digital-cygnet

2 ay öncediscuss

Self-driving cars decrease the internal costs of driving (allowing you to do it without having to pay attention) while keeping the external costs (congestion, danger, pollution, noise, etc) basically the same. So we'll end up with more driving, with society at large bearing the cost.

Locking this future in for good because of "present infrastructure" would be short-sighted.

digital-cygnet

3 ay öncediscuss

I'm not exactly sure the point you're making about each country pointing at another as a positive example. The chain you've listed (US->UK->Germany->Spain->China) is a pretty good list of countries in descending order of cost to build infrastructure (it's not a straightforward analysis, but see https://transitcosts.com/new-data/ for example). There are always boondoggles, but the scoreboard is pretty clear -- each country in that list is better than the country before at building rail infrastructure.

Your analogy is like saying that everyone thinks someone else is a faster runner: amateurs point to collegiate athletes, collegiate athletes point to elites, elites point to Olympians. You can find someone in each of these categories who has run a bad race, but that doesn't invalidate the existence of the differences in ability.

digital-cygnet

4 ay öncediscuss

Different people have very different relationships to art (in this case, music). For me, the aspects of communication and empathy are key: I think of a song as a message from a particular person at a particular time trying to get across a particular feeling, message, etc.

There is nothing wrong with your approach to music appreciation (removing the author entirely and appreciating it as an isolated work), but it's worth recognizing that a lot of people have different values from you here and their preferred mode of music appreciation is equally valid.

digital-cygnet

5 ay öncediscuss

I like the thought behind the piece, but what I think the criticisms are reacting to is the profusion of short, bursty sentences (just like the ones in the parent post), which can be great when used sparingly, but start to feel repetitive and have a "LinkedIn"-ish vibe, at least to me. For example the very end:

  Most of you won't be able to answer that. And you already know it.
  
  That's the conversation this industry needs to have. Not tomorrow. Now.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way and do continue writing - I enjoyed this piece, just wanted to give some constructive feedback

digital-cygnet

7 ay öncediscuss

This is normal for the Economist. I don't really understand why -- they clearly have an American edition (I get their print version in the US and its headlines and organization is totally different than the same edition in the UK), yet they leave all the "colours" and "boffins" in there, when it would be pretty trivial to regionalize the language same as they do the currencies and structure. My assumption is that being a bit eccentric and foreign-seeming is part of their brand.

digital-cygnet

7 ay öncediscuss

Can you explain more why you think this? As I see it, cars in general remain very highly negative-externality, and self-driving doesn't change it much.

Regular ICE cars: - air pollution from tire wear and brake dust - air pollution from exhaust - embodied carbon - noise - endangering other road users - traffic congestion - land use (sprawl) - long term health impacts (encouraging sedentary lifestyle)

Switch to all-electric and you lose a bit of noise and all the tailpipe emissions, but gain whatever emissions generated the power (sometimes solar, great, but sometimes lignite, boo), whatever environmental damage resulted from the battery materials, and probably marginal worsening of safety as the same ranger requires a heavier vehicle

Switch to self-driving and you may increase safety (feels like Waymo basically yes, Tesla probably no based on their track record with stat manipulation), but also vastly increase use, worsening congestion and land-use. The others stay the same.

So I don't understand why you're saying the externality ratio is good. From my perspective self-driving cars don't really move the needle.

digital-cygnet

7 ay öncediscuss

I don't think this is a crazy take, but it is missing two big factors that self driving maximalists often ignore.

First is the cost of driving. A reasonable rule of thumb is $0.50/mile all in (i.e. including depreciation, repairs, gas, etc) -- you can get down to half that pretty easily and maybe a little lower, but especially if you're spending tons of time in this car you're probably going to want a nice comfy one, which will cost more and depreciate faster. So, these trips you're imagining everyone taking constantly are not going to be accessible to most people. Cars are already the second biggest expense in most Americans' budgets, one which scales with mileage, and which self driving would only increase (have to pay for the lidar, on-device compute, whatever remote service handled edge cases, etc).

The second thing your predictions miss is geometry. Despite the decades of predictions about self-driving cars being able to run safely at much higher speeds and with much tighter tolerances than human-run cars, the tyranny of geometry and stopping distances (which actually won't change much even with millisecond reaction times) means that throughput of car lanes is unlikely to change much (though we could all imagine top-down infrastructural changes helping this a lot, eg coordinated self driving cars and smart roads, those seem unlikely to land anytime soon given American political inclinations). Imagine how spaced-out people are on the highway -- in each lane, 1.6 people (average car occupancy) every football field (300 feet -- safe stopping distance at 70mph). If you're trying to go anywhere more densely packed than that -- e.g., a city, a restaurant, a ball game -- you're going to start to run into capacity constraints. Mass transit, walking, and cycling all can manage an order of magnitude higher throughput.

So while I think your prediction -- that self driving cars will increase demand for road space -- is right, the valence that takes for me is much more negative. The wealthy will be able to take up way more space on the road (e.g., one car each dropping off each kid at each extra curricular activity), condemning the poor to even worse traffic (especially the poor who cannot afford a self driving vehicle, who will not even be able to play candy crush while they're waiting in this traffic). People will continue to suburbanize and atomize, demanding their governments pay for bigger and bigger roads and suburbs, despoiling more of the areas you'd like to hike in, with debt that will keep rolling over to the next generation. Bikes and peds will continue to be marginalized as the norm for how far apart people live will continue to grow, making it even more impossible and dangerous to get anywhere without a car. I hope I'm wrong but this is how mass motorization played out the first time, in the post-war period, and if anything our society is less prepared now to oppose the inequitable, race-to-the-bottom, socialize-your-externalities results of that phase of development.

digital-cygnet

8 ay öncediscuss

The bright line distinction is Pepsi watching Food Lion's end-consumer pricing and trying to force it up in order to mollify Walmart.

I actually doubt this is remarkable in the world of major producers and retailers (e.g. I've heard anecdotes of brands sending around reps to ensure that their shelves at retail stores are appropriately well lit and placed, so having an agreement on price seems pretty normal). However, it's probably a good case to get the public thinking about the desireability of such an oligopoly -- evidence that it's not merely better economies of scale and logistics that are keeping Walmart's prices low, but also explicit, private deals that feel shadier. I don't know that anyone did anything objectionable here given the norms and incentives in front of them, but it's a bad look for those norms and incentives.

digital-cygnet

8 ay öncediscuss

It's not the discounting that's a problem -- it's the intentionally watching other stores and preventing them from closing the "price gap" with Walmart

> As a result of Food Lion threatening Walmart’s price gap, Pepsi created a plan to nudge Food Lion’s retail prices on Pepsi products upward by reducing promotional payments and allowances to Food Lion and raising other costs for Food Lion

digital-cygnet

11 ay öncediscuss

I cannot understand this sentiment. If you commit a crime in a country and don't pay the fine, why would you be surprised if they made you pay the fine next time you crossed the border? Even if it were a parking ticket I wouldn't find Canada's actions here objectionable, and DUI is a lot more serious than that. Unless I've misunderstood the scenario you're describing.

digital-cygnet

2 yıl öncediscuss

In the USA, unemployment is based on a periodic, 60k household survey. You may not have ever been contacted but that's just the nature of sampling. It's true that some countries report unemployment as those who are actually registered as unemployed, but that's not best practice (and a good reason to be careful comparing country unemployment rates)

You can read more on the US system here - https://www.bls.gov/cps/faq.htm#Ques3

I agree it's a bad outcome that someone who gets so fed up with the labor market that they stop looking for work no longer counts as unemployed, but that's why we have labor force participation (and why imho that should be reported in headlines along with unemployment, after adjusting for age and education)

digital-cygnet

2 yıl öncediscuss

A couple of points:

- Headline unemployment _is_ "people who want jobs [enough to be looking for them] but can't find one". The metric you linked to is including people outside the labor force and then weighting in a fairly opaque way. Between labor force participation being at the same point as it was 2014-2016 and unemployment being lower, I don't think it's fair to say unemployment stats are misleading. The point about underemployment is still definitely valid though.

- I'm with you that minimum wage should likely be higher, but federal minimum wage has never been intended to be "comfortable wage in a major metro". Major cities have their own minimum wages -- e.g., NYCs is $16/hr. Making $32k a year in NYC would of course not be comfortable, but is doable (eg you can rent a room in an apartment for $1k/mo, live off of oats and rice, etc). It's not intended to be a "head of household" wage, but "the least amount you can ever pay anyone"

Other than these nits I'm with you that stats don't cover the lived experience of all Americans and there's more too it than simply vibes. However I also do think that some of the vibecession is due to increasingly effective media manipulation to squeeze money from consumers. I (coincidentally just now) wrote a blog post explanding on this hypothesis here - https://medium.com/@digital-cygnet/manipulated-into-malaise-...

digital-cygnet

2 yıl öncediscuss

I respectfully disagree. Once you open up the possibility of physical force the guarantees of cryptocurrency look pretty thin.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/

digital-cygnet

2 yıl öncediscuss

It's always interesting when I see this take because I was raised the opposite way and was really surprised to learn a few years back from articles like [1] that some people consider this an etiquette breach.

From what I can tell there are two populations: those who prefer to recline and those who prefer not to. As long as an entire column of seats belongs to one population you're fine (if everyone wants to recline no one loses space, we all just shift around to a configuration in which everyone is more comfortable). But when you have someone more comfortable staying upright sitting behind a recline-preferenced person, that's where issues arise. It's not clear to me whether it's morally wrong for the front person to recline in that case, given that's basically just preferencing the default of "upright", which is arbitrary.

Nothing here should be read as justifying people who don't pay attention to what's going on behind them and/or recline suddenly/aggressively. It's always something that should be done with a glance behind and a smooth, gentle motion. Maybe also a word to the person sitting behind though again I'm not convinced that's a moral imperative.

[1] https://thepointsguy.com/airline/airplane-seat-reclining-eti...

digital-cygnet

2 yıl öncediscuss

Sorry, what's your position here - that any renting of a property is an "economic rent" and thus immoral? That makes little sense to me. I am a renter and glad to be so because I'm not confident I want to live in my current home for the 5-10 years it takes for purchasing it to be worthwhile. The landlord is providing me a service, turning a big, illiquid asset into something that can be accessed with only a 1-year time commitment. This is economically productive (allows me to live somewhere I otherwise wouldn't) and is hence not an "economic rent".

The classic example of an economic rent is a feudal lord putting a chain across a river and charging a toll. This is economically unproductive because it's just putting a price on something that was free (and, you have to assume for the example, non-rivalrous). This is why the sibling comment points out that the rent-seekers in the housing market are more like the people seeking to constrain supply via zoning and regulation.

digital-cygnet

2 yıl öncediscuss

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, or approaching this wrong as someone who doesn't tend to have bad reactions to altitude if I am careful with it. But doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose? Won't your acclimation take a lot longer (or never happen fully?) if you're spending most of your time at sea-level pressure? I imagine these folks would be very comfortable in their houses, but the sudden increase back to 10k feet of pressure whenever they left home would leave them out of breath and susceptible to acute mountain sickness even weeks after they arrived in Colorado. Unless I am misunderstanding how acclimation works, this seems like refusing to rip off the Band-Aid.

There's also the other rich-person-pressure trend of sleeping in hypobaric chambers to simulate altitude and promote red blood cell and lung growth. Seems like probably at least one of these practices is wrong!

digital-cygnet

2 yıl öncediscuss

Title is a little misleading, as attested to by several comments here. It's more a standardization (which, yes, does include "banning" the non-standard labels)

Relevant quote:

> The law is set to take effect in July 2026, establishing a new standard for food labeling in California. It will require the use of “Best if Used By” label to signal peak quality and “Use By” label for product safety, an approach recommended by federal agencies

digital-cygnet

2 yıl öncediscuss

Can you explain why you'd characterize it as hyperbole? Larger vehicles are demonstrably more dangerous[1], especially to children, and do put out more CO2 emissions. In what other context is it socially acceptable for people to put externalities like those brought by SUVs onto those around them? The one I can mostly think of is secondhand smoke, which at least in my part of the world is pretty heavily looked down on.

[1]

> compact SUVs, full-size SUVs, and pickup trucks all result in a significantly higher probability of pedestrian death when compared to a similar collision involving a car. Compact SUVs increase the probability of death by 63%, pickups increase the probability by 68%, and full-size SUVs increase the probability by 99%

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221201222...

digital-cygnet

2 yıl öncediscuss

I don't see the argument here. Importing less leads to selling less USD (yes), somehow leading to devaluation of USD? Is the implication that the dollar is strong because the US government "forces others" (foreign manufacturers) to buy it? Isn't that the opposite of the first thought, which implied that "selling less printed USD" was the reason that domestic manufacturing would be inflationary? I don't understand the causality, and it doesn't match my mental model ("a country that can build things domestically at a competitive price point should be deflationary because now there is more supply of stuff and equal supply of money"), so I think this could do with some expanding.

digital-cygnet

2 yıl öncediscuss

I was going for sources that could be cited -- for instance, I could only find reliable data on the Big Mac because of the Economist's famous index thereof. If you have a good source for historical McDonald's prices I'd love to see it and compare.

Without having some data to compare I cannot differentiate between (1) you are correct, (2) you are misremembering, or (3) you've experienced the inflation you claim, but for particular reasons (eg, you got a nicer car, or, your area had an influx of high earners).

Also, a small nit: by my calculations 60% growth over 10 years is 4.8% annualized - outpacing CPI yes, but not more than double.

digital-cygnet

Submissions

The $50k Burrito: how small financial decisions add up

How much of a role does ad-tech play in "bad economic vibes"

A quick, visual illustration of the folly of street parking

Public Key Encryption: Temporary Privacy, Temporary Security

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