We as a society accept the insurance system as an implementation of "funding healthcare" because market capitalism is supposed to lead to lower prices, fair allocation of scarce resources, and innovation, among other things. That is, the insurance industry is a market solution to a moral problem.
If insurance companies then can wiggle out of covering pre-existing conditions, they're no longer solving the moral problem they were brought into the world to solve, and now we need some other solution to solve the rest of it. Then, whatever that other solution is, it's solving the hard part, so why not extend it to solve the whole thing and cut the insurance middlemen out of the economy entirely? What are they even doing at that point besides extracting a rent?
(This is one answer among many good ones to what is really a bad-faith question—health-insurance is not a lot like fire-insurance at all)
I would love to have a coworking-space-on-every-block (or in every building) where all the WFHers can go to be around other people (just not the coworkers)
Yeah, I was spoiled by my college town. Libraries open until 2AM, a 24 hour space for students. Even a few cafes downtown open 24 hours a day. Suburb life is mostly fine, but that's one thing I miss most.
Gotta travel 20 miles to downtown for anything resembling night life.
> Our auditoriums are provided as a public service for use by individuals, institutions, groups, organizations, and corporations for a small fee, when not being used for library-affiliated or sponsored activities.
And maybe we can pool them a bit by profession, because they often need the same tools and can help each other. Any maybe they can even work on some of the same projects, so we can remove meetings.
HN people always try to do this cute rhetorical gesture where you take a thing and say "hmm nice idea what if we called it <thing that already exists>", but they like this joke so much they get baited into doing it in dumb ways like this one.
A coworking space in every building != a WeWork. There's a big difference between these! You could implement the former by opening a million WeWorks but that doesn't sound good at all; residential apartment buildings already have common areas, free to residents, they would simply have to be reimagined slightly.
Prices are constrained by demand moreso than by cost of production. Lego pieces are expensive because they can be, they still sell, and this is largely due to the quality. As long as the quality moat persists, they can charge as much as people will pay, and--good for them!
That you personally would prefer lower prices does not mean they "should" be lower. Those lower costs of production, to Lego company, "should" mean higher profits, not lower prices, and again--good for them!
The risk Lego faces is that they don't actually have a quality moat any longer. You can get non-lego sets with no stickers, plenty of prints, LED lighting, at a cheaper price, and with the exact same piece quality. I purchased this set: https://www.lumibricks.com/collections/steampunk-world/produ... over Christmas, and I paid $105 because it was on sale. The pieces were indistinguishable from Lego in quality, and the lights and lack of stickers was a quality increase from what Lego offers.
What moat Lego has is: brand recognition and licenses. Which aren't nothing, but don't offer much protection.
Not disagreeing with you, but at least when I hear "lego knockoff" I think of the shitty ones, because I've never seen a Lego knockoff that wasn't shitty.
Lumibricks seems like a promising brand, but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego. And if they did spend more in order to compete with Lego, they might need to increase price!
> but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego
It’s a newer brand—they changed their name to it some time last year. But they seemed to spend a lot on advertising last Christmas—at least on YouTube, it seemed like tons of reviewers were talking about their sets. That’s how I found out about them, at any rate. And I’ll say—the one I got came together nicely, and looks great. The tons of lights are just, really neat.
> when I hear "lego knockoff" I think of the shitty ones, because I've never seen a Lego knockoff that wasn't shitty.
The cheap-o ones you get like at the dollar store, absolutely. But Chinese manufacturers have been making good quality knockoffs for a while. A decade at least? I bought my first knock-off technic set around 10 years ago, and it was 90% the quality of Lego at 25% the price. But the quality has only gotten better since, and is now totally on par with Lego. Admittedly, the price has gone up, too.
Interesting. Gotta check those out! Not that my family needs more LEGO... The remains of our Millennium Falcon after my nieces came over glare at me everytime I look at a new LEGO set.
I don't want to sound like a shill, because I don't know them at all, and I still spend enough money on actual Lego. But I am really happy with it. Pieces were great, quality was great, I love the lights, I hate Lego's stickers. And the piece count was 2x or 2.5x what I'd get from Lego at the same price. And I love steampunk, and Lego doesn't have a steampunk line. I'll absolutely buy more from them, so (for me at least) their big Youtuber push last year worked.
No but I appreciate your recommendation. I find that product recommendation on HN tend to be higher quality and/or more relevant to me than generic lists (I added so many books and games to my backlog from HN comments because many HNers have really good taste).
Maybe I'm saying the quiet part out loud. I hope no one tries to advertise on HN after this.
A reputation moat is still a moat. It seems to me that Lego prices will drop as soon as they are forced to by competition, and not before, and this is fine.
It is, absolutely, but it’s a lot more shallow a moat than having a product quality moat.
> Lego prices will drop as soon as they are forced to by competition, and not before, and this is fine.
I agree, they’ll survive quite well. But the large profit margin they’ve grown accustomed to might disappear, and that probably doesn’t bode well for their management.
And heck, maybe they’ll stop shipping stickers on expensive sets, too. That would be nice.
I've seen enough reviews of recent Lego sets to doubt this. Sets with a brick or two where the color is off, sets where the final model falls apart if you look at it wrong, and when there's fan designed alternatives which are more solid and better looking it's clear it wasn't a physical limitation.
Not to mention sets that indeed just feel like a ripoff, like the pyramid of giza which costs $130 and is actually just half of a pyramid, but the backside of the model has slots that let you connect it with another half if you buy two of them. And they even admit in the marketing it's an incomplete product with "Complete the pyramid - This model comes with clear instructions and can be connected to a second model (sold separately) to create a full pyramid", of course only visible after scrolling or looking at more product pictures.
They are. I should have added that Lego’s designers are a bit better still. You can get botanical sets from a lot of manufacturers, but the Lego ones are just nicer.
It appears that the real lesson here was to lean quite a bit more on theory than a programmer's usual roll-your-own heuristic would suggest.
A fantastic amount of collective human thought has been dedicated to function approximations in the last century; Taylor methods are over 200 years old and unlikely to come close to state-of-the-art.
Your dismissal of moral concerns is not convincing.
Imagine a world where the only energy you do is use was generated by a stationary bike you had to ride yourself. You would, generally speaking, use that energy differently than energy you would pay for--you would generally reserve your effort for worthwhile things, and would be averse to farming energy yourself just to power frivolity or vice. How you determine what to put your energy into would explicitly be a moral question.
Instead in our world we an abstractions conceals the source of the energy. But if the moral concerns from the first world had any weight, they haven't lost it now; if energy is anything short of completely free we should by the same logic be averse to expending energy on worthless work or vice. The human being is not a utility monster, but something very different, and moral questions of this sort are central to how it navigates the world, they should not be dismissed.
Doesn't this argument hinge on equivocating between two different definitions of aversion, though? I'm averse to bananas, but that doesn't mean I think it's immoral to eat them. The moral dimension kicks in if somebody else had to ride that stationary bike for you, because then you'd be wasting their time on frivolities.
Of course I'd use energy differently if it cost more. If I had to generate energy by pedaling a bike, I'd consider it costly indeed. So what? Energy doesn't cost as much as it would if I had to manually generate it, and who are you to say allocation decisions made under that regiment are good and ones made under ours are bad?
Wouldn't your argument also compel us to use steel as if it were gold? Salt as if it were saffron?
No it's 100% these idiots pushing their fascist propaganda just like they tried to "rename" the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Most members of the military never even see actual fighting.
It’s been a term in rare-to-moderate use since the 1990s — Trump/Hegseth ramped it up to 11 and it’s every 3rd word out of Hegseth’s mouth because he thinks it sounds tough.
If you think a gender-neutral term used for decades within their own circles as a form of inclusive corporate-speak is "fascist propaganda" then I'm sorry to say you have serious issues.
I think the issue with "modeling" is really a human one, not a mathematical one.
It's helpful sometimes to think of our collective body of mathematical knowledge as like a "codebase", and our notations and concepts as the "interface" to the abstractions at play within. Any software engineer would immediately acknowledge that some interfaces are FAR better than others.
The complex numbers numbers are one interface to the thing they model, and as you say, in a certain sense, it may be the case that the thing is C. But other interfaces exist: 2x2 antisymmetric traceless matrices, or a certain bivector in the geometric-algebra sense.
Different interfaces: a) suggest different extensions, b) interface with other abstractions more or less naturally, c) lend themselves to different physical interpretations d) compress the "real" information of the abstraction to different degrees.
An example of (a): when we first learn about electric and magnetic fields we treat them both as the "same kind of thing"—vector fields—only to later find they are not (B is better thought of as bivector field, or better still, both are certain components of dA). The first hint is their different properties under reflections and rotations. "E and B are both vector fields" is certainly an abstraction you CAN use, but it is poorly-matched to the underlying abstraction and winds up with a bunch of extra epicycles.
Of (d): you could of course write all of quantum mechanics with `i` replaced by a 2x2 rotation matrix. (This might be "matrix mechanics", I'm not sure?) This gives you many more d.o.f. than you need, and a SWE-minded person would come in and say: ah, see, you should make invalid states unrepresentable. Here, use this: `i = (0 -1; 1 0)`. An improvement!
Of (b): the Pauli matrices, used for spin-1/2 two-state systems, represent the quaternions. Yet here we don't limit ourselves to `{1, i, j, k}`; we prefer a 2-state representation—why? Because (IIRC) the 2 states emerge intuitively from the physical problems which lead to 2-state systems; because the 2 states mix in other reference frames; things like that (I can't really remember). Who's to say something similar doesn't happen with the 2 states of the phase `i`, but that it's obscured by our abstraction? (Probably it isn't, but, prove it!)
I have not given it much more thought than this, but, I find that this line of thinking places the "discontent with the complex numbers in physics" a number of people in this thread attest to in a productive light. That dissatisfaction is with the interface of the abstraction: why? Where was the friction? In what way does it feel unnecessarily mystifying, or unparsimonious?
Of course, the hope is that something physical is obscured by the abstraction: that we learn something new by viewing the problem in another frame, and might realize, say, that the interface we supposed to be universally applicable actually ceases to work in some interesting case, and turns out to explain something new.
Even in the US we see cities becoming desirable place to live when they successfully cultivate a film scene, or an art school, and being dead when they don't. But this feels like a better approach than a basic income (which is an invitation to idleness)--make it easy to use the environs for film, streamline permitting, provide cheap capital, solicit locals for public installations.
If insurance companies then can wiggle out of covering pre-existing conditions, they're no longer solving the moral problem they were brought into the world to solve, and now we need some other solution to solve the rest of it. Then, whatever that other solution is, it's solving the hard part, so why not extend it to solve the whole thing and cut the insurance middlemen out of the economy entirely? What are they even doing at that point besides extracting a rent?
(This is one answer among many good ones to what is really a bad-faith question—health-insurance is not a lot like fire-insurance at all)
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