pjkundert

Show me an example of “gouging” in any market except those with government-controlled supply.

Surprise!

You can’t — because, it turns out, people enjoy providing goods and services at a profit, and will gleefully and immediately resolve the supply disruption that led to the “gouging”.

This topic is surprisingly robust, for something with so many obvious counter examples in such a wide range of scenarios…

Except the shortage lasts for mere moments, instead of as long as the causal disruption.

People incapable of doing (or even understanding) something, interfering with other people who can do it, with no consequences if they are found to be wrong (or biased) in their basis for objecting to the activity.

Fundamentally, this is loathing and envy encoded into law.

I’ve been doing this for 40 years. I love it, every day.

I’d quit today if forced to do what I saw 100% of the guys doing in that Windows dev shop…

Or, continue to believe I’m a “Linux fanboi”. Cut my teeth on Gosling emacs + make on a Vax running BSD Unix. It was great, 15 years before I installed Linux 0.8 + X from a stack of 40 floppies.

Get the off my lawn.

There’s plenty of regulation.

It’s caused several builders I know to close their businesses.

Congratulations! Sometimes, evidently, you get what you vote for?

That’s the demand side of the equation. Simple to fix, in an operational economy, right?

The supply side has been imploded by government decree, leading inexorably to the current debacle. I personally know several builders closing down their businesses. Not for lack of demand, of course, but because construction has been made impossible by vacant-eyed bureaucrats.

Dear central planners and jr. totalitarians:

This self-imposed disaster won’t cease until you decide it’s time for it to be over. Or, keep voting as you have - your choice. You do you.

Do you use Windows to do software development?

I've talked to several people who described why they left "software development", and recently worked in a Windows development shop -- I'd leave the field, too, if I had to work like that!!

If so -- try switching to development using a more traditional *nix philosophy, but make sure you have a seasoned mentor! You may just find that you actually love software development, but didn't know it because it was hidden under a pile of ... Windows.

With current Starlink + solar, Canada has so much arable, accessible land that it beggars the imagination — the entirety of Western Europe fits well within the western 4 provinces, below the arctic circle.

This is livable, beautiful land. I’ve lived there for much of my life.

As for investors buying up all supply? Unless the free market has ceased to function, supply will increase until the marginal cost equals the market-clearing price.

There is essentially no supply available, and builders (I personally know several) are closing their businesses due to government malevolence, not the lack of buyers.

For example; if the revelation of the training datasets and their relative weighting revealed bias on the part of the LLM trainer toward some ideological goal, should we have the right to know that?

Similarly, if some food ingredient was found to be metabolically harmful and addictive, and the food producer is found to have funded and gamed the research to avoid your understanding of this fact, should you have the right to know?

I have become increasingly convinced that both of these events are occurring.

Should it not be our right to assure ourselves of the integrity of our nutritional and intellectual inputs?

Tragically, there is evidently now a majority of HN readers and voters who disagree! This renders HN an intellectual liability, instead of the valuable resource it used to be…

They should be concerned; these kinds of issues have led to revolutions in the past.

Canada is a prime example. We have huge amounts of available land, and 90% of that inputs to home construction are locally available. There is a huge labor pool, ready and willing and able to fuel new home construction, and a huge pool of available buyers.

However, we are seeing what can only be described as a controlled demolition of the housing industry, due to absolutely hostile regulations and a justice system that seems bent on destroying small business, especially in the housing industry.

Hiding the content and weighting of LLM training data sets is the equivalent of hiding poisonous ingredients in food.

I guess you do get what you voted for…

s/More Sustainable/Less Convenient/

France is arresting people for providing end-to-end encrypted communications?

What could possibly go wrong!

Price “gouging” always ceases, virtually immediately, in an open market.

Only with government interference stopping new suppliers from entering the market (eg. making it illegal to protect your store from looters) can “gouging” persist.

Let the leftist silent downvoting begin!

A) Government destroys competition in marketplace by allowing looting, etc.

B) Government passes laws to prevent “gouging” by remaining government-funded incumbents, further increasing risk to new market entrants.

C) Remaining providers depart, leaving no service in the area.

D) Government creates new DMV-inspired provider to “help” the populace, which provide acceptable service to absolutely nobody (see: $billions for government provided fast car chargers that were never built)

E) Taxes are increased to support and expand the useless provider.

F) Go to step A for the next market.

- subsea temperature increases impossible to explain by any atmospheric heating mechanism

- complete predictive failure of all atmospheric models, over both the last 2 decades, and the last year

But, trust us — we’re “the science”, and we totally know what’s going on, and you should give us trillions of dollars and sacrifice your economy and standard of living to follow our suggestions to address “the problem”.

No, I can’t imagine why “Americans” aren’t flocking to do as these “climate scientists“ say.

Tax is for us working-class slobs.

Nobody with mobility options pays taxes.

But that’s not the problem: your betters have convinced you that they need to take 50%+ of your earnings to pay their elite friends for things you’ll never see.

And if you don’t like it, they’ll just print money (inflating your currency and thus looting your savings), and buy it anyway.

So: it’s our own fault for allowing them to force us to use their fraudulent money.

"Wow, the government is so catastrophically bad at managing IDs; what should we do?"

"Hmmm. I know! Lets get the government to manage a mandatory ID system, and require it for all aspects of citizen's lives! In fact, lets centralize all of their medical, financial and personal data using this ID, and ensure that it can all be accessed using this ID! What could possibly go wrong?"

2-3% is the rate of inflation that has been shown, historically, to allow the monetary authorities and those close to them to transfer the wealth of the nation's public to themselves without (much) turmoil.

Any more than 2-3%, and you'd begin to notice that your children are being systematically impoverished, and revolt. Keep it at 2-3%, and you'll die before you notice, apparently.

What are the odds this "study" was produced by an AI? ;)

It is a proxy for consuming less Poly-Unsaturated FAts (PUFAs). Likely because your skin ceases to be able to withstand sun exposure, making it more uncomfortable to generate vitamin D.

This also explains why supplementing vitamin D doesn’t work: it’s the PUFAs poisoning your metabolism that cause the problems, not the lack of vitamin D.

Sounds crazy, but explains a lot.

https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/what-im-currently-...

You realize this is the expected normal, with large unmanaged forests and fire suppression… right?

I live near these forests. They have been poorly managed for decades. We’ve been warning about this.

PUFAs.

I’ve been doing IPv4 networking for decades, and recently decided to take plunge and update all my gear and systems to IPv6.

So far, it’s a train wreck.

20 years in, and none of the major platforms support IPv6 in a consistent way (DHCP6 vs. SLAAC, anyone?), there is little to no analytical or diagnostic tooling, no (working) walkthroughs of equivalencies to standard IPv4 practices, little security clarity, …

This IPv6 debacle is a self-own of major proportions.

Besides just abundant trial and error, there's a great Python module call greenery, that produces Finite State Machines from any Regular Expression:

https://github.com/qntm/greenery

So, you can observe what kind of state machine is produced from any given Regular Expression. You can also use it to merge and such manipulate state machines, or simplify Regular Expressions.

Quite helpful.

The evidence presented thus far doesn't have any discussion of brand safety, and appears focussed on retribution for wrongthink against specific ad platforms.

Which may or may not be fine. IANAL.

Personally, I am shocked and appalled by the (few) ads I've seen lately, and arrange my affairs to avoid using any vendors I see advertising on the mainstream channels touted by the defendant in this case as being "safe" for their represented brands.

My young daughter sees none of these ads, as they are IMHO generally sex-cultish religious indoctrination... (specifically: the ads / programming revolves around glorifying whatever sexual identities or behaviours are embraced by that religion, instead of on the relevant topic or event at hand).

Once again, that's fine -- and I don't think there's a legal foundation preventing individuals (or the companies they own) from avoiding ad sellers that appear to be ideologically / religiously motivated to proselytize for (or avoid) sex-cultish religions.

It is probably even fine for an advertising industry organization to proclaim publicly that it rejects ad platforms based on ideological grounds -- I would certainly join such an organization, if it resulting in my company's advertising never appearing on a channel that contains sex-cultish religious programming or advertising!

Would that be ... illegal? I hope not!

So, in that light -- what is wrong with this industry organization avoiding ad channels that reject sex-cultish religious programming or advertising?

If everyone involved knew exactly that this was the goal of the defendant's organization (and they all felt that their product's ads belonged on channels containing such IMHO questionable programming), why wouldn't that be just fine?

HN is, unfortunately, now sadly inhabited by many un-inquisitive cowards.

Why is collusion of buyers (group influence over supply) not fundamentally different than collusion of sellers (restriction of supply)? I don't agree with pretty much anything being done, by either side, but it's interesting.

It used to be much more interesting, here; filled with people who asked "why" things occur, and if things form coherent patterns, what this could mean?

Now, it is evidently a boring leftist DEI soy-boy echo chamber. If one engages in wrongthink, one gets silently downvoted, evidently by people who hold opinions they cannot robustly support...

Using a third-party organization to establish common selling prices amongst independent sellers appears to be suspect. Even if the sellers don't actively "collude" to set the price.

This is what is happening in the San Francisco rental marketplace, right now.

As for buyers (advertisement buyers) belonging to a group that evidently was colluding with various buyers to induce their wider membership to exclude a subset of sellers (websites) because of their political leanings?

Maybe this is just activist "boycotting". If every ad buying company in the organization, and every agency was aware that they were all trying to penalize websites that held certain opinions, that should be fine: It's just the "Anti-Conservative Ad Buying Club". No harm, no foul -- Just baddies like X, Daily Wire, Zero Hedge, etc. get hurt.

But, it doesn't appear that everyone involved knew that was the game being played. They were just members of an ad industry organization that recommended good behaviour.

If so, then everyone should be OK if some companies join an "Anti Leftist Ad Buyers Club", and boycotts CNN, WaPo, etc.? Right??

Agreed.

99.9% of users will just appreciate the fact that their money retains its purchasing power (as measured in civilization supporting commodities), across multiple generations. Not just for a few years; their grandkids will be able to purchase the same amount of "stuff" with it).

Those that want to create wealth and then monetize that wealth to (for example) purchase property or businesses will appreciate the non-corruptible value management features.