it could not be mandated because of EU policies on it. So a company could chose to use a color coded system with readable information or not at their discretion. There estimate was that no more than half of companies were using the system.
So saying 'the UK has this system' is not entirely accurate.
Seeing as how I cannot actually do simple things like paying my state taxes without the internet these days and companies certainly don't even want to mail me a paper bill... Then yes the internet is a need.
Actual non-diet industry research using tests with mice has shown it is heavily processed foods with about equal amounts of sugars and fats that cause issues. You can live quite easily and not get huge on high fat foods that are not processed. You can also live on a high sugar diet on foods that are not processed. Though either one is not a good long term choice. Our bodies are designed to eat certain amounts of both.
Tests on rats shows they will nearly OD on something like cheese cake and yet high sugar foods are simply nibbled on and high fat foods are eaten in moderation.
So no. Eating 'lard' itself is not going to do you severe harm.
lioness hunt almost exclusively. Their are plenty of other examples besides that, but it was the first one to come to mind.
Because Lucas has already been leaning to these things? And with the cart blanche from this we have every faith that Disney will go the extra mile.
Besides there were some great stories in the EU (among some not so great or even bad). Just throwing the baby out with the bath water can only mean bad things...
For Pennsylvania (the state I live in) Full Time is 30-40 hours with overtime required after 40 as an hourly employee. However for benefit purposes benefits are rarely paid for less than 35 hours per week of work. This means most jobs will be 35-40 hours/week (full time) or sub 30 hours/week (part time) with nothing really in between.
I have worked full time with benefits in my state quite extensively, as well as multiple times below thirty hours a week without benefits. Part time has always sucked and my state is one that has not increased medicare to match the minimum federal aid levels for 'obamacare'. So I know several people working part time now that cannot get health care form the state and also do not meet the minimum for help from the federal government. It's a horrible position to be in.
I think it highly depends on what those of us in this discussion think of when we say 'IT'.
Personally I've been a network engineer, a systems administrator, a network administrator, had various titles with the word 'support' and 'technology' in their names, etc. When I think 'IT' I think of those jobs and they are a lot like playing doctor most of the time as I get a list of symptoms and need to solve the underlying problem or at least treat those symptoms if I cannot find an exact cause. Otherwise it's about new projects when not trying to fix issues cropping up with old ones. I rarely need to code anything (and so those skills are fairly out of date), but I do need strong written and verbal skills as well as problem solving ones because I deal heavily with business people and administrators who don't really speak the 'lingo' (though they often think they do).
However plenty of people hear 'IT' and think 'programmer'. Programmers do heavily deal in mathematics with a good mix of problem solving skill needed to handle debugging code. In fact I wish more new grads got a lot of debugging experience while in school or any other practical application of programming. I usually see way to much theory and people who have not a clue who to apply that theory in any practical way.
Things like this always annoy me. Someone has decided either that you don't know your job or that they need more layers of bureaucracy. In my experience it is usually because they think you don't know your job as a system admin. Do I really need a 'paper trail' or make work for things I'm already tasked to manage the risk for? And why would a group of business people (generally) think they are somehow better at mitigating IT risks than the IT person?
Part of what they are supposed to be paying me for is to know that if patch X breaks on the test server it is probably not a good idea to go live with it and I should also know already how to revert the changes in said patch if they have an adverse effect on a live server when they did not on the test server.
Things like this were they feel a need to micromanage things they don't really understand just annoy the heck out of me.
Not just that, but from what I've seen in other news bits... The consumer side ISPs want to charge their customers, Netflix, and Netflix ISP... So they are being paid triple for the same bandwidth. How exactly that is supposed to be 'normal' is left up to the craziness of those saying such things.
Discounts are a lie.
While I mean that to be funny, the concept isn't. They will simply tailor their offers to better match your socio-economic expectations. Economics calls this price discrimination and it is about charging you as an individual the maximum they can get away with. And if your rate is to low to appeal to them you are excluded from buying at all.
You do realize that if they are ~97% accurate among their entire dataset (Which includes Asia, Europe, North America, and South America) that they can already handle some portion of the 38,929,319 'African American' population, the 14,674,252 'Asian American' population, 2,932,248 'Native American' population, 540,013 'Pacific Islander' population, 19,107,368 'other race' population, or 9,009,073 'two or more races' population just in the US right...?
Well much like me in IT, one guy was the 'maintenance guy'. We got along pretty well being in very similar situations. I have no idea if he is still there or not now, but he was also made into a manager. 4 part time (2 hours each night after school) workers were hired to clean the place. I know he was there for an even longer day then me and I'm not so sure he got paid for all those hours. I do know his 'work shift' was meant to be equal to mine, but how could he manage people he never saw and had no way to communicate with?
Both of us though were kept as 'full time hourly' employees and so got screwed by having to pay for our own holidays (school holidays for us were not given as regular time off, but we were required to take them as vacation days to be paid for them) and they absolutely refused any attempts to do things outside 'normal work shifts'. It is tons of fun to have to do server restarts, hardware upgrades, or anything effecting the network or systems during 'normal work shifts'.
Both of us had trouble pulling any money out of them for basics no matter how well needed (though there always seemed to be more money to offer the Chief Academic Officer as a salary). I was trying to keep 7 year old systems from the windows 95 era running when I worked there (Loads of fun with a Windows 2003 server running exchange as the domain controller which was purchased before I took over). The maintenance department was dealt with in a similar fashion.
Locally at least one grocery store chain has done just that. They said 'Screw the middle man' at least when they can get it locally. The went outside the cities and looked for farms growing what they want and paid 10-20% more directly to the farmers that chose to work with them, compared to what the farmers had been getting. They also worked with the farmers to provide transportation. It's a win-win for both parties, the farmers make more than otherwise and the grocery store (while still needing additional supplies to offset things not currently growable in this area) get much higher profits on those items they can get from local farmers.
They also get to advertise how they support local farmers and green farms. They have generally given Walmart superstores a run for their money and just in the local big city they are now dominating the chain grocers other than Walmart. Their are 8 stores for this chain in said large city, and about 4 for all other grocery chains combined as well as about 4 Walmart super centers which offer food (out of 8 Walmarts in the same area).
So based on this example, this can actually work quite well and the middle man does not seem all that much value added to either side of the transaction. Sure not all cities have a significant farm industry nearby, but where there is taking power from the middle man makes a lot of sense. For the record I live in northwestern PA. We grow grapes, strawberries, potatoes, corn, and other staple crops and we also have a large dairy industry in this area.