When did stealing other peoples' life work segue from a guilty necessity to a noble cause? I missed that.
922 karma · joined April 9, 2014
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Government activities are generally important to a lot of people, if not because said people are direct consumers of the alleged benefits then because they paid for them. We keep paying and they keep ballsing it up, and everything we know about the theory of government (in an economic sense) tells us this is a design flaw and, ergo, not something that can be expected to self-resolve.
And it's not that they're totally inept all the time (although ineptitude is a recurring theme) - sometimes they do get good stuff done. The much harder question to answer in these cases is how efficient was it? How much tax money was shat away in admin/stupid compliance BS, and is all that wasteful pomp really a necessary price to pay for democracy? Could there be another way?
It's all very contentious, high-stakes stuff and if you disagree strongly enough with it all to wilfully not comply you'll soon find the whole system is propped up on various threats: they'll take your money, your home, your pride - they may even take you. And they'll do it all under a banner of moral righteousness that turns it into you vs. "society". How could that ever not be a talking point?
I talk about it most days in one way or another, and not because I'm some horrible right-wing fanatic who wants to wipe my ass with money and glee in the suffering of others, but because it's an incredibly fragile, wasteful system that perpetually sits on a knife edge and I suspect does just as much harm as good. It's misguided in so many ways and so, so hard to change that all I can do is moan about it and hope that my moans contribute in some way to getting the volume of the debate loud enough to think that something could change.
So, yeah, that's why I think it keeps coming up.
Also I see the minimum wage as harmful in this situation - you can tell yourself and the world that an hours worth of human time is always worth at least x USD, but it will never make it true. Policymakers do not set minimum wages with someone struggling to get off the streets in mind, but rather with someone in an altogether much less dire situation, and in doing so they raise the barrier too high. Hiring a homeless person for $5/hr would in many cases bring great utility to both parties: outlawing such transactions seems absurd.
I've been writing a lot of ClojureScript/React lately and with that I only really touch HTML to include CSS and scripts. It's pretty glorious, highly productive, and makes a very strong case for opening up lower levels to allow new paradigms to evolve - with this set-up, HTML and JS only get in the way.
The browser is now (almost) an OS in a VM and, imho, the sooner we start treating it like that the better.
<input name='kids[1]' value='Thelma'>
<input name='kids[0]' value='Ashley'>Excluding Virgin's cable service, the last-mile infrastructure is wholly owned by BT Wholesale which, despite the name, is "independent" of BT Retail. It's operations are heavily bounded by legislation and politics - it is, in effect, a public corporation. So tied down are they, in fact, that they have a flat price list for almost all customers. Pricing innovation is precisely nil. I've have a copy from two years ago, but I'm under NDA wrt specifics.
(Note that none of the above is a criticism, the idea of letting them free to do what they want is horrifying.)
The result of this is strange to observe from an economists vantage point. On the one hand you can catch a glimpse of what perfect competition might look like in the consumer market as a thousand companies vie to maximise market share with an almost perfectly commoditised good, which in reality means packaging (with TV, phone, mobile, insurance, pretty much anything.)
Aaand on the other hand most of the country is paying £30/month ($50) for 6Mbps down/0.2Mbps up at 50:1 contention and a fair usage policy to boot.
Of course this is much better than straight up nationalisation as the private companies will at least innovate on peripheral services like billing and support, and will use a stronger punch when it comes to motivating BT Wholesale to stay on their toes.
Is this better than the US situation? Most probably. Is this the ideal solution? Most probably not.
I have a 152Mbps connection from Virgin which is around the same price, and am now in a super-exclusive club of Brits who get to moan about not being able so saturate a servers pipe (I want my downloads to read 18MBps every time, dammit!)
This, evidently, doesn't ever happen in the real world: in reality, you'd take into account whether you have time to buy it, whether you have the will to carry it around, etc., before arriving at a definite answer that implies (value - price) has collapsed to some non-zero value.
The goal is to maximise wealth in the whole economy in such a way that gains incurred by one agent cannot come from harm incurred by another (Pareto optimality).
> My entire point is that it isn't possible for everyone to be as happy as they could be in a purely distributive scenario. If there is $3 of surplus on the table then whoever doesn't get all of it is going to be less happy than if they did.
It's not about surplus!
Take a good X and denote it's cost C(X). Assume we're using pennies (i.e only dealing with real, positive integers) and that the market is large and normally distributed. For ANY flat price, P(X) = c (a constant), such that P(x) > C(X)+1 there must exist a class of consumer whose true monetary valuations are in the set V = { v | C(X) < v < P(x) }. They will never be catered for and are always worse off than they could be. Consumers with v > P(x) are gaining v - P(X) at the expense of: the producer, who is incurring an opportunity cost of v - P(X); and members of V, who are each losing Utility(X) - v. We therefore have utility deltas vs. price discrimination of (assuming no indifference for simplicity):
u1 = Utility1( Consumer1 w/ v1 > P(X) ) = U1( v1 - P(X) ) > 0
u2 = U2( Consumer2 w/ v2 in V ) = U2(v2) - U2(X) < 0
u3 = U3( Producer ) = -U3( v1 - P(X) ) - U3(v2) << 0
Solutions? Well the producer could set a flat price P(X) = C(X), essentially giving all their surplus to the consumers. This removes profit from the equation, which under imperfect competition removes the incentive for the producer to go on doing anything at all, and nullifies the analysis (as well as being completely unrealistic.) The only way to make sure everyone is as happy as they can be without harming anyone else (i.e. members of V) is to make P(X) = vn for any given consumer n.
You may not like the idea of producers taking all the potential consumer surplus, but in the absence of perfect competition, this surplus can only ever be consumer surplus at the detriment of other consumers (members of V) and the producer.
> But you're also ignoring the point about competition.
Perfect competition and perfect price discrimination are equivalent under the usual perfect assumptions, you're quite right. But when we recognise that neither is actually possible this becomes less relevant.
Perfect competition always results in P(X) = C(X) and this whole discussion is moot. Imperfect competition (in the absence of government subsidies, etc) results in P(X) > C(X). Again, members of V are missing out and the case for price discrimination is created. The strength of the case for price discrimination is a function of the sum of the members of V, which in turn is a function of [P(X) - C(X)] assuming consumer valuations are distributed somewhat normally. Therefore, one could argue that the "less perfect" the competitive environment is, the stronger the case for price discrimination (I need not point out that the current state of the world is far from economically perfect). In fact - under the assumption that perfect competition and perfect price discrimination are not possible - I suspect it could be shown that an economy implementing some "good-enough" version of both is optimal.
Any kind of flattened pricing structure will always harm some consumers for the benefit of others in a sufficiently large market. If I'm willing to pay £12 for X, you're willing to pay £8, and the producer is asking for a flat £10 because people like me find price discrimination morally abhorrent, then: I get the utility from having X plus a bit more from the £2 kickback; the producer isn't fulfilling his goal of profit maximisation and has incurred an opportunity cost of my £2 + your £8 = £10; and you get nothing. I'm the only winner, and the £2's worth of economic value I've gained by enforcing an unfair pricing structure is less than the sum of the value I've deprived you and the producer of - my behaviour is tantamount to stealing a small slice of yours and the producers combined utility and burning the rest.
The only way around this is to find a way to set price equal to true valuation on an individual basis. Of course, if you allow your model to not be Pareto efficient ("there is no change that could be made to benefit someone without harming someone else") then there are much more efficient ways to steal wealth than flat pricing.
You don't need to subtract a penny to make it so. The value of the product for A must be greater than $13 or A won't buy it. The value of $13 cash must be greater than the value of not selling the product to the consumer or the seller won't sell. Everybody has more value than what they started with!
The only way this can possibly be true for all cases is via per-consumer price discrimination, anything less will always leave someone out.
No, I'm not. For one thing, I picked £7 out of thin air. Change it to £6 and this (erroneous anyhow) statement falls apart. Moreover your analysis is wrong - not everyone is as happy as they could be, you're only thinking from the consumer's perspective. The cinema could have made £7 * 10 + £10 * 20 = £270 so in your "best" case for everyone, the cinema is actually £60 short of their best scenario. The 20 adults were willing to spend £10 each, so their arbitrary £3 bonus that they didn't actually demand is optimal based on what? Consumers being less evil than companies? Give me a break.
> if the market has vigorous competition then engaging in price discrimination will only drive the customers being discriminated against to your competitors.
It is not discrimination in the political sense, but the dictionary sense: to differentiate. Price discrimination in theory should not drive customers anywhere but rather make them indifferent to their choice of supplier.
No matter how pissed off people get about finding out that they paid more than someone else, it has absolutely no bearing on the mathematics which shows this to be the optimal (for both producers and consumers) way to allocate scarce resources.
Price discrimination appears, at first glance, to be about maximising profit, but really it's about clearing the market.
Say you're a cinema, and you set your list price for a ticket at £10. 20 adults show up and buy the tickets and are happy. Then 10 students show up, scoff, and go home - they weren't willing to go above £7. The market has not cleared: you'd be happier with £70 from them than the nothing you've got, and the students would be happier being £70 worse off but having seen the film. Neither party got what they wanted, no trade occurred, and no economic value was created.
The situation could be improved so that everybody gets what they want without harming anybody else: set a student rate at £7. Students get to see the films and your cinema makes more money - everyone is as happy as they could be.
In this example, the criteria for price discrimination is discovered by intuition, existing knowledge of students, maybe surveys. But even this isn't ideal - what about that one really tight student who buys pasta in 20kg bags and who values a trip to the cinema at £4? Ideally you want their £4 and they want to see the film - but how to cater for them without shooting yourself in the foot by making the student price £4 across the board?
Until the advent of the internet and fancy algorithms that could at least try to understand you, you couldn't. But today maybe we can.
Everyone has their own "true" valuation for a given product (not how much they think it should be worth, but how much they're willing to pay), and if you're a supplier with a magic ball which can divine this with 100% accuracy then you're as well selling your product at 1p over cost if that's your customer's true valuation. Again: they get the product they wanted and you get profit you couldn't have had any other way, and everyone's as happy as they can be.
But we don't have magic balls, and you can't ask someone for their true valuation because suddenly you'll find yourself knee-deep in a bartering game of bullshit and lies. Your only option is to try to divine it somehow.
This is what these guys are doing. And it's a good thing. To say "this is wrong and it should stop" is incredibly selfish - with reference to the example above, an equivalent statement might be "Yes I'll pay £10 to see this movie, but only if those students don't get a discount, which I implicitly understand to mean robbing you, dear cinema owner, of £70, and those students of the chance to see this hot new flick, even though both of those things are fuck all to do with me."
If you're a habitual bargain hunter (not out of necessity, more as a personality trait) and you're feeling affronted by this then all you need do is take a cue from these companies and adjust your tactics to suit the 21st century. Googling around may have done you proud up til now, but the world has moved on. I daresay that once you've mastered the art of using a VPN, user agent spoofing, and possibly the cultivation of a set of dishonest consumer profiles, you may find you'll save even more money in the face of this new enemy.
I'm fine with JS as a thing that exists, my problem is with it's position as the "assembly of the web" (credit to user Lerc below for that fine phrase.) The good parts of the HTML/JS/CSS paradigm are making awesome things, but the bad parts make our lives far more difficult than they need to be.
And don't worry, I'm not actually going to kill myself, but thanks for the concern.
Back in the day the browser was a document browser - like a read-only, network-enabled version of Microsoft Word. It's goals have changed immeasurably, but the technology largely hasn't - at least not at the conceptual level. We use it to make applications that are much more like actual applications than they are documents. The slow march of the browser is to doing "anything" a native app can - we now have geolocation APIs, graphics card access, "threading", native drag-and-drop interop, etc., etc.
By OS, I meant it more in the way the JVM is an "OS" ("virtual machine" is too vague): it can do almost anything the actual OS can, provides platform-agnostic drop-ins for many native toolkits (e.g. GUI), and for a tremendous amount of the workload, developers needn't care needn't care what platform they're on. Now the JVM has its flaws for sure, but at least it knew its purpose before it grew up, the result being it is highly performant (less the boot time) and flexible.
If you need a document browser, sure you can build in a little macro language with only one kind of number, but if you need a VM a la the JVM you'd be well advised to build something better. My point is that we're heading somewhat blindly towards the latter by making a Frankenstein out of the former, and we really could do with pulling over and looking at the map for a bit.
With any luck we might finally realise that we're not dealing with "documents" anymore, that HTML, JS, and CSS do not a good UI framework make, and that JS simply isn't good enough for what we need it to do and how we need it to do it.
ECMAScript 7 will be pretty much ready to implement and the standards committee will realise that they've run out of syntax for ECMAScript 8, forcing a rethink. Fingers crossed a neckbeard will arrive and point out that a LISP would be ideal for both defining the "DOM" and providing a base language for targeting by other languages, who can just (ok, "just") serialize their ASTs and pass it in.
Seriously: if, in 5 years, we're still perfecting the dominant user-facing runtime by tweaking an arbitrary XML spec, a language with only one kind of number, and a styling language so inept it almost requires auto-generation tools, well I might just kill myself.