Rationality Quotes December 2013

Cyan

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

A 100 page comic book cost me $0.25 US in 1970 or so, it is a few US$ now. A 12 oz soft drink cold in a deli was about $0.10, it is more usually $1.00 now. A gallon of gasoline $0.29, now about $4.50. Not a single one of these is of notably better quality now than it was then, I'd say they are directly comparable and are quite different enough in nominal price so that there can be no doubt.

Sorry not to go all the way back to 1913, but I was 13 years old in 1970 so it was easier to use what I could remember.

A 100 page comic book cost me $0.25 US in 1970 or so, it is a few US$ now.

A few dollars? 100 page comic books in the U.S. these days usually sell for upwards of $20. But comics are really another case where the product itself isn't directly comparable between time periods.The market has shrunk tremendously, so they try to make up the difference in volume by selling high quality "glossies" rather than the old low quality "pulps," for a larger profit margin per sale. In terms of physical quality of materials, it absolutely is better th... (read more)

7Eugine_Nier13y

Nitpick: well the gasoline no longer has lead in it.

2Jiro13y

Any comic book fan could tell you why comic books went up in price. It has to do with 1) the collapse of the newsstand market and the decrease in readership, and 2) having to give creators better pay/royalties. (It sometimes gets blamed on the paper stock, which isn't really true). (And you probably didn't mean to say 100 pages. There were 100 page comics then and there still are now, but they cost 50 cents. Typical size of a comic book is 32 pages.) It's also pretty obvious that gasoline has gone up in price for reasons that are not just general increase in prices.