Will an end to the war in Ukraine, on whatever terms the active fighting will end, be disinflationary in the West as commodity markets are reintegrated, or inflationary due to the pressure on resources that reconstruction of the destroyed country will impose?
@Big_Worker @phillmv I use inoreader daily. but the network effect disappeared post-Google-Reader, and lots of feeds disappeared or are poorly maintained.
@Suzyanalyst1 @stephenjudkins (I don’t know. Because I’m unenthusiastic about another centralized “winner” of the network effect, I’m devoting very little attention to post.news)
it seems unfair that it’s the very wealthiest people who get to live rent-free in our heads. and quite extravagantly.
in my day, toy stores didn’t have separate kids’ sections.
@SteveRoth @DetroitDan youch. i really hope it is not that horrible for China.
@Suzyanalyst1 @stephenjudkins I think common explanations for micropayments never happening are payment overhead (just making a credit card charge often cost ~$0.35, and then a percentage of the charge is taken, so payment of even $1 yields only like 62¢) and "cognitive overhead", the theory that it would be exhausting to people to have to constantly think about whether to pay a nickel more as they follow links around the web. 1/
@Suzyanalyst1 @stephenjudkins https://post.news/ is trying to overcome the payment overhead by having a within-site currency of "points", with no cost other than revising their internal database for internal transfers. It's like casino chips, you make payments in those, and can cash out for real money at the end. 2/
@Suzyanalyst1 @stephenjudkins This could be an interesting micropayments experiment, but it requires basically that the whole ecosystem belong to the entity that manages the "points", ie it requires a Twitter-style monolithic host for all the articles, and I'm basically too burnt out on that part to get very excited about the micropayments experiment. /fin
@DetroitDan Yes. My understanding is that their vaccine uptake rates (on their domestically produced vaccines, not our mRNA vaccines) is low, especially very sadly among the elderly. I've been told maybe this has to do with older Chinese's faith in traditional Chinese medicine over Western-style care, but I don't know if that's right. It was similar, and catastrophic, in Hong Kong.
@stephenjudkins it turns out there are lots of situations where concentrating the burden makes more sense in practice than broadening and sharing it that seems so much better in theory. the canonical case i think is employment, in practice firms fire a few rather than, say, imposing small blanket reductions in compensation.
@danhon the only way you can properly figure that out is if you do some research, on location.
If, perhaps, we return to a civilized age where one discovers and reads much of ones news by RSS feeds, a nice, gentle alternative to a paywall would be access to full-text feeds rather than feeds you have to annoyingly click a link from to reach still open content.
Every time I click, I'd be reminded that I'm asked for support I'm not giving, and think about whether I wish to give it.
@poetryforsupper Woohoo! Congrats!
@poetryforsupper (i’ll have to wheedle some elaboration from you when next we speak!)
@shawnhooper from my perspective at least, 2022 was a banner year for anxiety. i spent february through july endlessly ducking and covering on the inside.
@pkedrosky i love garrulous therapists. so many great stories!
people think anxious people are workaholics in order to relieve their anxiety and maybe that’s a part of it.
another part, though, is that the opportunity cost of lost leisure is very low if you know you’re going to ruin whatever you do with it by being anxious.
@hcetamd @pluralistic @SaintPeter @IraCogan maybe most hypermodern, private-equity-run corporations. historically, actually, most businesses left some surplus on the table in favor of sustaining long-term relationships. that’s why capitalism used to kind of work, stakeholders jockeyed over the pie for the bigger piece, but did allow each indispensable constituency to take home a meaningful slice.
@DetroitDan And people like Tabarrok are unhappy that authorities were so cautious, waited so long for evidence of safety and effectiveness rather than reducing mortality by accepting greater risk! (Perhaps Tabarrok would argue that the evidence was already sufficient long before the approvals, so the additional risk would have been mininal.) 1/
@DetroitDan Maybe a synthesis of your preferences and his would be to offer the vaccines earlier, but express more uncertainty about their safety and effectiveness? I’m not sure whether from a public health standpoint that wouldn’t be the worst of both worlds, with skeptics talking up every anecdote of adverse reaction leading to low uptake and a situation like China is facing now. /fin
“social media sites are always trying to optimize their mistreatment of users, mistreating them (and thus profiting from them) right up to the point where they are ready to switch, but without actually pushing them over the edge.” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/ ht @SaintPeter @IraCogan
// with lots on the importance of low-cost exit to deter and to remedy this sort of “enshittification”
