magicnubs

> I do think there will eventually be abloody falling out between our classes. Times have changed however, and I doubt workers will be able to 'win' anymore.

It's a shame, but I have to agree. I'm not into conspiracy theories, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was actually some sort of concerted effort by some elites to keep normal people at odds with one another, simply because if they weren't fighting amoungst themselves they would begin to wonder what to do about the fact that so much wealth and power has concentrate into the hands of such a small group of people. We might could find a political solution to address this if there majority were united, but I think once police and military work are largely automated that will be the ball game. There will thenceforth no longer be any fear of extralegal repercussions (e.g. riots, revolution, etc.) for abusing society at large for personal gain in legal ways.

> A single app aggregating Uber, Lyft, taxi, and 3rd-party car services on one screen would open those up for competition. Similarly, a federated Facebook that provided various social networks in one client would let you pick your hosting provider, configure your own feed, and communicate with people on other platforms.

Is there any talk of requiring companies that have or intend to have effective monopolies due to network effects to make their services price-comparable (or aggregatable, in the case of the likes of Facebook where the "price" is your being served ads) in some way as you mentioned? It seems like it would do a lot to solve the problem. Not being able to shop around is antithetical to competition

How can the customer confirm that the numbers are truly random and drawn live so you can't coordinate with them? It's to both your benefit and the insurance company's to not have high dollar prizes pay out. The insurance company would be on the hook for the prize, and it would cause your premium to go up.

Companies wrongfully fight unemployment claims all the time to keep their insurance rates down. It would be awful tempting for the insurance agency to send you the drawn numbers even ever so slightly early and let you alert them so they can redraw if the jackpot was ever awarded.

A government is basically a company, in the sense that they are both just groups of people associating for their collective self-interest. The real difference, at least in the US, is that the government is much more transparent and everyone is granted an equal voting share at birth (theoretically). Those are the biggest differences in the recipe, the outcomes differ because of those ingredients.

I don't see how doing away with our current company and hoping that more opaque groups with more concentrated voting power could be expected to produce any better results. It would essentially guarantee extreme concentration of power and wealth. A group that includes everyone that are under it's power, and taxation of those members, are the only ways to avoid the prisoner's dilemma and ensure that everyone is contributing to things that are beneficial to everyone instead of competing in ways that are detrimental to everyone except the owners of the group. If the only situation the central government could ever intervene in was direct threats to life and property (I assume you are including contract enforcement?), then there is no incentive for companies to avoid social traps [1]; anti-competitive behavior, price gouging, indentured servitude (they signed the contract, after all!), pollution... there is no amount of external cost too great as long as there is even a modicum of internally-captured benefit. It makes the game not even zero-sum, but negative-sum. The basic argument is that avoiding these issues in education, healthcare and retirement are all already forms of protecting everyone's life, property, and liberty. For instance, the only reason you're even able to earn "your" money that you claim the government steals is because of roads the government has built. What's to stop a company from buying the sidewalk and road outside of your property and charging you half of your salary as a subscription fee to use it? In fact, allow a company to buy up the road networks across the nation and charge as much as people are willing to pay; they'd make tons and tons of money, but introduce huge friction into the entire economy (and likely destroy GDP).

Government control can cause problems and create inefficiencies, certainly. It can create moral hazards too. And there is an argument to be made that the control that the government currently has is too much, and dialing it back could cause a wellspring of beneficial innovation. I think that's likely the case in some industries (healthcare, especially). However, it would also cause a huge surge in innovation in negative ways too; there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in unsavory areas that companies haven't pursued because it's been illegal to do so. Throwing out nearly all of the oversight, checks and balances that have been devised can only make sense if you completely ignore the outsize effects that everyone benefits from due to the controls that we do have in place. The benefits are often invisible (or nearly invisible), so they can be hard to see and so they are easy to ignore in crafting the ideal world in one's head. When thinking of the government, we are naturally more often going to think of the times it's failed us. I just urge you to reconsider. There are places that are run on principles closer to the libertarian ideal, and they tend to be run by power-hungry madmen and be much worse places to live than democracies unless you're at the very, very, very top.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_trap

> It also looks like they bought a bunch of fake 5 star reviews at the end of January.

I took a look and yeah it's pretty obvious this is what happened. There are 88 reviews total, and all but three of them occurred in the 7-day period between 26-Jan and 02-Feb, of which all were 5-star reviews.

It seems like this sorry if thing should be easy for Google to flag?

Living in a places with weather very similar to what you describe (Raleigh, and before that in south Florida, Orlando and Tallahassee), I used to feel the same. I hated walking anywhere outside. I recently moved to a walkable neighborhood and since I'm motivated to walk and bike more since it's easier than driving, I discovered that despite thinking I was dressing to be comfortable in hot + humid weather (shorts and a t shirt), I wasn't. I was dressing to be comfortable once I finally got out of the weather (pretty much exclusively in air conditioned buildings). As a result I was spending as little time as possible outside, which reinforced the way I was preparing for the day.

I've only really made a few changes so far (breathable/better ventilated shirts and shoes, and not wearing socks when I can do without). It's still hot and I still sweat, but much less and when I do sweat it evaporates more easily and I feel cooler. I also now try to bring a sweater if I'm going to be inside for hours, just in case they have the AC really cranked (occasionally I'll find it's needed at work or in movie theaters).

I guess it's not really a great solution if you are restricted in what you can wear to work though. There are supposed to be breathable suit fabrics (like linen) that are good for hot + humid weather, but I have tried them. I wonder if we'll see increasing acceptance of "professional summer workwear" in the US as the sunbelt continues to boom. Maybe that's part of the reason athleisure has become so popular?

(continued as I accidently submitted my comment too early)

Or is it simply about making it seem like things have returned to normal? "See business are reopening, schools are reopening, the world is back to the way it was".

What's the end game in this scenario? It feels like political suicide if it causes coronavirus deaths to spike even more before November, as people already don't care for how the administration has handled it. Although, since it's mostly young people, maybe cases would spike, but deaths wouldn't, making the virus seem less deadly. But maybe deaths are expected to spike either way, so better to both increase cases (with relatively fewer deaths making it seem less deadly, as mentioned above) and also spur the economy somewhat? Or maybe it's pure and simply just a way to energize the base by "scoring a point against the other team", as it is seen as bringing defiant liberal institutions to heel?

I liked the visualizations a lot by the way. Maybe you mentioned in the write-up and I missed it, but what did you use to make them? Checked the skills listed on your CV but didn't see any not-static visualization tools listed

> There's still a high number of items from various in-house brands from Florida department store Bealls (namely Coral Bay, Reel Legends, and Dept 222)

Looking at the chart, it appears these 3 brands were all in the top 4 most commonly sold (or at least available for sale) brands at Goodwill in by 2019, and they've been in the top 10 or so for years. I can't imagine organic amounts of resale from a Florida-only department store chain could account for this. So is Bealls just straight selling their old stock to Goodwill for cheap? Or maybe even giving it away as a write-off (and to reduce cost to store items they don't think they'll ever be able to sell). I wonder how much of Goodwill's stock actually comes from things like this, as opposed to houseful donations.

> (...now I’m off to slip Bill Watterson a tablet and stylus and see if we can get some new C&H :)

Now I'm imagining Bill Watterson's take on Cyanide and Happiness

Oh and also from the article:

> In some markets, BMW owners may also be able to pay for "authentic" BMW engine sounds that will come through the car stereo. In many BMW cars today, the engine sound is augmented inside the cabin with pre-recorded sounds from the stereo. These are tuned to match the engine speed and performance so they sound like actual sounds coming directly from the engine. This is done so that the cabin can be quiet during normal driving but occupants can still experience engine sound when it's wanted, BMW executives have said.

I'm not going to go as far as to say we've stopped building useful things, but we really could be a post-scarcity society if we had our priorities right.

This is interesting. It seems like everything is going subscription-based. It sort if makes sense in that software can be improved upon after sale and needs to be maintained, but on the other hand a single but fix can be sent to an arbitrarily large number of units, so with this model only the largest companies will be able to compete in features and price.

With so many purchases to consider, and less and less time during which to do it, I wonder when we'll get to the point that there are companies that sell an entire "lifestyle". You make $30k/year? Here's our bronze subscription option. For $20,000/year we'll put you up in a spartanly furnished apartment and with a servicable car and you'll get your staple foods and toiletries delivered every other week. Whatever you have leftover after taxes is yours for saving or spending. Make $150k? The gold package costs $90k/year and includes a luxury apartment downtown, a Tesla and fresh vegetables shipped twice a week!

Make governments compete in a free market like companies. It's an interesting idea, and compelling on its face. But that leaves open the question of how a government could ever be expected to invest in it's people. The incentive for other countries would be to not invest as much in education of their own, since anyone could up and move to a country with lower taxes immediately once they finished school. Or they wouldn't invest in healthcare, since you could just "move" to a country that has healthcare, get treated, and then move back to your low-tax country immediately after.

I expect we'd end up with a system pretty similar to the one we have now, with each country demanding a certain "investment" from the prospective citizen before they be granted the benefits of citizenship (e.g. certain number of years spent there) or that they are bringing something valuable to the table (e.g. in-demand skills or qualifications).

200 million copies of Minecraft sold to date, with 126 million active players each month? That seems almost impossible. It seems like that would mean that even most of the people who bought the game years ago are still playing every month.

> And with all of this money being injected into the economy, we are absolutely going to get an enormous amount of inflation... eventually.

But if basically none of the money is making it into the hands of the average person, will we actually see inflation of anything except stock prices (and probably also luxury goods that are being bought by people who receive most of their income from capital gains)?

There was supposed to be inflation due to QE as well, but interest rates have been low for over a decade and we've barely seen any inflation. Maybe it's because the average person isn't seeing any of it, and the small portion of people who are will only consume so much. Most of it ends up getting shoveled right back into assets.

For this reason, I wonder if near-zero interest rates and corporate bond purchasing will ever end in the US. If it continues, isn't it kind of like the government supporting these large US corporations in the similar way? Encouraging them to take any contract or spend on any investment that returns more than 0% in interest?

I'm not saying this would be "good" or "bad". I imagine it would be bad for smaller companies, but good for larger ones, maybe good for American competitiveness in world commerce (for a while) but could be bad in the long run because we'd be committing to a race-to-the-bottom price war with a competitor who has a lower bottom price than we do.

> instead of doing anything people just have their burger whole try can

I assume this is just a typo, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the original was

> Amazingly they tripled in size from $6b in sales in 2008, in just three years. Then lost 85% of their sales in another four years after that.

I assume this is due to the advent of touchscreen phones. Around when people were getting used to the idea that mobile phones could be used for more than just making calls, touchscreens could be buggy/laggy and there wasn't haptic feedback or any sort of attempt at recreating the physical sensation of typing. RIM doubled down on physical keyboards, and Blackberrys had great ones (I could type much faster on my Blackberry Bold than on an iPhone at the time) and they already had productivity/utility apps and such since they were really PDAs. But the gradually improving touchscreen typing experience, combined with the increased utility of being able to put the keyboard away when you didn't need it, spelled the death of physical keyboard phones not long after.

How many people can afford a personal trainer and a therapist while not having a job?

What is a "backward caste"? Haven't heard this term before

They weren't saying the fill tool was an early form of what we think of as an "AI algorithm" today, but that the leading edge of machine intelligence / intuitive capability has changed, and it will continue to change.

> The great bubbles can go on a long time

What he said may be true, but that doesn't mean it's useful. By this logic, you can just say that stocks are overvalued any time after they've recovered from a prior bubble pop or they go over a certain P/E ration, and you'll eventually be right given a long enough timeframe for a correction, but you might miss out on decades of growth in between.

> now is the time to print a bunch of new money

I'm curious as to whether the money would ever make it into the hands of the average consumer (which is where I'm assuming it needs to go to actually cause an increase in inflation, considering how consumption-heavy our GDP is, but correct me if I'm wrong!) There have been recent calls for the government to distribute money to prop up demand, but won't banks lobby politically against this sort of activity? Seems like a lender wouldn't want inflation to actually increase because that would cause their current lower-interest loans to be less valuable? One of the oft-cited concerns for continually missing our 2% symmetric inflation target is that market participants will begin to expect and plan for low inflation, which has a negative feedback effect on future inflation. Seems to me like financial institutions are already expecting low inflation and aren't all that interested in seeing it rise.

Is this part of why stocks have slipped so much? Based on what I know of the market (what relatively little I know, I keep up with it, but it's not my day job), I'd have expected most of the volatility from coronavirus to be in the sectors most heavily affected by low foot-traffic. Instead companies like Google and Apple are down 30%. I doubt the anyone is seriously expecting COVID-19 to cause the average of Google's or Apple's profits over the next 20 years to fall by 30%, so it seems the market must have been oversubscribed? Maybe it still is. The S&P500 is still at a historically relatively high PE of 18.5 and a Schiller CAPE of 23.2, both of which will probably be even higher after earnings are announced next month.

You'd be surprised how many unpaved roads there are. Even in Europe

https://i.redd.it/4xau5auzqg741.png

> companies actually did take care of employees

Was this primarily due to employees having more leverage and demanding it (because union rights were a lot stronger)?

> because those acquiring companies were themselves so very profitable.

The quote says that the acquiring companies were profitable, not the acquired companies.

So, basically video-streaming, but with websites instead of tv shows?

I'll definitely agree with that. Broadly, I like the direction Microsoft has been headed in, I guess I'm just disappointed that there has been no more information (even them saying they've shelved the idea) after the huge outpouring of support.