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The web sucks if you have a slow connection

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Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#611

Post by eggsome »

milesrout wrote: post #460
ttepasse wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember astronaut Alex Gertz somewhere saying the VNC was also for security reasons. Keep in mind that most infrastructure on the ISS was installed in the middle 00s and that the Thinkpads were possible running Windows XP and IE 6 then.

I certainly bloody hope they're not running Microsoft software on the International Space Station.

They were in 2001: https://m.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/27/nt_4_0_sp7_available/

This is one of my favorite NT4 tidbits :)

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#612

Post by aaight »

ikeboy wrote: post #609
dsacco wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't prove that giffen goods are equivalent with veblen goods, there. If a package of ribeye steak normally sells for $2.99 and doesn't sell well, but then its price changes to $6.99 (but nothing else changes), and demand increases , that steak is a giffen good. The ribeye steak is not conspicuous consumption (unless your definition of status is really loose and includes posting photos of your food to Instagram…

The steak in your example might not be a veblen good, but it still isn't a giffen one. The article states that a necessary condition is that "The goods in question must be so inferior that the income effect is greater than the substitution effect". The reason people are buying more when the price rises is not because of the income effect (which would be because they have less money since the price went up, so demand…

IANAEconomist (but I could play one on TV)

It is simply not true that that a good must be "inferior" to be a Giffen good (unless you adopt a special meaning of inferior, which since it's not necessary to do, I won't agree to). The classic example (thought experiment, without regard to whether it actually happened) is potatoes in poverty stricken Ireland: a poor person's diet would be mostly potatoes (inexensive Econ-Utility (compared to steak): calories, fills the belly) with some meat a few meals a week (expensive Econ-Utility: protein, iron, B vities, tasty, "not potato", even a touch Vebleny)

So, arbitrary budget example, let's say $20 at the grocery gets you $15 potatoes every day and $5 of steak 1 days a week. If the price of potatoes goes up, you need to reduce something, but you need to eat every day so you can't reduce potatoes, so you reduce your steak consumption, but now you have some extra money which you spend on even more potatoes. Price of potatoes went up, consumption of potatoes went up. So, potatoes are not "inferior" to steaks, both are requirements for a balanced diet; I supposed a technical econ-definition of inferior could be designed to mean something along the lines of "inferior is defined to rule out your example, aaight"

In any case, while Giffen goods probably can't exist in a market for any length of time, the concept is completely understandable as a short-term reasonable thing that occurs: I go to the store with cash intending to buy an "assemble your own" burrito with guac, the price of beans went up, I don't have the cash at hand now to get the guac, but it's not a burrito at all without the beans, so I leave out the guac... but turns out by leaving out the guac, I can get a larger size burrito: consumption of beans just went up at the same time as the price. This effect happens for sure... does it happen enough to counteract the people who would leave out the beans and keep the guac? Can the "substition of beans for guac" function always be seen seen to be continuous and differentiable? that make beans not a Giffen good? ...

my point is, the way you guys are arguing this is leaving too much out, can't be answered and wikipedia at this level of analysis is too unreliable.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#613

Post by ikeboy »

aaight wrote: post #612
ikeboy wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The steak in your example might not be a veblen good, but it still isn't a giffen one. The article states that a necessary condition is that "The goods in question must be so inferior that the income effect is greater than the substitution effect". The reason people are buying more when the price rises is not because of the income effect (which would be because they have less money since the price went up, so demand…

IANAEconomist (but I could play one on TV) It is simply not true that that a good must be "inferior" to be a Giffen good (unless you adopt a special meaning of inferior, which since it's not necessary to do, I won't agree to). The classic example (thought experiment, without regard to whether it actually happened) is potatoes in poverty stricken Ireland: a poor person's diet would be mostly potatoes (inexensive Econ-…

Inferior good just means that demand increases as income goes down. Potatoes in your hypothetical are inferior, since if you have less money you can't afford steak and so buy more potatoes instead.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#614

Post by aaight »

ikeboy wrote: post #613
aaight wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAEconomist (but I could play one on TV) It is simply not true that that a good must be "inferior" to be a Giffen good (unless you adopt a special meaning of inferior, which since it's not necessary to do, I won't agree to). The classic example (thought experiment, without regard to whether it actually happened) is potatoes in poverty stricken Ireland: a poor person's diet would be mostly potatoes (inexensive Econ-…

Inferior good just means that demand increases as income goes down. Potatoes in your hypothetical are inferior, since if you have less money you can't afford steak and so buy more potatoes instead.

so that's what I mean, that term-of-art definition is intertwined with dependent variables of the definition of Giffen goods, so it would be no wonder if the ideas get tied together even if the concepts are not facially.

Terms of art annoy me (the legal profession and philosophy are full of them, overloaded (OOP definition) on preexisting words) because IANALinguist but I could play one on TV without rehearsing, so my point is, if you want to have a narrow morphology for a word, don't recycle a word that has broad meanings, invent a new word that is precise, like econ-inferior. Then at least when a person doesn't understand what you say, they will think to themselves "maybe I should look up the definition" as opposed to actually believing you said something different than you did.

Nobody can live on potatoes alone, you'd die. Nor can anybody live on steak alone. Neither good can be said to be precisely econ-inferior to another, only econ-inferior over some delta range of prices and/or time (and assuming demand, etc). But the whole question of Giffen goods is also valid only over some delta, so as long as they are different deltas, the definitions would not be in conflict (and vice versa all the variations of that).

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#615

Post by ikeboy »

aaight wrote: post #614
ikeboy wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inferior good just means that demand increases as income goes down. Potatoes in your hypothetical are inferior, since if you have less money you can't afford steak and so buy more potatoes instead.

so that's what I mean, that term-of-art definition is intertwined with dependent variables of the definition of Giffen goods, so it would be no wonder if the ideas get tied together even if the concepts are not facially. Terms of art annoy me (the legal profession and philosophy are full of them, overloaded (OOP definition) on preexisting words) because IANALinguist but I could play one on TV without rehearsing, so m…

Fair enough, but this is a standard term taught in Econ 101 (at least, I was taught the econ meaning of inferior good in my first econ class).

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#616

Post by aaight »

ikeboy wrote: post #615
aaight wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so that's what I mean, that term-of-art definition is intertwined with dependent variables of the definition of Giffen goods, so it would be no wonder if the ideas get tied together even if the concepts are not facially. Terms of art annoy me (the legal profession and philosophy are full of them, overloaded (OOP definition) on preexisting words) because IANALinguist but I could play one on TV without rehearsing, so m…

Fair enough, but this is a standard term taught in Econ 101 (at least, I was taught the econ meaning of inferior good in my first econ class).

I've studied econ at the graduate level at MIT after having taken it as an undergrad as well, and I have a degree in Finance, so I didn't mean to imply that I don't know what I'm talking about. But I know a lot of other topics as well and I've always objected to terms of art in one field being easily confused with terms from other areas, and hell if I can remember what an inferior good is 20 yrs later. My point was not that you didn't know what you were talking about; I joined in because between the two of you I replied to, I didn't think your discussion was benefiting the rest of HN as much as it could because many of those people have not taken any econ at all. I was trying to Econ 100 the discussion, without losing the flavor of what is interesting about Giffen goods; and I think that if researchers are going to "prove" that Giffen goods don't exist in aggregate (Not trying to argue, just trying to clarify what I came upon. Econ theory I think is sound but requires many simplifying assumptions to teach and learn, and then when we talk about whether Giffen good actually exist or not it's easy to lose track of simplifying assumptions like "long term" or "substitution".

cheers.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#617

Post by chrismorgan »

wingerlang wrote: post #446
chrismorgan wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And converted to using single-character class names and reducing the CSS needed, it can be down to about 3KB, sans-compression. (I manually minified the whole source; the original is 53313 bytes, 12438 gzipped, while my minified source is 25628, 10124 gzipped. Most of the bloat in the tables compresses really well, as is common with such things.)

Out of curiosity, how did you do it? I did as well, and I used Sublimes multi-cursor functionality + some manual work to replace classes where it should be. Mainly because i saw an interesting problem and I like (love) using the psuedo automation tool that is Sublime 2. Just curious how you went about it, if it was /all/ manual or some interesting technique. My result was not too shabby, 7kb I think it was when I sto…

Mostly fairly manual, with a bunch of regular expressions and things like sorting the CSS block by background-color (Vim: `:sort /{/`). It was tempting to slurp it in Python, gargle it about a bit and spit it out neatly refactored, but I didn’t do it that way. A small quantity of Vimscript would also have been fairly straightforward. But no, I did it the hard way out of the wrong type of laziness. (Why did I do it at all? Who knows.)

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#619

Post by janesconference »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #266
iLoch wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, but those are secondary markets for most American businesses because there are an abundance of issues with delivering any application to those areas. Whether its political, cultural, financial, etc. Priority for most businesses and website owners is to serve the people you know you can serve first, then work on supporting those other areas. Twitter, like most companies, exists to make money. If you're bus…

Rural areas secondary markets for most American businesses? This isn't just about Twitter, its about making sure if you are helping build a local Mom & Pop Shop's online presence - which is where all business is now days - then you build it in a way that their customers might care about. There is a world outside of cities, and a lot of people live there. The tech world needs to wake up to that, because those people w…

They vote, yes, but do they buy? Do they significantly contribute to a company's economy (even potentially)?

If they do, companies will be happy to spend time and resources in serving lighter versions of their content. But if they don't, there's no reason, from the POV of a company, to employ resources in something that doesn't generate revenue.

If there's money, there's will.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#620

Post by WhiteOwlLion »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #610
SilasX wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming "parking spaces" include one's home space (like garage or reserved spot), 3 should be expected, at least: home, work, and wherever you're visiting.

Now assume Uber et al own fleets of self-driving 9-passenger minivans. During peak commuting hours they're completely full because they pick up different passengers who have the same commute, and that way you eliminate the parking space both at home and at work. The rest of the day they don't actually park anywhere, they just stay on the road operating by carry one or two passengers at a time instead of eight or nine…

More likely scenario will be self driving cars cooperating with each other to drive from start to finish without any stops. Whether on freeways or local streets, cooperation amongst vehicles will raise the average speed and the volume of vehicles you can process through a given area. Pools work to a certain degree if everyone is starting and ending at the same location. When they don't, then it actually takes longer than driving by yourself.

Final point, you can certainly build out less parking spaces, but pre-existing spaces won't go away without redevelopment.

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