341–350 of 368 posts
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On top of decision fatigue and needing to know the market, losing auctions gets expensive fast if you value your time.
aka transaction costs Book I read about market design estimated that only 30% of commerce was done in an open market. Relationships, fulfillment, quality, service, returns, etc are all factors too. All those non-price intangibles that the Freedom Markets™ zealots ignore.
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I agree, because for all the money and chatter about them most of the companies providing them are making carbon copies of each other with little real innovation -- they're always the same square shape and its always about fancy keyswitches, RGB, and little else. Computer-building has turned into this, at least if r/pcmasterrace is any indication. It's positively infuriating -- 99% of people's posts are bragging/vali…
> they're always the same square shape and its always about fancy keyswitches, RGB, and little else. This is where I disagree. I had severe hand and arm tendon pain for years, and finally dove into ergonomic mechanical keyboard options. It solved my issues, and I no longer feel the pain after typing all day. I easily spend $350+ for a keyboard, and it's a very practical, life-changing decision, which involves a non-r…
When eBay first started, I loved the idea of auctions as a way to set market prices. From an economic and game-theory perspective, it is so optimal! Clearly as later examples like Amazon have shown, auctions don't make sense for most product categories. I believe this is mainly due to psychological reasons. Decision-fatigue is a real thing. People dislike having to think hard. In a fixed-price sale, the buyer just ha…
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It's funny how on hacker news apparently buying a fancy keyboard for your home where no one can see it is "signalling", but if you point out that wearing Apple watch, holding iPhone, and displaying those ear buds is also signalling/branding/status symboling, I am generally very aggressively downvoted. I'd say buying a mechanical keyboard with RGB lights and nice switches is probably 100X less signalling (several orde…
Did it ever occur to you that people buy Apple stuff because it’s just good/better?
Why do exclusive wines fetch several hundred a bottle when in double blind tasting tests oenologists fail to differentiate them from 6€ supermarket wine? Why does the same Malaysia made shirt go up in price 50x if it gets a top brand label attached a opposed to a cheap generic brand one?
I doubt what you say about wine. Wine tasting is extremely complex and some experts might not be as near as good as they think they are. But an expensive aged Bordeaux will not taste like a cheap random 6€ supermarket bottle. Also, taste is just one criteria on the price, rarity plays a big part (some vineyards are small, some years the production is smaller), the wine ageing potential is another criteria etc.
"Expensive and inexpensive wines taste the same, research shows" https://phys.org/news/2011-04-expensive-inexpensive-wines.ht...
"The Color of Odors" (add red food coloring to a white wine and tasters think it is a red wine) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11712849
"Expensive wine and cheap plonk taste the same to most people" https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/apr/14/expensive-wi...
For those interested there is an actual "Journal of Wine Economics" https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...
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@phaus any improvement to your wrists with the Ergodox?
yes but its only been a couple months with that setup, I think having the ability to tilt each half so the inner side is higher than the outer side has helped my right wrist's tendonitis, but it could be because the tilting forces me to keep my hands off the desk to reach the keys, which is the supposedly "right" way to type, wrist rests help some people but you're still supposedly putting stress on your joints when…
I don't have tendonitis, however last week I was typing with the top of the keyboard much lower than the bottom and there was a feeling of relief in my hands. Just putting this out there.
With respect to the high price, it seems pretty simple really. Some people have a fair bit of money that they're willing to spend on their enthusiasms. This wouldn't even be a notable question if, instead of mechanical keyboards, we were talking "designer" handbags, shoes, custom-made suits, etc. The auction question is more interesting. Auctions are well accepted when there's clear scarcity or uniqueness in what's b…
Well I guess that's sort of the answer to the author's question about why auctions aren't used more often. The same way we (most of us anyway) wouldn't trust a company that begins with a crowdfunding campaign, selling your items at auction makes it look like you've done no market research and have no business plan. And I'm reluctant to back a company without business sense or a plan.
Depends on what I'm buying really. I don't really care if an artist has a business plan. Indeed, I figure they probably don't or they wouldn't be an artist. But a manufactured good that I might expect support or replacement for defects for? Sure. By and large, I don't want an artisan laptop.
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"More"? I understood CommieBobDole to be saying it was entirely about status signaling: > the purpose of the hobby has transitioned from primarily "making/using the thing" to "obtaining and displaying ever more extreme versions of the thing to impress other people who know about the thing" What do you think the difference is between "status signaling" and "impressing other people"?
Status signaling is a specific way of impressing other people: it's impressing them with your status , sometimes called more precisely prestige (as opposed to, for example, your money, your strength, your talent, or your character), in a way that's difficult to fake because it's costly . So, for example, Donald Trump bragging on a talk show about sexually assaulting strange women counts as "status signaling", because…
- Status signaling is the only way of impressing other people.
- Signaling is sending any message by any means. Signals that are difficult to fake are more effective than signals that aren't. But easy-to-fake signals are obviously still signals.
- Status is anything that impresses other people. Money, strength, talent, and character are all forms of status that are valued differently by different groups. If you're very strong, then you have high status among groups that respect strength -- as long as they know you're strong. Which is why you have to signal it.
You appear to have confused the concepts of "status signaling" and "conspicuous consumption".
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Details on the 20 minutes of easy mods?
Sure, I'll explain and link. It sounds like a lot but I am not a particularly handy person and I did it right the first try. I just had to use a brush to remove a little excess lubricant on one of the stabilizers because it was sticky. On my GMMK keyboard where I was going for silence, the different before and after the stabilizer mods were incredible. It sounded cheap and rattled a lot, even though the keys still fe…
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Details on the 20 minutes of easy mods?
I'm guessing by the '20 minutes' part they're referring to moding the stabilizers: https://youtu.be/cD5Zj-ZgMLA Not hard to do, and it changes the sound/feel of them in a way a lot of people appreciate. P.S. I second the GMMK ( https://www.pcgamingrace.com/products/gmmk-full-brown-switch ) as a good way to try out switches and keycaps. The board is fairly cheap, nicely built, and has hot-swap switches that allow you…