What makes it true or not is how healthy the competition and the market is. A company that only did this to extract more money from each sale would find itself having a hard time finding buyers compared to cheaper competitors. Companies that offer a genuinely good deal don't do it from the goodness of their heart, they do it because it's also a valid business strategy to aim at making a larger number of sales with a lower profit margin.
The issue with price discrimination is that instead of both parties capturing some excess value from the trade, one party captures almost all the excess value, while the other captures epsilon (as in, just enough to make the trade worthwhile, but no more).
In the case of "signaling" addons, it's quite possible that both the car manufacturer and the customer are happier with price discrimination. After all, the point of signaling is that you're showing everyone you paid for something expensive because you have money. If it was cheaper, or if it was available on every trim, that exclusive paint color or colored stitching the rich person paid for wouldn't be useful to signal how rich he is.
Yes, that's the plan. I'm planning on moving to a city next to a paddleable river this year, I want to practice in that river this summer, and then in autumn do a weekend trip not necessarily a trip down a river where I'd camp along the way, I'm also looking at campgrounds next to scenic paddleable lakes for daytrips.
pigeonburger
2d ago
I'm currently looking to get into canoeing as a hobby, inspired by tales and aesthetics of it from preceding eras, and I'm very afraid that I'm about to arrive into a hobby that had all the discovery and enjoyment (for me) optimized out of it. People are already reporting that national parks have to be reserved at the opening of the season if you want to have a chance to get a camping spot. My plan to avoid this is to use my contrarian superpower to look for under-optimised strategies. Everyone's reflex when it comes to these things is to go to national parks, maybe I should look at private camp grounds? Or at hunting/fishing lands, which do regulate the recreational use in a different scheme than national parks.
pigeonburger
2d ago
The steelman of price discrimination is that it enables a lower floor to a product's price than if it had to offer a single price point, which helps accessibility. It can even be good, in that the people who overpay for a few extras (especially for stuff like "color stitching" on seats or other visual upgrades which are pretty much just signaling that they could afford to pay for a fancy trim) are subsidizing the product for the people who get the cheaper ones. That if you made it illegal and that all cars had to have only one trim, it'd be a middle trim, it'd be more expensive than the current middle trim and the people who could only afford the base trim now just can't buy it anymore.
pigeonburger
4d ago
He's not actually saying anything about invading allies, what happens is that he mentions he'd like something that's a long shot, journalists jump to ask "is a military intervention ruled out?" and then he (or a surrogate) answers "nothing is ruled out" because the administration doesn't want to play or discard cards in their hand because of some jackass journalists. And the circus of "he's planning to invade an ally!" starts.
pigeonburger
4d ago
and the EU seems to be taking it seriously.
I don't think that means anything. There's political capital to win for western politicians in being the one who's most against or opposite Trump, and that's easier if you interpret everything he says in the least charitable, most unhinged way. We saw the same here in Canada, a certain defeat for the liberals was flipped by the media acting like Trump is seriously planning to invade.
pigeonburger
5d ago
My guess is that it's good a place as any. Wokeness, in its racial form, is in large part what we call "white guilt", which requires whiteness, which Minnesotans have, probably more than any other group. The kind of metastasized prosocial niceness that even if someone else does something bad right in your face you'd find a reason to excuse it and blame yourself for it. It also requires fairly recent multiracialism as over more than a couple of generations, white people tend to see that other races' successes and failures hinge on more complex factors than "white people".
pigeonburger
6d ago
I don't think you're not getting it, we just have a different gaming profile. The progression is frustrating and randomised, but personally I just put out of my mind. All it does is inform which buildings I'm likely to target for looting in a run but other than that I'm happy just getting random stuff and shooting ARC. I don't hate the looking through trash aspect. And the shooting is satisfying to me.
I'll grant that the out of run inventory management is annoying and especially coupled with the slow progression. I'm filling up with materials to build stuff I just don't have the blueprints or levels to build; and there's little use in building a bunch of entry level equipment, you'll always be able to build them right before a run.
It's not game of the year, but it's the low time and mental commitment that makes it so I keep coming back for a handful of runs a day.
pigeonburger
6d ago
It's not a competitive shooter, it's an extraction shooter, like Tarkov. That means sometimes you'll end up in a fight with other players, but in my experience the ARC Raiders playerbase is quite chill, at least when I play solo. 95% are not going to initiate PvP, most are happy just saving someone's ass for the fun of it. The PvE enemies are overwhelming but also previsible which makes them fun to plink at. The biggest issue I would say the game has is that it's repetitive and has a hard time keeping me occupied for more than an hour or so at a time.
pigeonburger
6d ago
I keep putting hours into ARC Raiders. It's low commitment to just go do a run or two. I also keep playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion, which was phenomenal at start but later on in the game it starts piling up more frustrating enemies. I don't know how I feel about that.
pigeonburger
7d ago
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't think that guy exists. But one can position themselves as him until he gets elected and the media shrieks at him constantly anyway.
So hypothetically, if I think the President is giving illegal orders to the military, or might, it’s out of bounds to say that to soldiers?
If you think so, you point to which orders you mean. Also, it's probably not up to a partisan politician to point it out, but to military instructors to explain it.
Something like “a soldier’s duty to disobey illegal orders is extremely serious and can have extremely serious consequences don’t fuck around with it as part of your political posturing.”
Pretty much. The military relies on obedience from soldiers except in the case of grossly illegal orders. "Don't execute illegal orders" is not for complicated matters that requires judges and courtrooms to parse, let alone those thorny enough that they often end up at the Supreme Court level, it's for obvious "I order you to set these unarmed civilians on fire" stuff. If those senators had any examples of those they should have been able to point them out. Otherwise, they're just messing up the chain of command by encouraging grunts to apply discretion to stuff that's way, way, way above their station to decide.
pigeonburger
7d ago
There's also some less committed Republicans who could be driven to exhaustion by the constant "everything Trump does is unprecedented and threatens the republic if not the entire planet" background messaging of the media. Positionning yourself as the guy that will still be a Republican but won't have the media shriek constantly about is good if you feel that these people outnumber Trump-only (or Trump-approved-only) voters.
pigeonburger
7d ago
DeSantis was the most surprising
DeSantis is not surprising. He's trying to thread the needle between not angering Trump while trying to get the media's approval as the "least bad Republican" for his next run.
pigeonburger
7d ago
The problem is the implication. We can play dumb and act like either are just innocent reminders of facts that are usually irrelevant because the preconditions for them (illegal orders or seditious senators) doesn't happen often, but what really matters is that the timing and the choice of messengers carries with it a neon flashing sign implying those preconditions have happened.
What do you make of knives? They're pretty uncontroversially deadly weapons, also have non violent uses and I would guess more Americans have at least one than cars.
I think the differenciator for deadly weapon shouldn't be whether there is a non violent use for it, but more what the likely intent is if someone attacks you with that object. If someone attacks you with a knife, or a car, you can surmise the intent is deadly, or at least the attacker has little regard whether his attack will cause death. Unlike a taser, or some blunt weapons (like a baton; a hammer I would probably consider lethal).
pigeonburger
8d ago
Or any of other innumerable chances to defect and/or make-a-buck that people would surely come up with were this to become normalized?
Yeah, I don't know how someone can wave away the fact that it's possible to, on stock markets, bet against a company, and that it's trivial for a CEO to ruin a company in a sudden, stroke-of-a-pen way that makes frontrunning everyone on benefitting from the collapse guaranteed. The individual incentives becomes to wreck every single company.
Come on. I am pretty sure that most women, feminist or not, would be disgusted at the thought of their partner having sex with dogs and would not need "Animals can't consent" as a justification for their disgust.
Of course they would be disgusted, daguerran was not denying that. But they would be unable to justify it as anything else than lack of consent because disgust is outside of the moral vocabulary of the modern liberal west (as per Haidt's observations on WEIRD morality). Try explaining why it's disgusting without resorting to a variant of "it hurts the animal" (or imagine a situation where the animal initiated, and is clearly unhurt by it). You'll inevitably end up sounding like a rabbi or an imam explaining why eating pork is impure. Of course, in many situations it probably also hurts the animal, so the objection is also partially genuine, but it's a different impulse that led to digging for a post-hoc justification for condemnation.
Similarly he posits that jealousy is outside that vocabulary, and that the justifications for porn-negativity given are post-hoc, even if they might still make a genuine point sometimes.
A good test for that would if someone offered as a solution that porn be mandated to be instructive in helping men bring women to orgasm, but otherwise could still be of hot younger women. Do you think the complaints would stop? Do you think there's any amount of accomodations that could be done for the goalposts to stop moving? Personally, I think he's right on the money that the only accomodations that would do it are those that make either porn unthreatening to the sexual value of those complaining about it, or so unenjoyable that men stop watching.
pigeonburger
9d ago
“I’ll have ninety-nine problems, and my VP can’t be one.”
So as a presidential candidate she had ninety-nine problems and her running mate being a bitch was one.
pigeonburger
10d ago
What I don't get from the second group is the pig-headedness refusal to accept workable compromises. Plug in hybrids are (cost and technical complexity aside, and the first's less a concern on the second hand market) mitigating almost all the issues of electric cars, but no one hates them as much as electric car fans. Daily commutes use no gas or a thimbleful of gas, and longer trips are not limited by infrastructure outside of already implemented gas stations.
pigeonburger
11d ago
If you let private corporations accumulate capital without forced redistribution it's not communism or socialism, yes, obviously.
pigeonburger
13d ago
This is what makes entertainers dangerous. I hear friends repeat and absorb arguments from stand-up comedians all the time and it pisses me off; being entertaining is not the same as being correct, and entertainers, be they writers, artists, comedians, directors... do not have access to a source of cosmic wisdom that makes them more likely to be right about anything than anyone. In fact, many of them live very atypical, non-representative lives that I would not be surprised made them more often wrong than the modal person of similar intelligence.
I keep telling people that but no one IRL agrees with me. Everyone is addicted to hearing "but what happened to characters after!!!" and few writers manage to write the stakes down or at least sideways in a sequel, the appeal of "recontextualizing" a perfectly good original as being only one part of an overarching, higher scale and higher stakes narrative is too strong. But unless you execute that perfectly, you actually damage the original. If you avoid scaling up, a lesser sequel does not damage the original, look at Back to the Future; part 3 is certainly lesser, but it can be ignored entirely if you want. It does not cheapen or weaken 1 and 2.
What was nice about Stranger Things from the start was not the characters, it was setting and vibes, those could and should have been preserved and the characters ditched.
pigeonburger
24d ago
Judges and jury duty as a concept was thought of by mutant deontologists (the English) for a race of mutant deontologists, which humans are not.
There's a difference in how existential for the regime protests are in regions like that vs in countries that have been stable for over a century are.
In the West, even a riot is mostly just the population trying to convince the government it's totes mad enough to take to the streets. Look at Jan 6th, even if they take one of the seats of government they just don't know what to do with it, they end up taking a tour of the place, it's cute. For many/most governments in the middle east, latin america, africa, even eastern europe, rioting is within living memory how your or your neighboring country's government got the job, so it's taken a bit more seriously. If a middle eastern riot takes its capitol, you can expect a lot worse than stealing a pedestal.
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