The core case is that Amazon causes prices to be too high, which is perhaps the most absurd allegation I have heard in a long time. Conlon says the FTC does perhaps have a case on the part where charging a lower price elsewhere leads to a demotion in Amazon’s rankings, although as he notes what would be the remedy there? Also how exactly is the consumer harmed by that?
I am not an expert, but it seems to me that you are not even trying to be charitable here. While it is possible for people to be mistaken, we should also explore the alternatives.
You mention that Amazon has hidden fees for sellers, in form of ads they have to buy in a zero-sum competition. But they are not allowed to add these hidden fees to their costs on Amazon, without simultaneously increasing their costs everywhere else. That does sound to me like Amazon causing prices to be high. Perhaps I (and apparently many others) have made a mistake here, but if that is the case, I would appreciate an explanation instead of just calling it absurd.
As a toy model, let's imagine that my production costs of something are $100. Outside of Amazon I already sold the thing for $150, where $45 was the fee of the traditional shops, and $5 was my profit.
I want to reach more customers by selling via Amazon, but all the official and unofficial fees combined are let's say $65. So if I want to keep the $5 profit, I need to sell for $170 now. Even if I decide that my profit per piece can be lower now that I am selling more pieces, still, even with $1 profit, the cost at Amazon is $166. And according to the rules, I also have to increase the costs everywhere else to $166. (Or not sell at Amazon.)
We can argue that the loss of my previous customers, who now pay $166 instead of $150 is more than compensated by the new customers who previously couldn't buy my product at all, and now they can. But that is not the same as saying that the allegation of increasing the prices is absurd.
Thanks, Zvi, these roundups are always interesting.
I have one small suggestion, which is that you limit yourself to one Patrick link per post. He's an interesting guy but his area is quite niche, and if people want his fun stories about banking systems they can just follow him. I suspect that people who care about those things already follow him, and people who don't aren't that interested to read four items from him here.
The tragedy is our continued focus on the symbolically superior pure electrics over the vastly better for the planet hybrid vehicles.
Pure electric vehicles can have non-symbolic benefits too, though maybe not environmental ones. In our case, we would very rarely have use for the option to use gasoline. By going purely electric, we avoid: 1) a bunch of maintenance, such as oil changes; 2) worrying about the price of gas, where convenient gas stations are, or even about the shelf life of gas (if you go through it slowly enough it can actually go bad in your tank); and 3) hauling a heavy, seldom-used engine around.
Also, fun news tidbit: this year, as Hurricane Idalia was rolling toward Florida, a worker at a port terminal made a mistake that contaminated regular gasoline with diesel. Said gas then went out to a bunch of stations and on to consumers. That was one extra headache folks did not need while prepping for a hurricane.
Things on the AI front have been rather hectic. That does not mean other things stopped happening. Quite the opposite. So here we are again.
Bad News
PSA: Crumbl Cookies, while delicious, have rather a lot of calories, 720 in the basic cookie. Yes, they display this as 180, by deciding serving size is a quarter of a cookie. This display strategy is pretty outrageous and should not be legal, we need to do something about unrealistic serving sizes – at minimum, require that the serving size be displayed in same size font as the calorie count.
It really is weird that we don’t think about Russia, and especially the USSR, more in terms of the universal alcoholism.
Reminder that there really is an architecture conspiracy to make life worse. Peter Eisnman straight out says: “Anxiety and alienation is the modern condition. The point of architecture is to constantly remind you of it. I feel anxious. I want buildings to make you anxious!” There is also, in response to being asked if perhaps it would be better for there to be less anxiety not more: “And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right. And I’m not convinced, by the way, that it is all right.”
My wife is exploring anime recently. It has its charms, but the rate of ‘this thing multiple friends recommended is actually pretty boring’ is remarkably high. New generations have other concerns.
Can I suggest a third way? You don’t have to say anything. If you love an anime and others are calling it problematic, you don’t have to defend it and you don’t have to condemn it. You can enjoy your anime in peace. I get that there’s a lot more of the ‘silence is violence’ and compelled speech thing going on, but I will need a lot more evidence of real consequences of silence before I stop pushing it as a strategy in such spots.
‘As a bioethicist, I support requiring students to take ethics.’ Ethics professors continue to show why they are no more ethical than the general population. We badly need ethics, but almost nothing labeled with the term ‘ethics’ contains ethics. Recent events have made this far clearer.
Republicans continue to prioritize not letting the IRS build a free digital tax filing system. I have other priorities, but important to note pure unadulterated evil. Even an ethicists get this one right.
Tipping indeed completely out of control, potential AI edition?
Good News, Everyone
Lighthaven, a campus in Berkeley, California, is now available for bookings for team retreats, conferences, parties and lodgings. Parties are $25-$75 per person, other uses are $100-$250 per day per person. I have been to two events here, and the space worked exceptionally well as a highly human-friendly, relaxing and beautiful place, with solid catering, good snacks and other resources, and lots of breakout areas. Future events being held here definitely raises my chance of attending, versus other locations in The Bay.
All is once again right with the world, Patrick McKenzie now gets his insurance from Warren Buffet. Because of course he does. Fun thread.
Magnolia Bakery to make weed edibles, but for now only for dispensaries in other states: Illinois, Nevada and Massachusetts.
iCarly revival is cancelled on a cliffhanger, and we will never find out about her mom. Seems somehow highly appropriate? Not that I’ve ever watched. Some cliffhangers are good endings.
Vitalik Buterin reports success in the creation of Zuzalu, a two-month-long intentional community of 200 people formed out of a resort during its off season. Give people a gorgeous and affordable setting, with likeminded people excited by a core group of projects, with people who want to be there and have no other commitments, and it can go great. I encourage more such experiments to happen with more ambition, but no I do not see this as heralding a Network State or other such nonsense.
You don’t have to worry about trying not to offend philosopher Agnes Callard. Oh, you’ll offend her, but not in the usual ways, so there is no avoiding it, and she doesn’t mind. So don’t worry about it. Also, I am guessing that she would get offended by you holding back to try and not offend her, rather than speaking or seeking truth.
Electric car growth is not slowing.
The tragedy is our continued focus on the symbolically superior pure electrics over the vastly better for the planet hybrid vehicles.
While I Cannot Condone This
It’s true, figuring out how to fund good science is complicated. Choose your fighter.
I agree that we would get better results funding the person and letting them choose the project. I have zero faith in our process to choose valuable projects, instead predicting that the process will choose reliable projects over valuable ones. I also don’t love our ability to choose the best scientists, but I think we are capable of making at least some good decisions there, and if we offer those scientists freedom then many of them would choose valuable projects.
A hybrid approach might be good as well. If you make your mark we let you do what you want, if you don’t then you need to make a great proposal, but you can’t use your reputation for that at all and there are not many slots available, so it needs to be ambitious and awesome, you can’t play it safe. Or at least, that would be the idea.
Wait, non-creative types don’t use every moment as an opportunity to learn and train and figure things out (includes 2 minute clip)? Not all work looks like work, and it is not only the comedian that is (as Seinfeld explains elsewhere) mining actual everything that happens to them for material.
It is the torture that many of the rest of us embrace as well. Why wouldn’t I scan a new restaurant menu for font designs or think about the sound acoustics, isn’t that cool? That does not mean one cannot relax. Relaxing is imperative. But when people’s relaxing involves getting zero useful training data, it confuses me. I love me a relaxing bath, but I’m usually going to be listening to a podcast.
For the true value of working, most of you are slacking off, big time.
I cannot condone anything Meta does but yes, this is a good point:
Meta also seems to have had people who wanted to take various steps to protect mental health and make their products less addictive, including disabling some filters, and Mark Zuckerberg ultimately said no, citing lack of causal data on the harm, whereas the demand was clear as day. Reports involve noting things like the products providing dopamine hits and satisfying novelty seeking.
This all sounds quite bad, with talk of ‘worse than tobacco.’ But let us remember, also, the story of the man who read smoking was bad for him. So he quit reading.
I fear that if we punish Meta for having reports on harm and considering harm reduction interventions, the main effect will be that they and others censor and render illegible all discussions of harm and harm reduction.
Meta has much to answer for, but let us beware of hitting them on their internal processes until we know what incentives that would create.
Government Working
Government actually working! IRS makes 83(b) election electronic signatures permanently valid, hopefully avoiding future time bombs exploding on founders when their stock vests. Still insane that the law works this way, but in practice should claim a lot fewer victims.
Even better, IRS launches free online tax filing service for 2024 season. For the pilot program, you need to be in one of 13 states (Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New York or the ones without a state income tax, so either obnoxious-tax city or no-tax city) and have a relatively simple tax return. Let’s f***ing go.
No10 is listening to my conversations, and I am here for it.
Makes sense to me. If you are already addicted, and you can’t buy legally, you’ll have to buy illegally. Whereas if you choose to start knowing you will never be able to legally buy, that is a choice. Alternatively, we keep cigarettes legal, and the barrier to sell anything else is you show it is safer and less addictive than a cigarette.
Imagine this as well.
In a world where consumers increasingly see product offerings sorted by headline price, and with related human biases and adjustments of expectations, there is continuous pressure to utilize hidden ‘junk’ fees. Everyone is better off if all the prices are displayed in full up front.
As Danielle notes, the real value is in places like medicine. The junk fees there are even more outrageous, the true prices more hidden and out of our control.
How much should we worry that business will pass on costs to consumers in other ways here? That depends on execution details but my prior is not much. Yes, most of the costs get passed on in the base price, but that is the point. That is good. A lot of the surplus here is reduced cognitive load on the customer, a lot is in better customer choices. We are not actually trying to lower effective prices as such, although I expect a little of that on net.
Give SSI beneficiaries $3,200 stimulus checks, notice they have a bank balance over $2,000, attempt to claw back years of benefits that this balance proves they shouldn’t have gotten, stop the checks while the victims appeal? Yep.
FAA offers us new MOSAIC rulemaking for light-sport aircraft. Eli Dourado reports that the new rules are actually pretty great, giving much greater experimental flexibility on numerous fronts and plausibly hitting the safety sweet spot. You’ll get more passenger seats, higher speeds, more takeoff weight and more.
Eli says this could be transformative, allowing us to to maybe even get our flying cars some day.
Buy American rules are far worse than they look. Not only do you need to source everything from American suppliers (who are in turn sourcing from American suppliers and so on) but also everyone involved needs complex chain of custody systems in order to prove the Americanness of all the objects involved. Often entire projects incur massive delays. If one is determined to shoot oneself in the foot, one can do a lot less damage by using a mix of tariffs and subsidies.
The saga of SpaceX continues.
This we have a tight lid on. Training AI models that could kill everyone, not so much. Can we please concentrate our anti-regulatory fire where it is so richly deserved?
Ro Khanna (team blue) says to Matt Gaetz (officially team red, mostly team schmuck), let’s have the house vote on the things like term limits and bans on member stock trading that the public 80% supports but that members for obvious reasons do not want, speculates that an actual vote might shame some into voting for it. Certainly it creates a prisoner’s (legistlato’s?) dilemma, where no one wants to vote against but also no one wants it to pass. Except most of the American people, but who cares about them? Forget it Matt, this is Congress.
Even better would be to go back to letting individual members introduce bills and then the House votes on them. We have computers, this need not disrupt regular business, perhaps if something passes that way you then do a traditional vote for real.
At the Movies
Scott Sumner’s film ratings for Q3. He is always exactly correct in his ratings, on the dimensions he is evaluating. If you want to see the highest Quality films, the objectively best films, he is here to tell you what they are.
Yes, Barbie is a 3.3 on his scale, and MI: Dead Reckoning is a 3.0 (out of 4) – I’d have said 2.8 or 2.9 for MI before learning it impacted Biden, and 3.4 or 3.5 for Barbie, but then I remember Scott is never wrong.
However, as always, one must remember that the dimension Scott is measuring is merely one dimension, which is also composed of its own subdivisions. There are many other dimensions to measure as well, that mostly are of no concern to Scott, but which I care about quite a bit. Is this something I actually want to watch, and would enjoy? Which is highly correlated with Scott’s ratings… once you control for certain factors. And which much more favors relatively recent films.
It is on my project list to do my own film rankings some day. They would look very different. Also at some point when things are quieter, to watch at least all of Scott’s 4.0s and 3.9s.
Note that this search cleanly brings up all his reviews.
I also completely endorse Scott’s horror at the ‘4DX’ theater, and would continue to happily pay a lot to never be in one again.
Dumb Money review: Kind of dumb. Also money. Would invest again. If Scott Sumner saw it he would probably give it at most a 2.5, but again, not why I saw it. Enjoy life.
Saw old movie The Adjustment Bureau, which was okay. Most unrealistic thing was that New York Senate elections were treated as competitive. Was enough about AI to not stand up to scrutiny in any way. Predicted Scott review that would be fair in its own way: Uninventive, seen it all before, philosophically incoherent, 2.2.
Wanted a short-ass dumb action movie one night and watched Avarice on Paramount+, which has no plot, no characters, no acting, no action and no movie. The gimmick is ‘she is an archer and has a bow’ I guess but if you replace it with ‘she carries a gun’ actual nothing changes. Actual 0.0.
Mostly I need to find time to watch more movies, and to always check reviews first and choose my targets more deliberately.
Warner Brothers attempts to bury a third movie, Coyote vs. Acme, as a tax write-off, despite a great concept, a finished product and good audience testing. This was not a ‘this is so bad we must pretend this never happened’ situation, whereas they said Batgirl was unreleasable and my imagination can suffice for a project entitled Scoob! Holiday Haunt. After creatives cancelled a lot of meetings with Warner Brothers, understandably concerned this might happen to their projects as well, WB agreed to let Coyote vs. Acme be shopped around instead. It sounds like fun.
Twitter Twitches
Twitter’s algorithm is severely punishing external links, and on top of that they’ve stopped displaying the headline text of the links. As Nate Silver points out, this might sound like a good short term idea, but it’s a terrible long term plan, and no this is not a purely Elon Musk style of mistake.
Daniel Eth predicted sites will start putting the headline into the graphic. Paul Graham predicts it will be obnoxious.
Meanwhile Simon Willison offers a practical solution to auto-generate social media display cards.
Up until now, I have found Twitter has retained most of its prior usefulness, so long as you use a chronological feed and lists.
I have found the lack of titles on links only mildly annoying. The severe punishment of links does not directly impact my feed. But together they mean less people are posting links, which has been a non-trivial downgrade.
An illustration: Referrals from Facebook and Twitter to top news sites have cratered.
Odd choice to not have the y-axis start at zero here, this decline is dramatic.
Axios blames this on lack of positive selection, that tech companies no longer try to ‘elevate quality information.’ There is doubtless some of that, there is also the factor that these news organizations keep trying to forcibly extract payments, and that links to outside are being intentionally throttled across the board, partly to avoid those payments, partly to keep social media users from leaving the website.
I would support a rule saying that major social media sites cannot throddle posts with outside links, but if they are also going to try and extract payment, not so much.
Also every ‘major news’ site is now behind a paywall. I can read links to the two were I have subscriptions, not to the others. Without a unified subscription option, most people will be unable to follow most links. If I can’t easily share WSJ or NYT links, the value of a subscription goes down a lot, which feeds the cycle. Even I chose one mainstream source to stay grounded on that (WaPo). I also find Bloomberg valuable enough to pay for. Most people don’t even go that far.
Tyler Cowen claims that it is good Elon Musk bought Twitter. Here is his reasoning:
I strongly agree with the underlying principle of ‘getting one big thing right.’ Often this will indeed prove more important than ten or a hundred little things you get wrong, and the reverse would have been true as well.
The question is, what is the particular big thing one must get right? That is itself the big thing one must get right. I do not see the videos as so important one way or another. Freedom of speech in general is a plausible candidate for the big thing, and the past month has reminded us of its importance. Community notes is very good, it could perhaps be the big thing. Or they could together be the next big thing, with notes allowing much more free speech.
An example of a big thing one could get wrong, that might be going wrong, is to give too many interactive advantages to paid users, especially across multiple tiers. Asking for $8 a month is one thing, but I would be very careful with the new additional tiers.
On the bright side Bloomberg’s Aisha Counts says Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino is claiming Twitter is cash flow positive excluding debt service and expects to be cash flow positive including debt service by 2024.
Nate Silver makes the case that a run by RFK Jr would more likely favor Biden than Trump. This seems right to me, with wide uncertainty bars. Kennedy does not hold positions compatible with the Democrats, and Libertarian runs typically hurt Republicans for obvious reasons.
Yay Free Speech
Free speech is super important. I highly value free speech, and deeply thankful for the first amendment every time I see what happens in countries without one.
Presumably in response to some people not taking kindly to Paul Graham saying things one can totally say, he responded by posting this image, note the date on the older conversation:
Allow me to demonstrate what level we are on by saying this and noticing I do not expect any negative consequences whatsoever for saying it, because come on:
Thus, by this scale, we are at Level 1. Which, by the definition of the scale, is the minimum level that has ever existed in any society, so it is not some huge indictment or big whoop. I do agree that the set of such things is larger now than it was in 2003, but less than in 2020, and again, I feel completely comfortable saying that, and would even if I lacked any power.
I would also not confuse level 1 here with the actual situation, which is that when there is an issue where lots of people are accusing each other of supporting genocide, saying pretty much anything is going to get one side, the other or both mad at you to some extent, that does not mean we can’t say things.
Also, my lord, reversed stupidity is not intelligence, the scale is not the territory, etc:
The ideal censorship level is zero, the same way the ideal Simulacra level is 1.
(Since everything is also about AI now, note the danger of an AI concluding things like ‘whatever seems like it would metaphorically be the -1 level must be good.’)
Money Stuff
If you are surprised that new findings say the Eaterlin Paradox was bogus and money does indeed increase happiness indefinitely on a log scale, I am curious why.
Yes, obviously. No need to read the paper, yet an important paper to ensure exists.
Increasing the minimum wage 10% increases low-end local rents 2.5%-4.5%.
Patrick McKenzie talked anti money laundering law back in February 2023, recommended for those interested if you haven’t seen it.
His new related piece, also recommended, is Seeing Like a Bank. The core idea is that banks could in theory solve your problems using bespoke professionals who can track information and understand the underling dynamics and use reason, but those people cost a hundred times as much the way doctors and lawyers do, and most bank issues very much do not require or justify such action and involve That Guy calling in time and again, so instead you get a three-tier calling system gating everything. But, if you know the right shibboleths, you can get the professional involved on your behalf and make things actually work. Banks also could in theory have software that worked well and kept good track of everything, but mostly they don’t and it will be a while before they do.
Historians do not know their economics, and thus do not know their history. Economists say the Great Depression was a story of aggregate demand contraction, monetary contraction, protectionism and failed Federal Reserve policy. History textbooks talk about income inequality, under-consumption and a stock market crash. Of course, the economists are also making big mistakes here, especially their failure to emphasize the gold standard and various contractionary policies implemented throughout, as always I recommend Scott Sumner’s The Midas Paradox.
No, it’s not free under $5, but if you want justifications for spending money you don’t have, ‘girl math’ and ‘boy math’ are now here for you. Why rationalize away your money all by yourself when you can have professionals help you do it, for free? Given your hourly, that means you’re making money. Which you can now spend. That’s math.
With a little software work, Mercury has routed around the requirement that every payment to a new person effectively requires a new W-9, because all the info in the W-9 is already known.
Paper claims the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 substantially increased corporate investment, those with mean tax change increased domestic investment 20%, with equilibrium long-run effect of 6% greater domestic capital and 9% greater total capital, while net tax revenue declines less than 2% of baseline corporate revenue due to feedback effects. As Tyler Cowen notes, this will not settle the matter, very few will be convinced. In my model, those who want higher corporate taxes would not change their position even if they were indeed convinced, they care about some mix of fairness and equality and perception of fairness and equality, so efficiency and positive-sum arguments will land on deaf ears.
Is it this simple?
Kind of yeah. Things are no longer rapidly getting more expensive. Things are still much more expensive than they used to be, and interest rates rising means rent, mortgages and car payments are way up. It’s kind of a big deal. And for whatever reason, the government is responsible for the price level, and isn’t responsible for your raise or new job.
The results of the UAW strike illustrate the real effective rise in wages and the cost of living, with the minimum raise being 25%. Yes, there was some catchup there, but also they quote someone jumping from $20/hour to $35/hour. In my experience hiring people, I have also had to pay a lot more than I did a few years ago, far more than the official inflation rate.
Relatedly, Tyler Cowen notes income stability in America has been rising for decades. Yet workers do not seem less nervous. I posit this is partly because workers are more risk averse, partly both are caused by us otherwise giving people less margin for error, giving people less affordance to survive being down on your luck and still keep your life on track. Having a volatile income is not that scary if you think you will still get a family in the end. I do agree with Tyler that if you are not too risk averse, there are great rewards at start-ups and for other forms of risk taking here.
I also would presume that people notice the specter of future changes from AI.
At equilibrium I would say that such effects do not merely bring pools of capital down to the average rate of return. It goes far lower than that, the equilibrium is that a vulnerable pool of money will be entirely extracted. Something about a fool and his money.
Banks increasingly give people the option to pay to access money from a check right away. Patrick McKenzie notes that notes that banks used to instead turn to their risk department, and also that you could ask for a waiver and someone in the bank was authorized to credit your account today.
Letting people pay to get the money now seems an odd combination of price discrimination against the poor that does not seem great, and adverse selection against the bank that seems far worse. The whole point of placing a hold on the money is to guard against cases where the check is fishy and the customer does not have the money when the check bounces. When do you think people will pay to cash it now? When they suspect the check will not clear and they intend to use the money right away. The market for this service does not seem like it should clear?
529 savings plans are technically owned by the account owner, not the beneficiary, because otherwise colleges would impose an effective tax rate of 95% by reducing aid awarded. Kids should essentially never save for college with their own money for the same reason, unless the plan is to actually pay the whole thing, because you will not make college any cheaper. It still boggles my mind that we allow colleges to demand to know your assets and then perform ~100% asset confiscation.
Thread by Chris Conlon on the FTC’s case against Amazon. The core case is that Amazon causes prices to be too high, which is perhaps the most absurd allegation I have heard in a long time. Conlon says the FTC does perhaps have a case on the part where charging a lower price elsewhere leads to a demotion in Amazon’s rankings, although as he notes what would be the remedy there? Also how exactly is the consumer harmed by that?
Ben Thompson covers the FTC complaint, says this is the key paragraph.
Amazon’s coercive tactics to thwart competition lie within the Amazon website. You are totally free to offer products elsewhere. Amazon’s ‘anti-discounting’ is, as noted below, that they will price match. The rest of the complaint is found to be even less compelling, and the FTC framing every ordinary business offering such as Amazon Prime, bundling or (gasp) store-branded goods as inherently suspicious does it no favors.
Thread on the details of that FTC complaint against Amazon. What are the actual objections?
Forcing ad buys seems worse than a straightforward fee. Amazon gets the revenue either way, and it ‘pays for’ the ad buys by having the customer experience get worse. As described, this is a perverse process that Amazon has every reason to fix. Corporations make these kinds of errors all the time, no idea why it requires an FTC action other than a political hit job. There’s some strange underlying assumption that Amazon shouldn’t have control over or profit from its own website.
Amazon being excited by this is bad news for Amazon if the ads are like this. Ads you have to buy are a zero sum game at best, again is this about disguising how much it cots to list on Amazon?
The concept is that Amazon will match any price drops by rivals, but not move to lower prices first. A price match. You’re calling out a price match. Ben Thompson notes that Amazon will also punish the seller (via lower prominence on the website) if they offer a higher price for an identical product at Amazon and a lower one elsewhere. So Amazon is demanding that prices on its website not be too high, at the cost of not featuring the related product if it isn’t listed at a competitive price, and that’s bad because it leads to high prices. Got it.
Yeah, 95% is… not actually that great, especially if the 5% is non-trivially late, and if there is not proper accountability and repair when something goes wrong. But no, it was far from the sole motivation here.
Amazon’s rule is, as Ben Thompson points out, that if you pay Amazon for guaranteed delivery services, that it provides those services.
The case rests, as Thompson notes, on the accusation that Amazon is a monopoly. Amazon does not seem like a monopoly to me, except that it has a monopoly on selling via Amazon. Which I would hope does not count?
Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
Freddie DeBoer asks how the NBA can survive its current era of player empowerment. If star players keep demanding trades to the same handful of teams in attractive locations – such as Miami, New York and Los Angeles – and their teams feel forced to then do so for what amounts to pennies on the dollar, how do the teams in less fun places ever win?
Rules enforcing parity in pay and limiting hiring of superstars help mitigate the damage somewhat, but they also lock in the result. If we each get to pay the same fixed pool of money, but superstars are the best deals to begin with and can choose to take pay cuts in order to play in places they prefer and with better teams, solve for the equilibrium. Even if everyone plays it straight without loopholes, it only ends one way.
This is compounded by the NBA being highly skill-intensive with best-of-seven series that lack large sources of variance, with results being dominated by the superstars.
I see two plausible ways this goes. Option one is to embrace it, or at least accept it. The Indiana Pacers of the world will be second-division teams that occasionally threaten to break through. Perhaps that is fine. The Lakers and Heat generate more excitement anyway. Like in college football, each team can have its own baselines and goals. People come to the NBA to see star personalities playing exceptional ball, to enjoy that the players are off the hook. So release that hook.
Alternatively, we could go back to a world in which the players largely don’t control their fate or where they play. Except no, we can’t and we won’t. So option one then.
Which I really do think is fine. Then again, the NBA rarely holds my interest.
The MLB strike zone is in theory a function of player height and stance. In practice, with human umpires, any attempt to abuse this for technical loopholes would run afoul of the ‘who are you kidding’ clause, and the umpire would call strikes anyway. With robot umpires, there is no such clause. They are now testing, in the minor leagues, an automatic system that measures from knees to a baseball above the belt. For now, in the minors, that should work, because no one cares about winning and the goal is to make it to The Show, if you game the robot umpire it won’t do you any good. So the system might work fine.
However, if you move that system to The Show, the munchkins will be out in force, and you won’t like the results. Another illustration that the rule that a computer must follow to the letter often needs to be very different from the human rule. This is on top of the fact that umpires widen or narrow the strike zone based on the count to favor whoever is behind on it, and also that they favor the home team a bit and veterans and stars a bit, and sometimes the team trailing, all of which they are very much not supposed to do but very much do anyway.
I would be in favor of actively codifying all those quirky preferences, as long as they are symmetrical. Home teams winning more than half the the is good for the game if played fairly, as are the other adjustments. But the fans would not stand for it.
Remember the principle of Leaders of Men, to focus on what matters most.
Such incompetence is indeed a hint that perhaps some firing-worthy things are happening. On the margin it can cost you games. But we need periodic reminders that you pick your coach mostly on whether they can draft or recruit, sculpt, script and motivate a team. The things that fans rightfully yell about as dumb or incompetent? The fans are right, but ask how much they matter.
Zac Hill gives his perspective on what is wrong with Magic: The Gathering’s Standard format. He sees Standard as about board presence and doing powerful individual things players like to do, giving a ‘standard’ play experience. Variety is good, but the ‘good stuff’ midrange style strategies need to remain the heart of the format. When the dominant play patterns depart too much from this, and the best decks you see all the time are all about walls of text and detailed interactions or they fog until they take infinite turns or their curves only go up to three, the heart is gone.
I think there’s something to be said for that, although I do not take it as far as he does. I would instead place a lot more responsibility on the ‘too many words’ problem. Cards now are too complex, are too fiddly and noisy, and there are too many cards released. Players cannot keep up or keep track, driving them into evergreen formats that change more slowly or where universal awareness is not expected. Cards often not ever being in Standard at all compounds this problem.
Having Standard rotations every three years instead of two seems if anything anti-helpful. Yes, your core concept can last longer, but you also need to keep 50% more things in your head at once, and there is less room for new concepts to breathe. As Sam Black notes, a lot of Standard is letting new cards shine. You want it small.
Sam Black goes farther, saying that Standard no longer makes sense. When Magic was designed around Standard, especially when it included mechanically unified blocks, Standard was great. Now that many cards are never in Standard, and the releases offering the best value include many non-Standard-legal cards, what are we even doing? There is no grassroots support for Standard, no reason for there to be any, and tournament support alone won’t cut it.
Sam’s suggestion is to sunset Standard without replacement, as Magic is trying to do too many different things, and Standard is no longer key to the business model. I do not think, long term, that this works. I think Standard is serving several purposes other formats don’t. It lets new cards shine, allows play at a more modest power level, offers a compact set of cards players can hope to fully learn or have access to as a gateway to being competitive. More than that, it is constantly changing.
Commander, Modern, Pioneer and all the rest are mostly static. Sure there are changes, but also there mostly are not. It is cool to visit those worlds on occasion, but Magic requires a place players can innovate, 1-on-1 with 20 life, without being up against years or decades of refinement.
That does not strictly have to be Standard. I have always loved Block Constructed, although to have that you would need to have blocks, and Wizards says people don’t like blocks. So mostly we are talking rotation speed, also known as talking price, and figuring out how to navigate the desire to aggressively power creep with some new releases, to create something sustainable.
I admit I do not know how to do that. I fear that Magic has in important ways peaked, having picked its low-hanging fruit of low-complexity cards and simple concepts, and now picking the fruit of connection with other franchises. That the future is a game built around Commander, which means a whole sort of general mish mash of stuff that people do for fun but that holds little interest for me outside of perhaps occasional limited play or something like Premodern.
Magic: The Gathering unifies its two types of boosters into new play boosters, designed for draft and also sometimes with multiple rares.
Drafts are not cheap. This will make them less cheap. Or perhaps it will make them slightly more cheap? A draft will cost more money, but before draft boosters gave you worse value than set boosters, so if you get full value from the cards you could come out ahead. If all you care about is drafting, not as good.
Magic has gone from three rarities, to four rarities, to having relatively more copies of its higher rarities. Which seems like going around in a circle. The rarer cards will be less bomb-like, which seems good. All of that with some price raises along the way, but one has to keep up with inflation somehow I suppose.
I am still out. I experimented briefly with Wilds of Eldraine limited, but the online experience failed to hold my interest, the logistics of playing in person are not great for me, and the continuous investment cost of keeping up is way too high. So perhaps a draft or two right around release when reading the cards as I go is still fine, some occasional light Premodern, and that’s probably about it.
I Was Promised
FlyingSelf-Driving CarsIt is simultaneously amazing the ways people talk about and frame questions about the dangers of self-driving cars, and also amazing that it is all not so much worse.
In this case, I mean, wow.
Nothing in the article suggested what the driverless car could have done, even in theory, to be safer, other than not being on the road in the first place.
Except, actually there was something. It seems that after the woman flew under the car, the driverless car dragged her along a bit in a way it shouldn’t have, causing more damage. This is not itself shocking or worrying to me, because ‘another accident flies a person under the car’ is exactly the kind of not-in-the-training-set situation that you’re not going to handle so well the first time.
Except, actually there was a bigger problem, you idiots.
That got Cruise suspended in California, and then Cruise voluntarily suspended their other operations. Intentionally misleading officials about accidents is rather not okay. This is an existential threat to Cruise. If they actually did what they are accused of doing, they brought it on themselves, and have single-handedly pushed back development of self-driving cars for years.
I say if because California has a history of pulling tricks around this issue. I would not rule out, based on what I know, that Cruise did cooperate and they are twisting this all around somehow. Otherwise, yeah, this is something a company should fry for.
Cruise also has this little other issue.
This is how it always starts. You have to bootstrap to get data, given how crazy the public is about every little thing that goes wrong. How else would you do it?
Except, why are they still doing this? Why does the CEO think this situation is long term stable? In some sense this is 97% less human driving, but this is very much not 97% of the way there nor does it provide 97% of the value. In the beginning, This Is Fine. Given how long they were on the road? Very much not fine.
Waymo vehicles at a minimum generated fewer insurance claims and generally have a strong safety record. Seems robust, even taking into account that Waymo has no reason to ever file an insurance claim, or to not pay money before letting anyone else write one. What is happening behind the scenes at Waymo? I don’t doubt some amount of support, but I presume they are much farther along in reducing the need.
Potentially Effective Altruism
Mr Beast provided clean water for up to 500,000 Africans. Some people were (checks notes) unhappy about this. He will keep doing such things. Anyone upset about this should notice the skulls on their uniforms. Doing good that earns you back the costs is the most effective of altruisms.
But yes, such people do exist.
I will take a bold stance that it is good to help people even if those people should not have to rely on you.
I will also note that I am confident this bold stance is very popular.
Effective altruism too is rather popular among those who have heard of it. Which it had better be, if your whole plan is to dedicate everything to helping others as much as possible given fixed resources.
I’d certainly hope that the definition would be popular, to those who don’t know about the movement. And indeed, seems to go pretty well, and better with those who are familiar with the concept?
Next time an EA thinks they need to hide their affiliations, notice that this about as good as approval numbers ever get.
Scott Alexander writes up the experiment with impact markets. Judges found that the projects collectively were not worth what investors paid for them. Of 18 invested projects, 17 had negative ROI until Austin and Scott decided to overpay for two more, leaving 15 with negative returns.
The remaining one project got a 25x return, but that was because it was sold for $300 total, and it was pure community building at the University of Maryland future. Which I am assured is technically a Big 10 school. But for recruitment to be valuable, there needs to be something else effective going on.
Effective Altruism’s major organizations are largely under a single legal umbrella, which is inhibiting risk taking and information sharing quite a bit. This seems quite bad and I do not see sufficient corresponding upside.