2,180 karma · joined May 11, 2015
Assuming it's that simple, do you have an alternate theory as to why e-readers in this range are not more common?
I'm curious how much you think an e-reader should cost?
Let's say the BOM for a bargain-bin e-reader is ~$65: e-ink display (~$25), mainboard (~$15), touchscreen and/or buttons (~$7), radios (~$3), battery (~$3), case (~$3), assembly (~$6), packaging (~$3). Forget about a charging cable. Then you've got to iron out the drivers and software, provide support, handle returns (which will be higher if you cheap out on materials) and turn a profit (assuming you're not Amazon). Let's say you charge ~1.5x BOM, now your product is ~$98.
Maybe you "borrow" your software and hardware designs from a competitor. Maybe you're willing to continuously change your company name so you can purchase low-quality parts without having to accept returns. Maybe you ask suppliers for a discount because you just know you're going to have enormous economies of scale and you're somehow more convincing than every other company (that isn't Amazon) asking for the same discount.
You do all of the above so you can sell your new e-reader for the insanely low price of $80. Will you move enough units for all that to be worth it? Are there really that many customers who would buy your $80 no-name e-reader instead of a second-hand Kindle?
I agree it's a problem across all of science, but AI seems to attract more than it's fair share of researchers seeking fame and fortune. Exaggerated claims and cherry-picking data seem even more extreme in my limited experience, and even responsible researchers end up exaggerating a bit to try and compete.
In my experiences, companies can afford to care about good software if they have extreme demands (e.g. military, finance) or amortize over very long timeframes (e.g. privately owned). It's rare for consumer products to fall into either of these categories.
This is a fair question.
For one thing, the US dominance in science has allowed us to dominate many profitable products and new industries that were derived from that science. I'm not sure I believe the commonly-given estimate that every $1 spent on basic research yields $8-20 in economic return, but I do believe that the return has been positive.
If other countries become the preferred target for the best and the brightest scientists then the US is unlikely to continue to dominate new research-dependent industries as we did for the last ~4 generations.
I don't necessarily think this is bad for the world -- concentrating too much wealth, talent, and power in one country has had corrosive effects. But this decline may ultimately be bad for the average US resident, even if their taxes go down.
> other than funneling billions to arms industry?
As someone who has worked on several military research projects, for better or worse my sense so far is that US military research budgets will be the only ones to come out of this administration largely unscathed.
Typically such a product either doesn't have sufficient UX attention, or it has black-hat UX folks.
Optimally toolkits and browsers should have handled this since they know the layout dependencies. If an element is still loading and it doesn't have fixed dimensions then all elements whose positions are dependent on that element should not be shown.
In the latter case, you could quietly disable buttons after a layout shift, but this can cause problems when users attempt to interact with an onscreen element only to have it mysteriously ignore them. You could visually indicate the disabled state for a few hundred milliseconds, but this would appear as flicker. If you want to be very clever you could pass a tap/click to the click target that was at that location a few tens/hundreds of milliseconds prior, but now you've got to pick a cutoff based on average human response times which may be too much for some and tool little for others. That also wouldn't help with non-click interactions such as simply attempting to read content -- while not as severe, trying to read a label that suddenly moves can be almost as frustrating. Some products attempt to pause layout shifts that might impact an element that the user is about to interact with, but while this is possible with a mouse cursor to indicate intent it can be harder to predict on mobile.
Some of these ideas are even used in cases where a layout shift is necessary such as in a livestream with interactive elements. However, the general consensus is to use content placeholders for late-loading content and avoid rendering visible elements, especially interactive ones, until you have high confidence that they will not continue to move. That's why most browsers provide penalties for websites with "cumulative layout shift", e.g. see https://web.dev/articles/cls
Why the left lane? I used to live in NYC and when traffic was light enough to actually drive the speed limit I generally stuck to the right lane to avoid inconveniencing other people who wanted to drive faster. Wouldn't people with court-mandated speed limiters simply stick to the right lane?
> Any attempt to force people to drive slower than the 85th percentile speed poses a danger to others on the road.
Perhaps they'd need the "ATTENTION: This vehicle's speed is monitored by GPS" stickers that I occasionally see on fleet trucks in the city.
Regardless, this seems to be an objection to selective enforcement methods, right? For example, if all drivers are subject to the same constraints (whether speed cameras, universal speed limiters, road diet, etc) then not only would this not increase discrepancies in speed, but it would likely decrease them. Does this mean you would support such measures?
> Doing draconian things that are ineffective has an opportunity cost
Agreed. But that applies to ineffective things whether or not they are draconian.
I do agree that stoplight cameras have mixed results -- typically reducing serious T-bone collisions while increasing rear-end collisions -- but to be clear, when I said "cameras" I was referring to speed cameras, not red-light cameras. On the topic of NYS, their school zone speed cameras seem to have been effective at reducing injuries caused by drivers in school zones.
> As long as the distance between vehicles remains non-zero, collisions are avoided. Efforts really should be focused on maximizing the distance between vehicles, rather than on minimizing the speed at which they travel.
Due to human reaction times and the physical limitations of braking, maintaining a time between vehicles is more relevant than distance. That's why defensive driving courses teach you to keep about three seconds between your car and the car in front of you, more if you're hauling a trailer. If you're driving at 8mph that's only about 10ft, but at 80mph that's 100ft. So while I agree that increasing distance is useful, the distance necessary to ensure safe operation is a direct function of speed.
I heard of a few cases in which so many drivers were already breaking the speed limit on an overengineered highway that raising the speed limit did not increase collisions e.g. in Michigan, Texas, British Columbia. But otherwise the data is pretty clear that making people drive more slowly improves safety.
Can you explain how you think encouraging such a culture would be at odds with measures like cameras or speed limiters? I'm also unsure why you think it's "misguided" to expect those technologies to help reduce behaviors like illegal speeding.
I don't see them at odds myself, but if you are correct then I would just support the draconian measures alone. I have low confidence that such a broken driving culture can be fixed and that American drivers can be trusted to follow the rules and stop killing so many people.
However, in the interim I'd support draconian measures (e.g. cameras, speed limiters, more effective consequences) until Americans demonstrate empirically that they are capable of operating dangerous equipment with some degree of competence.
I totally get that some people's use-cases necessitate 300+ mile range, touchscreens, infotainment, DIN slots, four passengers plus a bunch of sheets of plywood, whatever. But why complain about the existence of a truck that doesn't meet your requirements if so many existing electric trucks already meet all of those requirements? Isn't it OK if other people want something different?
I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.
I don't think so. I used an extreme example to make the effect obvious, but a 20% tax will have a similar effect at a smaller magnitude.
> Products would just cost a little more
The point is that this increase is not uniform. Consumer product advertising budgets already vary by an order of magnitude from less than 5% of sales revenue to more than 25%. This already results in price disparities e.g. between white-label products and brand-name products. Therefore, brand-name products for which advertising is a nontrivial fraction of their budget will experience an increase that is an order-of-magnitude larger than generic products. This will alter consumer purchasing decisions and force companies to respond.
Every brand considers advertising ROI carefully e.g. at what point will an extra dollar spent on advertising yield less than an extra dollar of income. Taxing ads simply shifts this equilibrium point.
Advertising spend is elastic, even for consumer products. Companies don't commit to a certain level of advertising regardless of cost, they carefully evaluate the ROI of each advertising buy. The primary purpose of the proposal to increase the cost of ads is to reduce the ROI of advertising and therefore reduce the amount of ads across the board.
For example, Coca-Cola has competitors that spend significantly less on advertisements, which is a major reason store brand cola often costs less. Same with Dove, I see far fewer ads for store brand soap or brands like Dr Bronners. Same with fast-food chains like McDonalds which spends about an order of magnitude more on ads than many of their competitors.
Brands that advertise heavily typically charge a premium to cover the cost of their advertisements and many customers are willing to pay more for heavily-advertised products. But consumer preference for advertised brands is not unbounded. If Dove soap costs 10x more than store brand soap to cover the increasing cost of their advertising budget then more consumers will switch to store brand soap no matter how many Dove commercials they see. Therefore, Dove must calibrate their advertising budget to balance the cost of advertisements against the expected premium they can charge over their less-advertised competitors.
(Whereas something like a tariff on raw materials would affect companies more broadly -- it's a lot easier for a car company to run half as many ads than to make a car with half as much aluminum.)
> the main effect would be to lower advertising prices, not reduce advertising space.
Edited to note that the prices charged by advertising platforms cannot go lower than the cost to deliver the ad. It costs money to run a search engine, create TV shows, or construct a billboard, so if it the price a company is willing to pay for an ad on that platform goes below a certain point then the advertisement is no longer economically viable and does in fact disappear. Possibly forcing the ad-supported service to adapt (e.g. paid video) or disappear entirely (e.g. billboards).
Equating "things I don't like" with "negative externalities" does not seem like a helpful framing for this discussion. I personally like traveling around the world and eating avocados, but they have substantial negative externalities. I personally dislike watching ballet or eating mushrooms, but they have minimal negative externalities.
Advertising may very well be something that the author dislikes AND that has negative externalities, but the point of a Pigovian tax is solely to apply a price commensurate with negative externalities, not the dislike.
> you to some extent want that activity to occur otherwise you've got budget issues
Perhaps, which is why he mentions "freebates", and why I find revenue-neutral Pigovian proposals like the "carbon-fee-and-dividend" so compelling. The primary purpose is not revenue, it is to ensure the correct price on negative externalities so society can rely on a free market to solve tricky allocation problems.
That may be correct if every company spends similar amounts on traditional advertising, but this isn't true. In reality, such a tax would hit companies with larger traditional advertising budgets harder, and make some companies choose to shift some of their marketing spend to other communication methods.
For example, I work for a company that has a small advertising budget with no traditional advertising. We have a website, publish papers, and occasionally have a booth at a conference. Some of our competitors have significant advertising presence in trade magazines, social media, news sites, etc. Therefore this tax would impact them more than it would impact us.
More importantly for the purpose of the tax, it might shift our competitors' behavior. Ad buys that were of marginal utility to the company before would be even less cost-effective so either advertising platforms would lower their prices or the company would not buy the ad. In some cases this lower price would make it no longer profitable for the platform to display, eliminating the ad enteriely.
However, I'm skeptical that the US would adopt such a complex and pro-consumer regulatory framework. Perhaps once the EU goes through a few iterations we'll get a watered-down version here.
"IIHS research examining large U.S. cities with red light camera programs found significant reductions in citywide fatal red light crash rates (and fatal crash rates of all types) at intersections with traffic signals, including intersections that didn’t have a camera. ... Cities that discontinue their programs tend to feel the sting. The fatal crash rate was 30% higher in cities that shuttered their red light camera programs." https://www.amica.com/en/resources/auto/safety/ways-red-ligh...
But the data do indicate that the benefits of automated traffic enforcement vary widely by community. I suspect any of poor road design, reckless driving culture, or local corruption that prioritizes income over safety can lower their net utility, and some combinations of those might even make their utility net negative.
But even if it doesn't, it might still be a reasonable tradeoff. A higher number of minor rear-end crashes (typically between unsafe drivers) might be acceptable if it helps to reduce more t-bone crashes that are more likely to be fatal.
That's not nothing of course, especially for a school trying to minimize food costs. Many schools (like the one I attended growing up) procure the cheapest possible USDA/NSLP-approved product.
But kids at these sorts of schools seem like they'd see the greatest benefit from this sort of legislation to raise the threshold of what constitutes a healthy lunch.
Having said that, I see your point that setting too low a threshold might be unnecessarily onerous on cafeterias and manufacturers. Perhaps a threshold of ~1g sugar per slice would be more reasonable?
> It keeps whiplashing back and forth between "big government good" and "big government bad".
With respect, perhaps you are trying to fit the article into a pre-existing worldview that divides political positions into pro-big-government and anti-big-government? At least, I have heard people espouse this perspective before and it always struck me as odd -- do you think there is a correlation between the size of a government and its quality?
There exist well-run countries with higher levels of government spending (e.g. Scandinavian countries) and lower levels of government spending (e.g. Switzerland, Singapore).
And there exist poorly-run countries with higher government spending (Greece, Brazil) and lower government spending (Hati, Somalia).
Similarly, some large companies are run well and others poorly, and some small companies are run well and others poorly. Scale confers advantages and disadvantages but doesn't seem inherently bad.
Personally I would find such a risk acceptable just as I find the risk of traveling to countries with a high homicide rate acceptable.
But if a friend or family member expressed concern about visiting a German Christmas market due to prior cases of terrorists murdering tourists there I would not dismiss their concerns as irrational or unfounded as there exists a rational basis for this concern.
Perhaps this is what you meant, but I'd rephrase that as: if you are a well-meaning tourist with all the proper paperwork then it is very unlikely that anything will happen to you.
I've had a few "well-meaning" friends and colleagues who experienced significant life impacts due to paperwork problems with US Customs and Border Patrol. One example was a student who didn't realize they needed additional authorization to work part-time, another overstayed their visa on a prior trip and is barred from re-entry. Being "well-meaning" is entirely insufficient bordering on irrelevant compared to having the proper paperwork and following the proper processes, especially if you are young and/or from a non-European country.
For decades this has been a topic of discussion amongst international attendees at US conferences and events, and for every person who is denied entry there are several who are reluctant to visit the US due to experiences at the border. Given the particular zeal with which the current administration enforces entry rules it has become the dominant conversation amongst international participants.
I couldn't find any specific numbers with regard to US tourist safety, though Australia's travel advisory does mention the high rates of gun crimes and about a month ago a couple Israeli tourists were shot in Miami Beach.
Again, gun violence would not be my primary concern if I were visiting the US as a tourist, I'm just pointing out that there exists a basis for this concern.
But people worry about all sorts of irrational things with zero basis in fact. I'm merely pointing out that there is, in fact, a factual basis for this concern.
Personally I consider the benefits of traveling even to other countries (even those with higher homicide rates than the US) to vastly outweigh the risks. But if someone feels otherwise and avoids traveling to places with higher levels of risk then I think this would technically provide a "realistic reduction in risk".