maybe it’s being developed in the arctic circle and there really are only four nights per year

regular tensors are tough enough, i dont even want to begin to know what ⊗^⊗ means

yeah that’s a pretty big oversight tbh. they should make the website play “hold” music and add some “timeout” popups you have to keep clicking

yeah the period/comma switch up has caused me some trouble while studying abroad (mostly by apple). the calculator app for example will show a period (to specify decimals), but pressing it will insert a comma (to specify decimals), despite my number formatting settings being set to use periods for decimals.

i probably should’ve added an /s to my comment

well 9.792 km is a lot than 2,600 km. are you sure you aren’t in malaysia? /s

this was very comforting to read

this makes a lot of sense. now i’m questioning why it’s not more common

why do you think so? (i’ve never thought about it before and am genuinely curious)

bill’s days are numbered

quite a few of them are “natural monopolies”. for those unaware (source):

A natural monopoly is a type of monopoly in an industry or sector with high barriers to entry and start-up costs that prevent any rivals from competing. As such, a natural monopoly has only one efficient player. This company may be the only provider of a product or service in an industry or geographic location.

ie, cable companies, electricity suppliers, amazon. it’s really complicated and really expensive to build the infrastructure needed to meaningfully compete in those industries.

another relevant concept is the “network effect”, defined as (source):

a business principle that illustrates the idea that when more people use a product or service, its value increases.

this kind of thing is more applicable to things like social media companies (they’re more appealing the more users they have). this makes it hard to compete with social media companies because convincing people to use your new app is really hard if the usefulness of it depends on everyone’s friends already being on it. (this is also part of the reason twitter is taking so painfully long to die)

both concepts illustrate the different barriers to entry that exist when trying to compete with these giant companies. these barriers are also what allow these huge companies to get so complacent.

(i’m not happy about quoting investopedia or wharton, but they do give simple definitions of both concepts so i did it just this once.)

In 2023, a full-time worker needs to earn an hourly wage of $28.58 on average to afford a modest, two-bedroom rental home in the U.S. This Housing Wage for a two-bedroom home is nearly four times higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

source: https://nlihc.org/oor/about

this isn’t even taking into account groceries, transportation, medical expenses, etc. the problem is not buying too many carbonated drinks.

that depends on whether you’re a vegan arch user or an arch vegan user

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he’s not even able really kill it either. everyone i know still calls them tweets. even in the articles i read, the authors all say twitter or “X, formerly known as twitter”. it’s such a stupid branding decision that no one is buying into it

i wish they would take the edge off my computer

i don’t think i’ve ever used a microsoft product that didn’t feel like it was still in beta

i appreciate the well thought-out reply. i disagree with some of the things you’ve said but respect your reasoning and level-headedness. i’m going to (generally) quote the first line of each paragraph so you can more clearly see what i’m replying to, but my responses are intended to address the whole paragraph.

And that’s solved with trusted sources. I personally don’t analyze what toothpaste I get, I ask my dentist or look for the support by the American Dental Association.

you may be a bit of an anomaly then. this page gives an overview of consumer behavior and how companies are able to influence peoples decision making. it also links to this page listing ways in which consumer behavior tends to be irrational, often being influenced by their moods, what their friends buy, and also by marketing techniques.

putting that aside, let’s suppose that everyone did behave rationally and only bought things recommended by experts. wouldn’t this be much more work for everyone than simply letting the experts pass regulations on which products can be sold? wouldn’t it be nicer if you didn’t have to consult an expert each time you bought something? if instead, you could have some faith that anything on the shelf was a good option?

It’s often a lot easier to figure out who to trust than it is to figure out which products to buy. And with a free market system, there’s a lot of competition both at the product variety side, as well as the product review side, so bad products tend to die and good products tend to succeed.

i’m not so sure it is easy to find out who to trust. this article you linked is a good example of that: 40% of people had a hard time finding out who to trust in regards to the 2020 presidential election, something that arguably is way more important than something like which brand of toothpaste you buy. it might be tempting to write those people off as unreasonable, but keep in mind that would mean saying 40% of the population is unreasonable.

next, i’m not sure i agree that bad products tend to die. i understand “good” and “bad” can be subjective, which makes this topic a bit more complicated, but you yourself have said fox news is relatively untrustworthy. i think it would then be reasonable to say they are “bad” news organizations. despite this, they were the most watched news network last july and i dont think they’ll die anytime soon. there are many other examples of this: companies like EA, comcast, nestle, etc, who many people have disliked for years, continue to do well economically and show no signs of dying.

This is almost exclusively due to cronyism.

this is actually part of my point: cronyism is part of the free market. if companies are incentivized to compete with each other britannica defines the free market as “an unregulated system of economic exchange, in which taxes, quality controls, quotas, tariffs, and other forms of centralized economic interventions by government either do not exist or are minimal”. in an unregulated system with minimal interventions where companies are supposed to make money above all else, why wouldn’t they influence legislation, sue other companies out of existing, and all the other things you mentioned?

in a free market, cronyism is just playing by the rules. this is probably the biggest reason why i don’t think free markets work. you can say that’s not right or it’s not supposed to happen, but it is what happens. it’s why we need regulation. another famous example of this was the book “the jungle”, which led to the creation of the FDA.

In your example about electricity providers, that’s because the deals are made between the power company and cities, not between individuals.

i’m not sure about electrical grids (texas comes to mind but that arrangement seems much different the situation you’ve outlined), but from what i’ve read, britain’s current arrangement is (at least a bit) similar to what you’ve outlined. we can see how that’s going. but i want to make clear that i understand you expressed apprehension about applying a private model to the electrical grid, so this is more of a minor point.

Capitalism works best when you expect selfishness and have the government set and enforce rules. If something cannot feasibly be offered in a competitive fashion, the government should step in and provide it as a public good.

this is something i agree with. i would add a few more things to your list (such as housing, all parts of healthcare, public transportation, among others), but i can acknowledge that certain things could work fine if they worked in the private sector with government regulation (eg video games and movies). i also agree with you that we need much more action when it comes to enforcing antitrust laws.

It happens a lot in autocracies, democracies, and everything in between. It seems to happen less in smaller communities, which is why I prefer to have each level of government be as small as possible while remaining effective.

i completely agree. it’s something that can happen in government as well as the private sector, and does seem to happen less in smaller communities. this is a very hard problem to solve, and i’m not sure it can be completely solved. i think having a good education system reduces the risk of corrupt people coming into power, but that only helps to reduce the problem. that being said, things are very bad in the current system. this kind of corruption and manipulation is allowed in the private sector: most of the time it’s either legal or it’s illegal but the consequence is a very small fine.

The only overlap with the free market is that we have a mix of trustworthy and non-trustworthy sources.

the overlap with the free market is that news organizations are incentivized to pander to their viewers, which is what the thing about fox news showed. they played the election fraud narrative because they didn’t want to upset their base. this is because from an economic perspective, the viewers aren’t the “buyers”. the advertisers are the “buyers” and the viewers are the product. in the context of this example, this means that it’s “bad” to say the election wasn’t stolen because it could result in fewer viewers, resulting in fox news having a “worse product” in the eyes of advertisers.

Just think how much worse it would be if the government were in control of the media.

don’t get me wrong, i completely agree that things can get very bad when the government is in control of the media. controlling the media is one of authoritarians’ favorite pastimes. my goal in bringing up that point was to show how free market principles can be inherently at odds with journalistic integrity. in a capitalist society, journalistic integrity will take a back-seat to economic pressures.

the problem is that not enough people make “good decisions”, partly because of how exhausting and time-consuming it is to carefully analyze and consider all the options for every facet of life. for example, there are lots of people who don’t want to switch to linux because they think its tedious to pick a distro, learn a new operating system, and find replacements/workarounds for software that doesn’t work out of the box on linux. now imagine having to do that for every single aspect of life. how do you pick your toothpaste and deodorant? do you carefully examine all the options each time you go to the store, or do you have a brand you pick without thinking about it because it works fine enough?

another problem with free markets is the inherent progression towards monopolies. this can be seen most readily with the so called natural monopolies (monopolies that emerge because of an extreme barrier to entry). how much choice do you have when it comes to your electricity provider? if they do something you don’t like, what can you do other than complain to a politician or move to a new region? aside from natural monopolies, we also see a progression towards monopolies because of inherent efficiencies of producing at scale.

there are other problems as well, such as corruption/lobbying, companies lying to the public, using psychology to manipulate people (link may not be the best source on the subject).

something that i personally find to be a great example of how the free market works in practice: rupert murdoch (among several others working at fox news) knew the 2020 election was not stolen, but pushed the narrative anyway because they didn’t want to upset their viewer base.

its really absurd. it becomes even stupider when considering that many of these assumptions allow mathematical models to be built on top of them, and then those models are treated with such importance and authority. but then they sometimes also get the math wrong. i remember learning a while back that part of the 2009 housing crash was caused by faulty mathematics laid ontop of these weird economic assumptions. the part im talking about is:

The paper, generally referred to as the Dahlem report, condemns a growing reliance over the past three decades on mathematical models that improperly assume markets and economies are inherently stable, and which disregard influences like differences in the way various economic players make decisions, revise their forecasting methods and are influenced by social factors.

the first part refers to a kind of “smoothness assumption”, where they approximate the bumpy, jagged graph with a “smooth” curve that is easier to analyze. but it turned out the bumps were there for a reason. oops! the second part of the quote then says that in addition to the faulty smoothness assumption, there were quite a few important things the model flat out ignored

i’m sure the free market will solve this. we just need to wait for a new company to pop up, make a new operating system, ensure windows programs are properly emulated, convince the majority of people and businesses to use it, and then use its new monopoly for good.