AnthonyMouse

It's snake oil.

Landlords have an inherent trade off between holding out for a tenant who would pay a higher rent and not having the unit vacant in the meantime. Holding out for longer than that helps the other landlords at your expense. Meanwhile there are a large number of landlords, there is no way for the ones using a given system to force the others to do the same, and a significant percentage of them don't.

So if the system tells the landlords using it to do the thing that would increase rents if every landlord was using it, the "defectors" who don't use the system win out over anyone using it, which means using the system rather than defecting would cause you to lose money and everyone would have the incentive to defect.

Whereas if all the system is doing is suggesting the optimal point in the trade off between holding out for a higher paying tenant and renting the unit sooner, without assuming the other landlords are being required to use the same system, that's the same thing an individual landlord would do if they're not colluding.

The actual way landlords collude is through zoning boards, because then they have an enforcement mechanism, i.e. if someone is trying to defect by adding new units to alleviate the limited supply then the other landlords can sic the government on them, having passed the various laws against constructing those units there.

> If the U.S. were to switch its production to robots and thereby cause mass unemployment, a revolution would break out in the U.S.

You're assuming the US starts using robots to produce the things currently produced manually in the US, rather than using robots to produce the things currently produced manually in China.

> Because with that logic, every company in the world is a monopoly because every company in the world has their own niche and their own products which are different from others.

There are numerous companies that make bleach or wheat or ceramic bowls. Their products are completely fungible with their competitors. None of them has a monopoly on any of that.

Whereas the ones that have no viable substitutes for a particular use... have a monopoly. That's what a monopoly is. It's when you can't get something from anyone else.

That's not the same thing as having a vendor-specific part. It's pretty common that the brake pads for a particular vehicle won't fit on a car from any other make. However, that doesn't mean the OEM is the only one who makes that part. You can get Ford-specific brake pads from Duralast or Powerstop or others in addition to getting them from Ford.

> Ford would never sell you a car with an engine in it which isn't from them.

Ford has sold millions of cars with engines in them from Mazda and others.

> Apple doesn't prohibit you either from ripping out the motherboard from the chassis of whatever device and putting your own stuff in there. People change batteries etc.

They expressly prohibit you from running macOS or iOS on anyone else's hardware, and likewise prevent you from running any other OS on an iPhone.

You're solving for force when the thing that causes the damage is (very rapid) acceleration. The total acceleration comes from the initial difference in speed between the two things that collide and the proportion of the acceleration applied to each object is inversely proportional to their relative masses.

If they have the same mass then they each take half. If one of them is 19 times heavier then the other one takes 95% of the acceleration. If one of them is six hundred trillion times heavier then the other one takes ~100% of the acceleration, but this is still only ~5% more than taking 95%.

Consider what happens if you walk at 2 MPH into a concrete pillar which is fully anchored into the Earth. The mass of the Earth makes the mass of your body look like zero with some zeros after it, so are you immediately crushed? No, but get launched out of a cannon into the pillar at 200 MPH and you're dead even if it's not anchored into the Earth.

Vehicle mass is a significant factor in collisions between vehicles because taking two thirds of the impact is a meaningful increase over taking half of it. Heavier vehicles are much more dangerous to lighter vehicles.

It's basically irrelevant in pedestrian collisions because the pedestrian is already taking ~95% of the impact even from a lighter car and the <5% difference between that and an arbitrarily heavier vehicle is completely dwarfed by any of the other variables like the speed of the collision. For a pedestrian it's better to get hit by a freight train at 35 MPH than a 3000 pound vehicle at 39 MPH.

> Neither MacOS nor iOS are anywhere near being dominant in their markets in the same way Microsoft was with Windows.

A market is the set of goods or services that are fungible substitutes for one another. If Ford and Chevy use the same kind of battery as each other but Honda and Toyota use a different kind then "battery for Ford or Chevy" is a market and "battery for Honda or Toyota" is a different market. If they each require different kinds of battery then "battery for Ford" is a separate market from "battery for Chevy", but even within those markets there can be multiple competitors, i.e. Ford isn't necessarily the only company that makes batteries compatible with Ford vehicles.

Whereas if Ford vehicles use a different kind of battery than other vehicles and there is only one company who makes that kind of battery, "battery for Ford vehicles" would be a market in which that supplier has a monopoly, regardless of whether the one supplier is Ford or someone else.

Which one of these looks like what Apple is doing?

> Ford isn't getting sued either for only selling cars with Ford motors inside.

Ford isn't only selling cars with Ford motors inside. They offer them that way, and it's a popular purchase option, but they'll also sell anyone essentially any part of the car by itself. They also don't prohibit you from taking the engine out of your Ford and putting it in a Chevy or vice versa.

> I used the price as an example to indicate how heavily subsidized it must be.

The amount of the subsidy is an independent question. Regardless of the amount you choose, it can then be in kind or in cash.

> Because the market for daycare will favor the well-off. You're just topping off the income of people who need daycare, then leaving everyone to fend for themselves.

If you give someone with less money the amount of money it takes to pay for a quality daycare, they obviously now have the money to pay for it -- you've just given it to them.

At which point there are two possibilities, right? One is, they use it for that, in which case your objection doesn't apply. It's the same thing as happens if daycare was provided in kind.

The other is, they use a less expensive daycare because they need something else more than they need the more expensive daycare, e.g. they would use the extra money to buy food. Then what you're really doing is forcing them to use the more expensive daycare when given the choice they'd have used the money for something they regard as more important. That's not actually helping them when they're right, but assuming they're wrong is assuming that you know their circumstances better than they do.

> And now you've taken a person out of the labor force. Possibly forever.

Only under the assumption that being a homemaker isn't work.

> None of this makes much sense in most cases. In my municipality, kindergarten employees are responsible for roughly 5 small children or 8 big children at any given time. There are no full-time jobs in this country that pay a fifth of a kindergarten employee's salary (yes yes, there are overheads etc).

Daycare as a business/government has costs that daycare as a family member doesn't. The former needs a separate piece of real estate to operate out of, insurance against claims by the family, the full complement of support staff for accounting/legal/HR/etc. The latter uses their own home which is a sunk cost and doesn't require the rest of it because they're not an organization.

> Because having each parent have to go to a privatized daycare utimately costs more, for a worse service than it being a public service.

Why would it work in such a way for this when it works the opposite for everything else?

> It also reinforces social segregation, where wealthy parents can afford to put their children into the fancy daycare, while poorer ones either don't (which is horrible for the children), or have them in run down, overcrowded day cares.

If the subsidy is enough to pay for the "fancy" daycare then everyone can afford it because everyone gets the subsidy. If it isn't, you haven't done that to begin with, because then the public daycare is underfunded and the wealthy parents use their money to opt out of it regardless of whether it's operated by the government.

It's also missing the condition. macOS is only "free" after you buy their hardware, i.e. acquiring it is still tied to buying the hardware. If it was actually independently available for free then you wouldn't be prohibited from running it on other hardware.

See also Windows and Internet Explorer.

If you offer to add a bunch of offshore wind turbines or build a new nuclear plant, what happens? It's basically "address NIMBY opposition by doing something that incurs NIMBY opposition".

The real problem is that politics has gotten so broken that people have lost the connection between building things and having them. You'll have the same people opposing new generating capacity while complaining about high electric bills.

Right, so why is the proposal to prohibit "data centers" instead of the thing you're objecting to? Make them add more in non-fossil fuel generation than they're consuming.

> foreign bot armies understand they're most effective when the amplify real sentiments.

"Propaganda is just helping you get in touch with your true feelings."

If the problem is demand outstripping supply then the obvious thing to insist on is that if they want to build, they should add more supply than they're consuming, so that they're fronting the money to make your electric bills go down.

Whereas instead we keep seeing proposals to ban them outright, which is the thing you'd expect to be pushed by someone with a different interest than domestic electric bills.

> But in this very high-cost country it costs about €200/month to have a child in daycare/kindergarten (ages 1-5, usually run separated in age groups 1-2 and 3-5). Second child simultaneously is cheaper. Third is cheaper still.

Because they're subsidizing the rest of the cost. But that's the issue. If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money? Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare. Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.

> I'm pretty sure that would leave us with extremely variable coverage for those who do choose kindergarten.

It would have a similar effect to having an economy that allowed more families to be sustainable on a single income rather than two. Then fewer of them would need daycare and there might be fewer daycares, but that doesn't seem like a great reason to force more kids into daycare, especially when the consequence would plausibly be something like the nearest one to you is 14 km away instead of 10 km.

> Although I am a free-marketeer, I also believe that these are services that should be available at quality to anyone independently of income.

But now you're talking about the price again.

Suppose the actual unsubsidized cost for providing quality service is X. If you provide a daycare subsidy for each child in the amount of X, it costs the government X, and then everyone can afford daycare. If you instead provide a cash subsidy for each child the amount of X, it costs the government X, and still everyone can afford daycare, because paying for it costs X and they received X in cash to use for that or anything else at their choosing.

> How is this perverse? Do we not need people doing low-wage jobs?

It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.

And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.

> If they're so smart, why didn't they see this data center backlash coming and plan for it accordingly?

Because the backlash isn't actually about the data centers, it's about AI. 80% of the complaints about data centers are nonsense and the remaining 20% only apply to the ones where they're doing something that isn't actually required, like burning fossil fuels to power them.

Which you can tell because the demands look like "stop building data centers" rather than "to build one you have to add 110% as many watt hours in new non-fossil fuel generation to the grid as you use".

> Higher temperature operation sheds heat energy via radiation much faster.

Isn't this what heat pumps are for? Then you can run the radiators at higher temperatures without needing to run the electronics at those temperatures.

> Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default

I feel like the absurdity is the other way.

Consider the two components of a public daycare: Who runs it and who pays for it.

With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.

With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids. Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?

The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves. Whereas if the parent can do higher skilled work then they can still take the job and use the subsidy money to pay for daycare, even if they're not required to use it for that. So the better subsidy is the one in cash.

Building companies optimize for profit which is why they have a good incentive to build things that are in short supply. They build whatever the customer buys.

On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.

The requirements are nothing but a type of tax whose revenue is allocated to some de facto government program. But taxes on new development are asinine because they inherently get passed on as higher rents for humans and businesses, and the latter then have to pass them on as higher prices -- or can't afford them and go out of business, which is how you get the high street full of vape shops.

> You're advocating central planning.

Central planning is the status quo. That's essentially what zoning rules are, and why everything is such a mess. You want to open a shop and live above it? No, sorry, not zoned for residential; banned. Operate the shop out of your house instead? Haha, banned. What if your shop really doesn't need very much space at all, so something the size of a closet would do as long as it's in the right location? Nope, minimum unit sizes or similar, prohibited by law. And so on.

If they want to stop doing this that would be great, but if they're not going to stop doing it then having the rules be things like "no chains" instead of "no small units" would certainly be an improvement.

> It's a cultural shift and will only come when the bosses -- the venture capitalists who ultimately control our industry -- are held accountable when things break, and given strong incentives to ensure they don't break.

The problem here is that the correct amount of resources is context-dependent.

Suppose you're a small business and you're putting up a website to display the menu for your restaurant and directions to get there. Do you want it to get compromised? Of course not. Does it matter very much if it does? Eh. Should you spend $50M in formal verification to make sure it doesn't? Definitely not.

Whereas if you're developing the software that keeps planes from falling out of the sky, that's an entirely different context.

The problem comes when someone grabs the awful WordPress junk that was suitable for displaying static menus and wants to use it to process credit cards. But even that isn't really the fault of the awful WordPress junk, it's the fault of the credit card companies for designing their financial technology in such a ridiculous way that Merchant A has to be given a secret that allow purchases to be made against the same card at Merchant B, instead of using the decades-old cryptography that would prevent the customer from ever needing to give anyone a secret that enables that wide a scope of compromise.

It comes down to how much work is justified to ensure that the thing not have problems, which is not at all the same across different domains.

> But you really have no choice, that mess is transparent to large-enough LLMs.

It's transparent to large-enough LLMs given enough resources. Which is the thing that was always true. The difference now is that the level of resources is lower, so we're finding a bunch of things it wasn't previously economical to find.

But the cost still isn't zero. On top of that, the same LLMs are now generating enormous volumes of new code, which both nobody has verified to that level of exaction and nobody has even considered how it interacts with existing and other new code.

> You just have to pay Apple their $99/yr for the privilege.

Do you expect ordinary people to do this?

Also, what's the excuse for even having a "developer" distinction if ordinary users are expected to need it?

The stock market is basically a system for abstracting ownership away from human beings.

When you have a small business, or even a large business that has a single owner, that person has to care about things like their own reputation and might sometimes have preferences for things other than maximizing returns. There is a significant difference in behavior between a profitable company that makes money by providing something people want and a company that makes slightly more money by turning the screws at every opportunity.

And typical funds only care about number go up. Even the ones that nominally exclude "bad" companies/industries have their rules, but then hold shares in Comcast rather than Exxon and still expect Comcast to turn the screws. Whereas to do the real thing, you would need funds with missions to do things like specifically fund companies who are new entrants to concentrated markets to increase the amount of competition. Which to most funds is a conflict of interest, because if the fund has that industry as a target then it already owns shares in the companies the new entrant would be competing with. Conversely, mergers they're all for, because they own shares in all three companies in that industry, so causing three to become two is higher margins for everybody.

So it produces market concentration and drives obsession with quarterly profits, harming customers and employees. The consequently larger companies then buy off the government to get subsidies and insist they're too big to fail whenever they screw up, use the nature of multinational conglomerates to arbitrage tax rates and shift tax incidence to purely domestic companies and workers, etc. All of which the funds like because they make number go up.

It's basically a paperclip optimizer which is trying to accumulate money rather than paperclips.

It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out with their "no unapproved code" stance. The old excuse was that normal users don't know how to write code and so don't need to be able to run their own code.

But now normal users can have some AI thing write single-use code for them, and for relatively simple code like "show me all my pictures between these two dates that are in landscape rather than portrait" they'll usually get it right.

And now who wants a phone where you can't do anything like that?

> Those were the loans that were rated AAA.

If you're going to make a point of it then don't leave out the part about how it happened.

What they were doing was, they'd take a block of subprime mortgages and split them up into tiers. Basically they'd agree to wait to see who defaulted and then the top tiers would get all the mortgages people actually paid back and the bottom tiers got the ones they didn't. If 10% of the mortgages defaulted then anyone who bought at the 10th percentile tier gets all the defaults and everybody else gets paid. If 20% of them defaulted then the ones who bought the 20th percentile tier lose too, but the 30th percentile tier still gets paid.

The highest tiers were rated AAA, because for them to lose you'd have to have preposterously high default rates.

Then we started seeing preposterously high default rates.

> Then that's going to force the companies that DO use humans to respond to switch to AI, because the responses are coming in via AI.

There are two obvious ways to handle this.

The first is to charge for human support. If you want to pay $100 each time you make a human spend 15 minutes responding to your AI agent's query, it's your money.

And the second is that you put a chatbot out front that has memorized the FAQ and thereby successfully answers 97% of queries, but cause them to get better at identifying when they're being useless and route that small percentage of issues to human support.

That's assuming Anthropic ceases to exist rather than having to file for bankruptcy and sell off their assets to someone who continues to operate it as a business.

And that you couldn't subsequently do antitrust against OpenAI.

They also caused it by encouraging banks to make loans to people who couldn't afford to pay them back, to "promote home ownership".

The actual problem wasn't really regulatory, it was that they made a change to a complex system and nobody noticed what the implications were until it was already a Problem.

What happened was, mortgages were always considered safe loans, because if the borrower defaults then you repossess the house and sell it to recover the principal. Meanwhile banks would only make loans to people with good credit, because even if you can repossess the house, doesn't mean you want the trouble. So if you looked at the past, holding mortgages was a good investment.

Then they started allowing the banks to sell the mortgages to investors and for the investors to buy insurance against defaults. Which is fine if the investors/insurers are doing their homework and buying loans that are going to be paid back, but mortgages were considered safe, so they were basically not paying attention. There was a thing where they had some bundles of mortgages rated as AAA when they shouldn't have been, but that was more of a scapegoat for the institutional investors who should have known better to blame somebody else after things started going south.

The actual cause was this: Once the banks started selling mortgages to investors, they no longer cared if the borrower would pay it back, because now that's the investor's problem -- and the investors weren't paying attention. Meanwhile as soon as the bank sells the mortgage, they have the principal back from the investor and can go loan it out again and then sell that mortgage. And while this is happening the government is encouraging it because look at all of these new home owners. So now you have the banks giving mortgages to everybody regardless of creditworthiness, and that's what really caused it.

Because doing that creates a housing bubble, as all the people who can't actually afford a house can now bid up the prices by taking out a loan they won't be able to pay back. And the housing bubble in turn invalidates the assumption that if the borrower defaults you can recover the principal by repossessing the house, because now when the bubble pops, people end up underwater on their mortgages. The value of the house crashes and is now less than the loan principal. So when those borrowers start to default, the investors holding those mortgages and the insurers insuring them were lined up to get smashed. Oops.

In a casino the thing getting milked is the gamblers. In the stock market the thing getting milked is is mostly the customers/employees/taxpayers.

> The zoomers on the left and right disagree on just about everything, except they both agree that radical change needs to happen.

This is how the two party system evolved to sustain the status quo. When people are mad about something, divide the people into two parties and have them each demand a different solution while demonizing the solution of the other party, so that their votes cancel out and then nothing changes.

Extra points if you can get them to demand something unnecessarily polarizing, disproportionate or simplistic when there are better solutions available, because then you can get them to fight against the moderates too.

Notice also that when you point this out to a partisan, they have a tendency to violently agree and then immediately mischaracterize the problem as being that the other party is bad and wrong and the solution is to have everybody do their party's thing.