pushrax

Working with the idea that value is current and future utility to people:

Total utility depends on people's ability to use/appreciate goods and services. Therefore, a transaction that allows for more use/appreciation creates value.

However, you can anticipate that other people will use/appreciate something, and set out to produce it. The expectation of future sale creates value for you; value is created before any buyer appears.

Feels to me like most value is probably created intentionally this way.

On real estate: I think there's not that much value created on average simply due to transacting. Sometimes people die and their estate is sold, or a space has features that are more valued by the buyer (e.g. proximity to water for a sailor, or 3-phase power for a machine shop), or some other asymmetry arises. However, most spaces don't suddenly provide more value to people just because someone else resides there. The majority of value in real estate is created by building/modifying, and the overall community (e.g. building a train stop increases value around it). Asymmetrically valued features are probably far from the biggest driver of value or price increase in aggregate. So, I agree value can be created by transacting real estate, but find the statement a bit misleading when thinking about why prices go up. The growth of availability of space is much slower than the growth of population and buying power.

Long term investors in stocks hope those companies generate value for others, producing profit, and that fundamental reasoning is why the stock should either go up or dividends be paid. Proxy capitalism. Money goes from everyone to the owners (wealth gap rises).

That's not to say stocks aren't also priced by market dynamics of speculation and meme spread. However, very long term trends in stocks should beat inflation in the currency those stocks are most exposed to. Stocks are a liquid representation of the most productive asset you can own (the work of other people and technology), so a good deal of the money created ends up in the stock market. Plus, companies own various tangible assets. That reasoning creates a strong price dependence on money supply.

Bitcoin's relatively fixed monetary base makes it theoretically stable under fluctuations in fiat monetary base. However, at the moment, partially due to low relative market cap of crypto compared to the entire stock market, meme spread and sketchy actors create huge amounts of price movement, leading to distrust. Long term that could definitely change but it also might not. Currencies have a network effect. Until critical mass is reached (historically by government sponsorship), the value of a floating currency will be unstable.

Also, you mention Bitcoin is fixed-emission. This is true and worth noting - around 18.6M out of 21M coins are minted. Right now inflation is ~2.2%. Relative to fiat this is pretty low, and there's only ~13% inflation left. https://charts.bitcoin.com/btc/chart/inflation

You buy based on maximum expected value for your risk tolerance and then hope you don't end up on the low end of the distribution of outcomes.

Example tail outcomes:

- Anti-capitalist uprising destroys all records of ownership.

- Massive fraud in companies you invest in.

- Competitors outside your holdings outcompete and take the market share.

It's pretty reasonable to bet that these won't happen at a sufficient scale to affect you, especially with international diversification, but you do also hope they won't.

Also, the stock price is backed by people's perception of the health and growth of a business, and by the price and performance of alternative assets. Pricing is hard. Obviously fundamental earning power influences price, but it's not the only or biggest force in price discovery, especially on <10y scales. As we have seen in the past year, expectations of money supply have a drastic nonlinear effect on stock prices across the market. A major (and unlikely) Fed strategy change could halve the market and keep it below ATH for a decade.

Indeed. The comments section shows the history; the author mindlessly corrected a non-error into an error. This looked like a decent summary at a glance but that issue is definitely distracting.

Implicitly they are arguing the value to people is low compared to energy consumption. They are sickened by the allocation of our limited sustainable energy production to this inefficient endeavour.

Presumably a proof of stake system with energy consumption within a few orders of magnitude of centralized ledgers would not be sickening.

> other fields where such principles aren't really applicable

Statistics and reasoning are almost always applicable, and that's the extent science is applied to most fields.

If you want people to act in an evidence-based way without invoking trust/faith, they need to understand statistics and be able to evaluate studies on their statistical merit. Unfortunately that's quite difficult and the educational systems we have do a poor job of teaching it.

Statistics is subtle. For example, "It turns out, most doctors don’t know actually know probability." https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/11/12/doctors-dont-k...

What they're saying here:

Some tech can be directionally utopian and some not. Various technologies lead us in various paths along the gradient of utility. Some tech is actively dystopian, when put in the context of social psychology. Tech is inherently meaningless - its usage in the real world by real societies defines its effect.

Tech's overall effect on utopia is based on our collective ability to predict and responsibly use it. That ability may not scale.

The risk depends on your net worth and earning power, as you allude to. Your net worth might have low variance if the ratio between it and your car's cost is high.

This is the most precise way to phrase the original recommendation. Don't get insurance for things that are easy for you tolerate the variance on. That can be true if you buy a cheap car and are pretty well off. What's the actual chance your car gets stolen 3 times in a year? After the first 2 times maybe you could change the place you store your car, get a GPS tracker or something?

There were 6858 vehicles stolen in NYC in 2020 (nearly doubled 2019) [0]. There are roughly 2M cars registered in NYC [1]. That's a 1 in 300 yearly chance to have your car stolen at least once. If we assume events are uncorrelated, there's a 1 in 100000 chance of two or more thefts, and a 1 in 25000000 chance of three or more. The odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident in the next year is something like 1 in 8000 [2].

That aside, there's all sorts of optional coverage that most people definitely can tolerate the variance on without calculation.

> You can't just be chasing the positive EV when the variance is potentially large.

There are many investment strategies that are exactly this. Writing options is one example. Forgoing insurance, like option writing, isn't possible without sufficient collateral of your own. I recognize that this is not possible for everyone. There are some cheap cars that work fine though. The biggest takeaway is to second guess the sales pitch on premium insurance plans.

Your example is another instant bankruptcy case, with reward that doesn't come close to compensating the risk.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/nyregion/car-thefts-nyc.h... [1]: https://dmv.ny.gov/statistic/2018reginforce-web.pdf [2]: https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...

Gas-fired humidifiers exist, though I'm not sure if you can get small ones easily.

Cold outdoor temperatures cause indoor humidity to get extremely low, because cold air can't hold humidity well.

Today where I live, the relative humidity outside is around 50%, and temperature -5c. That puts the absolute humidity around 1.7 grams per cubic metre. At 20c indoor temperature, that equates to around 10% relative humidity. Far too low.

That's a good point. So more precisely, at any instant your current risk is capped. I think that's more important, since it defines your worst case outcome. You could keep buying new cars, and after the 20th one is stolen go bankrupt, but you probably wouldn't do that if you can't afford it, so bankruptcy isn't a possible outcome.

The capped instantaneous risk lets you go for the option with highest expected value without having some chance you'll get instantly bankrupted.

All of my non-mechanical car damage has been either from someone else's driving or while the car was parked. The last one involved a guy who had a seizure at the wheel and barrelled through a red light in a truck. There wasn't any way to avoid it, fortunately it was a light swipe though.

My most expensive repair was in a parking lot where someone scraped and dented the entire side of my car trying to get into a space they really should not have. I'm under the impression most damage to cars happens in parking lots or street parking.

Still, as I wrote above, I still agree that insurance for the car isn't worth it, even though at some points it would have had positive value for me. In the long run it statistically won't.

Though if you have any financial assets to use as collateral, you can get cheaper leverage elsewhere. Then you don't need to buy an insurance contract with negative expected value, for a capped risk that you can tolerate out of pocket.

The part about driving skill is definitely just wrong, there are many reasons why cars get damaged. Though I agree that it's way better to drive cars that are cheap enough to repair or replace out of pocket.

Insurance companies make money by overpricing the actual risk. And they make a LOT of money. The expected value of an insurance contract is negative to the buyer. Coverage of tail risk (e.g. millions in liability), makes sense since you don't want to get bankrupted, but when there's a capped risk you can tolerate (e.g. value of car), avoiding the insurance statistically saves you money. Insurance companies pay their actuaries very well to guarantee this.

Plus, not having to deal with insurance companies makes car repair so much less stressful in my experience...

As far as anyone knows, catnip is completely nontoxic to cats, but ethanol certainly is toxic. Cats also simply don't like the smell of alcohol.

Eating very large quantities of catnip can give them gastrointestinal discomfort though.

The post above is explicitly not advocating attempting to cut costs to $0, but to consider survival time when evaluating expenses. The extreme example is just useful for projecting an intuition of the relationship between spending and survival.

Same as how "You can generate revenue to infinity, but you can only cut costs to zero." shows the edge cases to build the intuition.

There's another useful way to look at this mathematically and practically: survival time. If you cut costs to nearly zero, you can survive nearly infinitely.

There are plenty of small companies that serve a small market and last for decades by being careful about spending. That doesn't mean scrimping on coffee, but it means not paying $20k for a stylish sculpture for your office reception or $2M for a beach concert with the hip artist of the day.

The exact same thing applies to personal finance. Often, working towards making a lot more money is the fastest way to get rich, rather than spending a lot of time eliminating small costs (e.g. cheaper coffee). However, for a typical person, eliminating big costs such as expensive luxury cars makes a big difference. If you want your money to last, you need to be frugal relative to the scale of your assets, revenue, and growth.

Apple's 3.5mm audio dongles are honestly very well engineered and they're selling them at an uncharacteristically reasonable markup. Great DAC implementation. I use mine all the time.

I just don't believe most people think the device is better without the headphone jack. It's not a "special use-case". Deleting the jack has definitely driven some sales for wireless headphones to people who don't want to use the dongle, rather than a desire to get rid of the wire.

For some reason it's very hard to find a cheap and solid way to charge via Lightning and use wired audio at the same time. My workaround is to charge after I'm done listening. Probably good for reducing phone use, but it can be annoying on occasion.

Wireless headphones are an e-waste nightmare (in particular Airpods, designed to never be disassembled). When used with a mobile phone, their convenience is incredibly minor, and for me is more than offset by the need to keep them charged.

I agree with getting rid of dying interfaces, but this is a case where it makes way more sense to keep options available. Almost everyone uses audio, and different people have different priorities. Waterproofing the jack is easy, and phones still have enough space for them. The only way I can interpret their decision to remove that jack was to incentivize wireless headphone sales, and perhaps appeal to the small ultra minimalist crowd.

In other words, the helium is used to move heat around, and isn’t lost. It’s like the refrigerant in your air conditioner, except that it needs several stages of pre-cooling.

Initial cost is high but running it should mostly just incur energy costs if it’s well designed.

BMW charged $80/yr for a feature that used to cost $300 total. They since reversed it and now offer the feature for free (i.e. back into the initial cost) due to backlash.

We have had passively cooled high performance devices for a while. M1 Macs are a great step, but it's more useful to compare them with previous gen mobile devices (iPad Pro 2018 ran faster than the 13" MBP at the time). Bringing ARM SoCs to laptops is also not new (e.g. Surface Pro X from Oct 2019), but I agree it's worth noting that Apple is doing a great job of it. Best x86 translation out there.

Carmack famously also has declared "I would rather have magic software over magic hardware" - the context being that we're using current hardware to a small fraction of its potential.

Still, I feel there's a lot of software I use that is hard to optimize or no longer developed, and I'm certainly happy to have it run faster given new hardware. As a programmer I also like being able to be lazier and still have usable software. Higher level languages, GC, less thinking about access patterns and debugging prefetch problems, etc.

They probably see that most people don’t want to deal with setting up their own build, and want to make adoption as easy as possible.

Though they should definitely make it optional.

The parallel there would be giving away @mozilla.org addresses. @firefox.com to me feels somewhere closer to @gmail.com, both being products, not companies.

Sounds very plausible from the outside.

Also implies a widely varying experience with the program; levels of promotion politics must vary across the company, and levels of recognition for anyone's particular project must also vary.

The major barriers to competing with Google/Amazon/Facebook etc are not regulatory hassles, by far. Even in highly regulated industries, like space launch vehicles, the additional cost of compliance over your own due diligence isn’t the biggest barrier.

Also, consumers on average do a bad job of managing anticompetitive behaviour and harmful externalities, even if they know about them. Convenience and habit are strong motivators. And we need regulation to disincentivize companies from outright lying in the first place.

Companies and people in a fully free market system won’t magically become rational automata that behave ideally. We’re only human. Our superpower is the ability to collectively leverage our individual specialization. Foresight for negative externalities is a specialization that needs regulation to be effective.

The whole point was that it was free. I’m not aware of anyone choosing CentOS over RHEL because of the governance structure. The feature set of CentOS directly depended on decisions by Red Hat anyway.

in /etc/lynx.lss or wherever lynx.lss is installed on your system.

I think it's also worth noting that this is specific to (common) CPU architecture where cache is sufficiently big and orders of magnitude faster than main memory, and where main memory reads and writes have similar cost.

The tradeoff in moving memory at the end of the array vs scanning to the point of linked list insertion could be different on some existing and some hypothetical systems where these concepts may be relevant. For example, storage write cycle minimization could be a priority in rare cases.

That said this is an excellent point about the majority of use cases. I hadn't considered the dominance of the time it takes to locate the element to modify. I've never had a reason to benchmark a linked list since even a basic idea of the effect of cache/prefetch precludes its use in every use case I've actually come across.

Probably useful for CS education to start comparing linked lists to bubble sort. There's always a better algorithm, but here's a simple one to learn so you understand how to compare data structure performance.