quartesixte

The size thing is getting out of hand. I grew up in older housing built in the 60s and 70s -- fairly small by modern standards, but there was a bigger backyard and still enough space to store everything. It felt adequate and honestly more than enough for sleeping, eating, and resting from the outside world with friends and family.

And then I started visiting my friends' more modern home and I was flabbergasted by the sheer size. You have to text someone to get their attention because yelling across the house is not very convenient anymore. And so many rooms just stood empty like gallery spaces -- "to be used on specific occasions".

I don't quite get it -- and I hope that construction costs come down and permitting eases. For once I am ready to buy a home, I want to be able to custom build my own small house.

Medium Trout may be the intended market?

>because it calls attention to how merchant/consumer is a false dichotomy

Yes! People forget that the many merchants in this country are also participants in this consumer economy as well. I think one's exposure to mom&pops/small businesses informs this view greatly. One can be forgiven of seeing merchants as faceless corporations if the entire shopping experience has happened at faceless multinationals (...of whom's profits contribute to many consumer's 401ks!)

And also Merchants are in many ways the "edge compute" of the long, very complex tangle of suppliers, wholesalers, service providers, and (of course) the bank. All which entail transactions that, in isolation, looks very similar to merchant-consumer.

A few years back, I was assigned to a new team and had to run some analysis on a selection of hardware that kept failing quality checks. Was told this was of the utmost importance to the product and that a future production push hinged on solving this problem. I was given a week. The scope of work would entail at least one really late night into the project.

On Day 5 of 7 (sleepless night happened on Day 2 and 3), a passing engineer from a different team stopped by my desk to chat. Saw my screen and said "neat Python code, what's it all for?"

I replied, "oh it's to do some number crunching on that quality problem."

To which he blandly goes: "Oh. Didn't you hear? We scrapped that entire product line 3 weeks ago."

Reader, I almost actually threw my keyboard off the desk.

(If there was ever an argument for in-office work, it's coworkers telling you to STOP working on something and rescuing you from situations like this...)

>My hypothesis is that this is because manufacturing is currently modeled as a list of deterministic steps in a table instead of as a stochastic set of nodes and edges.

YES. Someone else who understands!

I will take a look, as very few people (even experienced manufacturing engineers of the highest pedigree and skill) seem to grasp this intuition.

To add to the other replies here.

From my perspective and experience, the actual reality of manufacturing anything complex does not match up with the set of rules that has to constrain any given ERP platform to be a useful, data-based record. Allow too much freeform data, and start losing more and more analysis ability. Too strict, and you quickly crash against the fuzziness of reality.

All the while requiring that your data be as close to 100% accurate as possible. That's the crux of the problem. Modern, complex engineering/manufacturing requires a level of traceability that cannot be handwaved away.

Now contend with this problem against a bill of materials tens of thousands of lines long with nearly a million discrete items put in, all with their necessary interdependecies recorded.

Now do this across an entire product line.

https://michelbaudin.com/2018/08/01/the-bom-rap/#more-126364...

^ A good read on the complexity of BOMs and why managing them can be tricky.

Buying individual legs for a two week trip usually came out to be the same for most people anyways. The JR Pass rarely made sense (especially with the restrictions on riding the fastest bullet trains) and now the price reflects that.

Parts tracking is an unsolved problem in general. Everyone in manufacturing is winging it in Excel or runs into enough chaos-complexity that violates the bounds of whatever software they’re using (homegrown or bought) that they port a part of the problem to Excel.

This is a billion dollar problem.

>because the employers don’t want to be responsible for their healthcare.

An argument for some kind of baseline, nationalized health insurance. Removes that burden from Employers and they can then turn to the far cheaper option of employing them for an extra 10 - 20 hours a week + raises.

Employers can use insurance benefits as hiring incentives, further creating better competition in the market for employees.

I agree. There is only one situation where this arb truly exists: rate hikes that occur after you secure the loan.

Any other arb requires you to take non-risk free investments which, has obvious drawbacks.

That being said, I still dislike all cash upfront

I see your point, but I don’t know if people in the financial position to do this do it to get rich. I always saw it as creating small bits of edge in the game.

Also, to this point, the interest arb doesn’t work out the way most people use it because they don’t account for the principle. You’re still going negative into a depreciating liability if you only invest the value of the car. It’s just you’re not going negative with interest.

To go fully not negative requires a lot more cash to generate the interest income to cover the entire payment.

I like the idea of having enough cash to pay off the loan immediately but having the loan (and interest arbitrage, however small) to keep myself liquid + make the monthly cashflow of My Personal Self, LLC, work for me in more optimized ways.

The credit score boosting as a result is also attractive.

But I recognize this requires me to have that much liquid cash anyways. Which a lot of people don’t so they get unfortunately put on the losing side.

Dealing with fleet sales in general is one of the better strategies and if you have the hookup with someone who deals with fleet dealers it can save you time and money.

Pandemic market craziness made a lot of them not as good as they used to though.

Recently worked under an ex-McKinsey consultant.

Say what you want about their solutions but they know how to talk to execs and boards and sell them on solutions.

Eye-opening rotation underneath them — my PowerPoint decks are so good now

This complexity for even the most mundane of objects is why, in my opinion, Centrally Planned Economies are doomed to failure.

You can’t optimize this! As far as I’ve learned and studied this, supply chains are NP hard.

If I remember correctly, Smith was concerned that the mercantile, feudalistic economies of his time was the source of poverty and inequality, and that free market economics would bring more prosperity to society.

Hence the title, “Wealth of Nations”.

Along this line of thinking: it also had made us resilient.

If all technology was to stop dead tomorrow, following the chaos of civilization collapse, we’d still have enough humans to do substinence farming and other survival tasks to help us get quickly back on our feet.

A bit of a meta comment, but the character-based criticisms I find fascinating because:

1) Golden Age SciFi (Asimov, Clarke, etc) had the same “problems” 2) It’s leveled as real criticism instead of a matter of taste? I think there should be room for fiction-as-idea-vehicles as much as there is room for characters-as-core.

3BP and its sequels sit very squarely in both the latter camp as well as follows a lot of cues from Chinese fantasy epics (classic and modern). It has been a while since we have had some good High Science Fiction and the ideas were thought provoking enough.

I have a personal bone to pick with the Cult-of-the-Character but that’s something for another day…

Same here — I have an Ikea bedframe that’s nearly a 2 decades old at this point and has moved four times. An office chair lasted me 7 years. Bookcases over a decade old.

I grew up in a nearly all Ikea household, and it’s only later in life I have discovered their reputation.

Am I missing something?

Is 25% fair? Why 25%? If you’re a business who spent most of its profits paying others who in turn paid taxes on that, should you pay that much?

What part of your revenue is taxable? Can you defer some of that revenue? Is it revenue?

Are flat taxes fair to all levels of society? Does a billionaire paying 25% hurt just as much as a single mother working minimum wage (the consensus for the longest time has been no, and why we have progressive tax brackets).

I can go on. Current status quo is not great, but it’s the best bad option we have, IMO

CPAs main purpose is to be accountants. The tax filing part is a natural output of their other accounting duties.

Large corporations will have CPAs on payroll + contract with big Corporate Accounting firms to process their books for them. Small mom+pops will hire their local CPA to do the same.

Which, leads me to an idea a much smarter friend once gave me: the tax code of the USA is centered around and made for businesses and business owners. And a large portion of the entire tax/accounting industry exists to service this need.

edit: also a CPA should charge roughly around $250 for your level of complexity? $2000 is closer to the fees for a small-medium business

At a certain level of complexity you want (need) a certified professional to make sure you are complying within the bounds of tax law and offload some of the audit risk to said professionals.

Is the US Tax Code very complicated? Yes. Is it more so complicated than other nations? I would hazard a “no.” Is that a scam? That’s a question of political philosophy I don’t want to get into here.

At a certain point you just use a CPA or roll your own with the Freefillableforms/literal paper files and I think you are the point where the time/complexity trade offs might warrant a good CPA.

The direct file is just for W-2. I don’t think it can even handle 1099-INT or DIV

Not just high end real estate. Your local mom & pop in a strip mall somewhere (at least in the US) has a high chance of paying % of gross receipts to the landlord + rent.

This may vary by location and landlord but it absolutely is a thing. And a guarantee for any high-end, high-traffic location.

I grapple with this because on the one hand, at some level you must abstract away the most fundamental concepts. It's overwhelming otherwise.

But on the other, these "lies to children" sometimes never gets corrected and you end up with an education system that produces adults with very incorrect models of the world.

We can "Lie to Children" but I think it's very important to emphasize that they are explicitly being lied to because the Truth (or the model that is closer/closest to the truth without overwhelming most anyone) requires knowledge of concepts they haven't learned yet. And at every step change in knowledge, they are updated about how "true" their "lie" is.

Yeah diplomacy isn't a series of automatic actions based on flow-control or checklists. Just because you crossed some lines doesn't mean the other party will respond exactly how they will.

That being said, credibility is important when making threats. And letting your lines in the proverbial sand get crossed, moved, erased, redrawn, etc. endlessly can make for some ... interesting geopolitical situations.

Well it helps when that exact moment of the lore’s history is not actually explored but merely invoked.

The actual book about the Butlerian Jihad on the other hand…

Some counter-points:

1) The failures themselves aren't all too complex (relatively speaking), and by the time the design made it to a flight vehicle it has been vetted for all immediately knowable risks. The rest you discover during flight. And even then the actual nature of the problems rarely (if at all) are esoteric or present breakthrough scientific discoveries.

2) Failure in rocket launches are catastrophic leaving behind very little evidence. There could be a limit to how much you can learn. But...

3) ...SpaceX is a business serving customers, and if a pivot means going away from a complex cloud of possible failures (known and discovered) to more robust, more deterministic, more reliable, you should do it.

4) At what level do you stop and go "this is fundamental enough"?

Yeah happy hour stories about their very methodical, glacial pace of development + decision to make a really big engine from Day 1 abound.

BO is Old Space wrapped in New Space.

To back up this claim, when fictional novels first became a literary format in the Western world, there was immense consternation about the fact that un-true things were being said in text. It actually took a while for authors to start writing in anything besides formats that mimicked non-fictional writing (letters, diary entries, etc.).