341–350 of 377 posts
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That solution is how it already works for the vast majority of companies in the US. “Too big to fail” is a meme that only applied to a tiny handful of companies during the financial crisis. Take a look at SVB for how fast a stalwart huge bank can implode with zero fucks given by the government.
Pretty sure Boeing should have failed 3 times by my count.
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Or we could just compete with each other for resources as we have since forever. I’d rather do that than have no choice but to live in Kowloon. Just whack an externality tax on fossil fuels and things like cutting down wilderness, job done.
Or we can stop acting like there’s only two options: living in wide-open fields with a clear horizon or the fucking walled city of Kowloon. Also, you have the mindset of a typical anti-social coastal elite who thinks “oh no big deal we can just raise the cost of living for all the poor rural types by sticking on a tax because I want to go LARP as a Victorian manor lord. And people don’t bend to my every whim immediat…
All I'm saying is that the efficiency arguments are silly unless you are comparing like for like. If we're suggesting that people simply do less because it's more efficient, well, no-one is going to do that without an incentive.
Everyone having 50 sqmi obviously isn't realistic (there actually is not enough space on the globe), but equally, if the idea is that everyone _has_ to live in a metropolitan apartment because each person has to use (1/7billion) of the resources, you're going to see an uprising, that just won't fly with people.
The best outcome is probably to convince as many people as possible to live in a shoebox so that the rest of us can still have a decent life. It seems to be working!
Those are great points! Another related law is from queuing theory: waiting time goes to infinity when utilization approaches 100%. You need your processes/machines/engineers to have some slack otherwise some tasks will wait forever.
I feel that a 100% efficient system is not resilient. Even minor disruptions in subsystems lead to major breakdowns. There’s no room to absorb shocks. We saw a drastic version of this during COVID-19 induced supply chain collapse. Car manufacturers had built near 100% just in time manufacturing that they couldn’t absorb chip shortages and it took them years to get back up. It also leaves no room for experimentation.…
The argument rides on the well-known Goodhart's law ( when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure ). However, it only puts it down to measurement problems, as in, we can't measure the things we really care about, so we optimize some proxies. That, in my view, is a far too reductionist view of the problem. The problem isn't just about measurement, it's about human behavior. Unlike particles, humans…
I think a big portion of that is humans don’t like to be viewed only as numbers and will rebel and manipulate any system you try to put the thumbscrews to them with. So the quote to mean rings golden and isn’t fallible to much of an extent
1. "Agents want to retain or increase their agency"
2. "Agents will subvert rules that decrease their agency"
3. "Agents seek resources to increase their agency"
This field needs to be studied, I think I need to apply for a grant (3rd law says so).
I have a pet theory that the state-planned economies failed not because they were inefficient (as neoclassical economics claims), but rather because they attempted to be too efficient. They tried to exactly calculate which producer needs what inputs, what they should produce and when, and a little deviation from the plan caused big cascading failures. Free market is actually less efficient than direct control, but it…
> I have a pet theory that the state-planned economies failed not because they were inefficient Well, a lot of it was corruption. A sufficient level of corruption can destroy almost any system, even if it had a well-meaning leader at the top.
Do we have any reasonable datasets for before-and-after corruption levels in the FSU, or would that be a project which would* need another 3-5 decades to be viable?
* in the absence of sufficient well-placed cabbage?
EDIT: circumstantial, but chin-scratch-worthy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasnost#Opposition (romania's post-communist transition was exceptionally** violent)
** here I count the stans as having suffered from preexisting violence
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Amusingly this is something that I see as being a huge divide in rural and urban politics. Yes, it’s inefficient. Yes, some people want that!
Right. Living is not an optimization problem.
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They meant things like bars, restaurants, sports stadiums, concerts, plays. Things that require sufficient density to make economic sense.
LA has multiple of all of those and nearly entirely suburbs
So while what you're saying is true, it doesn't disprove anything. LA is much less dense and therefore has much less "stuff" available for its inhabitants. But it's still more than a rural area.
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In a free market economy we shouldn't demand robustness, we should create a system that promotes and rewards robustness. A strict commitment against bail-outs would certainly be part of that. Companies (and private people) can decide to lower their risk exposure (at the cost of efficiency/profit) or take out insurance against risks. And if they go the insurance route they have to assess how likely their insurance is…
Patients have time to shop for most healthcare services. Only a small fraction of healthcare spending is for emergencies. The highest cost stuff is mostly elective procedures. If you need a colonoscopy or hip replacement then you have time to shop around. Socialized healthcare has its advantages and is probably more cost effective on average. But we also see affluent Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists an…
Patients have the time but rarely have the actual ability to shop around outside asking "is this provider in my coverage plan?" They demand me to sign a document stating I'm willing and able to pay while often never being able to actually tell me what the procedure will actually cost. Often, they won't even know that same day the procedure is done, it'll be weeks before I'm actually invoiced. And don't even get me started when you've chosen the surgeon in your plan, the facility in your plan but it turns out the anesthesiologist they scheduled wasn't in your plan. Oops. That's an expensive mistake you made, should have shopped around!
My knee kept locking up and I'd experience tremendous pain. Only once every few weeks though, so I had time to "shop around". I called up several places and tried to get an estimate of what it would cost ahead of actually seeing the doctor. Nobody would actually offer that, they could only make an appointment to see the doctor. No idea what the doctor would actually want to do during that appointment, so who knows what things will cost. Will they want x-rays? Will they want an MRI? Can they do the MRI there? Won't know until you commit to paying!
And out of the few dozen choices of kinesiologists around me which were covered by my insurance few had any appointments available within the next several weeks. Many weren't seeing new patients. So really it was deal with my knee randomly causing me immense pain for several more months or take whoever had the first appointment. And this is in one of the top five largest metro areas in the country, not some small town in the middle of nowhere.
Shopping for which hospital to do the delivery of my children, the estimates for our costs after insurance had a massive amount of uncertainty to the point of being useless. Could be $4k, could be $20k, who knows. Imagine going to a burger joint and the menu says a burger could be anywhere from $1 to $50, we'll invoice you in a month. Go down the street, menu says it could be $3 to $48, we'll invoice you in a few weeks. What an ability to shop around! Free market at work!
> avoid the queues back home.
I already mentioned, most kinesiologists around me were fully booked for months. Very few had anything within several weeks. That's queueing.
I tried to book an appointment with a new dermatologist a few months ago. Once again, in this very large metro area. For dermatologists in my area covered by my insurance, the earliest appointment was six months out. It took several months to get a family member's hip replacement scheduled. We have queues in this country as well.
Getting medical imaging is generally pretty quick and easy though, and places like MRI imaging centers just want to keep moving people through so if they have an empty spot in an afternoon having someone in the machine constantly is important. It's also generally the easiest thing to automate in healthcare; mostly just a matter of getting enough machines and lightly trained techs to rotate people through. Radiologists are often off-site contractors getting paid for every scan they review.
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Austrian economics also rejects empirical assesment of its claims. Instead, universal thruths are derived "logically" (formal logic banned though) from "obviously true" axioms using a method called praxeology. It seems a lot like Scientology: the more you learn about it, the more bizarre it gets. And of course it's used to extract a lot of money for few benefactors.
Unlike scientology, Austrian economics made some important contributions to mainstream economic understanding.