Are the Elites in the room with us now?
Readit Newshnuser847 commented on 44% Unicorn Startups in the US were founded by foreign workers twitter.com/IlyaStrebulae... · Posted by u/ZuckMusk
My kids watch a lot of YouTube/TikTok and playing computer games... Yet I don't. I sit in front of my PC all day for work and after work (after dinner) I also spend a ton of time in front of my PC doing things like learning how to make circuit boards, learning new programming languages, OpenSCAD (CAD) design work, and more.
I tell them they spend too much time watching videos and playing games and should "branch out" into new hobbies. Do they do this? No.
That is to say, I don't think hypocrisy has anything to do with it.
I mean, it sounds like your kids are just following the example you set. They're watching you sit in front of a screen as a form of recreation and they're simply doing the same. I think it's also worth noting that your hobbies are solo activities, so even if your kids did want to connect with you in a non-screen hobby, you'd be unavailable anyways. Maybe you could make the first move and invite them to do something outside with you?
hnuser847 commented on Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia will be completed in 2026 cnn.com/2024/03/25/travel... · Posted by u/mooreds
Be careful to avoid survivorship bias here. Only the "best" buildings from Medieval and Renaissance times (or even later into the 1800s) are still around. Many of the buildings we constructed in the second half of the 20th century will be gone in 100 years or so.
Also, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I know there was a lot of criticism when the Louvre built the pyramid, but I quite like the contrast of traditional and modern.
Yes, only the best buildings from hundreds of years ago have been preserved, but that still doesn't explain why we build ugly buildings right now. You would think we would be able to draw on centuries of architectural trial and error to determine what is objectively pleasing to people. Instead it's like the past never existed. Architects keep building hideous blobs of steel and glass and wondering why people don't like their creations.
Last time we had an article about this sort of thing (a few months back?) the difference wasn’t big between generations, at similar ages. Under 5% difference between current 20-somethings and the Boomers, IIRC. Up, but not that much. This could be a different dataset though, I dunno.
This article has a graph going back over a century. The percent of young adults living with parents in 1960 was only 29%, so I'd say the current value is pretty significant.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/09/04/a-majorit...
The framers created the electoral college because they were designing a power structure whose goal was to re-weight electoral power relative to population as opposed to voting population (because multiple significant stakeholder states wanted electoral credit for the large numbers of humans they treated as property).
That's not why the electoral college was created. The three fifths compromise was appended to the electoral college system, but it was not the reason for it being created in the first place.
The reason why we have an electoral college system, according to James Madison in the Federalist papers, is because the United States is intended to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. States within the US are not meant to be mere provinces; they are intended to be mini-countries with their own laws and customs under a broader federal umbrella. The electoral college system allows the states to cast the votes for President, instead of the majority of citizens voting directly.
It's sort of like how an HOA works, where each unit has one vote. The units themselves comprise the voting body, not the individual people living in each unit. The individuals in each unit might have different opinions and preferences, but at the end of the day they must submit a single vote representing their unit. The electoral college system works the same way, with the caveat that the number of votes apportioned to each state is relative to the size of the population.
Nope, the core issue is Amazon has monopoly on advertisement and distribution. And Amazon is abusing it to suppress competitors.
Consider the scenario:
Amazon executive want more bonus, so they decide to increase retailer prices by 10x.
Now, retailers cost have increased for Amazon by 10x. But other distribution channels remain the same.
So, retailers should increase prices on Amazon only. But Amazon forces them to increase prices everywhere.
This interference of Amazon on other business is the issue
Amazon sees that it's profit is lower
If Amazon did that, sales would drop to zero and retailers would leave Amazon. eCommerce is a low-margin business. Sellers will only stay on Amazon as long it's profitable for them.
You pay these fees so the products aren't cheap. And Amazon (using its size) made it impossible for sellers to sell their products cheaper elsewhere.
This is anticompetitive.
> You pay these fees so the products aren't cheap.
Except they are, otherwise consumers wouldn't use Amazon. Whenever I want to buy anything, I check Amazon first. 9 times out of 10 it's the same price as every other retailer with the added benefit of free shipping and free returns. If that wasn't the case, I would have no reason to use Amazon.
This has been pretty obvious for a while. Whenever I do product searches on Amazon the prime eligible results are more expensive by exactly the shipping costs of the non prime vendors.
The only reason I keep it is for the video service which I'm guessing is the same for a lot of people.
The “hidden tax” described in the article is to sellers, not consumers. Free shipping is subsidy for consumers that costs Amazon billions of dollars. I have personally never seen what you’re describing.
The TL;DR is that the “hidden tax” is onerous advertising fees paid by third-party retailers to have their products appear high in search results.
I don’t really see the issue here, since this appears to be a win-win for both consumers and sellers. Consumers get the cheap stuff they want with free shipping, and sellers get access to hundreds of millions of customers and the volume of sales needed to survive in a low-margin business. The fact that sellers are willing to pay these fees suggests that’s it worth it for them to be on Amazon. If it wasn’t worth it, they would be somewhere else.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.