DataDive

I don't know how prevalent my behavior is, but I eat out less since these random fees appeared.

If the price were simply 15% higher, I think would not mind (again I am guessing, who knows really - needs some sort of experiment).

I deeply dislike being quoted one price on the menu, but by the time I check out, it is notably higher. Once I add both the tax and the "fees," it is like paying for another complete entree. That unpleasant memory stays with me, even until the next time I consider eating out.

But then, I am not in the restaurant business, and I have lots of sympathy for those that make a living in such a razor-thin profit environment.

Do addon fees hurt more the businesses than help? I can't tell but I can provide my own behavior as an example.

I do think that it is an interesting thought - even if I don't necessarily agree.

If you go to any home improvement store, you'll see walls of insect-killing products; most appear highly toxic. Many people also exhibit overly fearful reactions to insects (or snakes, for that matter).

The tradeoff is not between having or not having roses/tomatoes/beans, but should you go out of your way to take out all insects with the most toxic means possible?

I read the article as more of a wake-up call and a bit of education, suggesting that maybe there is beauty and value in life in general, beyond us humans deciding what is valuable and what is not.

But if it is all ineffectual, then maybe it has the opposite effect.

If people think they are already doing something, they might see less need to make the hard choices.

> I sent an article to the NYTimes a few months ago and it hasn’t been printed by them yet.

In my reading it is exactly the other way around, no?

You sent something to NYT they published it and now they are not allowed to publish anything from you, and not because what new content is.The ban is because you wrote it.

And if they do publish something you wrote they are criminally negligent.

you misread what I am implying,

based on all past evidence, she never wants to wear makeup, read her works and interviews, I have done it myself,

these arseholes at Glamour made her do it,

she is being forced into a role never wanted to be in, looks disturbing

What do you mean?

That there are tasks out there that some ought to do for free if someone else thinks these should be done for free?

The "pay what you think it is worth" model is not a scalable and viable approach. It most likely only works when everything costs money and "pay what you think" is a novelty that gains sympathy and attention.

But as soon as the novelty wears off it is not a sustainable approach.

Look up disposable income over the years, and you'll soon see that that "glory" era of the 70s may have been less rosy than you think

The cheap housing of that era (even discounting the lead paint and asbestos-based insulation) might not be something you would want to live in today.

Housing is more expensive because people value it more than in the past.

They might value it more because housing is much better than in the past. That could be a simple explanation to what we observe.

The key measure to compare everything is disposable income rather than inflation-adjusted this or that.

Disposable income of the 70s was a tiny fraction, many orders of magnitude smaller than the disposable income of 2024.

In addition, houses in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s are not comparable to houses today. Modern houses and cars should cost a lot more because they offer a lot more.

All I am saying here is that the picture is a lot more complicated and nuanced and needs a more detailed evaluation than a simplistic scaling factor into the past.

America has plenty of affordable housing; it is just in the wrong place. There are enormous swaths of land with low populations and ultra-cheap homes.

We don't have a housing problem; the problem is that affordable housing has undesirable locations.

Make the locations attractive, and all of a sudden, there is no housing problem.

(I don't claim to know how to achieve that)

When I looked at the examples, very few seemed to be fully ChatGPT generated.

That being said, most scientists are very smart and recognize the power of ChatGPT. They are most likely heavily relying on it when producing summaries, abstracts, hypotheses, etc., and because they can and will edit it you won't be able to tell from words alone.

ChatGPT is an equalizer between native English speakers and scientists speaking English as a second language.

But both groups will use it heavily and nobody can foresee what the net effect of it is on science.

Having had that experience, I can tell you that it takes weeks or months to write up results as a paper and go through the most boring steps of formatting and organizing them into antiquated presentation formats: Intro/Discussion/Results, dumbass citations, labeling, backward wordings ... etc

What should be a five-paragraph discovery on a blog has to take the form of a multipage, heavily formatted document that contains enormous, unrelated, and useless information.

With ChatGPT, you can do it in a day. If you are not using ChatGPT, you lose out.

The people that are proposing the bills are not the same that pay the bills.

The same people that talk talk will pull a NIMBY.

Same with politicians, propose something bold and daring, just not in their lobbyst backyard.

Why would you want a flat tax rate if some of the money you made is not taxable? How is it not worth it if it saves you a thousand dollars?

An efficient economic system is inherently complicated. It should support people who take chances, people who start businesses, and people who innovate. At the same time, the system has to protect itself from people who want to exploit the benefits afforded to people who add value.

Unsuprisingly these constraints will inherently complicate the process.

All these armchair accountants believing they could devise a better tax system shows their ignorance rather than their expertise.

Do you want to see bureaucracy and inefficiency? Go start a business in Germany and compare it to starting a business in the USA.

I think doing taxes in the US can be an enlightening process. It has many benefits, it shows you how much you made, where the taxes go, and that recognition makes politicians less eager to nilly-willy raise taxes.

And with that it does keep your taxes lower, there is no doubt about that.

You spend a few hours and around 50 bucks each year but in return you save thousands. It is a much better deal than the alternative.

That you equate video conferencing and social media with transformative technologies such as applications of electricity, transportation, air travel, computers etc indicate you are caught up in that common fallacy of believing that the times YOU live in must be the most important ever

Good enough is not the correct term.

The other day I bought a 30 dollar phone,

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Walmart-Family-Mobile-BLU-View-4-...

it has all the functionality that you might need it has map, a browser, runs facebook and twitter apps, tiktok what else do you need

can I use that as an argument that why buy an iPhone for 1K if you can get a great phone for $30 - no because when you talk about phones or laptop you are talking about comparable products

what I was saying that you cannot buy the same value you get with a Macbook in any laptop product

Oh yeah?

Please link to a model, just one in the 500-600 range that is comparable to a 1K Apple model.

I have owned half a dozen Windows laptops in the past, in all kinds of price ranges, cheaper and far more expensive than a Macbook Air.

None were even remotely comparable to the build quality and practicality of a Macbook Air. This was true even in the Intel CPU era. In the M processor era, the gap only increased.

You cannot even do research on a good Windows laptop because the makers constantly change the model numbers to confuse the customer and hide the flaws of these systems.

You buy a Windows laptop then either the screen, the battery life, the touchpad or the keyboard will suck ... maybe all four.

The sole reason to buy a Windows laptop and put up with all these flaws is playing games. If you need that you will put up with all that crap.