maxsilver

This is kind of a crazy take.

The comparison to a "$150k sports car" is crazy -- a Sports Car can be a flashy way to display wealth. No one is displaying wealth by having once paid for a Sublime License.

No one is sliding up to folks at a bar, flashing their Coda license, to prove they've "made it". "Hey baby, why don't you come back to my place, I've got a developer license for the entire JetBrains Product Suite" is simply not a thing.

The closest analogy I can think of, is probably in construction hardware tooling. Folks being "Mikita" vs "DeWalt" vs "Milwaukee" people or some such.

> Why would it make people poorer?

Because people buying something means they no longer have the money, and are thus, poorer. If you have $20, and you buy lunch for $10, you now are $10 poorer.

> Were you under the impression that colleges burn the money?

(looking around at my alma mater, which has tripled the size of administration and built like four new sports stadiums, while the wages of professors have remained flat for ten years and cost-per-credit-hour has tripled) -- um, yes? Are there colleges that don't just burn the money, or dump it into stocks/bonds/trusts/etc?

I'm lost. How did people being poorer (having more student debt) push prices higher?

Most of the people I'm thinking of don't have student debt for fun. They did it because their jobs either hard-required it (to get licensed), or soft-required it (to get hired). Think folks who are teachers, social workers, LPN nurses, therapists, healthcare admins, etc.

Education and Mental Health seem to be the worst cases for this -- it's expected that you have 4 to 7 years of expensive college education, and 1 to 3 years of internships/practice, and after all of that, you get to maybe make $40k. If you are lucky you can eventually work your way up to $60k-$75k/yr.

> The author cherry picks the SV area which is not indicative of the country as a whole.

The whole country is SV now, plus or minus a few percentage points.

Even in nowheresville-Michigan, any house near any job costs about 4 to 5 times what it did 15 years ago. We even have cities that have lost total population and the prices still skyrocketed. Even if you scope it to just say, a specific small town -- a house that cost $80k in 2012, that exact same house now costs $360k in 2024, and wages did not rise 400% to compensate.

Tech folks sit in SV with a $200k/yr income and think, "ah, see, Michigan is so affordable". But the people here are holding Masters Degrees and student debt and make $45k/yr, $360k is every bit as out of reach to them, as a $1.5 million house is to you in SV.

Sure, not every place is SV from a literal perspective. But from a relative percent basis, nearly every city in every state in the US is now experiencing their own SV-like housing price explosion (regardless of whether their total population has grown or shrank, regardless of whether they have made it difficult to develop, or have been very open to new development, as most of Michigan has always been).

It's less about the games being high-quality, and more the games being community-created and user-driven.

Roblox isn't a competitor to Astro's Playroom or Ratchet and Clank. Roblox is like, the next generation of ActiveWorlds, or like a user-generated version of Uru. It's a 3D Chatroom that solved the problem of "what do you do when people want something to do, while standing around chatting in the 3D chatroom?" by saying, "we'll give a bunch of tech tooling to the players, and maybe 0.1% of them will do something interesting with it". And that's enough.

The closest PS5 equivalent would be something like, the Dreams game from Media Molecule.

----

As a parent (with a kid, who loves Roblox), I totally get it. I lived on ActiveWorlds as a kid, I saved up paper-route money to pay for my own "P-10 World" back in the day. The next summer, I used paper-route money to buy a "catch-a-call" device, so I could be on ActiveWorlds via Dial-up without tying up the phone line from my parents. I had an entire alternative identity and active social life on there in middle-school & high-school. I would bicycle all the way downtown to local community college, to take VB6 classes with college students over the summer, to learn how to program against their ActiveX control API to write my own ActiveWorlds Bot, to interact with folks in my private ActiveWorld. I ran an ActiveWorlds "TV Station" (in AW, you could set a JPEG image to 'refresh' regularly like a webcam, and I would point the URL at a custom PHP script I ran on an old cPanel-based shared hosting plan, that would rotate JPEG images out in appropriate order every 1 or 2 seconds, in pre-programmed ways, so you could have 'shows' broadcasting, and you could switch to 'live' (screenshots) on 'air' and such)

I treat Roblox similarly for my child. (They can play on it, but never use real names, reveal no personal information, there's some time limits to ensure you don't go crazy, talk through appropriate content and what stuff warrants adult intervention, etc. And gently prod them that, if they're ready to deep-dive on Roblox, all the tools people use to make their favourite "obbys" are things they could actually learn and write themselves, with some time and patience and practice...)

> Carriers see the ability to easily move a physical SIM outside of their control as a problem

Every carrier has already had the ability to block moving physical SIMS too, for many decades now. (AT&T in the US literally did used to block physical SIM swaps, for ages)

eSIMs don't actually give carriers any more-or-less control over SIM movement than they already had before.

> How do I move my eSIM to my new phone?

You open your web-browser on anything with service (your laptop / desktop / toaster / Nintendo Wii U / whatever), go to "insert-my-carrier-here.com", login, and click "move eSIM". You type in the IMEI/eSIM ICCID number on the back of your new phone (or in the 'settings' menu on the new phone), and wait a few minutes. Your plan moves over as-is, same with your telephone number, etc.

Yes, it's steps, and it takes time, and in a remote situation, those are real barriers with real trickiness. But it's no more tricky than saying, "I smashed my laptop, how do I check my gmail now?".

> My old phone is dead and my new phone doesn’t have a SIM. I have to go out of my way to find a Wifi network (for billions of people their phone is their only internet connection)

Ok, sure. Yes, eSIM requires you have a new device to connect with. But other than that, it's not terribly tricky. (You can do it via your carriers mobile app, or you can transfer via any web browser, you don't have to get to a store or get a new sim card, its usually free to transfer an eSIM, etc).

> Because of this I will end up paying to repair a phone that I have already replaced, just to extract the eSIM!

That's not really how eSIMs work. No one regular person would ever need to do that. (If you are already in a phone repair place, you already have everything you need to transfer your service to a new eSIM in ~5 minutes anyway).

> eSIM seems like it was designed by someone from the US who has no idea how the rest of the world uses phones, particularly the developing world.

Well, I suppose that's fair (in that, half of the carriers in the US already did service provisioning without SIM cards at all on legacy non-GSM networks for a decade, so for them eSIM is entirely upgrade with no downside).

But as someone who actually uses eSIMs, the only real annoyance I've seen on eSIMs, is that US Cellular Carriers often lock it down to postpaid only or prepaid carriers don't know how to support it properly, so changing eSIMs on prepaid/mvnos is still a huge pain. (For example, US Mobile's eSIM support didn't reliably work for me on Verizon, but Visible's eSIM support did work on Verizon, despite literally being the same eSIM, same device, same network). Or they put artificial delays on provisioning, so it takes an hour for the network to "update" the "profile" or whatnot. So, while the technology works fine, carriers artificially make it kind of a pain.

But that's not SIM vs eSIM's fault at all, carriers also made switching physical SIMs a huge pain for many years (AT&T used to device-lock SIM cards, for example, defeating the entire point of the card).

> Then what do I tell customer support?

Nothing? It's like saying, "if I want to check my gmail, what do I tell customer support when I telephone call in?". The question is kind of nonsensical. You wouldn't call customer support, the whole point of an eSIM is you no longer have to talk to customer support to transfer the SIM.

> But really mixing two powertrains is expensive and complex, and can only be fit in big cars.

So "big, expensive, and complex", that Toyota's only been doing it since 2003. (Or 1997, in Japan).

Yes, it's a luxury to have both drivetrains and a sizable battery. But it's not a huge one. (using USA MSRP pricing, a Nissan Leaf starts at $30k, a Toyota Prius Prime PHEV starts at $34k).

> A small plugin hybrid doesn't make sense.

On the contrary, a small plugin hybrid makes perfect sense. You get all the benefits of the EV (somewhere between 40 to 60 miles of non-gasoline driving, every night, with no emissions) and you get all the benefits of an ICE (easy road trips, two-minute refills, etc). And yes, it incurs the costs and maintenance of both, but traditional hybrid cars have already proved for decades now that it's possible to handle that well.

I love my Gen 2 Chevy Volt (had the Gen1 Volt before that, and a 2009 Toyota Yaris before that). If my Gen2 Volt died, I legitimately don't know what I'd do, most cars are a huge downgrade, there's only a few decent PHEV's still on the market.

Toyota should have been pursuing this strategy from the beginning, and I'm told their current Prius PHEV is pretty good, but all that means is that it's finally competitive with 2013-era Chevrolet. Chevy killing Voltec is probably their biggest strategic failure in the past decade -- they stopped it just a few years before those vehicles became popular.

Something like ~6% feels "fair" (where "fair" means, is equal to the approximate value provided).

Apple isn't really incurring any costs for this. They don't make any of the content, they don't write any of the software, they do host the 'applications', but they only deliver the tiniest parts of the app (they host a small binary, but they aren't hosting the videos on Netflix or YouTube, for example, or the major assets in an MMO game or such) and a lot of the labor they do "provide" isn't necessarily valuable (their "review" of the apps, for example).

The 30% figure seems to be pulled from gaming console markets, but it was never really justified over there either, and the previous economics that made it work (like subsidized hardware) never applied to Apple's ecosystem. (iPads aren't like, $99 each, and priced at that point, with the expectation that Apple will 'make it up' via the 30% tax on app store sales, the way consoles once were)

Wouldn't the easy solution be to use two sets of letters for IATA coded flights for the same airline?

Something like "DL1234" and "DZ1234" for Delta?

I know a lot of the two-letter codes are claimed too, and I'm sure there must be some reason this wouldn't work OK, but it would seem like they they would each have at least one code left over from the various airlines they've acquired over the years?

If an American Airlines regional flight started with "TW1234" again, for example, I don't think it would break the world.

Is Apple really eating "years of losses". Or are they making a strategic play to pick up most of the prestige television market, without needing to push an M&A through the FTC (and they're doing it, just as David Zaslav is finishing killing the historic-largest player there, as HBO dies on the vine at Warner Brothers)

To me, it sure feels like the latter.

Apple spending $20 billion to pick up all this prestige TV and Film, is kind of a great deal, when compared to say, the $43 billion Discovery just paid for Warner, just to kill half of it (and then lose another $7 billon on it over the past 2-3 years)

> Who would want to be in charge of an aerospace company if there was a real risk that you'd get charged with murder if you don't have an almost psychic insight into the technical decisions of your company?

You say this like it's crazy, but we literally already do this with Doctors and Surgeons, it's not as tricky as you make it sound.

There's no valid reason that CEO/C-Suite folks get to forever escape any responsibility and accountability.

Yes, it's crazy to me that Netflix puts so much effort into improving encode quality, and then they don't let most people see that version -- almost no one gets to see the "good" versions of their encodes.

Whether it's because Netflix locks the good high-bitrate encodes to the most expensive subscription plans many people aren't on, or because their "Roku 4K" or "Fire TV 4K" or whatever is actually negotiating the 1080p-H.264-low-bitrate stream, or because their internet connection latency was auto-detected too low, or their device doesn't have enough memory to buffer nicely or whatever.

I bet Netflix is absolutely capable of delivering something really nice. But in my experience, Netflix quality as delivered looks about on-par with "YouTube free 1080p" -- so much so, that even plugging in a 1080p-only-Blu-Ray, is a huge improvement even non-techie folks can notice.

To be fair, the new test footage that Netflix released (into creative commons even) explicitly tries to protect against that to some degree. Some shots in the new footage use HDR to crank brightness up to a requested 4000 nits on the subject, while still having a mathematical-black background. (You can even compare the raw *.mxf to say, YouTube's 1080p version of it, and see the difference.

Variety's writeup has a bit more technical detail on it - https://variety.com/2016/digital/news/netflix-meridian-imf-t... .

It's pretty clever, many of the shots seem clearly designed to stress-test common encoder issues and failures -- they put thought and care into it, and it shows.

The scale of the IF text-parser problem isn't that bad, and they addressed a lot of the issues decades ago, modern games don't struggle with this nearly as much. It's just that that Interactive Fiction tends to be a niche hobby, so most of the IF written today assumes you are already at least a intermediate in the field -- they often don't throw in a Tutorial, the way every modern triple-A game does.

From an 'intro accessibility' standpoint, Modern videogames are often way more willfully-obtuse. We just don't recognize it, because it's assumed that everyone who plays a game already has basic understanding of twin-stick first-person and third-person gamepad controls, we assume it like it's another form of basic literacy. (Who hasn't played a game before, right?)

But for folks who don't -- for the (many) folks who have literally never touched a gamepad in their life, sitting them down to modern graphical interactive-fiction controller game (say something like Firewatch, or Gone Home, or Edith Finch, or Life is Strange) is even more challenging for those folks than the traditional IF text parser.

I've seen people spend thirty minutes just trying to figure out how to look in a general direction -- it takes truly-new adults quite a while to get used to the feel of twin-thumbsticks for movement+camera-control, it requires a lot of careful fine-motor control on both sticks simultaneously and often has to be felt to be learned well.

At least with text-based IF, most people have been exposed to typing at school or at work or at a library or such. The same is not usually true of twin-thumbstick gamepads.

> Like, you pay the electricity, I'll pay the water bill, you pay 75% of the mortgage, I'll pay 80% of our vacation, but we split meals 50/50...

Sure, it can be exhausting to keep track of everything separately and constantly re-calculate shared bills each month. But it doesn't have to be split like that. Here's a few examples I've seen that seem to work well.

Example #1: (a married couple, with equivalent incomes)

Add up rough costs once (water bill, electric, cell phone, rent or mortgages, etc), just one time. Then both commit to automatically dump maybe 5% more than half of that every month after. (So if all monthly costs add up to say, $2800/month, each person puts $1500/month into that checking account). Bills auto-pay automatically, the balance should slowly grow, if it starts to go too low, recalc to make up the difference. (kind of like how escrow works on a mortgage)

Example #2: (a married couple, with wildly different incomes)

Have a discussion about shared goals and shared debt. (Is the poorer spouse still paying off student loans? Is the wealthier spouse paying off debt from a previous marriage). Figure out a number that feels 'fair', based on cost of living and divided by share of income. And then the poorer spouse contributes this 'fair' fixed figure per month automatically, and the wealthier spouse covers the bulk of everything else. For example, if Person A makes $110k/yr, and Person B makes $40k/yr, Person B might contribute a 'fair' 50% of their take-home salary (~$1300/month) and Person A might contribute a 'fair' 50% of their take-home salary (~$3300/month) and all shared CoL expenses come out of that combined monthly pot (Groceries, Utilities, Rent+Mortgage, Car Payments + Insurance, Cell Phones, etc)

--

> And then you have those cases where I can afford to go to Disney World, but my spouse only has enough for Six Flags because she makes less or hasn't been saving--now what?

You just decide what it's worth and why, and make an agreement on how to save for it? I think your assuming the talk is exhausting because it feels like a constant fight or at least a negotiation and a math problem. But if set it up right, you only have them a couple of times a year, and if you are doing these conversations with someone you love (presumably, someone you love enough to commit to marrying them), they don't have to be that exhaustive, it's just fun banter, the way a couple might playfully banter about what to eat for dinner, or what movie to go see or such.

> OMG that just sounds like so much work to manage, all for what?

Some people have put their 110% effort into a marriage for many years (or even decades!) only for it to end in disaster anyway. You can fully commit to a marriage, and also think people can change over time. It's loving to help people feel safe and secure, even from someone who might be your own partner. Especially for folks who've gone through a divorce already, safety and security in any possible scenario (even the worst one) can feel very loving too.

It only takes one time of being "committed fully to marriage" and having it end in divorce anyway, before you realize it's crazy to pretend that's never a possibility.

> $40K, "affordable," shows what a bubble NYTimes is living in.

Did we read the same article? NYTimes is claiming that "$20k" (or rather, $20k after up to $7500 in federal rebates) is affordable.

Which, it kind of is? That's a brand new fully electric for like $400/month.

And we're seeing it in the used market as well. (2019/2020 Chevy Bolts are now going for like $15k or ~$350/month which puts them well into affordability for people around a $40k/yr income.

>. Google comes in and offers to buy you out. You decline cause you know that they are blockbuster and your Netflix. In retaliation google hires all your staff, and sends them to the roof to rest and vest.

If you know for certain that "they are BlockBuster, you are Netflix", then why are you not cutting them a deal to make it worth them staying?

This is absolutely about workers -- specifically, companies not wanting to pay workers anything close to what they are worth.

> My Playstation can accept directional and OK button presses over CEC, but my Roku can't despite that being much more useful.

To be fair, in this case, the issue not "CEC doesn't work", but rather, "Roku broke compatibility".

You can control directional/OK on a Roku STB built into a Roku TV via CEC, the hardware supports everything just fine. But in software, Roku (intentionally?) implemented unusual (arguably proprietary) control codes to do it, instead of the normal ones everyone else uses. Roku will, however, happily pass along regular codes to a connected Playstation or Google TV stick or whatever other 'lesser' device you connect.

(assuming HDMI-CEC) You can work around this by injecting Roku-specific codes into your CEC stream. But like, no one should have to do that...

> Even plug in hybrids spend most of their lives burning gas.

They don't. PHEV's spend 50%-80% of their time on electric only, if you use them properly. (Just plug them in once each evening).

> The Solterra (snip) is a very mediocre EV, far behind its competition in efficiency and charging.

The Solterra is roughly competitive with a Tesla Model 3 (Standard Range) or a Chevy Bolt. Which is fine, they're all reasonable EVs, but I'd still call all of these "first generation consumer EVs".

We're at the "everyone has a BlackBerry, the iPhone hasn't been released yet" stage of automotive EVs, in my humble opinion.

> Legacy auto makers claiming that ICE hybrids are EVs is very disingenuous.

Calling a traditional ICE hybrid an "EV" is disingenuous, completely agree. Calling a PHEV an EV is 100% totally fair.

I drive a used 2017 Chevy Volt (a "legacy auto makers" PHEV). I am fortunate enough to have a regular garage with a standard (120v/12a level 1) outlet + charger, and I only charge the car in at night while I'm sleeping. The car records all usage on all fuels for it's entire lifetime. Over the past 78,000 miles, my lifetime MPG on the vehicle is like 145mpg, despite the fact that I take a few long trips (multi-states away) each year. The vast vast majority of miles all end up being electric-only.

Yes, some people buy a PHEV and then never charge them, and yes, this defeats the whole point. But it's perfectly fair to call a PHEV an EV. Under normal regular intended usage, they're running on electricity-only anywhere from 50% to 80%+ of all total miles driven.

The Prius Prime and RAV4 Prime are great EV's (PHEVs), they have some of the best-in-class efficiency metrics (on either form of fuel). And their child company (Subaru, 20% ownership) is doing a full EV (Solterra)

Toyota isn't "avoiding" EVs, they just aren't rushing to put out a bunch of first-gen-tech EV-only cars. Which seems perfectly fine -- if you want those, Chevrolet and Tesla and Nissan would be happy to sell you those.

> Then something happened around 2017 and their coffee became awful (it was never incredible, but it got much worse)

Tim Hortons got acquired by Burger King (Restaurant Brands International / QSR) in December 2014, and the quality started to decline over the next year or two

> At least in the US this happens due to rent control rules.

No way, the vast majority of the US has no rent control at all. Landlords can already raise prices whenever they want, it's always been legal. Despite this, most choose to put in 10% to 40% increase, every single year, anyway. - https://www.michiganpublic.org/economy/2023-03-22/as-housing...

> If they knew they can raise prices when needed, they could afford to lower prices in a downturn knowing they can raise later.

The only time a landlord will lower prices, is if a downturn is so severe that the Federal Government prevents landlords from accessing credit to wait out that downturn, and the landlord risks having to actually sell the property. (Which after 2008, it seems unlikely that the Feds would ever let the market correct again)

> Corporations arent buying housing in the vast midwest for this exact reason

Except they are buying lots of housing. Even in nothingsville-small-city Midwest, we're experiencing exploding housing prices, despite no real barriers to construction at all.

> Its only a good investment because supply is severely limited by the government.

The entire American Midwest exists, and proves this point severely wrong. Supply can be infinite and unlimited, and it's still profitable for companies to exploit housing.

It is a major national emergency, but average voters don't care about it, because almost no politician is willing to address it -- there's no one to vote for, who would try to fix it.

Even politicians who are struggling with this specific issue themselves refuse to address it. (Members of Congress struggling to afford to maintain housing on $174k salaries, would rather petition for more money, than to make housing more affordable)

All of the above.

- Prices are determined by comparables. When home owners sell, and can push prices higher, it pushes all possible future prices for all properties nearby higher simultaneously.

- Corporate interests are buying up real estate, and especially rentals. (public and private equity purchases are 6x higher than they were a decade ago here). Higher rental prices encourage people to leave rentals faster, making people more desperate to buy, increasing their willingness to take on more debt.

- (in a few areas) construction is limited and not keeping up with growth. In most of Midwest US, construction outpaces growth, but since prices are determined by comparables, new construction in an area can be priced at top of the market, resetting those comparables higher too. Paradoxically, even though we do need new housing construction to have housing, our financial system is setup such that new housing construction generally raises all prices for all housing on average -- the "more supply" benefits don't really take effect for about 30 years, when they become normal mid-market units.

- In some areas, new Hotels entrants are escaping basic regulation by lying about who they are. (see AirBnB, Vrbo and similar hotel chains). This removes housing supply, and can't be market corrected by other competitive hotels (since they would have to follow basic hotel regulation, but AirBnB and Vrbo are allowed to break the law)

- Unlike in 2008, corporate interests are willing to just eat massive losses to prevent property prices from falling. And the federal government is willing to extend massive amount of lending to them to allow them to do this almost indefinitely. So even in places where there's a massive supply of empty units, those units aren't making it to the market at any reduced prices because it's too affordable to simply sit on them instead and hope they're eventually able to rent out again at ultra-high pricing. I suspect we'll never see a gentle market reset back to real-world-based numbers like we saw in 2008 for that reason.

Any one of those problems would raise property prices for everyone. But we're dealing with all of them, simultaneously.

Something like this https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2024/01/05/hedge-fund-... would be a gentle start to attempt to address the above problems, but it remains to be seen if they actually get this through.

It depends on the area. In Michigan, for example, the area here is mostly swampland, houses with no infrastructure have to build their own. Usually that means running new power lines, and figuring out well water and septic. Septic is trickier than it seems, you need to have enough space for a leech field large enough to drain properly, it needs to flow properly (away from your home, away from your own well) and soil absorption has to be high enough (and the water line low enough) to handle it all. Having a lot of land isn't enough on it's own, it has to have enough natural drainage to be able to handle itself and anything you need to seep into it.

For example, you might have an acre of land, but if too much of the soil underneath is clay, or if the water table is too high, the wastewater might not drain fast enough, so it sits and stagnates or mixes with freshwater, despite having "lots of land". You generally need a surveyor to produce and sign off on a Topographical Survey to assess that.

So yeah, "there were no sewers once upon a time", sure. But if you try to build suburban-like densities out here without a solid plan signed off, you are likely to end up piping your own sewage right into your own water taps.

https://www.miottawa.org/Health/OCHD/pdf/AboutSewage.pdf