141–150 of 203 posts
> This is counterintuitive and sounds like it is trying a bit too hard to be clever. Indeed. You could make the same counterintuitive and clever point about any bad thing, pointing out that there are things one might do to reduce that thing, which have other costs, and aren't worth it, but for many bad things that would not sound counterintuitive and clever, but deranged. Consider the following statement: > The optim…
> This is counterintuitive and sounds like it is trying a bit too hard to be clever. Indeed. You could make the same counterintuitive and clever point about any bad thing, pointing out that there are things one might do to reduce that thing, which have other costs, and aren't worth it, but for many bad things that would not sound counterintuitive and clever, but deranged. Consider the following statement: > The optim…
Well, then I have some bad news for you regarding bananas.
Which is funny, because it proves the point of the article: The optimal amount of [bad] is usually nonzero because otherwise you have give up too much of [good].
Just like everything. The optimal amount of crime, unemployment, accidents, deaths, etc... is not zero. For example, when building a road, there is a certain chance that an accident will happen, that some people will die, and that could have been prevented. For example, by installing a guard rail, enforcing speed limits, or by taking a different path. But installing that guard rail for a one in a million chance that…
> But the goal is not to bankrupt your citizens with fines,
There is this one crazy trick to avoid speeding tickets. Cops hate it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I regularly travel for work and it's impossible for me to make any purchases on major sites like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Costco, etc. They all will accept an order, charge my card, and then randomly cancel the order some hours to days later, and refund me. These sites are not cancelling your orders. The card-issuing bank is. If you have persistent trouble, switch banks.
Disagreed, the banks aren't cancelling it - they wouldn't authorize the transaction in the first place. Chances are, the banks are correctly returning an address verification mismatch if you didn't use your true billing address. Most likely the stores are cancelling the orders because of billing/delivery address mismatch or (if you didn't set a different billing address) that it doesn't verify against your card.
The site was clear upfront that everything had to match EXACTLY or they would cancel the order. I logged in to my online banking and copy and pasted my debit card details to make sure there were no issues.
The one thing I didn't think to copy and paste was my own name because, I mean, I know my own name, right?
Apparently not as I'd entered "John Public" and to my surprise my debit card was issued to "John Q Public".
> This is counterintuitive and sounds like it is trying a bit too hard to be clever. Indeed. You could make the same counterintuitive and clever point about any bad thing, pointing out that there are things one might do to reduce that thing, which have other costs, and aren't worth it, but for many bad things that would not sound counterintuitive and clever, but deranged. Consider the following statement: > The optim…
The world is naturally awash with unstable isotopes and low level cosmic radiation.
I want to launch a business which requires investing a lot of resources per customer. Think, the users pay 100$ and I spend 80$ in resources straight away, transform the resources in a peculiar way and provide it to the customer.
I have already tried this and failed due to occasional credit card fraud and sneaky chargebacks from users AFTER having used resources.
Now, being a small business (zero employees) I can't afford to stomach losses for months, invest into marketing and then wait until 100x growth bring me some profits.
Just because of fraud being the problem of the seller and not of the cardholder, my choices are:
1. Go to parasitic VCs and convince them to give me money, in the hope I'll be profitable in a few years
2. Sell 1 on 1 to trusted companies - which doesn't work if you're selling B2C, increase your sales cost and bar you from a typical SaaS paths with random customers
3. Accept only crypto-currency payments - but nobody will bother to convert money to purchase something when they are used to just use their credit card
Just like everything. The optimal amount of crime, unemployment, accidents, deaths, etc... is not zero. For example, when building a road, there is a certain chance that an accident will happen, that some people will die, and that could have been prevented. For example, by installing a guard rail, enforcing speed limits, or by taking a different path. But installing that guard rail for a one in a million chance that…
That being said: GPS based speed limiters are cheap, effective and not dystopian as long as they don't send telemetry back home. > But the goal is not to bankrupt your citizens with fines, There is this one crazy trick to avoid speeding tickets. Cops hate it.
While this is technically true (the devices themselves are cheap and effective), the data required for them to work well doesn't exist. If the data exists at all, it is usually horribly out of date. So in practice there will be many cases where these devices limit you to the 30mph from last year's big construction project. Then you get rear-ended because nobody expects you to slow down 50mph for no reason at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
like trillion dollar bank bailouts, subsidies awarded through ruinous competition among jurisdictions, trillions and trillions of dollars of defense spending for which the government will invent endless wars.. like that?
If you like, you can look at the data[0] I'm looking at. 15% on defence; 67% on health and related; education; social security; etc. [0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
What's the value provided to citizens by spending 67B on health in the USA in terms of value provided? 10B in a country where prices are not the result of insurance companies colluding with the government?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That being said: GPS based speed limiters are cheap, effective and not dystopian as long as they don't send telemetry back home. > But the goal is not to bankrupt your citizens with fines, There is this one crazy trick to avoid speeding tickets. Cops hate it.
> GPS based speed limiters are cheap, effective [...] While this is technically true (the devices themselves are cheap and effective), the data required for them to work well doesn't exist. If the data exists at all, it is usually horribly out of date. So in practice there will be many cases where these devices limit you to the 30mph from last year's big construction project. Then you get rear-ended because nobody ex…
Maybe let's start with residential streets only, using the residential speed limit. And let's say only those residential streets that are at least 100m away from a faster street.
I'm sure it will be possible to find a solution that eliminates false positives.
And in the worst case - it's just about acceleration. It's not like the car would abruptly break.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That being said: GPS based speed limiters are cheap, effective and not dystopian as long as they don't send telemetry back home. > But the goal is not to bankrupt your citizens with fines, There is this one crazy trick to avoid speeding tickets. Cops hate it.
> GPS based speed limiters are cheap, effective [...] While this is technically true (the devices themselves are cheap and effective), the data required for them to work well doesn't exist. If the data exists at all, it is usually horribly out of date. So in practice there will be many cases where these devices limit you to the 30mph from last year's big construction project. Then you get rear-ended because nobody ex…
Even in this rare fictional scenario, I don't agree that the costs outweigh the benefits. There are many vehicles that cannot go above 30 kmh and somehow they don't get rear-ended either. Plus, mid-term, the other cars will also have the speed limiter installed.