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Guaranteed Minimum What?

granolashotgun.com

361–370 of 446 posts

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side question... Is there anything better than Yelp?

Knowing people in real life.

This.

Talk to some locals and you'll quickly learn the atmospheres of various locations, times to go, where to avoid, etc. As long as their preferences are fairly similar to your own the suggestions will always trump what a generic review site will offer. This also sidesteps the problem of paid reviews and the like.

That dive down the road may not be as terrible as it seems. Provided you're looking for a specific type of experience. Avoid the food, stay for the local brew, sweaty 20 somethings and stumbling down alleys with some new friends.

>Worked in the restaurant industry for a few years

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's a matter of trusting the person behind the counter over your smartphone.

A person will be more reliable than your phone regarding these basic information? Give me a break.

We've banned this account for repeatedly posting uncivilly and ignoring our many requests to stop.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only realistic way for a small player to beat Amazon at selling physical goods is to charge more and convince customers that it's worth it.

At this point, if one could guarantee that what one is selling is not a counterfeit, one has a leg up on Amazon.

It's a growing problem with Amazon that for whatever reason isn't being addressed.

Issues like this are probably due to Amazon's size and culture, which competitors could take advantage of.

Anther example of Amazon doing an unexpectedly poor job was when my brand new seller account was rejected/disabled by mistake, it took significant effort to get any human to look at my case.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#364
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about it with you. They are there to take the most basic info (movie, time) and money, and give you a ticket. It's also always done thru a thick bit of glass that makes communication sometimes difficult if not painful. This has not been my experience at all. People who work at theaters get discounted, if not free, tickets to movi…

"Speak for yourself. There is nothing more aggravating to me than self-checkout, it is slow, ... " Oh, man. I never use the self-checkout. It's part of the invisible work movement--stuff someone used to be paid to do for you, now you do yourself. Same thing with pumping your own gas. I miss Oregon, for how there was always someone to pump your gas for you. Is gas cheaper here in Washington, where you have to do it yo…

Same, there's a group of Co-ops in Canada here. They do everything from gas to groceries, financial to hardware and other services. The profits are put back into the community and members of its programs receive payouts when they turn a profit.

The only reason I'm a Co-op member? Customer service. They pump my gas, are helpful in store, the workers are paid fairly and members of my community, managers understanding even do grocery delivery at a loss. Hell my buddy can manage a store and provide for his family as opposed to scraping by.

Kind of tangential to OPs post, but I'm getting disillusioned and sick of watching community funds get transferred away to accounts somewhere else. Fuck that, I'll pay the slight premium.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is value a conserved quantity, but value must decrease on a full accounting, through the process chain. That's the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Corollary: accounting of costs, prices, and values is badly flawed.

Ok, but then the "process chain" needs to include the massive energy input from the sun.

Correct.[1]

There are two ways you can get that though:

1. You can harvest current-cycle solar, as captured or availed by PV, solar thermal, wind, hydro, (pipe dream / ineffective) wave energy, or biomass.

2. You can draw down an existing store of solar energy input deposited, with some inefficiency, as hydrocarbon fuels: coal, oil, gas (including methane hydrates, should you choose to go there).[2]

The difference is that in 1) you're deriving value from a continuing series of deposits, of approximately 84 terawatts,[3] or roughly 2,000 TWh (170 billion mtoe, 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent), an allowance shared with all other life-forms, and ecological / biospheric processes on the planet (we might care to consider those requirements before hiving of yet more for ourselves). The practical value derived remains a small fraction of the influx.

In the case of 2), you're spending down what is effectively an inheritance, at the rate of approximately 5 million times its initial rate of accumulation. This suggests that the spending-down is not particularly sustainable, even barring consideration of any other issues presented.

Of which I'm informed there are several.

The point remains that as you process that energy chain, each stage of the process leaves less useful or usable energy going out than came in, the balance being waste energy (entropy).

________________________________

Notes:

1. There's a very small contribution from non-solar sources, principally geothermal energy, a roughly 50-50 mix of gravitational potential energy of formation and radioactive decay, which could be considered sourced from the supernovae which enabled formation of the Solar System.

2. https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1....

3. http://zebu.uoregon.edu/disted/ph162/l4.html

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at what's happening to the desktop/laptop industry. Print and broadcaast media. Telcos, especially wired. Politics. News. Propaganda.

I'm talking specifically about AFGAM: Apple owns consumer Facebook owns Social Google owns Search Amazon owns E-commerce Microsoft owns enterprise Nobody is coming even close to taking them out in their categories and they are collectively dominant in pretty much everything else except hard infrastructure - even then they are gaining ground. Snapchat could have had a close chance against FB before FB targeted them ha…

Correction: Google owns advertising.

At this point, I don't even think Search is a particularly significant element of Google's value chain.

Globally, the typical Internet user runs fewer than 1.5 Google searches per day.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/63bib1/google_...

That aside, I find your scoping of the situation excessively narrow.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#367
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should be working on better ways to get the poor educated and integrated with modern society as opposed to making them dependent on jobs which take all of their time, don't pay nearly enough, and block any and all opportunity for a way out because there's no free time or disposable income.

"Maybe we should be working on better ways to get the poor educated and integrated with modern society" So you want an order of magnitude more competition for your own job? Maybe we should be doing what we did in the 1930s when there was a similar 'surplus of labor' - creating jobs which create valuable public works like LaGuardia or the Lincoln Tunnel instead of pretending that if aggregate demand is weak, it's beca…

Agreed. And doing that will put a lot of money into demand, which translates into more and better business opportunities.

I visit the great places created by CCC, WPA type efforts and value them, even in their often current state of disrepair.

More please. Worth it.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#369

I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…

The argument I hear for UBI is that it eliminates all the administrative overhead of most existing welfare programs.

In most western countries unemployment does equal lack of food or housing... due to a large number of welfare programs.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side question... Is there anything better than Yelp?

Knowing people in real life.

Doesn't work very well when the people you know in real life (and whose judgment you trust) can only rarely afford to eat out.
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