FWIW my guess is most people are aware, and do know that supermarket/drugstore acetaminophen / paracetamol is the same, in some relevant sense, as Tylenol / Panadol. It's not like the retailers lack marketing resources. But for these off-the-shelf drugs the total $/£ amounts are small for a lot of people.
Then, there _are_ arguments about whether generics face adequate testing to ensure the same quality as the originally-approved name brand drug. A lot of this is FUD - I'll happily buy generic acetaminophen in the US - but it's not a totally irrational concern. I doubt any regulator ensures generic equivalence to the same degree of conformity that a big pharma companies' own quality control does.
For example, I personally find real differences in the jankiness of different asthma inhalers, even amongst generics. Maybe that's because I don't shake/use/clean them exactly per the directions, but then that's real-world use for you. My personal experience says brand-name Ventolin has solved a "robustness against user error" problem in a way some alternatives often have not, suggesting the FDA does not enforce equivalence on this dimension. It's not enough of a difference for me to go name-brand, since out-of-pocket price differences can be egregious, but I do distinguish between otherwise-unknown generics.
Finally, you may trust the UK regulator and so do I, but traveling somewhere without good regulatory oversight, I'd probably reach for Panadol - assuming it seemed authentic - over a generic brand I'd never heard of. Brands have value and brand owners have a lot to lose, which is a kind of insurance (see 1982 Tylenol recall).
Perhaps my reading is coloured by optimism but by my count, apart from peace, language, currency and (debatably) universal good taste, all of which seem a bit utopian (so maybe I’m a cynical optimist) we do—or are well on our way.
This makes some good points. Slightly off its main topic, can iOS or an app treat Face ID and passcode auth differently, or are they completely unified?
For example, it would make a lot of sense to treat them differently for Apple Pay fraud detection, since passcode + device compromise seems a lot more likely in the real world than compelled Face ID.
There’s a good argument for not “leaving it to the market” for things like this: when you’re evaluating an apartment (to rent, or even to buy), it can be difficult to know what the soundproofing is like. Noise is maybe not life and death, but it’s a major quality of life issue for some people.
Of course an outright ban is pretty extreme, but alternatives to overcoming this information asymmetry are not straightforward. Ideally: compulsory testing and disclosure, if it could be done.
You're very likely right there's no causation in that direction, but it seems entirely possible that we experience red as a vivid color in part because noticing blood is evolutionarily important.
One obvious thing is that some people are probably toasting a slice a week and others half a dozen a day. The parts don’t time out, they wear out, so that really matters.
Another is that being cheap, there’s probably quite variable quality.
So it’s not that surprising that experiences vary.
A more interesting question is do the cables (size, positioning, tension) vary by aircraft? Can any carrier-capable aircraft land on any carrier in the US fleet?
I don't really disagree. It's a naive analysis, but ignoring the opportunity cost of the time the owners put into a business, which I was replying to, is even more naive, and yet an extremely common mistake small business people make.
> I don’t draw a salary, so the total amount I earned from TinyPilot in 2023 was $236k.
and
> Result: I worked 35-40 hours per week, a reduction from previous years, and traveled more than any previous year.
This is a person who is effectively full-time CEO of this business and whose market salary is likely at least $236k. If they sold the business, the new owners would have to pay someone else to put in those 35 hours.
Maybe the new owner could employ a less-skilled manager and pay them less, or maybe there's still lots of potential growth or room to cut costs, but that's all quite speculative: right now the business has a profit, and therefore a valuation, closer to zero.
That might be true for the simple case of following within a lane, although you only have to drive around to realize most drivers do not leave adequate following distance at all times to make this a pure physics problem. And neither is a good driver watching only the car in front, but also the brake lights of the cars in front of that, to help anticipate the car in front's likely actions.
But take an even slightly more complex example: you're on a two lane roadway and the car in the other lane changes into your lane, leaving inadequate stopping distance for you. You brake as hard as you safely can (maybe you have a too-close follower, too), but still there will be a few seconds when you could not, in fact, avert a collision if for some reason the car in front braked.
I have no idea what the legal situation would be: is it their fault if the crash happens within 3 seconds but yours if it happens after you've had time but failed to restablish your needed stopping distance?
Honestly even in the simple one lane case, I doubt you can slam your brakes on the interstate for no reason then expect to avoid any liability for the crash, blaming your follower for following too close.
Driving has a bunch of rules, then an awful lot of common sense and social interaction on top of them to make things actually work.
They can vote with their vote too. If regulators do their job, grounded airplanes start to become quite a large expense for airlines and influence their fleet choices.
I come from a completely different background but am about the same age as the author. It sounds like many other commenters are in this same general bracket too. So are the sentiments expressed truly a period (or, maybe, cohort, given the post-communist contrast) effect, as suggested, or just an age effect?
I suspect that the middle aged in every society feel some closing of the frontier as possibilities seem to collapse and family commitments multiply.
This is important, because it forces a head-to-head comparison. Otherwise, what knowledge the judge has about the abilities of AI matters a lot.
A well-informed 2023 person talking to ChatGPT will quickly establish that it's not a human, but I'm pretty sure a 1950s person doing the same would swear it was human, if an odd human, because they couldn't conceive of a computer being that fluent. But force them into this head-to-head scenario and they will make the right choice.
If we follow the analogy the article gives for rebuilding the surface but not the tracks:
> It’s like having a big, clunky jalopy that doesn’t go more than 20 miles an hour, but instead of replacing the engine, we’re going to give it a paint job and hope that solves the problem.
then Moynihan was, unfortunately, more like a spit and polish. It's prettier to look at, but the main thing it did was move access for some trains a block further west (presumably away from the densest users as the article suggests of other plans). The basic experience is pretty unchanged (at least the Amtrak & subway experience, which I can speak to)
For one thing, AU 2-prong plugs have a much more physically secure connection than equivalent US plugs. The angled prongs mean there’s no rotational axis about which the plug can fall out. Of course it also means the prongs can’t really fold away for storage.
In what world is "knowing how much you spent" not a reasonable design requirement for a supermarket?
Just to pick one user story, it's a lot harder to check / challenge an itemized receipt if you receive it hours later, once you're already packed things away or eaten some of them.
It's more complicated than that, because there is a substantial trade in fish export to China, where processing happens, followed by re-export back to the US.
2019 figures:
* U.S. commercial fishermen landed 9.3 billion pounds of seafood
* Americans consumed 6.3 billion pounds of seafood
Given imports are more processed than exports, a part of that difference is presumably waste & less desirable byproducts. So it seems fair to conclude that the US eats pretty close to the amount of seafood that it produces.
In $ terms (because of the value add of processing), US seafood imports are roughly 4x exports.
Whirlpool is headquartered in Michigan. This predates my telephone-using career, but my guess is that they published a local number that saved them paying the 800 fees for Michigan customers. Either those customers were fine with making (& paying for) a local call, or perhaps there was some other within-state free calling product they used for them.
(It's also the period when MCI was challenging AT&T's monopoly - possibly both were able to sell 800 numbers and Whirlpool was splitting their business for some reason. But I think the former is more likely.)