sottol

I'm starting to notice the opposite of price inflation - I see more and more sales and bogo or buy-2-get-4 shenanigans. Brands trying to get consumers to buy certain products again without actually lowering the sticker price, probably in the hopes that it sticks.

I am sure the price hikes have had an impact on sales, maybe there was a slight delay in consumer adaptation and that's why hiking and more seemed like a good idea (short-term).

I wonder if the large brands have psychologists on staff coming up with the best strategies to make high prices stick long-term without too much short-term impact.

I don't know if the ~$20 HDMI USB capture cards work on a raspberry pi, but connecting one to a pi or laptop and capturing the signal to a v4l stream, overlaying in software and then outputting on built-in HDMI out might work?

Just call it "Lenny Kravitz Edition" and charge double?

https://lavidaleica.com/content/lenny-kravitz-edition-leica-...

That's exactly what I've seen so far. "Record sales of singular <type of car> in March, outsells XYZ competitor". I assumed that was part of their strategy.

This is often due to the bulk deliveries at end of quarter and only really having 1 model "per line" vs other manufacturers splitting their car lines into several variants.

Do they though when they have armies of bots snatching up released tranches within seconds?

Not saying this always happens but it's also not as simple as "people are comfy and thus pay more later".

With profits/volume comes "professionalization" (aka "scale") and the regular Joe gets left behind because they're just in it for one ticket and not thousand(s?).

> but the highest fertility rates are pretty consistently recorded in impoverished and conflict-torn countries.

The difference is that (in addition to birth control) in those situations having children does not really make a material difference (barring extreme food shortages). There's no career to heed, usually no mortgage or daycare to pay, there's no cars so no need to worry about getting that SUV, education is also not always a primary concern. The family just makes do with where they would have lived and pack in a few more kids. The main extra cost is feeding a few more mouths, which is usually manageable. But sometime down the line the children can help around the house or supplement family income.

Or the payer of support finds ways to "hide" income or they put in less effort and earn less knowing that some of it goes towards child/spousal support.

I've found that with housing, prices are often set "at the margins". If even one landlord is asking $4k for an 800sqft 2BR, it might sit unrented for a while but other landlords will notice and nudge their prices of similar units towards that. This definitely happens faster in tight markets.

Additionally, institutional investors have bought up around 5% of the SFH market so far, some estimates say they will own up to 40% by 2030. [1]

I would not be surprised if they already have significant pricing (signaling-)power and can already influence prices with just their 5% ownership, eg only Blackrock by itself.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-singl...

Imo our reflexes differ based on context. But I'm not sure if it's the reflexive system chosing one of N options that are always available or the planner that "activates" just a few options based on the current context.

Afaik, fatigue limit just doesn't apply to carbon fiber since it's a metallurgic term. So not having a fatigue limit means something completely different than with alumin(i)um.

Carbon fiber can take an infinite amount of repeated stress as long as it doesn't exceed the stress limit. Now the resin can deteriorate but that's a much slower process than metal fatigue afaik.

My trip to Germany was memorable for two reasons:

1/ The King of Thailand rents/bought(?) a hotel in the southern alpine part of Germany and spends a lot of time there [1]

2/ This caused some consternation in Germany because foreign heads of state are not to conduct business from Germany [2] and they had to figure out how to handle the king spending so much time there.

The whole thing is kinda fascinating really.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-luxury-hotel-thailand...

[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/thai-king-maha-va...

Would later official documents reference the Ellis Island records or how were the official names determined eg when an immigrant was naturalized?

Market share should be relative, so if there was a stark decline in search bing would have declined close to as much as Google. Unless this is some other measure erroneously labeled as market share .

A maybe, maybe not, less sketchy alternative could be a Nanote P8 from Japan. They were released in 2021 and can be bought for $200-$230 new and shipped from Japan on ebay.

The downsides are the much slower Intel 4200 CPU and less, slower RAM, slightly smaller 7" screen. I would not be surprised if the manufacturer of the Ali laptop is the same as that of the Nanote.

And in the end the big companies remain the gatekeepers and AI-providers will pull an Uber/Lyft and slowly ratchet up the price of their AI products and hire their profit-maximizing PhDs until they've squeezed every little bit of money out of the market.

The net result is probably the same, concentration at the big companies. Maybe a couple people selling "shovels" and "how I made $5k with 2h of work last week" will get rich along the way though.

WFH and WFO companies are pretty different, from the leadership down. Many existing companies (especially large) can't just adapt so they force RTO to accommodate their existing "style" instead of adapting.

I think we'll end up with two types of companies, WFH and WFO, and right now it looks like the WFH companies will have an easier time recruiting and hiring. So imo this would work especially well for small, fast-growing companies. We'll see whether they can keep up WFH as they grow but maybe there's a limit where they'll need to transition to working from the office.

If that's true, it might be a good time to start companies again and take on some of the incumbents. WFH is a pretty strong selling point to those disgruntled by RTO policies.

A quick search turns up energy per capita has been 300-350m btu pa since 1970 [2] while inflation adjusted per capita GDP tripled in that period [1].

One can argue over the definition of real gdp vs inflation adjusted gdp but the 3x increase imo vs constant energy use seems quite convincing to me.

Imo economic growth decoupled from energy use and it no longer holds.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDUSA

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/10/176801719/two-...

In my opinion economic growth is mostly fueled and sustained by population growth. And population growth depends on various societal, industrial and scientific advancements that often also coincide with EROI improvements.

Would our society look so different if 90% of our energy needs would be produced by nuclear? Would energy be cheaper?

I have a feeling this will soon enough lead to some protectionist measures and new sanctions based on some suddenly discovered anti-competitive behavior.

Or you get the armed version of Hitler's 1925 Sturmstaffel and Saalschutz/SA pre-military militias that helped a crazy dictator rise to power believing they were doing the "right thing", opposing the corrupt government.

Personally, I split my time.

I really enjoy a strenuous hike to a point of interest around sunset, setting up, and taking photos of the sunrise or sunset. But that's my personal time and I'm usually alone. On the flip side I usually only take (some) smartphone photos documenting the experience and the people when I'm out in a group. I like the "here's what you did N years ago" collages and reconnecting with the people involved over the shared experience.

Trying to combine both usually leads to someone being disappointed, either the photographer because they're rushed or the others because the photog is holding everyone up.

I feel like good photos take a lot of planning, time and some luck. But the chase inspires me to get out more and not do the exact same thing everyone else is doing (all the time) to get something even remotely unique. It also requires scouting the locations for a while and finding the right composition takes some exploring the area.

Plus, long exposure photography gives you a lot of time to be in the moment when every photo takes a minute to expose and you get to progressively watch the landscape and lighting change waiting for the right time to snap your photos.

One problem is the inherent assymmetry. Bambu gets to trivially copy open-source innovations like automatic bed-leveling or the corexy motion system without man-years of research. Then they get to use the saved time to improve upon those designs or the user experience but don't return anything back in return (for the most part, their slicer spawned Orca due to the software OS license). But now the OS community is at a disadvantage if they introduce something novel and keep it secret as they have to spend countless hours catching up, whereas the commercial entity can in turn just easily copy the community's new innovations and is free to spend the saved time to innovate in other areas again.

It would be nice if there was something like the GPL for "designs" or mechanical systems like automatic bed leveling where companies would have to open source their hardware and software implementation details in turn for using the "idea".

I am starting to see a lot of brands driving social media traffic directly to Amazon as of recently.

There is definitely a problem with the cheap stuff but I wonder if they're concertedly trying to turn that around somewhat and attract proper brands.

Interesting that it's called systematic tricking when Cummins does it, with VW it's just criminal fraud?

Used to be known as emissions cheating before VW, now it's emission fraud.

Imo every manufacturer does/did it for gas and diesel engines. I've heard of gas cars in the 90s assuming that they're on a test stand if you rolled down the window shortly after starting and kept it down and reduced power output. And stories like that.

As GP said, Minivan and compact SUVs are similarly priced. Yet the populace chooses the former. If being forced to drive a minivan makes parents choose not to have a 3rd child, then it's really not about car seats it's such a minor inconvenience. Deregulation fan is just arguing for deregulation here, I doubt we'd see a marked increase in fertility rates from this.

There's a lot more to consider. How many bedrooms does your house have? Are your kids gonna share? Bathrooms? Fridge space? Can they afford 20+% extra food budget, clothing? Time to take 3 kids to extracurriculars? Summer camps cost more. Do they like to travel, that extra kid is another full seat at the age they consider nixing child seats. More kids are much more inconvenient, it's just a fact.

Besides, there are several 3-across car seat options that can be found with just a tad bit of research. We can fit 3 kids spanning 5y age diff into the back of our compact e-Golf.

I feel that's not right either. Apple did not physically build the phone network and nobody is piggybacking on their network, Apple isn't hosting anyone's photos or videos afaict and the user pays for bandwidth, they maybe pay for notification relay to their own users.

It's more like phone manufacturer X that accesses Ma Bell's network creates phone with slightly better call quality that only works with other X phones and is worse with anyone else's phones. And they start doing that once they have >50% market share.

Often it's not a matter of want but need. Of course many (but surely not all) people would _like_ to live in a single family home near a job center, great civil services with well-paying jobs but it's just not going to happen for everyone. So most have to compromise and prioritize.

If you're lucky, doesn't mean you can't have it both ways but it's just not in the cards for everyone. So most people have a choice, good job and maybe slightly higher standard of living in the city or a house further (or far) out with lower chances of good employment.

Also depends on the definition of "high-rise", the ones shown in the article are 5-6 stories and not 20+ soviet- or banlieue-style "blocs". Many nice, safe but not necessarily very cheap parts of Berlin are in that style for example. Plenty of safety and families, just not as much space as a proper SFH.

You can kinda tell when at the grocery store. Anecdotally, a lot of "bulk-comfort" foods like potato chips, sodas, flavored waters, cereals, ... about doubled in price but now most of these items are almost permanently "buy 1 get 1 free" (sometimes but-1-get-3-free, the "old BOGO"). It's no longer a one-off reduction every couple weeks.

Consumers must have reduced purchases but companies don't want to backtrack on the price, thus they're always on sale without actually bringing down the base price.

I wonder if that affects inflation measurements as I don't know if the inflation basket is calculated based on individually marked prices or actual consumer spending.

1.5M$ sounds like a lot but in SF it's probably close to the cost of a single subsidized rental unit vs making Valencia more (or less) bike friendly.