Things on the AI front have been rather hectic. That does not mean other things stopped happening. Quite the opposite. So here we are again. Bad News PSA: Crumbl Cookies, while delicious, have rather a lot of calories, 720 in the basic cookie. Yes, they display this as 180, by deciding serving size is a quarter of a cookie. This display strategy is pretty outrageous and should not be legal, we need to do something about unrealistic serving sizes - at minimum, require that the serving size be displayed in same size font as the calorie count.
"The tragedy is our continued focus on the symbolically superior pure electrics over the vastly better for the planet hybrid vehicles."
Is there evidence / solid analysis that hybrids are better for the planet? I follow a lot of sources where I'd expect to hear about something like that, but have not, and would love to know about it.
From first principles, I can imagine reasons hybrids might pencil out better, but I can also imagine counterarguments, and I don't think it would be productive for me to bother listing them, what would be great is a source if you have one.
The reason is that the raw materials and battery size required for a hybrid are a fraction of those of an EV, so could be making far more hybrids instead of a smaller number of EVs, and this would result in much bigger gains while we are replacing traditional non-EVs. I modified the text to clarify that this was what I meant.
I don't have a particular source quickly handy but I've heard this explained a large number of times from sources I consider reliable on technical matters, and the quick math very much checked out.
Hybrids are better for now, but I expect that the simplicity of the design of the electric vehicle will mean that they will be better in the long run. As always, the market would be perfectly capable of working out the equilibrium if the government got out of the way.
I'm *generally* in favor of governments getting out of the way, but there are important exceptions. First of all, ICEs (including, to a lesser but still significant extent, hybrids) have negative externalities, such as CO₂ emissions. Say it with me: *the market does not address externalities*. Second of all, both gasoline cars and EVs involve various network effects, notably the energy distribution systems (gas stations vs. charging infrastructure). It's hard to jump-start a new distribution system, and for a system of this scale, it's difficult for the markets to summon the activation energy to transition from gasoline to electricity without a boost from the government.
(For another example, look at solar panels, which at this point are clearly a worthwhile technology but which needed decades of subsidies from various governments around the world to climb the learning curve high enough to compete with the extremely mature legacy electricity system.)
tl;dr: The reason Hybrids are dead is because they were straight murdered by CAFE regulations. It had nothing to do with the tech, the cost or sanity. CAFE standards were re-written to cap the effect of Hybrids on your fleet MPG, but not cap the benefit of EVs and the formula shafts Hybrids vs their RW performance.
Longer Version: CAFE standards exist so that manufacturers are forced to sell a bunch of fuel efficient small cars so they can also sell a few wildly profitable trucks and SUVS. In theory it was supposed to work like: You sold 5 cars, 10mpg, 20mpg, 30mpg, 40mpg, 50mpg = 30mpg fleet mileage (but fancier b/c you have to balance city and highway). In reality the calculation is set so that Hybrids look terrible against reality (and then the benefit to your fleet mpg is capped), and EVs look amazing. Since selling more Hybrid cars does not let you sell more trucks (laudably profitable trucks), but selling more EVs does, EVERY hybrid you sell (that could have been an EV or a super fuel efficient non-hybrid) actively prevent you from making money.
This proposed (then modified and eventually implemented) regulation meant that continuing to push the Hybrid revolution actively harmed your ability to sell profitable trucks/SUVS and make money. This is why companies strangled hybrid lines. Why do they exist at all? b/c of the cap selling a small # of them can still help a tiny bit. So you make just enough to harvest this benefit, but no more.
"For the fuel economy calculation for alternative fuel vehicles, a gallon of alternative fuel is deemed to contain 15% fuel (which is approximately the amount of gasoline in a gallon of E85)[26] as an incentive to develop alternative fuel vehicles.[27] The mileage for dual-fuel vehicles, such as E85 capable models and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, is computed as the average of its alternative fuel rating—divided by 0.15 (equal to multiplying by 6.666)—and its gasoline rating. Thus an E85-capable vehicle that gets 15 mpg on E-85 and 25 mpg on gasoline might logically be rated at 20 mpg. But in fact the average, for CAFE purposes, despite perhaps only one percent of the fuel used in E85-capable vehicles is actually E85, is computed as 100 mpg for E-85 and the standard 25 mpg for gasoline, or 62.5 mpg.[2] However, the total increase in a manufacturer's average fuel economy rating due to dual-fueled vehicles cannot exceed 1.2mpg.[28] Section 32906 reduces the increase due to dual-fueled vehicles to 0 through 2020. Electric vehicles are also incentivized by the 0.15 fuel divisor, but are not subject to the 1.2 mpg cap like dual-fuel vehicles." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
This is plausible, but frankly (and no disrespect to you or your sources) I'm dubious without seeing it worked out in detail by a domain expert. It's very easy to armchair quarterback this sort of thing and leave out important factors. To begin with, it's important to indicate which sort(s) of hybrid we're talking about (e.g. "full", like a Prius, or plug-in, like the Chevy Volt, though other variants exist).
Certainly hybrids get by on much smaller batteries than an EV, and require much less of certain raw materials. As SCPantera notes, they are also lighter, which reduces emissions from tire wear. And adoption is easier, as there's no range anxiety and the cost is generally still lower (I think?). On the other hand, they are more complex and require more maintenance.
The big issue, of course, is that hybrids still emit a considerable amount of CO₂. For that last reason, they are not a path to zero emissions, at best they are a short-term optimization while we scale up the battery supply chain. However, that short-term optimization likely slows the transition to fully electric vehicles, and complicates the political / regulatory story. Conceivably, if hybrids get good enough, we get caught in a path dependency where there's less pressure to build out charging infrastructure, the political will to push for full EVs wanes, we never get past hybrids, and so we're permanently stuck with automotive emissions, the need to maintain gasoline distribution infrastructure, etc.
Basically I have a pretty negative reaction to the confident assertion that the focus on EVs is a "tragedy", without any public sources to back that up.
This is true only in the short term, though, right?
So if the entire car fleet of the world were EV, then every $ spent on decarbonizing the electric grid has massive returns to global decarbonization. But if the entire fleet is still using gas because they are all hybrids, the equation is different.
I think the question is which is better?
1a. Port all gas vehicles to hybrids
2a. Port all hybrids to EVs
vs.
1b. Port all gas vehicles to EVs, skip step 2.
Note that even if 1b is more expensive than 1a, it may be better. Also note that 1b means the returns to efficiency improvements in batteries, raw materials, etc for building EVs are greater, whereas Hybrids have a lot less low-hanging fruit to chase in this regard.
One followup thought here, simply because some relevant new (-to-me) data just popped up in my inbox: https://rmi.org/press-release/evs-to-surpass-two-thirds-of-global-car-sales-by-2030-putting-at-risk-nearly-half-of-oil-demand-new-research-finds. Briefly, "new analysis by" the Rocky Mountain Institute projects that over 2/3 of global car sales in 2030 will be EVs. If this bears out, then the question of whether constrained inputs would be better devoted to hybrids instead of EVs will soon become moot, as in that scenario, the inputs are no longer meaningfully constrained.
Complicated? Definitely. But they still win (compared to pure electric vehicles) because batteries are so expensive. And they're competitive (compared to ICE vehicles) because electricity is cheaper and electric motors are much more efficient at handling the constant acceleration and deceleration needed for intra-city driving.
I'm not actually sure they are that much cheaper. The difference in price between the Kia Nero EV and the Kia Nero plug-in hybrid is ~$5500 for the base model of each.
Even for people who almost never go further than the 33 miles of battery range in a day (after which fuel costs would pretty quickly start to eat into that difference), my guess is that lifetime maintenance costs for the increased complexity would start to come into play.
I picked this model because the EV was one that was in my price range/feature set when I was car shopping earlier this year (I went with a Kona EV). In my use case, we are driving close to double the battery range in an average day. Taking Kias combined mileage numbers at face value, at current fuel prices in my area, about 20% of that monthly payment difference evaporates for me.
While I may not be a median consumer, I don't think I'm that extreme of an outlier, to the point where I think that the value proposition of PHEVs is at the very least ambiguous relative to EVs.
Also curious about this. Bought an EV earlier this year, and was considering both ICE vehicles and plug in hybrids based depending on price and meeting our needs. Ended up on pure EV because, given fuel savings it was cheaper than comparable ICE vehicles, and we regularly drive more (nearly double) the battery range of plug in hybrids.
Never having to go to a gas station is a _huge_ improvement to my QOL (larger than I would have predicted), and a plug in hybrid wouldn't have achieved this.
> Amazon shut SFP down because they said deliveries weren’t on time. But new info today shows sellers using SFP met the delivery requirement set up by Amazon more than 95% of the time.
Most anime recommendations I see cluster around the popular shonen adaptations, which can be fun but are explicitly targeted towards a younger demographic. If you want really interesting shows I'd recommend looking for either seinen adaptations, or late night otaku/arthouse stuff like what you get on noitaminA. You didn't ask, but I love playing this game so I'm going to offer up some options anyway:
Just watch the whole comments section turn into anime recommendations. ;)
I don't know Zvi personally, but his blog is about AI and he seems to like science. I mentioned Death Note, which has a complicated battle-of-wits plot based around a single supernatural element, Steins;Gate, which has scientists and a complicated time travel plot, Fullmetal Alchemist, which has some fun worldbuilding and reasonably-rational fantasy based on Western protoscience, Serial Experiments Lain, which is about the Internet before it was really a thing, and Princess Jellyfish, which is only a few episodes but you get to see what Japanese nerds are into (for example, Romance of the Three Kingdoms instead of Tolkien, 'cause Japan copied China for culture instead of England like we did). He might also like to see the original Ghost in the Shell--supposedly the Wachowskis saw it and went, "We wanna do that for real." There's also Ergo Proxy, which has androids and humans interacting in a last bastion in a postapocalyptic future.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica deconstructs a bunch of magical-girl anime tropes he hasn't seen.
I feel like if he's describing standard recs as boring, entry level stuff is a mistake. Better to skip ahead to the weird and esoteric.
The deconstruction in Madoka is the least important part, honestly. It's just there as otakubait. The meat of it is the ruminations on Goethe's Faustus.
I'll toss in "Macross Plus" for the AI antagonist (the "M3GAN" speculation applies here too, but 20 years earlier), as well as the spectacular visuals and music, and combining "The Right Stuff" and "Top Gun" with the melancholy atmosphere of Jane Austen's "Persuasion". No familiarity with the rest of the franchise is necessary. And it's short, too - either a 4 episode miniseries or a movie.
"If you are surprised that new findings say the Eaterlin Paradox was bogus and money does indeed increase happiness indefinitely on a log scale, I am curious why."
Fundamentally, what they were measuring was "when prompted, do you self-report being happy" (or having been happy in last time period). I think it's quite natural this scales with income. When do you say you're happy/were happy this week? When you did a cool thing, when you didn't have a life crisis (specifically things like "needed new tires, but so broke this is a major crisis" kind of crisis), when work doesn't suck.
The more money you make you are definitely decreasing "things solved by having a few K cash on hand".
The more money you make you are also doing (probably) more "cool" things per period, vacations/buying new toys/fancy dinners.
People making certain wages have selected into jobs they actually enjoy, or at least don't actively hate every minute of as well (see note later).
So of course when you ask people these kinds of questions the answers scale with income.
However, I strongly suspect if you measure some kind of "minute-by-minute" happiness %, you would find that it caps out at some kind of upper-middle class life where you more-or-less tolerate your job, have income to cover sudden expenses and are otherwise free from the kind of pressures it takes to be a doctor/start up person/lawyer/software engineer.
Going beyond that level (80k back-in-they-day, 130k now) requires sacrificing more minutes to unhappiness (grinding away hour 50-60 at work), even if your reported happiness (b/c of lack of sudden financial emergencies, increased toy purchases, fancy dinners) increases.
Now, I also back this theory up (following up on "see note") by recalling rates of depressing, substance abuse, suicide by various professions/jobs. Famously dentists, for example, despite having jobs that should rate super highly on many happiness factors have insane suicide rates and are wildly depressed. Lawyers and binge drinking/alcoholism. Doctors and being wrecked by "Cat's in the Cradle".
Rates of many "not happy" proxies increase in higher paying professions, but they are the kind of not happy proxies that might not be captured by this research. People taking Xanax daily might report happy on this metric, but I'd not rate that life as happy.
Now, there is another aspect to my gut check response and that is I could go back to doing a job I hated and wildly increase over what I make now. I could agree to go from 40-45 hours per week to 60-65 hours per week and probably doubly my yearly take home. This would certainly increase the quality of my toys, but I'd go from being basically happy/content something like 90-95% of my waking moments to miserable 8-12 hours per day. I suspect this is true for a lot of people. Of course, maybe may situation so strongly colors my perception here that I'm wrong.
Also, as a final note, the effect size is sooooo incredibly small I'm wondering is some p-hacking/question tuning/silly nonsense is happiness here as well.
ah, but you're thinking in terms of the high end salary options - those are still fundamentally middle class! go up the income scale again, to the point where all the money is coming from equity and you are your own boss, and day to day stress might be much lower still - not having a boss is a big deal! More likely to be able to work form home, too, and we know that commutes are murder on happiness metrics
That's probably true, but from my limited exposure to people who don't live based off of income they were even more constantly aware of a "sprint all out to remain in place" approach to work. Would they describe their lives as happy? I think it's very likely, but (IMO) if you're consistently taking anti-anxiety meds/anti-depression meds it should be a rebuttable presumption that you're not happy/content with life (and, this is an educated guess, a lot of them are either on meds or constantly questing for this month's latest contentment breeding method, also proof despite their likelihood of saying they are happy all is not right in Denmark).
Commuting is the worst though. For various holiday purposes I drove ~12 hours across the last 4 days and it made me remember how much I freaking hated commuting.
"529 savings plans are technically owned by the account owner, not the beneficiary ... It still boggles my mind that we allow colleges to demand to know your assets and then perform ~100% asset confiscation"
I'm not wild about this, but I recently had an opportunity that involved looking at some of the admissions/fin aid stuff from the inside and what I can say (completely unsourced beyond "trust me"): If you didn't do this than rich people would game the system to an insane amount. I'm talking people with 400k/600k yearly income claiming to be broke on a letter of special circumstance and wanting FinAid money set aside for impoverished people and, b/c they are more capable of navigating documentation/paperwork issues, providing all the papers/documents to make it seem reasonable that a family making 600k/year can't string together SOME way of coming up with 40k/year for college.
This was absolutely routine, my gut check recollection is that a huge chunk of the sub stories received by the FinAid offices involved people making 2x/3x/4x median household incomes, acting like it is just impossible that they should have saved any money up, use retirement money, sell stocks, or in any way contribute to their child's education. Can't we see? They make 4k week and spend 4k week (and have for 20 years) it's just not possible to help out at this time (or anytime in the last 20 years, or in the future).
Maybe this isn't the right way to fix this problem, but if you relax these rules you're going to be using endowment funds/FinAid budgets to by for Johnny Q. FancyPants the Third b/c his parents understand the formulas and will exactly spend themselves up to their "we're almost completely broke on a monthly cash flow level". The current fix is harsh, and is probably way too harsh on middle class parents and their retirement savings, but there are almost 20m people in college right now, and I'd guess maybe 2-3m of them would be able to wildly abuse a change preventing this kind of holistic financial analysis.
However, I think potential road to a fix lies in looking at (say) total assets + Social Security Income Years and putting together a sliding scale of "how much we care about your complaints" in a way that doesn't allow asset rich/income poor people to game the system, nor allows "net zero net worth, but 3x median income/year" people to have free college b/c they have elected to never save money in the last 30 years.
I'll conclude with 3 examples of the kind of logic I think we have to prevent from being accepted:
1. We own 5 luxury cars, 2 houses and have crazy well funded 401k/IRA/Roth IRAs, but our actual monthly income is through an LLC, so we can select how much money we make vs let sit in our capital account at the LLC. It's unfair expecting us "not to invest in our business" (i.e. grow the capital account b/c you simply draw down the amount needed to pay your bills) when our kid goes to college.
2. We make 1m+ per year, but once we pay our mega-mortgage, marina fees and car loans we have nothing left over. We could easily pay for college by swapping from very-lux cars to merely regular luxury cars, but this is an intolerable oppression on our standard of living.
3. Our entire networth is bound up in an incredibly successful business, but the income is very average (apart from the ability to take loans against the business, take loans against our ownership interest in the business or sell stock in it). All of these options for increasing cash flow (or simply giving ourselves raises) are "requiring us to sell or mortgage our family business merely to attend an Ivy League school". Why don't we (networth 100m+) qualify for financial aid because our yearly income is actually very meagre?
I'm sorry, the rule isn't great, but after months of reading letters like this I can't get behind a change that lets "these people" game the system.
You're definitionally talking about the top <1% here, and notably less than that in your LLC and 1M examples, more like .01%.
It's not worth punishing the 99%+ of the rest of people with 100% confiscation and intrusiveness just to make sure some .01% rich folks aren't able to get needs-based scholarships, that's an edge case that literally doesn't matter.
Weighed against the absolutely massive bureaucracy and intrusiveness FAFSA encompasses, this is possibly the worst possible justification. I don't know how many employees and bureaucrats are involved in FAFSA on the federal and individual school ends, but I bet it's in the hundreds of millions annually, all to avoid a .01% chance of giving some kid $50k they don't "deserve." This doesn't even mention the intrusiveness and time wasted and headaches and stress incurred on the student and parent end, which affects basically 100% of college students / parents.
The EV versus the costs is absolutely ridiculous, and FAFSA should die a well-deserved fiery death.
Children of elites are well represented at elites universities. I'd guess lower bound 100k, upper bound 1m, students that could be charitable described as "kids of people with enough income/money/net worth that I'll be damned if we're paying for their college".
The broader issue, though, is that our system of paying for college (near-infinite loans handed out regardless of projected ability to re-pay, but paid to the school as-you-go with no cost to the school if your degree never gets you a job and with largely need-blind admissions) is insane. FAFSA dies when we reform the college loan market.
In the meantime I'd suggest something along the lines of: you can opt-out of FAFSA by electing to receive 0 Fin Aid OR by providing your parent/legal guardians line 9 + projected SSN payment amount. If SSN+line 9 is under some amount, no need to FAFSA. If over some amount, you must FAFSA to receive FinAid
Set the amounts fairly generously, enough that most people won't have to FAFSA, but that will stop most abuses. The current system is terrible though, and we are asking for way too much info from way too many people that will either instantly qualify for max subsidized loans or will never receive any help.
Crumbl has a product called Crumbl Water which I very much like to think is just filtered water with chunks of cookie floating in it.
I’ve been playing a bunch of Exoprimal lately, which I can recommend if you’re looking for media with AI-trying-to-destroy-the-world premises. This one’s got a lot of goofy Japanese spin though: AI given goal of “make the best power suit”, does it by ripping open holes in spacetime and pulling dinosaurs into major population centers for skirmish training data, and also using their blood as a plot McGuffin power source.
> Zvi Mowshowitz hereby says: There are things in our society that you cannot say.
IMO Level 1 isn't very meaningful because the above statement could be repeated in pretty much any country, including Russia and China. You *probably* can't say it in North Korea but otherwise I'm not sure if there's a country where saying this would get you into trouble.
Using Sam Altman's definition corporate America is probably a Level 3 society and big parts of academia are a Level 4 society. But overall the classification system doesn't make much sense to me.
> Zvi Mowshowitz hereby says: There are things in our society that you cannot say.
You've conspicuously said a much weaker version of what Graham was challenging, omitting the "true things" part. Thus you've skirted the danger of someone asking for an example which, by Graham's construction, you'd be unable to provide.
This was then either an oversight or a sort of ironic validation that we are somewhere greater than 1 on his scale, such that you felt the need to soften the statement?
That's an interesting question, because "not allowed to say" is built into the problem. Asking for an example is defying even classifying our state as Level 1. If he could provide an example without major consequences, we would be Level 0. If he proved that we are in at least Level 1, he would take significant consequences for doing so, which we all understand is not worth it. That statement alone doesn't indicate we are *above* Level 1, since the consequences are built into Level 1 already.
That said, I think there are a lot of different levels in different parts of society, and some clearly do reach Level 3 and 4.
I'm going to try and explain the "problem" with Amazon's price matching being a penalty in the long term. This is going to require a table of numbers, so I apologise if the formatting is off.
So, when things are discounted, almost all of the time the discount is jointly funded by both the retailer and the supplier to the retailer.
For example, a product that is normally $10 gets a 20% discount - part of that $2 comes out of the retailer's margins, and part comes from the manufacturer giving the retailer a discount on the front end.
The trouble with price matches is that these are almost always set up in trading terms to be fully funded by the manufacturer, with the retailer fully recouping any cost.
This then drastically impacts the manufacturer's margin (and actually *increases* the retailer margin), disincentivising discounting elsewhere and creating some push to higher average prices faced by consumers.
For example, the below table shows the outcomes where a retailer sells a 4 pack of energy drinks for $10. They buy this from the manufacturer for $6. It costs the manufacturer $3.60 to make.
| | Base | 20% off (Mgn maintain) | 20% off (50/50) | 20% off (match) |
| Retail price | 10 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Mfr Price | 6 | 4.80 | 5 | 4 |
| Mfr Cost | 3.60 | 3.60 | 3.60 | 3.60 |
| Retail margin| 40% | 40% | 37.5% | 50% |
| Mfr margin | 40% | 25% | 28% | 10% |
There are a bunch of different ways of "splitting the discount", but the above are a couple of common ones.
As to the obvious criticism of "why discount in the first place, just always sell for the equilibrium price!": Discounting provides a release valve for issues that can pile up in inventory management - forecasting stock requirements is hard - and having an avenue to clear stocks is great from a supply chain perspective. There are also important roles for product discovery and enticing people into the top of the sales function and reducing barriers to trial. Furthermore, discounts provide an effective price discrimination function for selecting against wealthier customers who don't value the time used to research and "shop sales" or migrate between different retailers. Plus other reasons. The demand-supply equilibrium looks nice on a 2 dimensional chart, but it is hardly stable and some flexibility is needed to operate in the real world.
Now the obvious workaround is "always just hold a negotiated discount on Amazon at the same time as other platforms so you aren't fully funding the match", and certainly there are things like that happening, but it a) tends to piss off your other customers; b) diminishes the "price discrimination" effect noted above; and c) complicates the inventory clearing mechanism as the uncertainty of how much is going to be required in which retailer.
I'm not saying any of the above makes the FTC's case a sure winner, but it does make the "price matching can be bad, actually" look less crazy.
Edit: dangit, Substack destroyed my table formatting, as expected. Sorry!
Yeah, Substack will do that. That's a good explanation, TIL, but I still don't get why it's bad?
This sounds like 'I want to run sales outside Amazon which I fully pay for, and don't want to also run them at Amazon where I would also fully pay for them.' It seems highly reasonable for Amazon to demand it share in the sales? Yes, the other retailers would prefer it be one way but then so would Amazon.
I think you've missed that it's "I would like to run sales outside Amazon that I *don't* fully pay for, but doing so forces me to run sales on Amazon that I *do* fully pay for, eroding my margins more than I can afford, so I will just have to run fewer sales"
"Zvi Mowshowitz hereby says: There are things in our society that you cannot say."
This is an extremely different and much milder statement than what Paul Graham said, which is that there are things in our society THAT ARE TRUE, but you cannot say.
Critical Drinker posted a video yesterday re Batgirl. He spoke anonymously to people who worked on it. Apparently its test screenings weren’t bad (way better than Birds of Prey for instance) and it was more likely a victim of change of management at Warner and a string of previous flops that meant they were unwilling to continue to invest.
Birds of Prey wasn't even that bad. I can believe it, not like I ever saw the film for obvious reasons - but I could also believe, given how bad they have sometimes done with Batman, that they could royally mess up Batgirl too.
> It still boggles my mind that we allow colleges to demand to know your assets and then perform ~100% asset confiscation
Wait wait, so this is because ... colleges give so much financial aid / reduced-from-sticker prices based on financial need, that if you tell them your assets they will effectively simply raise their prices to a level that drains them all?
The whole point of the 'silence is violence' thing is to compel people who don't agree with you into saying they do, thus (a) making more people think your views are more popular than they are and (b) swaying people who think 'well, I don't really care but everyone thinks X, so I believe X too', as well as (c) convincing some people simply through forcing them to repeat stuff--there was a bit in Cialdini's Persuasion about how the Chinese brainwashed at least some captured Americans after the Korean War by getting them to write essays on Communism, etc. for better rations. (I am sure the US pulls this sort of thing too.)
If you don't want to go to bat for anime, I can definitely see that though. But if enough zoomers started dissenting, even on private channels (preferably IRL or through something like snapchat that destroys itself), the juggernaut can begin to be rolled back. Once you can conceive of dissent, the next step is to act on it, even if acting is too risky at the present time. I get the zoomers can have their lives ruined by someone showing up with receipts of something un-PC they said, and this isn't something prior generations had to deal with...but they can't get all of you, all of the time. The one thing young people never have (by definition) is historical perspective. The USSR looked invincible until it wasn't.
Also, as you get older and have more money cancellation is harder and there's less life left to ruin. And the fertility drop might wind up having its own unintended consequences--there's a reason most revolutionaries have been men with no children (as Malcolm Collins sadly discovered recently).
Back to anime...for my part I got into it late in life as I saw it as a way to resist giving money to woke Hollywood/TV companies. Crunchyroll is of course responsible for High Guardian Spice, but if they see I'm watching Rising of the Shield Hero, GATE, and Goblin Slayer, well, you know where your money's coming from.
If you're curious about it for non-ideological reasons (as is likely), I would look around at the various genres and try one of each. 'Anime' is really like 'American TV' or 'French movies'--it's a medium and a country of origin.
Based on what little I know of you, you might like Death Note (battle of wits with one supernatural element) or Steins;Gate (scientists doing sciency stuff with complicated time travel). The episode count also isn't over the top--you are never going to catch up on One Piece or Naruto, and that's OK. Serial Experiments Lain is about the Internet before it happened. Fullmetal Alchemist mixes fantasy, real-life protoscience, and scifi in an interesting way.
To help split up stuff you and your wife might like, the demographic categories are shonen ('young boy'--think DBZ), seinen ('young man'--think Death Note), shojo ('young girl'--think Sailor Moon), and josei ('young woman'--these are less well-known, but one I'm going to recommend is Princess Jellyfish, which has only 12 episodes and is about a bunch of young nerd women--sorry, 'onna-otaku' in Tokyo). Of course one of you might like something in the 'wrong' category, and that'll be great as you can both enjoy it!
I'm in no way opposed to anime as a genre or visual form, it's more that whatever selection mechanisms are being used don't result in things I want to watch. Could be because the selection is bad, could be because it isn't that great or that great a match.
Death Note started out fun but seemed to get rapidly less interesting around episodes 10-15 and I stopped caring enough to continue. For me the one I enjoyed most so far is probably One Punch Man but again after about a season I noticed I was getting bored. A bunch of standard recs just seem bad to me, straight up. My record with American TV is much better.
The 'silence is violence' thing is indeed a big power move, what I'm noting is that I disbelieve that the punishments for silence are that big a deal. No one is going to dig up you NOT saying something in the past. So that's my solution to places where I don't want to risk distraction or tail risk.
Perhaps 12 episodes is your limit. There are a few that are only 12 or 13 episodes long, you could look at those.
You don't have to be opposed to something for it not to be your thing. Maybe you didn't grow up with it, maybe it just doesn't speak to you because of the cultural differences. Not everyone has to like anime.
Does Einsmann actually say "I want buildings to make you anxious"? Or is that just how the twitter poster characterizes him? To take another quote from the photo that the tweeter didn't highlight:
"I am not saying that fear is good. I am trying to find a way to deal with that anxiety."
> • complaints that scientists perform the actual work before applying for the grant and then use the grant money for their next project
>
> • suggestions that we move from grants to prizes
This only seems contradictory if you've never applied for a peer-reviewed grant before. If everybody else has already done all the work for their proposal, you have to do the same, or you look like a slacker. In addition, this means you can only try things that you're sure will work. One might even wonder whether it's worthwhile to fund such research. (insert "that's the joke" meme here)
"The tragedy is our continued focus on the symbolically superior pure electrics over the vastly better for the planet hybrid vehicles."
Is there evidence / solid analysis that hybrids are better for the planet? I follow a lot of sources where I'd expect to hear about something like that, but have not, and would love to know about it.
From first principles, I can imagine reasons hybrids might pencil out better, but I can also imagine counterarguments, and I don't think it would be productive for me to bother listing them, what would be great is a source if you have one.
The reason is that the raw materials and battery size required for a hybrid are a fraction of those of an EV, so could be making far more hybrids instead of a smaller number of EVs, and this would result in much bigger gains while we are replacing traditional non-EVs. I modified the text to clarify that this was what I meant.
I don't have a particular source quickly handy but I've heard this explained a large number of times from sources I consider reliable on technical matters, and the quick math very much checked out.
Hybrids are better for now, but I expect that the simplicity of the design of the electric vehicle will mean that they will be better in the long run. As always, the market would be perfectly capable of working out the equilibrium if the government got out of the way.
I'm *generally* in favor of governments getting out of the way, but there are important exceptions. First of all, ICEs (including, to a lesser but still significant extent, hybrids) have negative externalities, such as CO₂ emissions. Say it with me: *the market does not address externalities*. Second of all, both gasoline cars and EVs involve various network effects, notably the energy distribution systems (gas stations vs. charging infrastructure). It's hard to jump-start a new distribution system, and for a system of this scale, it's difficult for the markets to summon the activation energy to transition from gasoline to electricity without a boost from the government.
(For another example, look at solar panels, which at this point are clearly a worthwhile technology but which needed decades of subsidies from various governments around the world to climb the learning curve high enough to compete with the extremely mature legacy electricity system.)
tl;dr: The reason Hybrids are dead is because they were straight murdered by CAFE regulations. It had nothing to do with the tech, the cost or sanity. CAFE standards were re-written to cap the effect of Hybrids on your fleet MPG, but not cap the benefit of EVs and the formula shafts Hybrids vs their RW performance.
Longer Version: CAFE standards exist so that manufacturers are forced to sell a bunch of fuel efficient small cars so they can also sell a few wildly profitable trucks and SUVS. In theory it was supposed to work like: You sold 5 cars, 10mpg, 20mpg, 30mpg, 40mpg, 50mpg = 30mpg fleet mileage (but fancier b/c you have to balance city and highway). In reality the calculation is set so that Hybrids look terrible against reality (and then the benefit to your fleet mpg is capped), and EVs look amazing. Since selling more Hybrid cars does not let you sell more trucks (laudably profitable trucks), but selling more EVs does, EVERY hybrid you sell (that could have been an EV or a super fuel efficient non-hybrid) actively prevent you from making money.
This proposed (then modified and eventually implemented) regulation meant that continuing to push the Hybrid revolution actively harmed your ability to sell profitable trucks/SUVS and make money. This is why companies strangled hybrid lines. Why do they exist at all? b/c of the cap selling a small # of them can still help a tiny bit. So you make just enough to harvest this benefit, but no more.
"For the fuel economy calculation for alternative fuel vehicles, a gallon of alternative fuel is deemed to contain 15% fuel (which is approximately the amount of gasoline in a gallon of E85)[26] as an incentive to develop alternative fuel vehicles.[27] The mileage for dual-fuel vehicles, such as E85 capable models and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, is computed as the average of its alternative fuel rating—divided by 0.15 (equal to multiplying by 6.666)—and its gasoline rating. Thus an E85-capable vehicle that gets 15 mpg on E-85 and 25 mpg on gasoline might logically be rated at 20 mpg. But in fact the average, for CAFE purposes, despite perhaps only one percent of the fuel used in E85-capable vehicles is actually E85, is computed as 100 mpg for E-85 and the standard 25 mpg for gasoline, or 62.5 mpg.[2] However, the total increase in a manufacturer's average fuel economy rating due to dual-fueled vehicles cannot exceed 1.2mpg.[28] Section 32906 reduces the increase due to dual-fueled vehicles to 0 through 2020. Electric vehicles are also incentivized by the 0.15 fuel divisor, but are not subject to the 1.2 mpg cap like dual-fuel vehicles." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
Hybrids are apparently better for emissions than electric cars too https://dynomight.substack.com/p/tires
This is plausible, but frankly (and no disrespect to you or your sources) I'm dubious without seeing it worked out in detail by a domain expert. It's very easy to armchair quarterback this sort of thing and leave out important factors. To begin with, it's important to indicate which sort(s) of hybrid we're talking about (e.g. "full", like a Prius, or plug-in, like the Chevy Volt, though other variants exist).
Certainly hybrids get by on much smaller batteries than an EV, and require much less of certain raw materials. As SCPantera notes, they are also lighter, which reduces emissions from tire wear. And adoption is easier, as there's no range anxiety and the cost is generally still lower (I think?). On the other hand, they are more complex and require more maintenance.
The big issue, of course, is that hybrids still emit a considerable amount of CO₂. For that last reason, they are not a path to zero emissions, at best they are a short-term optimization while we scale up the battery supply chain. However, that short-term optimization likely slows the transition to fully electric vehicles, and complicates the political / regulatory story. Conceivably, if hybrids get good enough, we get caught in a path dependency where there's less pressure to build out charging infrastructure, the political will to push for full EVs wanes, we never get past hybrids, and so we're permanently stuck with automotive emissions, the need to maintain gasoline distribution infrastructure, etc.
Basically I have a pretty negative reaction to the confident assertion that the focus on EVs is a "tragedy", without any public sources to back that up.
This is true only in the short term, though, right?
So if the entire car fleet of the world were EV, then every $ spent on decarbonizing the electric grid has massive returns to global decarbonization. But if the entire fleet is still using gas because they are all hybrids, the equation is different.
I think the question is which is better?
1a. Port all gas vehicles to hybrids
2a. Port all hybrids to EVs
vs.
1b. Port all gas vehicles to EVs, skip step 2.
Note that even if 1b is more expensive than 1a, it may be better. Also note that 1b means the returns to efficiency improvements in batteries, raw materials, etc for building EVs are greater, whereas Hybrids have a lot less low-hanging fruit to chase in this regard.
One followup thought here, simply because some relevant new (-to-me) data just popped up in my inbox: https://rmi.org/press-release/evs-to-surpass-two-thirds-of-global-car-sales-by-2030-putting-at-risk-nearly-half-of-oil-demand-new-research-finds. Briefly, "new analysis by" the Rocky Mountain Institute projects that over 2/3 of global car sales in 2030 will be EVs. If this bears out, then the question of whether constrained inputs would be better devoted to hybrids instead of EVs will soon become moot, as in that scenario, the inputs are no longer meaningfully constrained.
I second this. My prior is that hybrids are kind of overcomplicated dumpster fires, but I'd love to see what you're seeing and update accordingly.
Complicated? Definitely. But they still win (compared to pure electric vehicles) because batteries are so expensive. And they're competitive (compared to ICE vehicles) because electricity is cheaper and electric motors are much more efficient at handling the constant acceleration and deceleration needed for intra-city driving.
I'm not actually sure they are that much cheaper. The difference in price between the Kia Nero EV and the Kia Nero plug-in hybrid is ~$5500 for the base model of each.
Even for people who almost never go further than the 33 miles of battery range in a day (after which fuel costs would pretty quickly start to eat into that difference), my guess is that lifetime maintenance costs for the increased complexity would start to come into play.
I picked this model because the EV was one that was in my price range/feature set when I was car shopping earlier this year (I went with a Kona EV). In my use case, we are driving close to double the battery range in an average day. Taking Kias combined mileage numbers at face value, at current fuel prices in my area, about 20% of that monthly payment difference evaporates for me.
While I may not be a median consumer, I don't think I'm that extreme of an outlier, to the point where I think that the value proposition of PHEVs is at the very least ambiguous relative to EVs.
Also curious about this. Bought an EV earlier this year, and was considering both ICE vehicles and plug in hybrids based depending on price and meeting our needs. Ended up on pure EV because, given fuel savings it was cheaper than comparable ICE vehicles, and we regularly drive more (nearly double) the battery range of plug in hybrids.
Never having to go to a gas station is a _huge_ improvement to my QOL (larger than I would have predicted), and a plug in hybrid wouldn't have achieved this.
Do you only charge at night, plugged in at home or while at work?
Only at night at home.
When a finished film is canceled as a tax write-off, why can't the studio put it in the public domain?
> Amazon shut SFP down because they said deliveries weren’t on time. But new info today shows sellers using SFP met the delivery requirement set up by Amazon more than 95% of the time.
According to https://reason.com/2023/11/06/the-wildly-misleading-statistic-at-the-center-of-the-ftcs-antitrust-case-against-amazon/, this claim is wildly misleading. The delivery requirements that were met "95% of the time" were the ones which were committed to by the sellers. If a seller commits to delivering within 2 weeks, but Amazon Prime commits to delivering within 2 days, those are not comparable, even if the seller fulfils their commitment 95% of the time.
Ah, that is even stupider than I expected. Thanks.
Most anime recommendations I see cluster around the popular shonen adaptations, which can be fun but are explicitly targeted towards a younger demographic. If you want really interesting shows I'd recommend looking for either seinen adaptations, or late night otaku/arthouse stuff like what you get on noitaminA. You didn't ask, but I love playing this game so I'm going to offer up some options anyway:
Mononoke (2006)
Tatami Galaxy/The Night is Short, Walk On Girl
Woman Called Fujiko Mine
Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Sora Yori Mo Tooi Bassho
Just watch the whole comments section turn into anime recommendations. ;)
I don't know Zvi personally, but his blog is about AI and he seems to like science. I mentioned Death Note, which has a complicated battle-of-wits plot based around a single supernatural element, Steins;Gate, which has scientists and a complicated time travel plot, Fullmetal Alchemist, which has some fun worldbuilding and reasonably-rational fantasy based on Western protoscience, Serial Experiments Lain, which is about the Internet before it was really a thing, and Princess Jellyfish, which is only a few episodes but you get to see what Japanese nerds are into (for example, Romance of the Three Kingdoms instead of Tolkien, 'cause Japan copied China for culture instead of England like we did). He might also like to see the original Ghost in the Shell--supposedly the Wachowskis saw it and went, "We wanna do that for real." There's also Ergo Proxy, which has androids and humans interacting in a last bastion in a postapocalyptic future.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica deconstructs a bunch of magical-girl anime tropes he hasn't seen.
I feel like if he's describing standard recs as boring, entry level stuff is a mistake. Better to skip ahead to the weird and esoteric.
The deconstruction in Madoka is the least important part, honestly. It's just there as otakubait. The meat of it is the ruminations on Goethe's Faustus.
I'll toss in "Macross Plus" for the AI antagonist (the "M3GAN" speculation applies here too, but 20 years earlier), as well as the spectacular visuals and music, and combining "The Right Stuff" and "Top Gun" with the melancholy atmosphere of Jane Austen's "Persuasion". No familiarity with the rest of the franchise is necessary. And it's short, too - either a 4 episode miniseries or a movie.
"If you are surprised that new findings say the Eaterlin Paradox was bogus and money does indeed increase happiness indefinitely on a log scale, I am curious why."
Fundamentally, what they were measuring was "when prompted, do you self-report being happy" (or having been happy in last time period). I think it's quite natural this scales with income. When do you say you're happy/were happy this week? When you did a cool thing, when you didn't have a life crisis (specifically things like "needed new tires, but so broke this is a major crisis" kind of crisis), when work doesn't suck.
The more money you make you are definitely decreasing "things solved by having a few K cash on hand".
The more money you make you are also doing (probably) more "cool" things per period, vacations/buying new toys/fancy dinners.
People making certain wages have selected into jobs they actually enjoy, or at least don't actively hate every minute of as well (see note later).
So of course when you ask people these kinds of questions the answers scale with income.
However, I strongly suspect if you measure some kind of "minute-by-minute" happiness %, you would find that it caps out at some kind of upper-middle class life where you more-or-less tolerate your job, have income to cover sudden expenses and are otherwise free from the kind of pressures it takes to be a doctor/start up person/lawyer/software engineer.
Going beyond that level (80k back-in-they-day, 130k now) requires sacrificing more minutes to unhappiness (grinding away hour 50-60 at work), even if your reported happiness (b/c of lack of sudden financial emergencies, increased toy purchases, fancy dinners) increases.
Now, I also back this theory up (following up on "see note") by recalling rates of depressing, substance abuse, suicide by various professions/jobs. Famously dentists, for example, despite having jobs that should rate super highly on many happiness factors have insane suicide rates and are wildly depressed. Lawyers and binge drinking/alcoholism. Doctors and being wrecked by "Cat's in the Cradle".
Rates of many "not happy" proxies increase in higher paying professions, but they are the kind of not happy proxies that might not be captured by this research. People taking Xanax daily might report happy on this metric, but I'd not rate that life as happy.
Now, there is another aspect to my gut check response and that is I could go back to doing a job I hated and wildly increase over what I make now. I could agree to go from 40-45 hours per week to 60-65 hours per week and probably doubly my yearly take home. This would certainly increase the quality of my toys, but I'd go from being basically happy/content something like 90-95% of my waking moments to miserable 8-12 hours per day. I suspect this is true for a lot of people. Of course, maybe may situation so strongly colors my perception here that I'm wrong.
Also, as a final note, the effect size is sooooo incredibly small I'm wondering is some p-hacking/question tuning/silly nonsense is happiness here as well.
ah, but you're thinking in terms of the high end salary options - those are still fundamentally middle class! go up the income scale again, to the point where all the money is coming from equity and you are your own boss, and day to day stress might be much lower still - not having a boss is a big deal! More likely to be able to work form home, too, and we know that commutes are murder on happiness metrics
That's probably true, but from my limited exposure to people who don't live based off of income they were even more constantly aware of a "sprint all out to remain in place" approach to work. Would they describe their lives as happy? I think it's very likely, but (IMO) if you're consistently taking anti-anxiety meds/anti-depression meds it should be a rebuttable presumption that you're not happy/content with life (and, this is an educated guess, a lot of them are either on meds or constantly questing for this month's latest contentment breeding method, also proof despite their likelihood of saying they are happy all is not right in Denmark).
Commuting is the worst though. For various holiday purposes I drove ~12 hours across the last 4 days and it made me remember how much I freaking hated commuting.
"529 savings plans are technically owned by the account owner, not the beneficiary ... It still boggles my mind that we allow colleges to demand to know your assets and then perform ~100% asset confiscation"
I'm not wild about this, but I recently had an opportunity that involved looking at some of the admissions/fin aid stuff from the inside and what I can say (completely unsourced beyond "trust me"): If you didn't do this than rich people would game the system to an insane amount. I'm talking people with 400k/600k yearly income claiming to be broke on a letter of special circumstance and wanting FinAid money set aside for impoverished people and, b/c they are more capable of navigating documentation/paperwork issues, providing all the papers/documents to make it seem reasonable that a family making 600k/year can't string together SOME way of coming up with 40k/year for college.
This was absolutely routine, my gut check recollection is that a huge chunk of the sub stories received by the FinAid offices involved people making 2x/3x/4x median household incomes, acting like it is just impossible that they should have saved any money up, use retirement money, sell stocks, or in any way contribute to their child's education. Can't we see? They make 4k week and spend 4k week (and have for 20 years) it's just not possible to help out at this time (or anytime in the last 20 years, or in the future).
Maybe this isn't the right way to fix this problem, but if you relax these rules you're going to be using endowment funds/FinAid budgets to by for Johnny Q. FancyPants the Third b/c his parents understand the formulas and will exactly spend themselves up to their "we're almost completely broke on a monthly cash flow level". The current fix is harsh, and is probably way too harsh on middle class parents and their retirement savings, but there are almost 20m people in college right now, and I'd guess maybe 2-3m of them would be able to wildly abuse a change preventing this kind of holistic financial analysis.
However, I think potential road to a fix lies in looking at (say) total assets + Social Security Income Years and putting together a sliding scale of "how much we care about your complaints" in a way that doesn't allow asset rich/income poor people to game the system, nor allows "net zero net worth, but 3x median income/year" people to have free college b/c they have elected to never save money in the last 30 years.
I'll conclude with 3 examples of the kind of logic I think we have to prevent from being accepted:
1. We own 5 luxury cars, 2 houses and have crazy well funded 401k/IRA/Roth IRAs, but our actual monthly income is through an LLC, so we can select how much money we make vs let sit in our capital account at the LLC. It's unfair expecting us "not to invest in our business" (i.e. grow the capital account b/c you simply draw down the amount needed to pay your bills) when our kid goes to college.
2. We make 1m+ per year, but once we pay our mega-mortgage, marina fees and car loans we have nothing left over. We could easily pay for college by swapping from very-lux cars to merely regular luxury cars, but this is an intolerable oppression on our standard of living.
3. Our entire networth is bound up in an incredibly successful business, but the income is very average (apart from the ability to take loans against the business, take loans against our ownership interest in the business or sell stock in it). All of these options for increasing cash flow (or simply giving ourselves raises) are "requiring us to sell or mortgage our family business merely to attend an Ivy League school". Why don't we (networth 100m+) qualify for financial aid because our yearly income is actually very meagre?
I'm sorry, the rule isn't great, but after months of reading letters like this I can't get behind a change that lets "these people" game the system.
You're definitionally talking about the top <1% here, and notably less than that in your LLC and 1M examples, more like .01%.
It's not worth punishing the 99%+ of the rest of people with 100% confiscation and intrusiveness just to make sure some .01% rich folks aren't able to get needs-based scholarships, that's an edge case that literally doesn't matter.
Weighed against the absolutely massive bureaucracy and intrusiveness FAFSA encompasses, this is possibly the worst possible justification. I don't know how many employees and bureaucrats are involved in FAFSA on the federal and individual school ends, but I bet it's in the hundreds of millions annually, all to avoid a .01% chance of giving some kid $50k they don't "deserve." This doesn't even mention the intrusiveness and time wasted and headaches and stress incurred on the student and parent end, which affects basically 100% of college students / parents.
The EV versus the costs is absolutely ridiculous, and FAFSA should die a well-deserved fiery death.
Children of elites are well represented at elites universities. I'd guess lower bound 100k, upper bound 1m, students that could be charitable described as "kids of people with enough income/money/net worth that I'll be damned if we're paying for their college".
The broader issue, though, is that our system of paying for college (near-infinite loans handed out regardless of projected ability to re-pay, but paid to the school as-you-go with no cost to the school if your degree never gets you a job and with largely need-blind admissions) is insane. FAFSA dies when we reform the college loan market.
In the meantime I'd suggest something along the lines of: you can opt-out of FAFSA by electing to receive 0 Fin Aid OR by providing your parent/legal guardians line 9 + projected SSN payment amount. If SSN+line 9 is under some amount, no need to FAFSA. If over some amount, you must FAFSA to receive FinAid
Set the amounts fairly generously, enough that most people won't have to FAFSA, but that will stop most abuses. The current system is terrible though, and we are asking for way too much info from way too many people that will either instantly qualify for max subsidized loans or will never receive any help.
Crumbl has a product called Crumbl Water which I very much like to think is just filtered water with chunks of cookie floating in it.
I’ve been playing a bunch of Exoprimal lately, which I can recommend if you’re looking for media with AI-trying-to-destroy-the-world premises. This one’s got a lot of goofy Japanese spin though: AI given goal of “make the best power suit”, does it by ripping open holes in spacetime and pulling dinosaurs into major population centers for skirmish training data, and also using their blood as a plot McGuffin power source.
> Zvi Mowshowitz hereby says: There are things in our society that you cannot say.
IMO Level 1 isn't very meaningful because the above statement could be repeated in pretty much any country, including Russia and China. You *probably* can't say it in North Korea but otherwise I'm not sure if there's a country where saying this would get you into trouble.
Using Sam Altman's definition corporate America is probably a Level 3 society and big parts of academia are a Level 4 society. But overall the classification system doesn't make much sense to me.
To be entirely fair to Altman the over/under on how long he thought about that Tweet is something like 1.5 minutes.
> Zvi Mowshowitz hereby says: There are things in our society that you cannot say.
You've conspicuously said a much weaker version of what Graham was challenging, omitting the "true things" part. Thus you've skirted the danger of someone asking for an example which, by Graham's construction, you'd be unable to provide.
This was then either an oversight or a sort of ironic validation that we are somewhere greater than 1 on his scale, such that you felt the need to soften the statement?
That's an interesting question, because "not allowed to say" is built into the problem. Asking for an example is defying even classifying our state as Level 1. If he could provide an example without major consequences, we would be Level 0. If he proved that we are in at least Level 1, he would take significant consequences for doing so, which we all understand is not worth it. That statement alone doesn't indicate we are *above* Level 1, since the consequences are built into Level 1 already.
That said, I think there are a lot of different levels in different parts of society, and some clearly do reach Level 3 and 4.
I'm going to try and explain the "problem" with Amazon's price matching being a penalty in the long term. This is going to require a table of numbers, so I apologise if the formatting is off.
So, when things are discounted, almost all of the time the discount is jointly funded by both the retailer and the supplier to the retailer.
For example, a product that is normally $10 gets a 20% discount - part of that $2 comes out of the retailer's margins, and part comes from the manufacturer giving the retailer a discount on the front end.
The trouble with price matches is that these are almost always set up in trading terms to be fully funded by the manufacturer, with the retailer fully recouping any cost.
This then drastically impacts the manufacturer's margin (and actually *increases* the retailer margin), disincentivising discounting elsewhere and creating some push to higher average prices faced by consumers.
For example, the below table shows the outcomes where a retailer sells a 4 pack of energy drinks for $10. They buy this from the manufacturer for $6. It costs the manufacturer $3.60 to make.
| | Base | 20% off (Mgn maintain) | 20% off (50/50) | 20% off (match) |
| Retail price | 10 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Mfr Price | 6 | 4.80 | 5 | 4 |
| Mfr Cost | 3.60 | 3.60 | 3.60 | 3.60 |
| Retail margin| 40% | 40% | 37.5% | 50% |
| Mfr margin | 40% | 25% | 28% | 10% |
There are a bunch of different ways of "splitting the discount", but the above are a couple of common ones.
As to the obvious criticism of "why discount in the first place, just always sell for the equilibrium price!": Discounting provides a release valve for issues that can pile up in inventory management - forecasting stock requirements is hard - and having an avenue to clear stocks is great from a supply chain perspective. There are also important roles for product discovery and enticing people into the top of the sales function and reducing barriers to trial. Furthermore, discounts provide an effective price discrimination function for selecting against wealthier customers who don't value the time used to research and "shop sales" or migrate between different retailers. Plus other reasons. The demand-supply equilibrium looks nice on a 2 dimensional chart, but it is hardly stable and some flexibility is needed to operate in the real world.
Now the obvious workaround is "always just hold a negotiated discount on Amazon at the same time as other platforms so you aren't fully funding the match", and certainly there are things like that happening, but it a) tends to piss off your other customers; b) diminishes the "price discrimination" effect noted above; and c) complicates the inventory clearing mechanism as the uncertainty of how much is going to be required in which retailer.
I'm not saying any of the above makes the FTC's case a sure winner, but it does make the "price matching can be bad, actually" look less crazy.
Edit: dangit, Substack destroyed my table formatting, as expected. Sorry!
Yeah, Substack will do that. That's a good explanation, TIL, but I still don't get why it's bad?
This sounds like 'I want to run sales outside Amazon which I fully pay for, and don't want to also run them at Amazon where I would also fully pay for them.' It seems highly reasonable for Amazon to demand it share in the sales? Yes, the other retailers would prefer it be one way but then so would Amazon.
I think you've missed that it's "I would like to run sales outside Amazon that I *don't* fully pay for, but doing so forces me to run sales on Amazon that I *do* fully pay for, eroding my margins more than I can afford, so I will just have to run fewer sales"
"Zvi Mowshowitz hereby says: There are things in our society that you cannot say."
This is an extremely different and much milder statement than what Paul Graham said, which is that there are things in our society THAT ARE TRUE, but you cannot say.
Oh, sorry, I hereby also say that extra part and will edit the statement. Unintentional lapse.
Critical Drinker posted a video yesterday re Batgirl. He spoke anonymously to people who worked on it. Apparently its test screenings weren’t bad (way better than Birds of Prey for instance) and it was more likely a victim of change of management at Warner and a string of previous flops that meant they were unwilling to continue to invest.
Birds of Prey wasn't even that bad. I can believe it, not like I ever saw the film for obvious reasons - but I could also believe, given how bad they have sometimes done with Batman, that they could royally mess up Batgirl too.
> It still boggles my mind that we allow colleges to demand to know your assets and then perform ~100% asset confiscation
Wait wait, so this is because ... colleges give so much financial aid / reduced-from-sticker prices based on financial need, that if you tell them your assets they will effectively simply raise their prices to a level that drains them all?
Community Note: Yes.
The whole point of the 'silence is violence' thing is to compel people who don't agree with you into saying they do, thus (a) making more people think your views are more popular than they are and (b) swaying people who think 'well, I don't really care but everyone thinks X, so I believe X too', as well as (c) convincing some people simply through forcing them to repeat stuff--there was a bit in Cialdini's Persuasion about how the Chinese brainwashed at least some captured Americans after the Korean War by getting them to write essays on Communism, etc. for better rations. (I am sure the US pulls this sort of thing too.)
If you don't want to go to bat for anime, I can definitely see that though. But if enough zoomers started dissenting, even on private channels (preferably IRL or through something like snapchat that destroys itself), the juggernaut can begin to be rolled back. Once you can conceive of dissent, the next step is to act on it, even if acting is too risky at the present time. I get the zoomers can have their lives ruined by someone showing up with receipts of something un-PC they said, and this isn't something prior generations had to deal with...but they can't get all of you, all of the time. The one thing young people never have (by definition) is historical perspective. The USSR looked invincible until it wasn't.
Also, as you get older and have more money cancellation is harder and there's less life left to ruin. And the fertility drop might wind up having its own unintended consequences--there's a reason most revolutionaries have been men with no children (as Malcolm Collins sadly discovered recently).
Back to anime...for my part I got into it late in life as I saw it as a way to resist giving money to woke Hollywood/TV companies. Crunchyroll is of course responsible for High Guardian Spice, but if they see I'm watching Rising of the Shield Hero, GATE, and Goblin Slayer, well, you know where your money's coming from.
If you're curious about it for non-ideological reasons (as is likely), I would look around at the various genres and try one of each. 'Anime' is really like 'American TV' or 'French movies'--it's a medium and a country of origin.
The anime subreddit has a huge list by genre.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F0w1v880jtq661.png
Based on what little I know of you, you might like Death Note (battle of wits with one supernatural element) or Steins;Gate (scientists doing sciency stuff with complicated time travel). The episode count also isn't over the top--you are never going to catch up on One Piece or Naruto, and that's OK. Serial Experiments Lain is about the Internet before it happened. Fullmetal Alchemist mixes fantasy, real-life protoscience, and scifi in an interesting way.
To help split up stuff you and your wife might like, the demographic categories are shonen ('young boy'--think DBZ), seinen ('young man'--think Death Note), shojo ('young girl'--think Sailor Moon), and josei ('young woman'--these are less well-known, but one I'm going to recommend is Princess Jellyfish, which has only 12 episodes and is about a bunch of young nerd women--sorry, 'onna-otaku' in Tokyo). Of course one of you might like something in the 'wrong' category, and that'll be great as you can both enjoy it!
I'm in no way opposed to anime as a genre or visual form, it's more that whatever selection mechanisms are being used don't result in things I want to watch. Could be because the selection is bad, could be because it isn't that great or that great a match.
Death Note started out fun but seemed to get rapidly less interesting around episodes 10-15 and I stopped caring enough to continue. For me the one I enjoyed most so far is probably One Punch Man but again after about a season I noticed I was getting bored. A bunch of standard recs just seem bad to me, straight up. My record with American TV is much better.
The 'silence is violence' thing is indeed a big power move, what I'm noting is that I disbelieve that the punishments for silence are that big a deal. No one is going to dig up you NOT saying something in the past. So that's my solution to places where I don't want to risk distraction or tail risk.
Perhaps 12 episodes is your limit. There are a few that are only 12 or 13 episodes long, you could look at those.
You don't have to be opposed to something for it not to be your thing. Maybe you didn't grow up with it, maybe it just doesn't speak to you because of the cultural differences. Not everyone has to like anime.
Makes sense about the silence thing.
Does Einsmann actually say "I want buildings to make you anxious"? Or is that just how the twitter poster characterizes him? To take another quote from the photo that the tweeter didn't highlight:
"I am not saying that fear is good. I am trying to find a way to deal with that anxiety."
> Daniel Eth: Also we see both:
>
> • complaints that scientists perform the actual work before applying for the grant and then use the grant money for their next project
>
> • suggestions that we move from grants to prizes
This only seems contradictory if you've never applied for a peer-reviewed grant before. If everybody else has already done all the work for their proposal, you have to do the same, or you look like a slacker. In addition, this means you can only try things that you're sure will work. One might even wonder whether it's worthwhile to fund such research. (insert "that's the joke" meme here)