sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
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User ID: 636
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
I was recently chatting with Claude to get a better sense of the course of European architecture after the Romans. As early as the 11th century you start to see beauty in buildings again (st Mark's basilica in Venice, Ely cathedral, San Miniato al Monte), but before that it's truly depressing except in Muslim Spain (the great mosque of Cordoba was built in 785 and expanded in the 10th century, the great mosque of kairouan). It's not all bad (the monastery of Santa maria de Ripoll is decent if not masterful) but it really does seem like the 11th century was a turning point. Basically Christendom was building tremendously dreary stuff until the Romanesque style came about.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
There is nothing good about the number of men not working going from 5% to 14%.
Conversely, I think we'd be much better off with lower female labor participation. Many women who would prefer to stay home with children feel that they need to work, either for money or for social acceptability reasons.
You've got a just so story for why women staying home is good and men staying home is bad, but it's easy to make up the alternate story as well. It might go something like:
We don't need more women staying home and profligately spending the man's paycheck (recall that women spend most of the household's discretionary income). Let them work to understand the value of a dollar. Conversely, many men who would prefer to stay home to raise children feel that they need to work, either for money or social respectability reasons.
I don't expect you'll be convinced by my argument, but you should recognize that yours is also only convincing to those already convinced.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Okay, but we're not trading off 100% male LFPR vs 0%. The question is about 95% vs 86%. The fact that women don't want to work construction or whatever doesn't tell us which one of those two is better.
Generally fewer to care about female LFPR.
Fewer, except for respecting the freedom of an individual to choose whether they wish to work or not. Perhaps you can argue that women are driven into the workforce despite not wanting to do so, but you must admit that the opposite was happening in the sixties.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Yes, the total labor force participation is up due to women entering the workforce. It now takes 2 incomes to do what a single income did before. This phenomenon led to the one good idea Elizabeth Warren ever had: "The Two Income Trap". This is not a signal of prosperity, far from it.
The two income trap isn't that women enter the workforce, it's that people live paycheck to paycheck on two incomes rather than one, meaning that there's less slack in the household.
Things are obviously generally not twice as expensive in real terms as they were in the 1960s, though housing is a notable exception. However, the price of housing clearly is being driven by factors other than people having more income.
But men have been leaving the labor force in large numbers. Whereas only 5% of prime age males weren't employed in 1968, today it's nearly 14%. And, of course, this doesn't even reflect the rise of part-time labor.
Okay, but women have been entering the labor force in larger numbers.
By the way, you are equivocating between "employed" and "participating in the labor force". There are not the same concept.
Because U3 only reflects short-term fluctuations in the labor market, and not the disastrous long term changes which have occurred over the last 50 years. And the media reports on U3 but not on the things that matter more.
You've yet to show that it's disastrous, unless all you care about is minmaxing prime age male LFPR.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Inflation stats account for smaller packages.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
When we remove hedonic adjustments, inflation is much, much higher than the official numbers. The official numbers also just don't pass the smell test.
It's trivial to change any methodology to get bigger or smaller numbers. The question is if the new number is more meaningful than the old one.
Truflation estimates 26.27% inflation since January 2020. CPI has increased 21.23%. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if CPI is an obviously wrong estimate.
https://truflation.com/marketplace/truflation-us-aggregated
Then we get to "unemployment". It's super fake. The male, prime age employment rate was nearly 95% in 1968. Today, it is just 86%. That's 9% of men age 25-54 who are not employed. But they are not counted as "unemployed" either. It's all fugazi.
Again, why is U3 fugazi just because you can get a bigger number with another methodology? Especially when you're looking at a subgroup analysis. If we look at prime age LFPR for the entire population, it was 70% in 1968 and now it's 84%.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Beer of course is not distilled. Even spontaneously fermented beer can have ABVs above 6% (which is a pretty normal beer abv), so you don't even need special yeast to hit this ABV.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
i suspect this advice is for people where 'variety' means that protein needs are exceeded by animal protein alone
I suspect you did not watch even fifteen seconds of the clip I posted, because this is the very first thing discussed.
a lot of plant foods are deficient in lysine, so it can occur so 5 foods in a meal are all deficient.
Unlikely, unless you never eat legumes (see advice above about eating a variety of food groups).
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Apples are harder to ferment nicely than other fruits/berries due to the high levels of pulp and pectin in them. Every time I make cider dealing with the pulp is a huge pain in the ass, and it varies by apple variety as well. Berries are much easier to manage and generate much less pulp, and since they don't have any pectin, they clear up nicely just standing in the fermenter without the need for fining agents.
Since fruits and berries are and always will be available at any market (unlike cannabis, which in most places and times is a specialty product), and yeast is in the air all around us, there's really no contest here between growing and processing a plant by yourself vs blending some berries and letting it sit.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Your mileage will certainly vary based on the microbiome in the air and on the berries. There are styles of beer that are spontaneously fermented and can be quite tasty (e.g. lambic), and I've visited family in the countryside that literally just blend berries picked in the woods and make a kind of fruit wine from them that's also pretty tasty. However in my spontaneous fermentation experience at home, off flavors are much more likely.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
If you're eating a variety of food groups, don't fixate on protein quality scores. Deficiencies in one food group are made up for by another.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
You buy them from the supermarket. Obviously.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
It even requires fewer tools and resources than making alcohol.
This is definitely false, you can make an alcoholic drink by blending fruits/berries and letting them sit for a few days. No need for seeds, soil, fertilizer, regular watering, sunshine, waiting for the plant to flower, etc.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
According to this random article, the interviewed doctors were sent there by the Palestinian American Medical Association. I haven't done the legwork to fact check this myself.
However I do find the arguments against the x-rays to be convincing. Are there any counterarguments for those?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
A sufficiently big personality doesn't find any amount of leeway to be enough.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
The upper crust of indians has precious little idea of how the median Indian really lives once they are done driving them around or cleaning their house.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
You don't see rocket advancements made by a glorified military contractor to be liable to the centralization of power and control?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Unless you're positing a kind of experience machine in which you literally can't tell that you're not there, it's always going to be better to interact in person. Otherwise, it's true that if you remove everything that distinguishes A and B, then A and B are the same.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
It is quite obviously way cheaper. The only thing is that there's not too much left to explore in Earth orbit and there's little economic reason to go beyond.
You also shouldn't blame SpaceX for Artemis being completely regarded, it's just good old fashioned pork. Industry has no reason to go to the moon and government has no reason to go there cheaply or effectively.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Would modal behavior start to change if the economics of renting were blatantly better than the economics of owning?
Yes, and it's not just the millionaires, but in e.g. the bay area the modal person does not own a house.
There's still other frictions in moving, e.g. losing all your friends, that will continue to discourage moving even for people without mortgages and even if those people rent their furniture.
Can you actually do the math to figure out whether it is preferable to trade-in and upgrade every two years... WITHOUT knowing how much the new models will cost two years out?
It's not much of a leap to assume that the new models will cost about as much as the current models. The base model iPhone has been $799 for a few years now. It doesn't really seem like this plan is worth it (and the math in the post you linked bears it out).
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Well, these companies do in fact exist, explain that to them.
Do they? Who said that this service charges less than the value of the couch? I strongly suspect that you pay a premium for them to deal with everything for you.
For a type of person who just follows the highest salary or moves about on a whim, surely this is the best arrangement?
Probably, but much like people who replace their entire wardrobe every season, it's far outside the modal behavior.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
If the cost ends up being somewhat less, then what argument remains for choosing ownership?
If you're proposing that someone offers a couch subscription service that costs less over the lifetime of the couch than the value of the couch itself, we're talking about some kind of economic paradox. But yeah, if someone's cutting their own throat and offering me a couch rental for less than the value of the couch, I'd probably take them up on it so long as I don't need to care about the damage I'll inevitably do to the couch.
People who try to keep up with fashion trends or who prefer to wear new clothing on the regular could probably save TONS of closet space (or trips to the thrift store) by having a service that will rent them clothes on some kind of set time frame.
Probably, but that's kind of a niche demographic. We're pretty far from the average consumer at this point.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1mo ago
Nah, I'm suggesting you COULD do that. But there could just as easily be a service that does it for a flat fee anytime you want to update, and perhaps there's also a guarantee to replace anything that breaks as part of the deal.
The point here is, what's the benefit to you from owning your furniture and decor? Why would you argue against someone renting it to you instead? Is it really just about having the 'option' to do what you want and decorate however you like?
Change my furniture any time I want for a flat fee and with a warranty? we already have this, it's called having someone deliver/haul away your furniture and buying a manufacturer's warranty, no renting necessary. People don't usually do this because it isn't really worth it to them. Extended warranties in particular have a real bad reputation afaict.
To put it simply, it's difficult to imagine that a company providing this service can make money while the customers are not losing money over the alternative setup.
Maybe there really are people who change their decor every month, and for those people, yeah this might make sense. But for everyone else, the transactions costs are just too great for this to pencil out I think.
In theory, it reduces complexity a lot. Now the expense to you is collapsed down to a monthly or annual fee which represents the entire expense of using the carpet. And if you want to replace the carpet, you can call up a replacement from the same company. Maybe they even have an app.
Again, how does this pencil out? You basically are marketing a kind of insurance scheme or extended warranty scheme for my carpet, plus I guess the option to swap it out.
We all know that self insurance is the best insurance. Especially when we're talking about something like carpet where there's no catastrophic risk to consider (unlike a car where if I hit someone I can be liable for millions in medical costs), I just don't see a path to profitability for the firm renting out carpets without a price increase for the consumer over the status quo.
Is the option to swap out your carpet important enough for people to make this financially viable? I doubt it, because replacing carpets is pretty expensive and the firm would need to amortize the cost of the guy who swaps his carpet out every week across the entire customer base, even if the median customer changes carpets once a year.
Apparently you can rent fucking clothes these days, so I'm trying to hear the strongest arguments against doing such a thing, if we assume the service that allows you to do so exists.
How is this different from renting a tuxedo for prom, or renting some equipment from the hardware store? There's clearly a place for services that rent you something that you're only going to use once, and clothing for special events seems to be the target market for this list of services.
I like this argument, although I prefer the inverse "I may be ncentivized to be neglectful and cause more damage because it doesn't belong to me."
The landlord holds thousands of my dollars to incentivize me not to cause damage to the unit.
But I begin to think that the average person isn't really going to do much with a place they own that would 'justify' having them own it themselves.
I think painting walls is in the Overton window of things people do to their own houses (edit: or redoing the kitchen/bathroom), but I'd never bother doing this to a rental. It's the ultimate and final cuck. Think about it logically.
And why not just have them subscribe to a service that will do the interior decorating for them? Similar to those companies that do house staging for real estate sales, you could pay for subscription that lets you swap out your decor every 6 months.
So they'll put up wallpaper, I'll pay them a monthly fee for years for nothing (I don't want my wallpaper changed every six months, and I don't want a bunch of strangers in the house every six months either), then they take it down when I leave? Maybe if it was like $10 a year or something but otherwise it's hard for me to see how this is +EV. I could just pay someone to put up the wallpaper and tear it down, and that would probably be more cost effective.
Likewise, many people who own their homes nonetheless pay someone else to mow their lawn
Yeah, but that's a task that needs to be done all the time. People have had maids and butlers for as long as they've had houses, this doesn't really seem to be the same type of thing as paying for a furniture subscription service.
and they rent e.g. their modem and router from Comcast, since its really a hassle to maintain your own hardware.
This is totally bizarre to me and I don't really know why people do it. I've literally never had a problem with a router/modem I bought from Amazon. This is probably the best example of what you are talking about, though. I don't know how many people opt to rent rather than just buy.
Seems like its not so far removed to just rent... everything in your home and then you can also outsource annoying maintenance and repairs.
You already can (in some jurisdictions and some cases, must) outsource repairs. Water leak? Call the plumber. Electric problem? Call the electrician. Floors dirty? Call the carpet cleaners. Etc. what is the benefit of renting my carpets?
Maybe then I can buy a house.
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