I'll agree with other commenters that actually just showing a complete solution is better. Or both!
927 karma · joined November 20, 2018
Also, Chesterton’s Fence.
I humbly suggest that you flesh out the rules just a bit more. I struggled to figure out if pipes were allowed to run out of bounds, whether they all had to be connected into a single network, and the significance of the bulb-ended ones. I'm not totally dense and could make some guesses, but this still made the puzzle less than approachable for me at first. Basically I just guessed at these things, tried to see if I could solve one, and once I did and saw my complete solution all was clear. But why not state these things up front? Or maybe that's part of the puzzle? :-)
My first solve took 9min, then 3, then 1.5min for my third.
Televisions and microwaves are cheaper now. Intuitively I would have thought cars are cheaper too - but a moment of research indicated they're actually more expensive. Food and energy have become much cheaper as well. (Talking about over decades)
It's very easy to cherry-pick any one thing to focus on and say "Look how bad/good it is now." - but that doesn't make it meaningful or right to do so.
For obvious, numerous reasons we are producing less stuff now than before, so we have less available to consume.
Prices must outpace wages, or we get empty shelves, or we can ration. But we MUST consume less on average.
We could talk about taking from the rich, but actually the rich don’t consume all that much in aggregate, so that doesn’t help much (wealth and income don’t matter for this purpose, only consumption).
The price of the pizza goes to the restaurants, the delivery fee goes to the driver (mostly, I hope), and the "online convenience fee" goes to the business running the online ordering system. It all works out.
Clearly they're going to spend money on advertising anyway. And it's not unreasonable for those advertisements to include things they are proud of, such as when their franchisees support local businesses. They clearly say "Domino's franchisees" in the ad.
If printer companies try to make their money on the printer sale, then it's very difficult for folks who only need to print a little now and again, and they might not be able to afford a very good printer. By moving to a consumption-based revenue model, now they can let everyone have a super-cheap printer (they are MUCH cheaper than decades ago, despite inflation), and then the people who use the printer more (get more value from it) pay more, and those who don't pay less.
This seems reasonable, even though I also don't like hardware that bricks itself if I don't use as directed.
So the current argument might be that since the constitution does not give the federal government the power to regular abortions (or to prevent states from regulating them), then that power to regulate them or not is reserved for the states to do as they please.
The prior argument (from Roe vs Wade) is that the US Constitution provides a right to privacy and that prohibiting or otherwise restricting abortions violates that right to privacy.
While there's no explicit right to privacy in the constitution, it could be implied by the 14th amendment: "... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ..."
From the original Roe vs Wade opinion: "A person may choose to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, based on the right to privacy contained in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Viability means the ability to live outside the womb, which usually happens between 24 and 28 weeks after conception." https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/
Still I think there are workarounds: Maybe I can pay Apple $20/mo for 2000 'points' that I spend on whatever subscriptions I want, and they pass the points/payments along in bulk to each vendor. Not sure.
Things have changed now.
"paid app at version X, which will get bugfixes indefinitely" - Would you continue maintaining some old version of an app you wrote three years ago that nobody buys anymore? I certainly hope not.
Nuclear has been around quite a while as well, but is heavily encumbered by public sentiment, sub-optimal regulations, and knowledge atrophy. There is much more room for optimization before running into physical laws.
I feel like a big part of the problem is that the entire space is filled with junky 'free' apps, and getting to something high-quality is difficult. And so we're trained not to value apps because they're awful, and therefore not worth paying for anyway. A vicious cycle.
If the apps are reasonable quality and solve a problem, what's $5 or even $10? Many people spend around that for a cup of coffee that will be gone in 30min. I'd happily pay that for a good app - if only I could find one.
I'd LOVE to see super-cheap subscriptions too - like maybe ten cents or even less per month. This solves another issue: Once a dev has gotten most of the one-off sales they can, there's not much incentive to maintain the app. A subscription model is much better for this, but for most simple utility apps it needs to be very cheap.
This is how we end up with rent control and tight building restrictions - because it solves both problems. Roll up the drawbridge against new people by blocking development, but then make the housing affordable by fiat.
The only remaining problem then is 10 year waitlists to get into one of those rent controlled spaces. Bummer on that...
Of course, if it's STEP 1, and you're faced with many iterations of this, that's a different story. But if I'm somewhat certain that I'm looking at a great offer from a great company at some point, why not spend the 4 hours?
There is no price/quantity combination that will satisfy both producers and consumers.
"If people think Patreon is making a killing with their fee structure, they should build a competitor." >> Yes! And honestly this could be applied in so many places where people like to complain, and yet nobody builds a competitor, or they do and it ends up looking like the original. So easy to complain, so hard to do better.