conjectures

It's very simple. If you have N house-seekers and M house-sellers then when N >> M: houses get expensive. Given it's hard to change N, raising M implies building more houses.

In the UK the equivalent of 'zoning' regulations keeps M low. Government 'help to buy' here exacerbates the problem as it directly increases N without directly increasing M.

The fundamental model here is musical chairs.

> In practice you'll have a head start of maybe a year before a grifter in China replicates your three years of R&D and floods the market.

So, not much different then?

If this isn't a thing already it should be.

On UK fruit picking: yes and this is why I find the national post Brexit news here hilarious. "Farmers say locals can't be hired to pick fruit"- yes! at the wages being offered. For > £20p/h I'm sure the workers would materialise.

From the news, this sounds like the general economic model in the richer parts of the middle east.

I know BFI does a streaming service, can't vouch for the historical distribution but it's certainly this sort of stuff.

If you've not read it, 'Kicking Away the Ladder' by Ha-Joon Chang is a great book on this topic.

It has a good deal of historical detail on what developed countries did themselves to become developed with respect to IP and protection.

The extension to matrix-matrix is trivial, since a matrix is just a concatenation of columns.

It seems likely to. In MCMC this is known as the mixing/convergence speed. If one valid transition kernel decreases the mutual information between samples faster than another it mixes faster. Meaning the sampled chain has better statistical properties (effective number of independent samples).

This is true, the article is essentially 'cool new battery - for satellites'.

> Humour is rarely appreciated here, but I found this funny and on point.

Yes, we just play our hyperbole with a straight bat.

> If your argument for the market economy working in a way that shouldn't inspire paranoia is based on trust and distinguished consumer choice, you've not been paying attention to world news or you're arguing in bad faith.

No, I think you missed the point. It's based on greedy organisations being predictable. Amazon will send stuff we order so that we buy more stuff from them. Electricity grid with zero regulation will fail to invest in preventative measures against extreme events. Trust or distrust arises from the particular game theoretic situation we're talking about. Simply thinking every corporation will screw us at every moment is the paranoia.

The point is that if I want a can of sugar water (or aspartame) I can reliably find one. I'm unlikely to pop the tab and find kombucha or sand.

'Companies are out to make money' is not the debate trump card you seem to think it is. In fact the same view is embedded in my previous comment. The question is, given it's true what's the range of phenomena that result, what works well, what badly etc?

I realise this is an opinion du jour around here now, but it's a pretty paranoid take on the market economy.

I trust that if I buy a can of coke, it will contain coke because coke want to keep selling me coke. They don't need to be good people, they just have to care about making money in the future. The fact that I think they care about that is why I can trust that the can of coke in fact contains coke with high probability.

> remember when that was considered a skill?

Yeah ;) That era was like being given a car and pretending it's a horse. Skills for the future was mostly typing on a word processor, not programming the thing.

And there was me thinking that the future was getting to wear a helmet all the time to avoid accidents and contagion while getting a constant HUD and brain machine interface. Disappointed. Neat tricks though.

Not totally true. There's a whole suite of social problems stemming from having a large elderly population in poor health. Insufficient pensions, how to pay for healthcare, staffing in caring professions. If 'studying the science of ageing' translates into 'keep older people healthier for longer', then those problems may be mitigated somewhat.

Also, scientific advances can make treaments cheaper. E.g. modifying bacteria to produce insulin is cheaper than extracting it from pigs.

The use case is making it take less time to build stuff I imagine.

I'd like to agree and note that assuming we get to post-scarcity conditioning quality of life on work will be a bad definition.

On the other hand I recall, as a PhD student, David Cox lightly napping in the audience of a conference (he'd have been about 90), only to wake up for the questions and fire off some insights. So there is certainly some merit in the theory of a nexus between 'meaningful work' and living a long and engaged life, at least for some people.

Sorry, how does a government bring in tax revenue off of exports? Tarrifs are levied on imports rather than exports.

Sure they would make less money off corporation taxes with lower exports, but as those receipts are generally low anyway the tradeoff going to carbon tax would likely be favourable.

I guess it depends on the 'who' in those places.

It's not hard to imagine a government rather fancying getting a tax receipt from extraction companies, particularly if it is seen as green. Who would presumably lobby rather hard against it. This suggests the absence of pricing at source is to some extent a result of successful lobbying.

In the UK you can get spare bits too.

I respect the fact that you can be surprised by that. But even rewinding a bit: where are the data plotted, e.g. time vs failures?

Or, in a competitive market price = marginal cost of production and the marginal cost be 0. Value to customers is a separate thing.

That's not the case. Looking for |z|>t implicitly assumes the distribution is symmetric and unimodal for a start. As in, the method would break if those assumptions were violated.

Non-parametric means more than just avoiding talk of distributions.

Unfortunately this assumes that the politics of the city council is somewhat outcomes focused. If the mayor is intent on awarding the contract to her uncle no amount of 'soft skills' will help (and attempts to apply them may be counter-productive).

It's usually helpful to have an internal locus of control, and look for things in oneself (here, soft skills) that can be changed. However, sometimes reality just doesn't afford opportunities in a given situation. Accepting where that is that case means being able to extract oneself from a situation rather than wasting time on it.

I also doubt many of these things are even true.

I was always surprised in lectures watching people divide their attention between actually listening and trying to write structured notes. Most of the time there's a book which was structured by a pro. Rather than re-reading your own notes which reify misunderstandings from the 1st encounter.

Thanks for this one, it encapsulates a feeling I've had for a while but could never verablize so well.

Nah, every morning god rolls a d6 and on 4+ US are upvoters and Europeans downvoters.