You were pretty dismissive of David R and Geoffrey G's questions about consumer protections. "That's just the price we have to pay for living in the most dynamic economy in the world" does a lot of hand waving. People's complaints about expending mental energy trying to navigate through all the enshittification are legitimate, and I don't know who it serves (other than shareholders) for market economies to trend in that direction.
1. Enshittification may sometimes happen but it is vastly overstated. Is your smartphone shitty? Your new car? Your television set? Capitalism produces tons of non-shitty stuff.
2. Plenty of enshittified products are just consumers being cheap and stupid. E.g., flyers who insist on buying basic economy rather than paying for a bit of comfort.
Basic economy is possibly the worst example of "enshitification" I can imagine. It's a very straightforward, and more importantly, *transparent*, trade-off of ancillary services folks might not find useful in exchange for lower cost.
The endless vetting, research, and savvy needed to buy a goddamned kitchen appliance that will last longer than 3 years is much more foundational to how the median American experiences a complexity tax. In order to buy a refrigerator you don't despise you must now know that Samsung has massive issues with defrost cycles and LG's compressors fail within the first two years at a rate 4-5 times higher than Frigidaire's. How you're supposed to know that without direct experience or being an anal-ret... sorry, "extremely conscientious person" like me, is beyond me.
The need to navigate endless pages of directly imported, uninspected, untested, non-regulatory compliant, barely QA/QCed housewares and small electronics on Amazon is a complexity tax. A large quantity of what's sold on any online vendor platform can barely be said to have added value compared to raw materials, a proportion that's even higher on Temu or Wish.
The entirety of the structure of our system of health insurance is a complexity tax.
The experience of a car dealership is a complexity tax.
By no means am I saying that tons more regulation is the correct response to every one of these issues, but it's pretty easy to imagine regulations that could better align the incentives of manufacturers, sellers, and consumers in many situations. And in some cases those regulations exist but are not enforced.
Regarding the experience of buying kitchen appliances: you're saying it's bad, but compared to what? Are you saying that a refrigerator manufactured in 2025 is objectively worse than one made in 2015? I don't think that's true. NYT has a good article on this question (https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/modern-appliances-short-lifespan/), and I'll lift some of their key points.
It's true that appliance longevity has declined slightly over the last few decades, but not that much (maybe 10% or so). This is for a variety of reasons, including government restrictions, but the biggest one is that people actually want new stuff with new features, and the pace of innovation has increased. Thus people are less inclined on average to own something for a long time. If people are going to upgrade their refrigerator every 5 or 10 years to get new features, there's not much point in making it last for 20 or 30.
So these modern appliances break down sooner, but they do way more stuff than the old ones, and people's purchasing behavior suggests they want that. If you want a feature-poor, inexpensive, but easily repairable and long-lasting appliance, those models are often still out there for purchase. They're hard to find, sure, but that's mostly because people don't want that.
Regarding the need to navigate endless pages of uncertified imported goods online: you don't need to do that. If you don't want to do a lot of research, don't buy things on Amazon, Temu, or Wish. If you buy all your things from upscale retailers, you can be extremely confident you'll get a reliable and high-quality product. Sure, it'll cost a lot more, and you'll have way fewer options, but that's not you being harmed. Prior to Amazon, the options weren't "cheap good stuff" and "expensive good stuff." In many cases, they were "expensive good stuff" or "nothing at all."
I think the "complexity tax" you speak of is just the fact that you have a ton more options now than you would have had in the past. It's not that LG appliances had no drawbacks, and now they do. It's that in a world where LG is one of only two options, issues with defrost cycles don't seem like market failures, they just seem like the inevitable nature of things, and so we didn't get as upset about it. You can avoid the "complexity tax" at any time, by either paying someone to do the research for you and ensure that you have a good experience, or by simply making a less informed decision and buying what's in front of you, accepting the drawbacks of whatever product you end up selecting. Neither of these are actually worse than the alternative universe where you just have fewer options.
Do you think governments should restrict the use of coupons and discount codes? Those, too, are a way for consumers to get a lower price at the cost of convenience. Isn't that also a complexity tax? But nobody seems mad about coupons.
In short, there is always a trade-off frontier between convenience/simplicity and cost, and you are free to move wherever you'd like along that curve.
I know I'm stating the obvious just to get it on the record, but car dealerships very much exist overregulation to entrench rent seeking. There of course can be underregulated aspects of the automotive industry, some of which have been discussed in this subthread.
Yep, I specifically trotted out the example to prove that I'm not here screaming to regulate every aspect of the consumer experience to death, I just think there are some ways to better align markets in areas that have complexity/information asymmetry problems, or in which the savvy of the median consumer just isn't up to evaluating the options on offer.
My smartphone isn't shitty! Do I like having to replace it every 3-4 years because it slows to a crawl and crashes constantly? Do I like that I can't buy a high end refrigerator, microwave, or dishwasher that's built to last more than 10 years? Do I like that any car I buy now has a touch screen for basic functions which will break well before a knob or dial would? No!
I'm being a bit over the top because I do agree with your second point. But I really liked both of those questions and felt they deserved a more thoughtful answer. There's a middle ground between a Wild West of capitalism and Soviet Russia, and providing some consumer protections so that people don't have to expend every ounce of mental energy trying to find the best possible deal on the best possible product at every moment is worthwhile, and not incompatible with having a dynamic market economy.
My dishwasher is more than 10 years old and my refrigerator is 30, and while I do replace my smartphone every few years that's to get the latest features-- older smartphones still work and you can clear caches and offload data and unused apps to speed them up.
I have never had a touchscreen break on a car and I love the convenience of Android Auto, especially the maps and speakerphone calls.
Look how ridiculous you sound. This is not Soviet Russia.
Interestingly the 'right of repair' concept is one of the foundational ideas Marie Gluesenkamp Perez talks about. I have mixed feelings on it. On the one hand there's a very real sense in which certain appliances, hardware, and other consumer goods seems more fragile/not built to last quite like it used to be. Everyone has a grandma or uncle with a beer fridge in the garage that's been running for 40 years, inside of which you could survive a nuclear strike.
On the other I'm pretty hesitant to jump to conclusions without serious objective study. Again my go to example is that the power tools you will find today at every Home Depot are way better on nearly every metric and theres lots of stuff that wasn't even readily available or affordable to regular consumers in the not too distant past. Anecdotally I also feel like my Samsung phones hold up longer and better than the ones from 10 years ago. I actually got a call from Verizon last March to see if I was willing to replace my still perfectly well functioning 3 year old phone for a brand new one, essentially for price of doing the transfer. I of course took them up on it and when I asked the sales guy why this was happening he said that they've got too much inventory on annual releases, because they don't need to be replaced as often as before.
I believe a lot of the momentum behind "right to repair" is from farm equipment. Farmers, of course, have very tight margins, and are used to repairing their own equipment. With new equipment, repairs often can only be done by the dealers because of proprietary software.
Survivorship bias explains like 80% of this. Another 10-15% is easily explained by the fact that it is often less expensive to design something to go together once, work well, and be replaced at end-of-life.
Maintainability is actually expensive to design and manufacture into a durable good. Am I annoyed that the little plastic widgets in my dishwasher break down over time as they're exposed to major thermal cycling and aggressive cleaners? Sure I am. Would I pay 10x as much for each of those little injection-molded pieces to be replaced in the bill of materials with machined billet aluminum parts that would last longer than I will? No, I would not!
We don't have an entire industry of television repairmen anymore, and that's a good thing.
As far as government issues go, "right to repair" isn't high on my list, but I do agree with MGP on this one. I prefer to be able to tinker with things (hence my unreasonably strong aversion to Apple products) and it's frustrating that I can't do this the same way I could 30 years ago. But... there's a lot of truth to your comment (and others') in that you simply don't need to do that in many cases anymore.
Yes. The last time we bought an appliance, the salesperson straight out said, "Your last oven was 40 years old. Don't expect any new appliance to last that long. The standard is now 8-10 years."
I'm not sure how stating that your 30 year old fridge is very reliable is an argument against Gibbs' complaint that recently manufactured appliances aren't reliable like they were 30 years ago
I hate to say it but as Dilan points out, you are being irrational and the reason that some things like appliances built “in that past” allegedly lasted “forever” is that they were overbuilt. As a free market does, this over investment got reallocated to bringing you abundance in other domains. That said I think this is dramatically overstated—I remember stuff breaking *all the time* as a kid in the 90s. Also remember when cars would sometimes just not work and not last more that 100k miles? Exactly.
I think things are getting cheaper and better while services are getting more expensive. The logic of this plays out in us buying appliances and electronics for a shorter time and then upgrading to the new rather than service or repair it.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is actually probably the best scenario considering the constraints.
One example is that a 30 year-old-fridge would probably have cost you several thousand dollars of extra electricity usage during the final 10 years of its life, more than the capital cost of most models models available 10 years ago.
"Overbuilt" in the sense that they were sturdier, but "under-engineered" in the sense that most of them were hugely inefficient with inputs like electricity, water, detergents, etc.
The kinda legit complaint about smartphones is that the battery is designed to be incredibly annoying to replace, and those really do lose a lot of capacity in 2-3 years. In Ye Olden Days batteries were detachable, but now while it's *possible* to swap them you either need to pay a professional close to the replacement value of the phone to do it, or have some pretty specialized personal tools.
You can get one of those external battery packs for like $30, but it's still an annoying situation, and I'm sure Apple et al realize that it's one of the main drivers for people to frequently upgrade.
People who miss the audio jack should do what I did and get one of the $15 Bluetooth receivers with an audio jack. They're easy to set up, they're cheap, you're no longer physically attached to your phone, but you can still use normal headphones. You just need to remember to stick them on charge (and they're cheap enough you can have a spare to extend the battery life). The audio quality is usually a bit better than a jack in the phone because the analogue circuits have less EM noise around them, but not by much.
You can get fancy ones (which call themselves DACs rather than receivers) if you want more audio quality; there are plenty of them in the $100-$200 range for the sort of people who buy $500 headphones.
The key strength of the in-phone 3.5mm audio jack is simplicity: there's nothing extra to charge, it can't be left behind, it doesn't require Bluetooth pairing that can be messed up. It's just always there and always works.
This is one of those areas where the lifespan in practice of typical electric car batteries has been several years longer than originally predicted. So far.
To add to that: while the US has tried to incentivize EV battery recycling, the EU has set recycled content mandates. Which means, in effect, the number of new EVs can't be more than a fixed number of times larger than the number of batteries reaching end-of-life in a given year. Which means longer battery life potentially both slows down EV adoption and is directly harmful to battery companies' growth, unless you can either bring in recycled content from elsewhere or encourage early replacement.
I regrettably did the iPhone update to OS 26 a few days ago and my phone is shittier now. I guess on the plus side, the graphics are so ugly I don’t want to use it.
I have genuinely had the thought that this is Apple giving me what I want, namely to desire to use my phone less. My lock screen takes a noticeable amount of time to open now.
I was going to replace my tablet soon but since it doesn't have enough storage to accommodate the new OS I'm thinking of keeping it.
I cannot overstate how much I despise the new interface. It's like a toy for toddlers. I've been in the Apple ecosystem my whole life and now I'm starting to rethink that.
I'd start blaming energy efficiency regulations for appliance hijinks, aside from stupid things like putting giant screens on refrigerators, but you don't have to buy those.
There are high end brands of appliances that are well know to last beyond 10 years on average (e.g. SubZero for fridges, Miele for dishwashers). Obvioulsy YMMV, and there certainly are high end appliances that do have longevity issues. But with a bit of research it's pretty easy to discern the brands that last.
I'm not a huge fan of the touchscreens in cars replacing buttons and knobs (especially for climate functions), but I've had cars where the buttons and knobs start showing signs of wear a year in (I'm looking at you Jeep). So its a bit of a wash, but I think there is some happy medium of screens and knobs that was present maybe 5 years ago that I hope carmakers go back to.
My appliance repair guy (when the subreddit fails) tells me that many of the “high-end” brands (such as Viking) are actually less reliable and harder to fix.
I think my preferred solution on the appliance side of the fence would be that we bundle a 5-year parts and labor warranty with everything and the market price adjusts to sustain it, both in terms of risk coverage for the manufacturer and needed improvements to build quality to reduce said risk.
It'd more optimally align producer incentives and consumer needs even if consumers bitch about it when first enacted.
5 years is enough to heavily incentivize the improvement of QA/QC.
Sure. Five years ago there’d be at least two additional brands of dishwasher on that list, though. The market is not working to sustain those options. In some product areas no such options still exist.
It doesn't work for those brands because you, and the vast majority of consumers, are unwilling to pay the price to get them. A Speed Queen washer and dryer will last a lifetime or more but ther cost $2,500 each. Customers see that price tag and opt for the $500 -$1000 washer and dryer, or write them off because "for that price I can get the one with the IPad in it". If you look at inflation adjusted prices $2500 is just what washers/dryers used to cost back in the day and they cost more to operate and didn't wash/dry as well.
This strikes me as being an argument *for* minimum standards, precisely because we *know* the median consumer is not critically evaluating longevity and lifecycle costs basically at all and many of them end up deeply disenchanted with their purchases, but without the sophistication needed to avoid the problem next time.
Compounded by the fact that more expensive doesn't necessarily equate to better-functioning, more reliable, or longer-lasting.
You said this on a different reply of mine and I gotta push back again. Same Best Buy ad (https://www.reddit.com/r/90s/comments/n8j19l/best_buy_ad_may_24_1998/#lightbox) , dishwashers for $299, or $600 in today's CPI-adjusted dollars. I don't mean to suggest there hasn't been big progress on price--the cheapest full-size dishwasher I see on Best Buy's web site is still $299, which is amazing. But the inflation-adjusted price gap is not as big as you're suggesting. Whether today's products are better or worse is up for debate, but the price margin is not so large as to make the case a slam dunk without considering specifics.
I have the same windows computer i built over 10 years ago and have minimal problems, and I've replaced my phone twice, and not because i felt forced to do so.
The problem is that making good technical products is difficult, and it's even more difficult to credibly signal or evaluate that you're doing so. What's really missing is a better Wirecutter/consumer reports, and whole government could step into that, it would not be through regulations, but a technical version of death panels that would be difficult to defend from the populist mob.
The strongest signal a company can give is providing an extended warranty; I remember in the early 2000's Hyundai and Kia started offering warranties way over industry standard (10 year/100,000 mile), which I thought was a great way of them getting over a reputation for unreliability.
A lot of this is simply that the design cycle is accelerating, and appliances are becoming less expensive. To take the microwave as an example, modern high end microwaves combine a microwave oven, convection oven, and an air fryer; the air fryer became popular less than 10 years ago. I just bought a more modest microwave; I'll probably sell it on craigslist about a year from now, because I don't expect an appliance I bought with less than a day's pay to last me 10 years.
Out of curiosity, is there a difference between “convection oven” and “air fryer?” I thought they were basically the same thing, like “pressure cooker” and “instant pot” (ok one of those is actually a brand, but it seems like both of those are successful marketing and repackaging of old concepts and products, but I could be wrong.
An air fryer basically just takes the idea of a convection oven and leans into it. A convection oven uses forced air circulation to improve the performance of an oven; an air fryer speeds up that circulation to get some of the benefits of a deep fryer.
Some of the shittiness is energy or water efficiency requirements, but also some is manufacturers trying to compete with low-cost producers by lowering their own production costs.
My first-generation HE washer and dryer were bought used and have run 100% reliably for a decade for us after running for a decade for their previous owner. Meanwhile, our neighbors have just had their landlord replace the cheap, inefficient top-loader for the third time that we're aware of.
The center-right default to "overregulation" as the cause of all product-related issues in the car and appliance space is just grossly overconfident, overstated, over-discussed, and under-evidenced.
My proposal, as I said elsewhere, would be to mandate a several-year full-service warranty that would immediately align manufacturer incentives around longevity and reliability in the precise way that car warranties do.
Car touchscreens are more reliable than knobs or buttons. I have this on good authority from engineers I know personally who have worked in the space and have zero incentive to lie to me.
The real problem with touch screens isn’t reliability, but the fact that you can’t operate them without looking clearly at them. It’s easy to adjust a knob or physical button while looking at the road if you know roughly where the button is, whereas touch screens give you no feedback other than visual that you got the right place.
Yea I also thought the use of enshittification was a bit off on this topic. Now I actually think it's a real thing- you can see it with the degradation of social media and certain types of automation (IVR customer support for example) but I don't think it applies for general purchase of goods and services. The fact that I can login to instantaneously buy tickets to an event or schedule an appointment or service of some kind is really convenient compared to how the world used to be. I may have a little nostalgia for being a teenager, camping out in a mall parking lot for HFStival tickets, but it's not the way commerce needs to work.
I also think your point about goods is a strong one. My go to example is to look at any half competent DIYer's tool bench and compare it to what was there as recently as the 80s and 90s. And on top of that if you aren't a DIYer it's way easier to find someone who was able to equip themselves and can do your home repair work for a fee.
My wife and I bought our first television as a married couple pre 2000. We've bought a new TV 3 times since and every single time paid less in ACTUAL dollars. And every time the TV was bigger and better.
I have a 60 inch Panasonic flat-screen thats been running perfectly since 2012. Every time we go to Costco and see the new stuff I'm tempted to replace it, especially given how cheap newer, nicer TVs are but I just can't justify it to myself while the one I have is still operating without issue, and after multiple moves.
Companies have discovered there are a substantial amount of people who shop solely on price, not value, so why not give them what they want? And complaining about the product is just part and parcel of that mindset.
A lot of the complaints people have are real, but what you mentioned is an underrated part of what's going on. Turn back the clock 40 years and you simply paid a lot more for your fridge (or whatever else) or simply did not have one. You can buy a much cheaper one now, but it might be annoying and unreliable.
To the extent of allowing online sales platforms to blow off safety regulations and sell (literally illegally sell) electronic devices with greatly enhanced fire and shock risks? Really?
Seems like there's maybe some distinction there between "this product will kill you if you step in a puddle while using it" and "this product will use 5% more water than we want it to in order to get your clothes cleaner."
Virtually no household electronics goods on Amazon that aren't developed and sold by a US/Euro brand are vetted in any way. Some at least put fake UL or other lab stickers on them, most don't even bother. There's no enforcement at all.
So, are there a lot of deaths/fires/etc from those goods? I haven't heard of that, other than specifically some problems with lithium ion battery controllers (and those effected big-name brands too), but maybe I'm missing something.
A lot of enshittification is actually the end of a giveaway.
Growth phase: I give my product away for free or at a big discount in hopes of expanding my user base. During this time, I do little to monetize it, so no intrusive ads, prices are as low as possible if I charge anything, etc. The users are being subsidized by investors who hope to eventually make a lot of money on a huge user base.
Normal business phase: My product has to make enough money to support itself, plus pay back my investors. I want to cram in as many ads as possible, jack the price up to all the market will bear, make it very hard to use the platform in any way that doesn't result in my getting paid, jump on any sketchy way I can find to wring a few more pennies from my users or sell my users' data, etc.
Users experience this (correctly) as a big drop in the niceness of the product. But this is sort of like being mad that happy hour ended and now the bar is charging full price for drinks and appetizers.
OTOH, a lot of internet things are only worthwhile for most users in the growth phase when they're free/super cheap and relatively ad-free and nice to use. Turn them into something that can pay back the investors who subsidized the early service, and they become something like modern Facebook--just barely worth bothering with, since you're struggling to see anything from your actual friends among the ads, spam, "sponsored posts," weird videos crammed into your feed to try to make the service stickier, etc.
The other side of enshittification is what has happened to most free internet stuff over time: It's wonderful when the first set of users show up and (say) make a nice community. Eventually, though, successful systems attract parasites, so your nice web forum becomes a place where spammers will fill the message boards, crazy people will show up and do the online equivalent of a homeless guy crapping in the street and screaming randomly at passers-by, bored trolls will show up to pick fights/entertain themselves by disrupting the forum, PR/influencer types will show up and shill for their employers, etc. And then the nice web forum that was moderated as a labor of love becomes way more work than anyone is going to do without being paid, it kinda falls apart under the strain, and a previously nice thing is enshittified.
Seems like this is an argument for nationalized everything, then. Why are investors shouldering the costs anyway? That should be done with good old Monopoly money from the Fed. But no one should get super rich from it either
My tv and phone apps aggressively have shitty adds embedded within them. I tried very hard to avoid adds when I bought my TV, but it's extremely difficult, with a the best advice being "try to fine models built for demos on sales floors rather than for retail sale". And that's BEFORE trying to deal with the ads embedded in apps. Pause the stream? Get an ad. It's awful and ubiquitous.
Did you notice back in the day when you were entertained by TV and radio, there were ads there too (and many commercial breaks lasted far longer than the 10 seconds for a youtube ad?).
You don't feel squidgy about being a free rider? If you're looking for more cost-saving tips, a lot of transit systems will ignore it if you get on without paying!
I'm not talking about ads during shows. I'm talking about ads when the TV is idle. In the background of the home screen, etc. This is shitty, and most of the time there's not even an option to pay to avoid it!
Reread what you just wrote. Your TV has a HOMESCREEN. You have a computer, which you use exclusively to watch media content, between live content, Youtube, and whichever streaming platforms you choose to utilize. You are living in sci-fi, and your biggest complaint is that during the downtime when your television is on but IDLE, it plays advertisements, part of which goes towards reducing the cost of the initial purchase.
My biggest complaint is that it worked better and was less shitty 5 years ago. That's the whole point of this discussion. Embedded ads aren't the make-or-break technology that you're highlighting here. They're an choice of pricing model designed to maximize producer surplus. They don't even offer a clear option to pay them more money to not have to deal with this shit.
The weird thing is that NPR has followed the trend, and has pop-up "ads" in the middle of reading a story to tell you "hey, maybe you ought to donate some money to us." It seems very unlikely to me that this convinces anyone to donate, and unlike an ad, nobody's even paying them for it. But I guess they're following the herd of "pop up ads in the middle of someone scrolling through a news article or essay" even when it makes very little sense.
Look into buying a Raspberry Pi (tiny, cheap computer) and setting up PiHole. Costs about $30. It’s a bit of a pain to follow the instructions, but once you have it set up you can block most ads on all devices connected to your network, including smart TVs.
The best defense I've found against this is to never connect my TV to my home network. I do all my streaming from a box that isn't enshittified and it seems to work ok for me.
I replaced my Roku with an ONN Google TV box from Walmart that cost like $50. It was easy to customize so it gives me no advertising at all and a separate google account means no tracking as best as I can tell.
We watch all our TV through the PS5 and I can’t remember ever being shown ads on the home screen or anything. It’s a great way to access all your streaming and games in one place, I’m happy with it
TVs are arguably a yes since they’re now adware vectors. ETA: See also Samsung fridges (nb: I do not recommend buying Samsung appliances) which now have screens for some reason, and on which screens Samsung wants to show you ads.
Consumer Reports does reliability surveys, and new cars are massively more reliable than they were in the 1980's, when only a few makes like Honda were reliable and even their most reliable models had more problems on average than now.
And especially in American cars there were just a parade of little problems like there'd be a short or a switch wouldn't work or your solenoid would go out or whatever. Plus, warranties tended to be shorter.
True, but there were not two(!!) computers in your headlight assembly to get fried when a little water gets in after a rock flies out of a dump truck and blasts a hole in the headlight cover, resulting in $5k of repairs for a f'n headlight. Yes, this happened to me and I'm currently bitter about modern cars
Way back in the day you needed someone to check your oil and fluids every time you bought gas. My first car had a 3,000 mile service interval. Now cars don't even have service intervals, the computer tells you when you need to do something.
I agree. Enshittification is taken at face value these days. I may have agreed ten years ago but it certainly seems to me weve been quickly climbing out of that trough of technical despair.
Please don't conflate Geoffrey's arguments and mine, for one.
For another... yes, my television set and new car are pretty shitty across many dimensions, as was extensively discussed in the original comment thread a week and a half ago.
Your television set is likely a very large flat screen high definition set that delivers far better picture and sound quality than anything a middle class person could have bought 30 years ago.
And your new car likely has a backup camera, better cruise control, forward collision detection, parking sensors, smartphone interconnection, maps, and any number of other things that were not available on cars 30 years ago. Plus, maybe you got a lemon (that happened then and happened now) but statistically cars are far more reliable now.
Your threads talk about the decline in "do it yourself" repair of cars, but I think automobile hobbyists don't understand that most people just want their car to work and don't find it fun to spend Sunday afternoon changing out the distributor cap.
It's reminiscent of something I am wistful of-- I like manual transmissions. I bemoan that they are harder and harder to find. But your average person is not like me-- they don't find driving fun, they just want something convenient that automates the process as much as possible. And the market has to serve the average consumer, not the enthusiast.
The issue with cars is not that they're wildly less reliable (obviously not), but that the lifecycle costs for keeping them running for the full 12-13 years that were the average for cars produced from 1995 to 2010 have gone up considerably as they've become (deliberately) less accessible to independent mechanics and home ones.
We're very likely to start seeing average in-service times for vehicles falling a bit in the near future, as people decline to pay to keep them running the last few years. They've already plateaued.
This is particularly bad because American carmakers and foreign ones operating here have already adopted a "downmarket is used" strategy for market segmentation, whereby there are no new offerings for working class folks, the market is basically segmented by where in the depreciation curve one buys a car.
The increasing lock-in from the use and increasing centralization of solid-state electronics is driving up prices for independent mechanics as well, as I said earlier.
This is why if there was an actual competitive leasing market, it would actually be more efficient for most people, but that's a different discussion...
Just as an aside, I think a lot of the destruction of the low end of the market (no-frills small cars) came from CAFE standards that made it almost impossible to build a fleet of acceptably efficient small cars at a reasonable price.
I disagree completely. Consumer preference has obviously driven this trend, which in and of itself is fine, but cannot be paired with lock-in capturing the entire maintenance curve and making it so vehicles leave the road at 8 years.
I own a 2018 model subcompact that gets 35 MPG in the city and can reach 55 on the highway; it cost like $19-20k new, I got it at 30k miles and 2 years old for $12k.
Fewer aftermarket parts, too. Someone clipped my side view mirror in a parking garage; there was nothing at AutoZone or O’Reilly’s. I had to order OEM. And it was a Ford! Even though i have the base model truck with a regular, not power mirror, just the part was close to $500 iirc. I feel like Ford cars and trucks used to always have cheap aftermarket parts.
At least since it was a simple thing I could take the part to my cheap, independent, old Chinese couple’s auto glass place to fix it, they always do right by me
One thing I wonder about: I think it is usually uneconomical to repair home appliances beyond some very basic problems--the repair to the five year old dishwasher will cost you $300 and replacing the dishwasher with a new one will cost you $400.
My uninformed guess is that this is an example of Baumol's cost disease. As wages went up, the amount you need to pay a person skilled enough to repair an appliance has likewise gone up. And at the same time, better manufacturing and digital controls have made the appliances cheaper to buy new.
This is a guess. But I suspect there's several different things happening at once.
To have an efficient repair market you need a large number of repairs. Take the example of TV's. There used to be TV repair places in every town and city. There aren't anymore. What happened? TV's got more reliable, and they also became cheaper to buy and replace. In 1950, a TV cost $300 and per capita GDP was about $2,000-- in other words, a TV was 1/7th of a middle class person's yearly income. In that situation, of course you repair, and that means the demand for repair is high, which means people study and train in how to repair TV's and there's plenty of repair places and consumers can comparison shop the repairmen, etc.
Now, it's about $200 to replace your TV and per capita GDP is $90,000, or 1/450th of a middle class person's yearly income. This means no demand for TV repairmen, which means little supply, which means the few TV repair people who do exist (to repair very high end sets, mostly) charge a lot of money and have little competition.
My car has manual roll-up windows. The last time I brought it in for an inspection, I made the guy's day. He was so excited to see this. It is also very cheap to repair. 2009 basic Toyota Corolla. Oh, how I will miss you when you are gone.
Fun at the valet is rolling up in a 2009 Subaru Legacy with a manual transmission. Sometimes there’s like one guy who can drive a manual of all the valets working there. If it’s heavily immigrant valets, not fazed at all.
While this is true, I do think people are right to feel the squeeze. The combination of tech growth rate expectations colliding with those mammoth companies inevitably slowing toward rates typical of mature industries is introducing a lot of pressure, and it’s being relieved, in part, at the consumer’s expense.
To me that sounds like no substance and all ideology. "Mammoth companies"? What's wrong with a big company? I'd much rather deal with a big corporation than a small business in many situations.
And the consumer's expense? They are paying less! That's the enshittification dynamic-- consumers want a bargain and don't care about quality, and the market responds! The consumers are "expending" less. If they are getting less that's the reason.
I invoked their size just to make the point that as these firms collectively become a larger and larger share of the economy, their growth rate is going to look more and more like the economy. I am familiar with the Slow Boring line on big companies and mostly buy it. At the same time, I think most people intuit correctly that entry to consumer markets has changed, especially in digital spaces--the kill zone produced by cross-subsidies and network effects is real, there's a reason B2B SaaS is where choice proliferates. We don't have to rehash the entire neo-Brandeisian era's arguments, but it's true that "competition is just a click away" and yet also that this doesn't seem to be sufficient.
Enshittification usually specifically refers to companies that used to make low margins to attract consumers during ZIRP now trying to increase profits by squeezing consumers. Anyone who uses e.g. Facebook or Uber or Amazon regularly can see this is happening. It’s not necessarily a problem with capitalism per se, just high interest rates that pressure companies to have high short-term margins plus market power which allows companies to do so.
My parents' 1958 dishwasher (which cleaned dishes perfectly, as well as any contemporary dishwasher, with no digital failure points to boot) failed about five years ago. The—very expensive and heavily researched—replacement dishwasher is already on its last legs.
Most new cars (I just got my first electric car, which is great in many respects, but the cockpit experience is not one of them!) have incredibly frustrating, non-intuitive, poorly made, and failure-prone "buttons." Look at the interior of any new luxury car—bar a Maybach, Rolls Royce, or Bentley—and the finishes and quality would have gotten those manufacturers laughed out of the room in the past. Cars have, of course, gotten so much better in so many other respects, but both things can be simultaneously true. Many products have improved, certainly when it comes to price, while their durability, aesthetics, repairability, and ease of use have in many cases declined.
Enshittification typically refers to software/web platforms rather than tangible goods (though it could be applied to either I guess). So most of where people see it is how Google has gotten dramatically worse over time, as has Facebook, Adobe products, Netflix (particularly the UI...remember user reviews?), etc etc.
I gotta ask, in what world does economy buy comfort relative to basic? The seats are the same, you're probably in the back unless you have status, you still don't get check luggage on domestic flights... at most you've managed to buy an aisle or window seat.
Airfare is about the one area in which I generally *do* cheap out as far as possible so long as I'm not setting myself up for extra connections.
I took the whole family on an ultra-economy airline's flights to and from Spain over the holidays and it was in no way different from cattle class on a regular airline, aside from preventing my wife from moving her closet with us on vacation.
Beat me to it. I can understand why Matt would be worried about going overboard with certain regulations, and such more aggressive cases could be scrutinized. But on some of the smaller stuff, I think it's also fair to consider a tradeoff of people getting a tad bit of relief from the pricing maze in exchange for a tad bit of market inefficiency.
I agree with your point here. Maybe to frame it a bit differently, more and more of the economy seems to be shifting in a way that is predatory and takes advantage of lower educated people and/ or those with poor impulse control. The explosion of online gambling is probably the best example, but there is also buy-no-pay-later financing. I believe that the alcohol industry makes the vast majority of profits from a small percentage of alcoholics.
While not directly related to this point, I think it is similar in that there and more and more ways for more intelligent and industrious to find better deals and more opportunities to take advantage of others.
Curious what others think, but I feel this does help contribute to the view that elites are screwing over regular people. This is true in cases but I do think in the big picture the modern economy becomes more and more oriented to reward “merit” in the smartest and most capable, and overwhelm others with complexity.
Yes agreed, and it’s also telling that so many smart people are dismissive of this as being a problem. Fairness matters, and the perception that our economy is set up in this way contributes to people’s sense the whole “system” is rigged and fuels cynicism about politics as well.
“seems to be shifting in a way that is predatory and takes advantage of lower educated people and/ or those with poor impulse control. The explosion of online gambling is probably the best example, but there is also buy-no-pay-later financing. I believe that the alcohol industry makes the vast majority of profits from a small percentage of alcoholics. “
Other than the online gambling this has always been true.
This is likely true, but the gambling part starts to leak into everything else. So much of entertainment for men is sports-related and everything is now sponsored by sportsbooks. Even if on paper this is a small part of the economy, the subjective experience of certain parts of the country will definitely feel it. It honestly feels like the ad experience of a lot of male-focused entertainment the past few years has been filled with scams about gambling, crypto, etc.
There was a ton of this in the Good Old Days. Ever heard of a tobacco company?
If anything there's far more information now that can empower a consumer to resist the sort of thing you are talking about. Back in the day it was much harder to seek out information about addictive marketing let alone fraud.
Fair enough. It does not help explain why lower income people are also low trust. Maybe this is obvious but I feel like this is a reason for more regulation. I used to feel think legalizing gambling was a good idea because it would take something that was illegal but not really enforced to bringing in more legitimate companies. I now feel that thinking was really wrong, because I did not take into account advertising.
I would argue that this has not changed in practice but the combo of the internet social media, and looser regulation has made predatory practices easier, especially in targeting young people. Much easier to find young men who like football and push gambling on them than in the past. That’s how it at least seems to me.
> I believe that the alcohol industry makes the vast majority of profits from a small percentage of alcoholics.
It isn't just alcohol. Everything is like this, and always has been. The customer / consumption distributions are highly skewed. It's practically a law of nature. Check out the "80 - 20" rule (80% of the ____ comes from 20% of the people). The ability of sophisticated players to capitalize on that has increased, but the phenomenon has always been there.
Most Enshitification comes from the fact people don’t pay for services or platforms or in the past the service was juiced by VC capital and low interest rates.
This is also a good point. Obviously higher interest rates suck for a lot of reasons but I also wonder if one of the down sides of essentially 'free' money for Great Recession through Covid was a bunch of speculative investment in not even half baked ideas followed by offensively awful experiments in monetization.
Gotta disagree. What was the cause of Windows 11 being way shittier than Windows 10?
About three years ago my dad got a new 60 inch TV with Google something built in. The TV, when powered on, would go to the Google screen rather than the last cable TV channel. This required him to push a couple of buttons to get to his favorite channel. He never got used to it and really quit watching TV. (In assisted living and slowly fading at the time.) This is the same thing that happens to another older lady from church, she got swapped out her TV for a dumb one.
I'll take a stab at it. I'm not sure how in depth the price regulation being proposed here is, but if we're going as far as removing all price discrimination, like no matinée prices for movies or no surge pricing for Uber, then the losers are people who are willing to see movies on Tuesday afternoons who would have to pay as much as the people on Friday nights, and the people getting rides to the airport at 10am who have to pay the same amount as people getting rides home from the bar on New Year's Eve. And then secondly, the people at the high volume times would have longer lines, probably the movies sell out quicker and people on Halloween, or Thanksgiving Eve, or New Year's Eve would be standing in the rain for longer. I certainly wouldn't be out there as a driver on those nights for normal prices, I have other things to do. And in those scenarios, people would still be frustrated. They'd be frustrated that the movie sold out so quick and they'd be frustrated that they effectively can't get a ride home for at least an hour. Hell, I shared the anecdote of trying to buy the stupid Starbucks bear cup at 4am only to find they had been bought out by the employees of the store. I would have been happy in that situation to pay much more than get out of bed in the middle of the night for nothing.
Those are examples where price discrimination is probably less controversial. At the other extreme would probably be stuff like the fact that you have to play stupid app games to get good deals at McDonald's or literally just say the word "coupon" at Jiffy Lube to get $15 off your oil change. And then there's the big one, credit cards. My wife has the mental energy to play the credit card game, I don't. I've done the math and found that credit card A is better than credit card B IF we remember to use the correct card every single time, and if you forget ONCE per month, it's a wash. I trust her to do that, I don't trust myself. I will forget. I also just have a baseline expectation that stuff inexplicably goes wrong some 10% of the time. My favorite coffee shop is listed as a grocery store on my credit card statement. Why? I have no fucking idea. And there's nobody I can argue with to say "this is a coffee shop not a grocery store, so you owe me an extra point per purchase on this card." Having said all that, the reason I'm not too concerned about the credit card thing is precisely because the possible consumer surplus is so small I don't really feel like I'm missing out on much.
That was a long rambling post. I guess my own position to the extent I've thought it through is that price discrimination to alleviate actual scarcity is defensible, sending consumers through an endless maze of apps to get small discounts to ensnare them in to signing up for rewards programs they're probably never going to use is not.
As you're getting at, I think what's tricky here is that people are talking about a lot of different things:
- pricing complexity based on more price gradations for different varieties of a good or service (Basic Economy plane tickets, Uber surge pricing, cheaper matinee showings)
- price discrimination in the technical economics sense, where the same variety of the same product is sold at different prices to different consumers based on consumer profile (this is your Jiffy Lube example, or the many times when you can get a cheaper subscription service by trying to cancel, and it's probably related to the credit card case where part of what's happening is that the credit card company is negotiating for a lower net price for its price-sensitive consumers)
- information asymmetry problems about product quality
- scammy practices like making it very hard to cancel a subscription
The last two to my mind are unambiguous cases for regulation (with the caveat that, as for anything, some regulations intended to address the issue may be bad). The first practice is good and doesn't need regulation beyond price transparency. The second category is the trickiest--there's an efficiency case for price discrimination in that it reduces deadweight loss from uncompetitive pricing, but the cost is that it redistributes consumer surplus to above-normal profits and causes deadweight loss as consumers try to work the system to get the lower price and businesses respond. But some regulation in that area seems appropriate.
I'll fully the defend the first type pretty vociferously. As Dilan Esper points out, most complaining about that is just consumers being unreasonable. No, you cannot get tickets on the 50 yard line right before the game for $20. From the second type on down though I hate it. In CERTAIN situations, like frequent flyers, that type of price discrimination might make sense. But if it's just testing the patience of everybody to navigate systems and get the right customer service person, nah, I don't like that.
City, James, and I were talking about credit cards last week and I feel compelled to point out that all of Brazil, India, Kenya, and I believe Bangladesh now have state-owned payments clearing infrastructure that operates at cost, Europe is building one, and China's duopoly charges 0.15%. The US has allowed the legacy infrastructure to congeal into an unregulated duopoly that charges 1.9-3.9% even though it would be extraordinarily easy to build a public version with open-source or off-patent technology at the Fed that could operate for under a tenth of that cost.
It almost makes me want to say we should regard it as a market failure if a technology doesn't fall in price by 90% within ten years after it exits patent protection and allow states or the federal government to form public-benefit corporations to exploit it.
Why can't there be a new entrant into the market offering cheaper rates and take market share from existing credit card companies? Why would a state-controlled entity have more success as you suggest?
That's probably further than I'd go on credit cards, but ideally the only people who would use them would be top 10% consumers. Kind of like my industry. Ideally the government would default 10-15% of people’s paychecks in to some lifecycle funds and FAs would be for the top 10% of Americans who need more in depth planning. Frequent travelers using credit cards makes sense. For everybody else, not really.
Given the huge gap between infrastructure costs and processing fees, I really don't see what possible harm could come from the Fed building a public alternative offered at cost and accidentally gutting the market for anything except utility credit cards in the doing. I see no case for capping interest rates or whatever, but the underlying payments infrastructure is a completely mature technology that could be run as a public utility or at least a public option to keep Visa and Mastercard from colluding to prop up their revenues.
Unlike low-info progressive bitching about healthcare, it is actually true that nowhere else in the world allows payments processors to sit on their laurels and take this kind of a cut.
I'm open to credit card regulation, but mostly for paternalistic reasons not because I'm upset that I lack the mental bandwidth to optimize my purchases. This is why I have a simple cash back card.
One more anecdote, I recently downloaded on of those sports gambling apps, which I can only use when present in Oregon, and the first thing they do is give you a bunch of freebies and boosted bets. Obviously a freebie is a freebie so I used those, but the free payout boosts are so evil. They force you to do a parlay to use them and then you get like a 30% boost if you win. So it's still like a +EV bet if you use it, like I put down CMC, Puka Nakua, and Stefon Diggs to all get touchdowns for $5, and if I won, I would have gotten $60 rather than the $45 usually offered. Obviously this didn't happen, and I'm not in the poor house for losing $5. But it's so clearly designed to introduce the parlay system, hook people, and slowly drain them as they bet dumber and dumber parlays.
Ban sports gambling. The ills of it being run by bookies in seedy backrooms and people occasionally having a leg broken are wildly outmatched by the ills of perfectly legal and seamless scale.
I wouldn't go that far, but having to be physically present at a place seems preferable to the status quo. The fact that I have to go to Oregon is kind of perfect for me but it's obviously not replicable.
Oh, I'd be fine with going back to the status quo from 1950-2000. Go to AC or Vegas, blow a goodly but survivable chunk of money in a weekend, go home and live out the rest of your life with few opportunities to overindulge and bankrupt your family.
My view is that operations that want to try price discrimination can do that and see how well it works and those that prefer simplicity and stable pricing can do that and see how well it works.
One of the great things about a huge, free market is that you don't have to overthink things. Things either work or they don't.
Perhaps the most high-profile example in recent years of the government trying to simplify and standardize the purchase of a complex product is the ACA exchange market's attempt to slot health insurance policies into a few supposed-to-be-easy-to-understand defined packages -- Bronze, Silver, Gold, etc. Decidedly mixed results, and inefficiency leaking out all around, with examples like insurance companies paying thousands for things like MRIs that are available on the open market a la carte for hundreds.
But in simpler cases, there no reason, for example, why it should be intentionally hard to cancel a recurring subscription fee.
The healthcare market is so convoluted and complex, I’m deeply pessimistic there’s a fix for the horrible inefficiency. To me, the best argument for single payer is it would be a chance to remake the payment system to reduce some of the inefficiencies. But such an enormous, hypercomplex will never be anything close to efficient. See the military, which can’t even account for its spending.
I didn't see Geoffrey's comment originally and frankly think he's full of shit. Few of the issues I would highlight as significantly increasing the complexity burden on consumers are solved there, about the only exception is within parts of the healthcare sector depending on the country.
Buying what are supposed to be moderately durable small consumer goods in Europe is almost exactly as irritating as it is in the US, for almost exactly the same reason.
The regulatory intervention I would pose would be to require all B2C vendors to confirm that small appliances, cheap electronic devices, etc. being sold on their marketplaces have been tested to meet American consumer safety/quality standards by an American laboratory like UL. If the seller cannot provide ironclad evidence, then it cannot be sold until tested. Back it with draconian fines and Amazon would have no choice but to put a floor on the quality that would be hugely impactful to the median American's experience of buying small items there.
Based on my own experience, I'd guess that spending 20-25% more up front gives you a longevity improvement of 3X to... much more than that. What argument is there for allowing Amazon, and only Amazon, to sell a bunch of stuff that's almost literally illegal?
There's a lot of truth to this comment. I'll just say this -- I'd much rather that Matt's reply to Geoffrey was along these lines and we could've framed the debate on this, rather than taking it at face value and shrugging and saying "hey, that's just how America and Europe are different, you take the good with the bad." Would love to hear more specific examples from Geoffrey and others who've had a different experience than what you've said here in that regard.
Yea, a major gripe I have with the neolibs at present is that they seem to want to abrogate, or simply don't believe in, government's role as the maker of markets.
All of this exists downstream of government; we decide what markets are legal (should sports gambling be?), we decide how financial vehicles are regulated (stocks are heavily regulated, "prediction markets" aren't regulated at all), we decide on minimum standards for safety in a variety of goods (but apparently if you're selling something online that goes out the window), we decide what constitutes illegal cartelism, whether you can sign an exclusive contract with a reseller, the form and prevalence of price discrimination...
There's definitely a case for less regulation in some instances, but MY seems deeply unwilling to acknowledge when there's a case for more regulation of market transactions, as opposed to externalities.
I suspect the expansion of dynamic pricing could be particularly bad on this front. Partially because of the "mental energy" people expend to navigate it, but also because of the broader frame of mind that it encourages.
I think it's useful here to consider what we know about haggling. When I've talked to friends who have travelled to places where haggling is much more standard, they've told me they found the social aspect of it fun and maybe even got a bargain out of it (though often the dynamic is that the sellers can get more money out of tourists from a richer country, and they're fine with that). But none of them say that this is how they'd want to buy everything on a daily basis. And I definitely don't think it's a coincidence that the societies where haggling is more common tend to be lower-trust societies where people have much less faith in social institutions writ large.
Think about flights, where dynamic pricing has been standard for awhile now. I'm sure we've all heard people bring up folk wisdom about how you get a better deal if you search for flights in incognito mode. I think most people now realize that particular "trick" is bunk, and even a "trick" that might have worked at one point definitely will stop working once it becomes conventional wisdom and the companies can work around it. But it's telling that people's instinct is to try and find a "trick" in the first place, and then start to think of themselves as engaging in an adversarial cat and mouse game with the company on the other side.
For one part of the economy that's not something most people use daily, this isn't the end of the world. But people start engaging this way with all economic interactions, I could see it being pretty overwhelming on an individual and societal level. Especially since we've already seen this decade that discontent about prices has motivated a lot of negative sentiment around the world, beyond what it's meant purely for economics qua economics.
And then there's how this sits with other interactions that people find increasingly frustrating. I'm currently trying to switch careers, and I'm struck by how much job-seeking advice you find online has some degree of "here's how to end run around the normal process" framing. And like with flights, you see these cycles of people advertising "hacks", like copy-pasting the job description in a tiny font in the corner of your resume so ATS recognizes the keywords, or more recently doing the same thing with a ChatGPT command to return "this is an optimal applicant". Then people point out that everyone's doing this, so you need a new "hack" to stand out, and then you see links to websites promising help and asking for money, and most people have the good sense to notice they're scams, but then people start to think of the entire process as something of a scam. And if, God forbid, you look for advice on how to navigate dating apps, you see the same type of thing.
I don't think it's productive to make an "everything's terrible now" narrative out of stuff like this like many people do, but it is worth seriously considering if any given structural change to a large portion of society will make this better or worse. Expanding dynamic pricing seems to clearly be on the wrong side of that.
See, but this does get at the "this thing people hate now is a downside of an overall change they don't want to reverse" thing. I'm applying with genuine interest to various municipal government jobs in different cities and it would be way harder to do this pre-Internet! My current job that I got out of college was with a team based in San Francisco that would have been very hard for me to find out about as a graduate in Austin (and was also remote, which had pros and cons for early career development but provided me with a ton of flexibility, since my girlfriend at the time got a job in Boston and I was able to move with her while accepting the job offer).
So hard to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But yeah, the current situation really doesn't seem sustainable.
Still think it’d be better if everything was on paper. Sure, you’d have to travel to apply, but you might actually make an impression on someone and get one of those jobs. Now the process is a numbers game and a fool’s errand.
I mean...do people expend tons of mental energy on this? Like, I did a couple of moderately large purchases recently and here was my method:
1) Go to wirecutter, search for top rated item
2) Buy those
3) Hire a large professional company to install them
Now, if you're more financially restrained you might want to do more research, do some sort of extensive cost-benefit analysis and install things yourself, etc. but for most people I don't think that's required?
Similarly, for most stuff, I either buy the brand I know I like, or hire folks based on recommendations from people I trust? I found my doctor and dentist by asking folks at work, for example, when I moved to the area? For credit cards, I started out with a credit union, upgraded to their better credit card which just has a flat percentage rebate and no miles/points stuff I need to worry about and pay it off every month? Like, a lot of this complexity is purely voluntary?
Yeah I think the vast majority of people are in this boat and are not ludicrous cheapskates trying to search for a marginally better deal everywhere. It is a little different than the issue of whether we should have more dynamic pricing.
The finding flights point was odd to me because it is something that is really easy to do even when you are sweating it out for the absolute best value.
Just to understand your point of view, do you have these concerns when the market in question is highly competitive? (I can understand them when there’s some market power.)
I like the restaurant example. Suppose Restaurant X tries some gimmicky pricing scheme. If it’s something people hate, they’ll just go somewhere else. OTOH, if it’s profitable, then why not let them do it? People clearly don’t hate it that much. Competition with other restaurants will prevent them from extracting too much surplus.
Why don’t we just allow fraud? If people fall for it, they must not actually mind.
Restaurant groups in Chicago have started to put in place small print 3% charges instead of increasing the price. They’ll remove them if you ask, but you have to remember, be sober, and be willing to look cheap. They know that. You could skip those restaurants, but that increasingly means not participating in fine dining. It’s intended to deceive and it’s disgusting. Pricing everywhere is designed to deceive and trick you into thinking you’ll pay less than you plan. Why is this a good thing?
Agreed, I thought the response was insightful but also totally missed the point. Personally, I’d take the tradeoff of a bit less economic dynamism if it meant I didn’t feel like a trained mouse being forced to run a maze with every online purchase.
In an attempt to answer the question, I think a lot of it comes down to the choice paradox where having more choices and more options and opportunities can create frustration and paralysis in many people.
For airline tickets, this often means having to spend a lot of time optimizing for the lowest price and I have come around to Dylan’s view that it’s better to just buy tickets when you need them, pay a bit more, and save the mental energy.
We bought a new fridge a couple years ago and there are just so many models, brands, and features. We probably spent more time than we should have looking at each feature and deciding if that’s something we wanted or not and looking at brand reliability, Consumer Reports, etc. We had the option to skip that and get a standard and simple top freezer fridge with no bells, whistles, or gimmicks, but we didn’t for various reasons. But our decision tree would have been a lot simpler and more straightforward if we had fewer choices.
Finally, for some things, like Health Care, I think over regulation and system complexity is a big problem. Even for options like vision and dental where there is more real choice, there are a ton of options to compare. So many of the systems that determine who you can see, what gets covered, and how much you will pay are black boxes.
I read the mailbags with the expectation that Matt will avoid the heart of the question. With this particular question, I think that Matt has two beliefs that contribute to his dismissal. One is that he thinks paying for convenience is good, the other is that if he can't see data for something, he is predisposed to dismiss it.
I think what a charismatic person would recognize (and I hope the Democrats can find someone with the ability to communicate these types of things) is that there feels like a growing disconnect between how much money a company makes and how much value they provide. I don't think there is a way to fix that with regulation, but I think it is a sign of our markets not functioning completely properly.
I personally think that a lot of it comes down to people actually having simultaneously too much information (paradox of choice) and not enough information. I can see the price of every product if I go looking, so any time I buy something I have to be concerned that there is a better price somewhere else. If I buy something at Target, the price in the store may or may not be better than the price of purchasing it online and picking it up. So now I am checking the app to see if I am going to ask for a price match at checkout or just eat the difference because I don't feel like it. I leave feeling like they are trying to hoodwink me.
But I also don't have enough information. If I am buying a product on Amazon there are dozens of what looks like the same product for a range of prices, but I have no real way to assess quality. I also don't know if the fridge I am going to buy is going to last unless I wade through online reviews (that are often specious) or decide to just pay for and rely on Consumer Reports.
I think this was an area where Matt could have leaned into something he discussed recently, no one wants to feel like a sucker. The current buying experience is set up to cause fears of being a mark.
This is the feeling I'm getting increasingly from mailbags, it's definitely felt more prevalent recently. Pick an interesting question and completely gloss over it with a very surface-level answer.
It's basically coupon clipping. Price discrimination does, in fact, serve consumers. It's Econ 101 and not, in any way, a new phenomenon that has popped up in recent times..
I worry about the opposite: AI being used to do even more subtle and less obviously good price discrimination. For example, what if stores use AI to read people's faces and determine how distressed or desperate they are, and then charge them higher prices if they are in fact distressed or desperate? That seems really bad with no consumer upside, and it's also completely opaque to the customer.
It doesn’t matter; distress allows for more personalized advertising and makes people less careful and more prone to short-term thinking, all of which are good for business.
Love to see anything but AI puffery to back this up. AI operates on the training data it gets and I don't know how it is going to discern the complexities without an article already written about the topic. With matching specifics. How will I know it is an AI that I can trust vs one that has been trained with data that favors one of the choices?
Thanks. I'm not sure I'm getting the point though. Is the problem the profit from price discrimination or the complexity tax? I thought it was supposed to be the latter, but the argument here grants that the latter issue is solvable. Or are you saying that the AI would have to be overly complicated to use for some reason?
Anyway, I don't super trust a priori arguments like this to predict what will be possible in the future. Maybe AI companies will just provide general purpose AIs and you will be able to order them to handle these things for you, among the many other tasks you use them for.
Agreed, and I also think there's an enormous difference between "We're going to charge more when you visit our restaurant on Saturday night" than "We're going to charge you 5% extra for this Uber / Amazon item / whatever because marketing bots and your own purchase history tell us you can probably pay it without noticing."
Price discrimination that punishes you for getting ahead and siphons your head earned prosperity to shareholders is bad, no matter which way you cut it.
Indeed, my first thought when he pointed out that European companies have low market caps was to think “are they really less successful, or are their shares worth less because they give more value to workers and consumers and less to shareholders?” Allocating more value to middle-class workers and consumers and less to wealthy shareholders seems like a good thing!
On the simplicity tax thing, I think many people who complain about the airlines etc. don't realize that if everyone was charged the same price it would actually be higher. They fancy a world where there's no ticket scalpers and everyone pays $60 to see Taylor Swift, but in fact if there was no scalping she'd charge everyone $1,000 or whatever.
With event tickets in particular, I sense there's a mindset that "true" fans, however that's defined, should be able to attend regardless of income disparity. I've seen that particularly in the discourse over 2026 World Cup tickets. The problem, as you say, is that scalpers will always find a way to reach market equilibrium.
And there's no way any more than a small percentage of "true" fans can ever attend. Do people really think every European soccer fan gets to go to a WC in Europe just because prices are supposedly cheaper and supposedly harder to scalp? Or do those with connections get most of the tickets and most fans watch on TV?
I think it's so contentious because having the option to go, but having to weigh the tradeoffs, is much more frustrating than not having the option at all.
It's not just tradeoffs. I assure you that especially with their smaller stadiums, at every European World Cup, lots of people who want to go and who would weigh the tradeoffs in favor of going, do not get tickets. It isn't some utopia where everyone gets to go to the World Cup for 40 euros. Most people who want to go just can't get a ticket at all.
I completely agree, and as an aside I hate the discourse where European fans complain about America because a European organization priced tickets high for popular European teams. I don't want to defend FIFA! But now I have to because the alternative where I don't have the option of seeing the matches in my city is worse.
Effortpost elsewhere in thread, but I think I'm coming down on "price discrimination in the face of scarcity is fine, 'download our app and sign up for our rewards program we hope you'll forget about' is not."
I guess it's not really and I don't have a huge problem with it. At the point where we're showing up at Jiffy Lube and saying the magic word “coupon” it's kinda like what are we doing here?
Everybody values their time differently. "Price discrimination" sounds bad, but it's really just allowing people with different internal time:money exchange rates to buy something at the best price for them.
>> The problem, as you say, is that scalpers will always find a way to reach market equilibrium.
This seems comparatively easy to fix for event tickets, no? Just make them non transferable, bound to the buyer’s name and force people to show ID at the door. Scalper-based arbitrage being easy is a choice. It may be a good choice (eg, plans change, you can’t go, you can sell at market price to someone who wants to), but *is* a choice.
The public actually wouldn't like those changes very much. It would mean longer waits (especially at large events), higher average ticket prices, and pains in the neck when you wanted to informally transfer a ticket to a friend or travel separately to an event.
All for what? Because some people who weren't gonna get into the World Cup anyway object to the scalpers' prices?
Yeah, I don't think the transfer restrictions do much good. Who does it help if the ticket goes unused because you have an unavoidable conflict or get sick?
Have you ever bought a non-transferable ticket? Did you feel well served by it?
You see this in the NFL nowadays. They try to avoid having too many away-team fans by making season tickets non-transferrable (or heavily policing who you can sell them to). Season ticket holders, even the ones who do not intend to profit from it, despise this, because what it ACTUALLY accomplishes is screwing over fans who can only attend 6-7 games instead of 8-9.
I am not making a normative argument about whether non-transferable tickets are good, indeed I acknowledged a scenario in which transferability is clearly positive-sum. I am rebutting the specific descriptive claim that "scalpers will always find a way to reach market equilibrium." -- This is not, in fact, true with non-transferable tickets, which are perfectly feasible to implement.
I find scalping annoying, not because the price of the ticket is higher, but because it seems foolish to me that a random third party makes the act of buying the ticket harder by increasing demand at the moment the tickets are available and that extra money feels like it should go to the artist instead.
If the artist doesn't get that extra money, that's a conscious choice on the part of them/the ticket issuer. They could let prices increase when demand increases. If they choose not to, then the secondary market will just make that happen anyway, but move the money from the ticket issuer's pocket to the scalpers. Hard to see how the artist/ticket issuer can be the victim here.
I don’t think I said they were victims, I said I didn’t like it. I agree, however, that they could fix this problem if they wanted to, but outside of someone like Taylor Swift, I don’t know how many artists would need to act collectively to make a change happen.
Physically waiting in line for tickets provided a decent proxy for true fandom.
For sports, season tickets do a similar thing.
Yes of course you have to be well off to have season tickets, but at least it is a signal that you give a shit about the team.
For touring concerts, there is no real costly signal of fandom that is similar, since it's usually 1 show in a given city every 2-3 years, and most people listen to the music for free or as included with an all-you-can-eat streaming plan.
I think the World Cup is a strange one to discuss in terms of "real fans." To a first approximation everyone is a casual fan of international soccer, outside the big tournaments the games mostly suck and are poorly attended, even in Europe.
Right - and a lot of people think that would be better, because we spend vast amounts of mental energy on getting the inside lane. It is important to acknowledge there are tradeoffs, like you say. But I'd rather live in a world where I can throw something in my grocery cart without worrying I'm getting ripped off than one where I can go to in-demand pop star concerts more often.
A lot of times dynamicity in pricing isn't making things cheaper as much as shifting price pressure from the attentive and prepared to the inattentive or harried. I think that Matt is very much the former kind of person and should appreciate that a lot of people are the latter, and are kind of sick of this bullshit.
I mean, I would love dynamic pricing if I had an assistant.
But you do live in that world! The point is that dynamic pricing/price discrimination means prices have higher variance but a lower average price level.
If you concede that prices can be lower overall with dynamic pricing, but you don't want to do the work of optimizing every purchase, then just don't. You're probably not spending any more than the counterfactual world where prices are fixed, and the average price is higher.
Do you feel ripped off when the person in the grocery line in front of you pays less for oranges because they cut a coupon out of a catalog?
Do you not think it's "a thing" that discount hunters (which, by the way, takes time, which is money) are receiving better prices than might have other been possible because they are being subsidized by the suckers and losers, to an extent that offsets or surpasses any actual benefit of dynamic pricing? It's like how credit card rewards only exist because they charge ridiculous interest rates to some people and pass a fraction of those proceeds into cash back or miles programs.
We're kind of spitballing, but it is something that could be studied by somebody with the resources to do so. We can see when dynamic pricing was introduced to particular sectors and what the overall effect on prices was, and compare that to the shift in standard deviation of prices paid for goods within that sector, and see who is or isn't coming out ahead.
Like most SB readers I am extremely pro-market economy and dynamic pricing is probably unavoidable without regulations with negative downstream effects. So I'm not suggesting we prohibit it. But maybe we could try to engender some shift in cultural expectation. I really do think exhaustion from scam-dodging is a significant part of what people dislike about what (even after a year of insane policy) appears on paper to be a strong economy.
I do think that is happening, but I don't think there's any reliable or just way to distinguish a sucker from someone who places a high value on their time and is willing to pay more to not have to think about how much something costs.
I also agree that it's probably salutary for the typical person to more highly value thrift. But I'm not that confident about it -- it's equally possible that many of us thrifty people are wasting our time. I have always changed the oil in my car, and that saves me money in some sense, but who knows? Perhaps I'm the sucker, and I'd have been financially better off spending that time working more.
Such tricky cultural questions are, I think, outside the realm of good public policy.
Why don't artists/sports teams use Dutch auctions for tickets? Seems like an efficient way to find market clearing prices for limited goods. Is it an optics thing?
That's a weird recent thing that I am still trying to process. (Note, it also isn't universal-- the Las Vegas Raiders are happy to sell tickets to opposing fans.)
I recall the Chargers as the first ones to try it, when they were sick and tired of Steelers fans always taking over their stadium, to reserve sales only to people with CA addresses--which of course didn't work because there were a ton of Steelers fan locals. That was the beginning of Dean Spanos's descent into poor fanbase building.
The Raiders also have to deal with the added allure of people wanting to route in some gambling and shows with watching their favorite team beat the Raiders.
Well, maybe American sports teams - despite being far more popular on a global level, prices for soccer games for teams like Manchester City, Bayern Munich, etc. are all much lower than for NFL games, even accounting for GDP and such. Part of this is of course, fans have actual power in soccer teams, as opposed to being pure consumers.
Also, even within American sports, I do think certain owners have different views - an interesting recent example is the WWE. Vince McMahon was a terrible human being, but he also legitimately thought the family audience was important, so while there were up and down periods, even something like WrestleMania while expensive was accessible - for example, in 2016, I got OK - not great, but not nosebleed seats for $200-$250 and you could regularly get RAW tickets for $40-50. Not cheap, but not out of reach for a middle class family for the one or two times the WWE came to your area.
However, since TKO/Endeavous bought them combined with a hot period, ticket prices have exploded to a place where $250 wouldn't even get you nosebleed WM tickets (and it's not like the WM in 2016 had issues with selling tickets) and normal seats at a RAW are drifting to a $200 dollars. So far, this hasn't hurt attendance, but it might hurt long-term when the current booom is over.
"Well, maybe American sports teams - despite being far more popular on a global level, prices for soccer games for teams like Manchester City, Bayern Munich, etc. are all much lower than for NFL games, even accounting for GDP and such. Part of this is of course, fans have actual power in soccer teams, as opposed to being pure consumers."
So I mentioned this elsewhere but this was the argument that was presented to me on Twitter. And I was EASILY able to find MASSIVE secondary markets for tickets to popular European soccer clubs charging very high ticket prices.
In other words, the basic claim people make about this is completely false. Whether or not scalping is legal, it is common in Europe and fans who want to go to games and don't have memberships (the equivalent of season tickets) pay large amounts to do so. Just like they do here.
Yeah I enjoy discounts, it’s fun to feel like you got a good deal. I just don’t like haggling but thankfully that is pretty much gone. And sometimes discounts even reduce cognitive load—like if I’m buying groceries and don’t know what I want to eat but have a lot of choices, sometimes I just buy the one on sale.
why would she charge more in the absence of scalping? it doesn't matter to her whether somebody buys a $60 ticket for themselves or to resell for $1000 (unless she's secretly getting a cut...)
if she charged $1000/ticket scalpers would disappear, but that doesn't mean if scalping disappeared she would have a reason to charge $1000/ticket. is your argument that TS selling $1000 tickets is the only way to get rid of scalping? or am i missing something?
Taylor Swift's tour, which was quite elaborate (as a Chargers SSL holder, I got in on one of the pre-sales and saw it), costs quite a bit of money to put on. So assuming she wants to put on that show, her ticket revenues need to be enough to cover that.
Right now, what her management does is after holding back a certain number of tickets for comps, pre-sales, fan clubs, etc., they sell the rest on the open market, scaled to approximate the demand for tickets. The high prices also cause some sticker shock, which has the effect of controlling demand somewhat.
Now what happens if scalping is banned? Well, she's not going to charge $60 a ticket, because she has to make a payroll and pay for all those elaborate stage tricks and make some money herself. What she's going to do is... wait for it... charge exactly what her people think the scalpers would have charged (i.e., the actual market clearing price for tickets), so that she maximizes her revenue and can pay for the show she wants to put on and make the profit she wants to make.
And because of that, the average fan gains nothing from the ban on scalping except being unable to sell their own ticket if they can't go.
In a scenario where scalping is banned, why would her management team charge what they believe scalpers would be charging? If that was how they were going to approach ticket pricing, wouldn't they be pricing them according to "theoretical scalper price" now, seeing as the artist does not receive proceeds from resold tickets?
So the secret is right now concert promoters sell on both the primary and secondary markets. :) And/or they dynamically price so if the scalper price goes up they charge more too. In other words, they do price according to "theoretical scalper price" to a great extent now.
That's the point. You aren't getting $60 Taylor Swift tickets now and you still aren't getting $60 Taylor Swift tickets if you ban scalpers.
I would never expect $60 Taylor Swift tickets (I would also never buy tickets to a Taylor Swift concert but that is besides the point). She is arguably the most popular musical act in the world. Tickets for an artist of her caliber will be priced at hundreds of dollars under any circumstance. I don't buy the rest of your argument though. Promoters are able to sell on the secondary market, and dynamically price according to the secondary market, only because it exists. If scalping was banned, would promoters not be forced to price according to the actual demand for the show in the primary market? Dynamic pricing would still drive ticket prices up because the demand for a Taylor Swift show is astronomical, but this would be based on the fan demand for the show with the proceeds going directly to the artist.
I attend a fair number of shows at smaller venues around NYC every year. When those shows sell out, tickets that were sold at a $60 face value are often scalped for 2-3x that price ($150-$200 scalp price is not uncommon for the concerts I attend). How would eliminating scalping not benefit me in these scenarios? Scalpers would have no incentive to buy tickets to a show they have no intention of attending, which would leave additional tickets in supply. The artist could of course still charge as much as a scalper would, but they could also do that right now and actually receive the cash from the sale, but they are not doing that.
" If scalping was banned, would promoters not be forced to price according to the actual demand for the show in the primary market? " The "actual demand" (or, to use more precise terminology, the "market clearing price") is the same on the primary market as the secondary market.
"I attend a fair number of shows at smaller venues around NYC every year. When those shows sell out, tickets that were sold at a $60 face value are often scalped for 2-3x that price ($150-$200 scalp price is not uncommon for the concerts I attend)."
So basically what is likely happening there is that promoters are giving people a discount for buying early and committing to the show. If you want an analogy, it's like an advance purchase of a non-refundable ticket on an airline. If you can sell out a small venue quickly, that's money in your pocket, and you don't have to worry about hustling to get sales or even having to cut your prices later. (The promoters may also be selling tickets on the secondary market, BTW.)
But if you banned scalping, a couple of things would happen. First, to the extent they are right now on the secondary market, they would need to raise prices to recover that money. Second, prices would probably go up as the people who now buy from scalpers have to go back to buying when tickets go on sale, and the increased initial sale demand would allow promoters to feel secure raising prices and still getting that sellout they want.
Plus, if you buy and later can't go, you'd be out your money because you can't re-sell. And if you miss the initial sale, you can't go at all even if you would like to pay $200 and go.
Now how is any of that good for consumers?
At bottom, this is some weird psychological tick. People find ticket scalping skeevy. But it isn't-- it's just matching supply and demand and markets do that very well.
My favorite team is the Raiders, and I started as a Raiders season ticketholder when they were in LA. When the Rams came back, I had missed going to games at the Coliseum so I bought Rams season tickets even though I wasn't a big Rams fan. (Because of that, I saw the greatest football game I have ever seen in person, the 2018 Rams-Chiefs game.)
When the two teams moved to SoFi, I didn't really care about either one, but the Chargers tickets were cheaper and I get to see the Raiders once a year as part of the deal. Hence, I bought the Chargers tickets. SoFi is an excellent venue, but I still miss the Coliseum. :)
Ah, well that's a more disappointing answer than I was hoping for, but at least we can all clown on the Chargers getting their stadium overrun by fans of the visiting team. Raiders fans certainly do that in Inglewood, despite struggling to do it in Las Vegas.
And you got lucky on that KC/LAR game, because it was supposed to be in Mexico City but the field there was deemed to not be up to standard. I visited the Coliseum briefly last time I was in LA, and it was a marvel to look at, even if attending a game there might have been passed by by some other venues.
Sure, but price discrimination gets a lot more suspect when you see things like apps that match workers to gigs using data about the workers to judge how desperate they are, and bump down wage offers based on that.
It is totally reasonable to charge different prices for substantively different things (like restaurant tables at different times, or movie theater seats in different spots). There is even a reasonable argument for having airline ticket prices vary, with last-minute tickets for some random day in the middle of the week dropping in price, as the airline tries to avoid flying with empty seats; but spiking in price if they're for a long weekend and the airline is confident they'll still sell those seats to some last-minute vacationer who didn't plan ahead.
It is much less reasonable to charge people different prices based on _who they are_, i.e. based on spying on them. Like, _just setting a higher price_ already ensures that the person who values it less won't buy it, and the person who values it more will. People don't like the sense that an all-seeing algorithm is seizing them by the ankles, holding them upside down, and shaking to see how much money falls out. They don't want to have to face the choice between just accepting they'll consistently pay more than they could, or spending lots of time trying to game the system. In the worst case, this kind of thing turns into a Red Queen's Race, because most people DO game the system (so the seller doesn't _really_ make any more money, after you account for what they're spending on all the complexification) but also everyone is wasting a bunch of time and feeling mad about it.
I think it would actually be better overall if Taylor Swift just said "a lot of people want to see my concerts and there are limited seats, so tickets cost $1,000 each" or whatever the equilibrium price is.
I notice a lot of people and companies seem to think they benefit from rapidly selling out and then maybe covertly selling more on the "secondary" market, rather than selling over a longer time at a somewhat higher price. I don't really understand what drives this dynamic though.
I suspect they have too much love for their animals. They are thinking about what makes the animal happy, and they know & trust the creature. They are failing to consider how other people might feel about their actions.
The last few years, especially having small children that are scared of dogs, has made me extremely anti dogs.
The playground we frequent most often has a sign saying all dogs must be leashed within 10 metres of the playground but I see unleashed dogs inside the playground nearly every time we go. And 10 metres is really far! Most people seem to think it means 1 metre....
The park area outside of the playground allows dogs unleashed but they have to be under "effective control". In practice, almost no dog owners train their dog to that standard.
I've seen a family step away from their picnic to kick a ball and a dog ran up from 50 metres away and started eating their food. My kids were playing tag and two large dogs ran at them at top speed from 30 metres away. I've had dogs steal my kid's soccer ball and run away with it.
If people let horses behave that way -- running up to strangers at top speed while the owner shouts from 100 metres away "he's really quite friendly!" people would be losing their shit. But because adults are bigger than dogs and they have zero ability to empathise with small people they DGAF.
I mildly dislike dogs, but now have one (he came with my wife). So for the first time in my life I'm doing things like walking a dog. This experience has actually been fairly radicalizing.
There are three common complaints about dogs:
1. Dogs off-leash.
2. Dogs in places they aren't allowed.
3. Dog poop not being picked up.
Taking care of a dog has taught me it's really easy to avoid doing these things. Our dog is walked on-leash 100% of the time; he's only off-leash in our house or fenced yard. We just don't take him places he isn't allowed. And we pick up poop 100% of the time.
Honestly, it's been fairly radicalizing. Dog owners who do 1-3 are just selfish and inconsiderate people who prioritize their own convenience and their dog's fun over meeting the obligations needed for society to function normally.
As a fairly new dog owner myself, I'm curious why you still dislike dogs. I have much more fondness and appreciation for dogs now than before owning one.
I just don't get any enjoyment from dogs, and living with one hasn't changed that. To me dogs are just animals that make the world around me worse: noise, smells, poop, and occasional danger in shared spaces.
I agree on the negative aspects but am surprised that the positive aspects haven't become more salient for you, such as companionship, routines, sense of purpose, exercise, etc. From what I understand, it's well-established that owning a dog improves both mental and physical health. See https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/lifestyle/10-science-based-benefits-dog/
With that said, different types of dogs can have greater benefits. What breed and age is yours?
I’m honestly astonished that Matt doesn’t see off-leash dogs in DC! In my less-cool neighborhood (near the historic strip mall 😩 but also near many parks and trails) they’re everywhere.
Oh, that Targhetto is very important to the local shoplifter community. (I remember seeing so many turnstile jumpers carrying like 4 to 5 Tide bottles.) It looks like the wine store that was never open is closed too.
Boise's first strip mall is something of an icon, too. Not historically protected as far as I know, and the owners are the family descendants of the developer (who was also a former mayor) that have no intention to change the land use, but it's close enough to downtown that if some day the highest and best use changed, nostalgic people would probably throw a shitshow over it.
I don’t think Matt goes to Rock Creek that much. He isn’t really big on exercising for fun.
I found the closer you got to silver springs the more off trail dogs I would find. There is a definitely a white income gradient to this. I just wish park police or rangers would ticket offenders.
100%. But around here the dog people take over literally any open space (school yards, the trail to the Glover Park Trader Joe’s, etc) and let their dogs run wild. Even a lot of dogs on leashes are very poorly controlled.
Eh, to defend the idea a little bit- gigantic dogs are very lazy and fine with sleeping 22 hours a day. The ones I really feel bad for are the super-smart neurotic ones- all the very high-drive herding dog descendants who desperately need something to do all day. That's the real crime
That's interesting. I grew up in the DC suburbs and they are full of unleashed dogs and as someone who was afraid of dogs as a kid I hated it. I live in NYC now and I see them in parks but not really elsewhere--when I saw Matt say that, my reaction was that it was probably a suburban/urban difference. (Even the unleashed ones in parks are usually pretty well-behaved compared to the ones I remember in the suburbs. Assuming this is a real difference and not a product of me being older and less scared, maybe the threshold for training is just higher in a much more densely populated area--you can't have your unleashed dog barking and running at every stranger in a city park.)
This really seems like something that could honestly be block-by-block since it only takes a couple of people with big dogs before it becomes a thing. People complain all the time in the forum for my condo complex about unleashed dogs, but everyone in my specific building seems to leash theirs, so I don't see unleashed dogs running around like 200 feet from my door.
It’s just a lack of rules enforcement. Just like people playing TikTok on full volume on the metro. Fuck, and the people are old enough to know it’s rude! (So many middle aged people do this.)
The larger issue is that they're fucking morons who don't understand that they shouldn't trust the creature with anyone except themselves.
It should be legally permissible to shoot unleashed dogs on sight, not because I want them shot but because it's clearly the only way to get their owners to keep them on a leash.
I don't even actually support it, it's just a convenient shorthand for us needing to have some kind of consequence that dog owners fear when they decide to be anti-social jackasses.
Whopping fines followed by confiscation for adoption would be fine too.
In most places it is permissible to shoot a dog if it is threatening you, some other person, or livestock. Just barking at you off leash would be enough.
(I'm a lawyer and I have a concealed handgun permit)
I would hesitate to say that off-leash barking alone is legal justification for shooting a dog. It might be, but self-defense cases turn on things like reasonable apprehension and are notoriously unpredictable. Discharging a firearm, even at a dog, is going to summon the police and a possible raft of criminal charges.
My general advice is that using a firearm in defense should be close to a last resort.
How many of these cases have you seen? I don’t think I have ever seen anyone get in trouble for shooting a dog. That looks far less like animal cruelty than other methods. And it does happen from time to time. I can’t imagine not seeing barking as a clear enough sign that a bite may follow. And the little ones can be just as dangerous. Any animal bite can carry disease.
I am from a rural area though. If you live in an area where animals are considered superior to humans beings, you might have trouble no matter what the letter of the law allows.
I suppose most of us don’t think about the fact that choosing where we live is choosing our jury.
I agree completely with your first sentence but not your second. As a fairly new dog owner, I've learned a lot about dogs in the last couple years, and one of the big learnings is interpreting their communication. My understanding is that barking alone is extremely unlikely to indicate a threat. Instead, growling/snarling is the main signal you should look for.
How would a stranger know when the dog barking at them isn’t one of those barking-before-bite dogs? They can’t, and they would be legally justified in killing the dog.
That is why good dog owners don’t let their dogs off leash in public places. It protects the dog as much as the public. Dogs deserve better.
By that logic, how would a stranger know when a dog looking at them isn't one of those silence-before-bite dogs? Should shooting any unleashed dog in any circumstance therefore be justified? And even if the dog is leashed, how would a stranger know that the owner won't suddenly drop the leash? I guess the solution is to aim a gun at every dog you see, lest it get loose and suddenly attack?
Killing a dog is only legally justified if you reasonably believe the dog may harm you or someone else (or livestock). State and local laws may vary. We could get into all kinds of hypotheticals to test the boundaries of what would make a belief in the possibility of harm reasonable. I sincerely mean no offense, but I’m personally not interested in that exercise.
For me, it’s the damned dogs in the stores. There used to at least be some pretense of them being “support” animals of whatever. Now they’re riding around in the grocery carts.
Interesting, in the last few years several of our grocery stores have put up conspicuous signs saying "your actual honest-to-god service animal is okay, your 'emotional support' animal is not".
I dunno if it's the sign doing its work, but there are no whiny cart-chihuahuas here.
I’ve more or less given up. If the poorest, lowest-trust, least publicly-minded people in Philly think building housing elsewhere in the city is a plot to displace them, I am entirely out of sympathy when their neighborhoods become attractive to newcomers and they’re priced out to suburban Atlanta, or to Chester or Camden.
I want enough housing to make the lives of the working class decent, the underclass can get fucked at this point, they’re the source of all the problems.
I was walking on a trail this weekend. I was going 2.9 mph and this other guy was going 2.7 mph. But his unleashed dog was running around ±100 feet behind and in front of him. This meant that while I was executing my passing maneuver, I was in the dog chaos zone for a full 10 minutes.
If the dog approaches you can tell it to stop. You can also ask the owner to leash their animal. You can also physically keep a dog off you if it is not controlled.
I was riding my bicycle once on campus where I work, and a guy was walking his dog nearby off-leash. Suddenly the dog lunged at me, not in a threatening way, but in an exuberant “hi! I want to say hi to you” way. Still, I lost my balance and fell off my bike. I wasn’t badly hurt; I scraped my knee and my bike chain fell off. The dog’s owner rushed over being super apologetic, like, “She’s never done this before!” I didn’t have the heart to chew him out. I hope he took it to heart and has been leashing his dog since!
Having been in similar situations, in my experience the dog owners takeaway is NEVER "clearly this is an animal, not a thinking person, and can't be trusted off leash, so I will never let my animal off the leash again".
My brother commutes to work by ebike and is occasionally chased by off-leash dogs. When this happens he rides slightly faster than the dog, whistles to keep it following him, and heads away from the dog's owner while they're desperately trying to call their dog back.
Wow, this is the only space where I have seen multiple people against unleashed dogs . They are everywhere where I live, but if anyone complains, the usual answer is "They are better behaved than kids." One of our suburban malls now has a dog-friendly policy, although I haven't seen nearly as many breakers of the leash rules there. (I also don't go there nearly as often as the sidewalks and parks in my neighborhood. Or even stores.) Maybe because mall security is ever present, and you can more easily kick people out of a private mall.
Liked but ugh why do owners treat them as “children”/expect you to fawn over their dogs?
A while ago I (generally an enthusiastic animal person) was thinking about getting a dog to accompany me on my many walks. Now I am so dog-person-averse that I’ve given up on the idea.
You see it fairly frequently in any parenting group with a lot of toddlers because a lot of toddlers are scared of dogs bigger than them, especially if they don't have a dog at home and can't read the dog body language signs of "friendly, just wants to play".
Noticing that someone's dog has pooped on my frontyard lawn and going through the security camera footage to find out whose dog it was, is one of the most annoying things ever.
1. San Francisco (I don’t know maybe California) has recently had all the grocery stores posting signs about pets are not permitted (only registered service animals) likely because people were pushing the window.
2. Anyone that lets their dogs run around off-leash on the streets is an idiot, and I am sorry for the dog. (I was driving during rush-hour on Fell St near Divisadero and a large dog _bolted_ into traffic as we started to move and was hit by the car next to me. I heard the thump and the whimpering but didn’t stop just telling myself there was nothing I could do. [The dog was with its owners at the intersection.])
3. Londoners (England) seem much more “chill” about dogs although no one seems to push the window that much. I took my daughter’s dog (a black lab/Catahoula mix) walking on—leash several times:
a) I was able to take him into coffee shops to order to go. He was tolerated even when he would prop himself on the counter to see what was going on. (In fact, this always got a smile. Of course, I always pulled him down.)
b) Some people let their dogs off-“lead" on Paddington Green where others were casually playing cricket or football. This was posted as not allowed although no one was complaining since the dogs seemed well-behaved. (They also had specific off-leash areas where I let our dog run.)
c) Our dog was allowed to be off-leash in Hampstead Heath, which he really enjoyed.
d) I got a lot of smiles when people saw me walking him.
Regarding the wage compression question, there's the obvious tie in with inflationary conditions that pissed people off in many ways. Specifically with labor, there is the aspect of full employment, which is pretty standard to see as a good thing. However, one reaction I noticed that surprised me, and really so among certain people I know who I would take for otherwise being pretty labor friendly, were unhappy that the new leverage that workers got was causing them in their minds to deliver poorer service. Not sure how to deal with that.
Specifically, a lot of the best people working jobs like waiters and bartenders changed jobs during Covid lockdowns and found better opportunities outside the industry, while the people who replaced them were often worse at those jobs, so customers felt they were paying more for worse service.
There was also a lot of movement WITHIN service industries, though.
I don't think customer service has been any worse post-pandemic; I think people are just massively more misanthropic in a way they are extremely not self-aware about.
The funny thing is I noticed it the most with neat pours of whisky and rum, which are arguably the easiest thing to pour (don't need to worry about head from a beer on tap or find a bottle opener).
Another thing that, like miserly low-end wages, people say they want fixed, but will be mad if it's fixed:
One can imagine a future where housing prices are finally under control, and people howl about their investment in their home not paying off with consistently increasing value.
“[T] midwit thing to say about Trump is that Trumpism is a much bigger phenomenon than one man.”
Here is a question for a future mailbag: what are the odds that in ten years we look back on Trump somewhat fondly, a bit like people look at Bush now compared to Trump? Yes, Trump is a malignant wanna-be authoritarian narcissist, but he isn’t literally a Nazi and he does (much as liberals hate to admit it) at times show good instincts or at least the ability to suppress his worst ones. (Hence the TACO nickname). From what I can see from conservative friends and family, the next wave of right-wing ideology is way worse than Trump! Tucker Carlson is a Nazi apologist, Candace Owens is insane, Nick Fuentes…I’m not even sure what he is. Even a lot of Trump’s worst decisions such as anti-vax stuff are really pushed from the bottom up vs being stuff Trump is passionate about. What are the odds that in a decade, we realize Trump’s cult of personality was stifling the growth of a much worse ideology?
To pivot from influencers to real politicians, I think J.D. Vance's political philosophy is worse than Trump's. Trump thinks that *he specifically* should get to do whatever he wants, but I'm sure he doesn't care what happens after he's gone. Vance actually supports authoritarian*ism* as a system of government.
Liked for thought experiment but IMO ... very low odds. Appreciated the point Yuval Levin made on Ezra's last pod that the most extreme actions be taken right now (e.g., ICE = domestic terrorists) are extremely unpopular. Like 80 / 20. So there's just no path for electoral victory.
I kind of agree with this. You can do all sorts of lawlessness, self enrichment, crazy tariffs, abduct foreign leaders, blow up Iran, etc, and there are no consequences. Like, zero. Why wouldn't someone else want to push the envelope further?
The reason for Europe being behind the US is not consumer regulation—we know this because US companies operating in Europe have to follow all the same consumer regulations as European companies, and European companies operating in the US get to follow US regulations. Yet this doesn’t prevent US companies from being highly successful in Europe or cause European companies to be more successful in the US.
And following regulations is actually less harmful to businesses than the way we regulate-by-litigation in the US—at least government regulators in theory are there to act in the public interest, unlike plaintiffs’ lawyers. Like read about how dumb some consumer class actions are—the case that led to the Supreme Court upholding arbitration clauses (Concepcion) was about a couple trying to get a class action against a company that gave them free phones because they still had to pay sales tax. And now there’s a whole trend of “mass arbitration” where plaintiffs file arbitration complaints against companies just to bury companies in arbitration fees (most clauses require companies to pay the vast majority of the fees whether they win or lose) so they settle. This is not technically “regulation” but is actually worse and doesn’t happen in other countries.
There may be a regulatory problem but if so it’s probably more on the labor or perhaps capital markets side.
Also what is up with middle-class people and dogs? I live near a literal homeless encampment and still almost all the litter I get on my property is from middle-class people’s dog poop…
I agree Matt's dodge on Europe was a bit weak. I think Americans dramatically underestimate how much not being a true single market hurts European companies. Even just something as simple as "we can't run the same ads because everything needs to be translated" sucks for a business trying to build scale.
Yep, there’s a reason the distant second in tech to the US is China and not the EU, even though China is poorer overall—China has a massive single market. Most successful tech businesses make a little bit of money off of a massive consumer base—that requires scale.
The best thing the EU can do is further integration and increase market size, e.g. remove some of these localization requirements, prevent small countries from using the EU to increase the reach of their idiosyncratic and sometimes corrupt regulations, and offer membership to Canada!
You can't really lump the UK in there. Selling to the UK means your pricing team need to now deal in a new currency. Beyond just the bike shedding (if you charge €9.99/month are really going to charge £8.70/month...or some more consumer friendly number like £7.99/month or £8.99/month) you've also introduced another level of forex risk into your business. And as a small business trying to scale up you probably don't have a sophisticated finance team to help handle that risk.
To be a closer to apples to apples comparison you need to keep it entirely in EUR. But then you're down to just 60% the size of the US.
“The reason for Europe being behind the US is not consumer regulation—we know this because US companies operating in Europe have to follow all the same consumer regulations as European companies, and European companies operating in the US get to follow US regulations. Yet this doesn’t prevent US companies from being highly successful in Europe or cause European companies to be more successful in the US.”
This doesn’t follow at all. Just because Uber might be successful in Europe now, does that mean it could have ever started itself in Europe and moved the other way? Color me skeptical.
Uber was started by VCs empowering it to lose billions and billions and then some more billions of dollars until it was profitable. They could've done it in Europe, it just would've involved losing a few more billions first, maybe.
They literally still are litigating exactly that in basically every European market.
There's a bit to be said for not allowing them to engage in regulatory arbitrage on insurance and safety regulations to the degree that they have, but the original very high bar to taxi services was clearly just rent-seeking/regulatory capture by incumbents and they were correct to break it.
More specifically, the whole point of Uber was that they were going to engage in massive defiance of basic employment law and then dare the people who enforce those laws to stop them.
It should never, and in a society governed by the rule of law would never, have been allowed to exist in the first place.
This is true in one way. But you have to contend with the fact that the user experience that has resulted from the supplanting of taxis by Ubers is a massive improvement. People aren't going to be into your regulations if they can see that ignoring them makes their lives better.
The regulatory barriers for taxi service in most cities were absolutely ridiculous, and often corrupt, and without reform they were virtually assured of eventually being ignored.
It's kind of like people who demand boycotts of Amazon because of progressive politics. Why are people going to get behind progressive politics if takes positions like "that super convenient and easy thing you love? Yeah it's bad." To whatever extent there is a problem (and I'm certainly open to the idea that there is), it has to be approached from a different angle.
I mean, sure, yes, the US middle class is extremely complicit with wage slavery of all forms, both in goods manufacture (now outsourced to impoverished countries) and in personal services where there's a strong desire to maintain a repressed underclass to wait on them (hence why we harass illegal immigrants but not their employers). We treat wage theft like it's not a real crime, but an oopsie to be remedied with a slap on the wrist on the rare occasions the perpetrators are caught.
The political problem of how to get the PMC class to stop being selfish assholes for five minutes is a very real one, but it's not one I'm trying to address here.
"both in goods manufacture (now outsourced to impoverished countries)" very outdated talking point and one that was always silly anyway. Would those people be better off if those manufacturing jobs didn't exist and they had to go back to subsistence farming?
How do you mean "should"? Legally, or morally? Because I think it very obviously should have been allowed to exist, the taxi market was a huge rent seeking scam that sucked for consumers. And you can argue that Uber was bad for existing taxi drivers (of which there were far too few), but it's hard to make a counterfactual argument that current Uber/Lyft drivers would have been better off if those businesses were never allowed to exist.
I don't know how old you are but getting a ride used to really, really, really suck before Uber and Lyft existed. Like if you needed to be at the airport for an early flight, and ordered a 4am taxi the night before, you could basically flip a coin about whether they would show up or not. And if you picked up a cab at the airport for a 5-mile drive home, expect the cabbie to bitch and moan the whole way that they didn't get a 20-mile fare. Or if you took any cab in Vegas, they'd take the freeway to go 2 miles in 15 minutes instead of the strip to go 1.5 miles in 10, and charge you a higher fair.
The "Uber is evil, actually" sentiment will never cease to be silly.
You could literally just have an app that gets you a taxi-- those exist. Or you could just have a service that employs people to give other people rides.
The reason Uber and Lyft have outflanked those apps is that Uber and Lyft flagrantly violate employment law in order to undercut taxi drivers and car services (and even Waymo, somehow, which makes no sense) on labor costs. I like employment law and hate wage thieves like Uber and Lyft. Not a remotely hard call.
yeah, you aren't old enough to have actually needed a cab prior to 2010, are you? Or maybe you were lucky enough to live in a place like NYC, or with great public transport and never needed one.
Taxi hailing apps existed in the early days. but they SUCKED. they sucked because the taxi monopolies had no reason for them not to suck. The thing that made Uber/Lyft good was not just the software, it was the entire infrastructure behind the software that made it work. It was the first time that supply and demand actually were allowed to get to equilibrium.
It's not like "oh I can use an app instead of the telephone" was the reason Uber succeeded. And by the way, in the early days of Uber, the drivers made more than taxi drivers, not less.
>>And following regulations is actually less harmful to businesses than the way we regulate-by-litigation in the US—at least government regulators in theory are there to act in the public interest, unlike plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Is this true though? If to even start a company you need to hire a small army of lawyers to ensure you're compliant with 300 obscure regulations you never heard of then it's obvious why Europeans are less entrepreneurial and dynamic.
Regulations will always end up hurting small businesses more, which ends up in fewer start ups and more calcified large companies.
Yes it’s true. Small businesses can usually get away with doing what they want and they’ll get a warning first, unlike in the US where they get sued first. A lot of European regulations specifically exempt small businesses (what they call SMEs).
What regulatory issues are small businesses in the US getting sued for on the reg? Are they getting sued by regulators or plaintiffs' attorneys? From what I've seen, it's the large companies that get sued, as that's where the money is for the plaintiffs' attorneys (and the regulators).
I'm biased because I used to work with employment lawyers (and have done a small amount of employer-side defense work myself) but small businesses often face wage and hour and employment discrimination claims. The wage and hour laws are genuinely hard to navigate and employment discrimination liability is a bigger issue when you have a smaller and less sophisticated HR department.
Forced individual arbitration is one of those insanely inefficient corporatocracy things that lawyers can explain to nonlawyers and the nonlawyers just literally will not believe that it exists because it's so obviously stupid and wrong. And yet.
Something I have been thinking a lot about recently is the unreadable fine print on our TV ads. When I say "unreadable" I mean that literally; you physically cannot read it in the time that it's on the screen even if your eyesight would be good enough to make it out if you freeze-framed it. And yet somehow we have fair-business-practice laws that treat that unreadable fine print as if it has some legal effect. That is precisely the kind of hyper-literal information asymmetry that is the theoretical use case for regulation and yet we have none and have to live in a fantasy world where everyone is recording their TV programs and pausing them in order to read the ads.
It's enough to make you want to go mad and talk about frogs all day long.
There are all kinds of problems with European economic policy. I don't know European law well at all but for the particular issue of business size and development I would also look into how they regulate capital markets and corporate governance. But I am pretty skeptical about the problem being related to consumer price regulation.
IME, financial regulation in the EU is burdensome b/c the member countries get their say as well. So there are essentially two layers of regulation - one at the EU level and another at the country level. Whereas in the US, the feds preempt much of the state regulation. Its easier to navigate one set of rules.
The EU also loves reporting. The more the better, and no matter if its duplicative - reporting is good. I have no idea what they do with all the data, but it adds another layer of costs to doing business there.
D-D-D-D-Don't quote me regulations. I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation's in... We kept it grey!
Yes, like I said, labor regulations are an issue because a US company with a US head office wouldn’t have to follow them, but that’s different from consumer regulations which impact local and foreign companies equally.
Speed limits. I'd be fine with them being 100% enforced. But the limits would get changed, which would be good too. There are roads with 25 mph limits that I drive where no one is going below 30 and 90% of the traffic is 30 to 40 mph. The speeds are fine. The decision to penalize people though shouldn't be so discretionary.
It depends on each road. On controlled access freeways and rural highways, where usage is exclusively motorist or very close to it, I agree that higher limits would be warranted if consistent enforcement were implemented. But in more urban areas where there's heavy interaction with non-motorist traffic, the increasing argument is that slow posted speeds enforced strictly are needed to prevent death and serious injury. Obviously there can be cases in between that are more difficult to assess, as we saw in arguing this on Monday. And the argument for speed cameras in particular is that they can remove the element of discretion that you criticize here.
Urban planners and road engineers have begun to take seriously in the last 20 years the idea that we can't just put up a sign that says "drive 25 mph!" We have to do things that make people uncomfortable driving faster than that. Driver comfort is dangerous.
Things like high curbs, on-street parking, shared transit lanes, frequent stop signs and/or well-calibrated stoplights, traffic-calming roundabouts and landscaping can disrupt that comfort and create both more cautious driving and increased vigilance. In extreme cases you can even go to speed tables or arbitrary road curvature within an alignment.
And also like with most crime the optimal enforcement rate may not be 100 percent. It just needs to be high enough that when it is dangerous to drive fast, drivers need to fear a ticket enough they slow down.
One thing that's puzzled me is that there's (in my perception at least) strong overlap between the "pro speed camera" crowd and the "Kleiman pilled" crowd, but nobody ever seems to combine the two viewpoints. We should have lots and lots of speed cameras, but make the fines low, at least for infrequent offenders - like start at $10, but escalate if you speed often. I think that would be an effective deterrent while also avoiding a lot of political backlash.
Reminds me of those electronic "slow down!" speed limit signs by the side of the road that tell you how fast you're going. I know those always get me to check my speed, and I usually observe other cars slowing down too.
I'd actually be interested to see if they continue to have an effect even after they've been there a while! All it takes is one person to think there might be a police officer watching to slow down and delay the pace of everyone behind them. We had one in my neighborhood in Concord and it seemed to work.
I've seen Highway Patrol park empty cruisers near construction zones so drivers take the lowered speed limit seriously. It seems like a good idea and you only need to staff them some of the time.
That's sort of what they do in NYC. The fines are $50 which is much lower than in the surrounding suburbs with no cameras and you only get dinged if you go over 10 mph above the limit. The safety features on NYC roads actually make me prefer them to driving in the suburbs (this goes for non-highways as the highways are the same).
The fine is whatever. Most of what you pay is the administrative fees tacked onto the fine + doubling or tripling of your insurance at the next renewal.
No, I want to eliminate the financial incentives associated with policing. Every dollar taken as a fine or fee and every dollar seized needs to go somewhere far away from the police department/city government that does the fining and seizing, or you end up with some places where fines and fees replace taxes and the police are basically tax farmers.
Better to send every local resident a check in the mail every year saying “this is your fraction of the speeding fines we collected - it’s the least we can do to reimburse you for being subject to these scofflaws”.
The real solution is to redesign the roads so that it feels unsafe to the driver to go much faster than 25 mph. Narrower lanes, curb bump-outs, reduce/eliminate multi-lane one-way roads, etc.
This is so much better than random speed bumps that are nowhere near a crossing, this actually pinpoints the places where slowing down is most appropriate.
My city has gotten really into traffic calming recently and did this with some crosswalks. It makes a HUGE difference, drivers slow down to about 15 MPH at the elevated crosswalks. As a side benefit these crosswalks stay more clear of puddles and slush.
They did this recently with a new housing development (and even a brand new road) in my suburb and it works really well. It's bigger than an actual speedbump so you have to actually slow down, and it serves its purpose well for making you want to slow down for the entire stretch there. And I'm a chronic speeder who normally hates speedbumps.
I have one in my area that I regularly cross running, walking a dog, and driving. I've noticed that there is a significant visibility benefit, elevating the person (or dog) on foot by 8" makes them much more noticeable to people in cars.
The other visibility builder are bulbed out intersections, so the pedestrian is both clearly visible and the motorist can't sideswipe them with a wide turn.
I'm a big fan of road redesign and it should be part of the decision, but it's also something that costs and lot and may be impractical in some very built up areas.
Exactly. There’s a persistent belief in traffic engineering that the thing you want to do is design a road for 70mph and then post it at 25mph so you have a generous safety margin. If people speed, that’s an enforcement problem.
Understandable how an engineer brain gets there, but a recipe for misery and disaster given actual human psychology. Also makes for ugly, depressing places! No one wants to live near a road that seems like it could be safely driven at highway speeds.
Doing that in any single large city in the US would cost several hundred billion.
And the outliers who currently do 50 on one-way urban streets with on-street parking and pedestrian traffic would still do it. Design affects the median; enforcement is all that will ever curtail the right tail of the distribution.
Hot take: speed limits in densely populated areas are not for your protection, they are for the protection of everyone around you not themselves protected by a car. If you are in a city the speed limit should be 25, period, and the final penalty for exceeding it too often should be to have your vehicle taken and crushed in the public square.
The "punk-ass anti-authority teenager" that still lives in me regards the speed limits that we treat as speed minimums as effectively functioning as a system that allows police to pull over anybody, whenever they want, because hey, you were technically speeding.
The transportation engineer in which that teenager resides just really wants people to drive slower, please.
There ought to be a trade-off of resources going to enforcement with the optimality of the rule being enforced (the marginal harm from violation. Speed cameras (very low cost) ought to be entirely calibrated to the optimal speed at that point/time of day.
Same principle as interior enforcement of no-visa residency.
If obsured/able plates were a vioation and citiznes were incintivized by a share of the fine -- as theyshoud be for reporting the location of vehicles with outstanding fines -- fot reporting it, the penalaty would not need to be so severe.
This. Justice by expected value is a bad idea. If you only catch 5% of perpetrators, and then you charge them a fine that's 20x larger to make up for all the people you didn't catch, it creates a bunch of bad incentives.
If Americans would accept speed cameras, there would be fewer interactions with police. Fewer police officers would be killed and fewer people would be killed by police.
It’s upsetting we prefer a sporting game of cops and robbers to cameras.
I think the future is "enforcement" where your car knows where it is and refuses to go above the posted speed limit unless you hit some manual "something has screwed up and I am making a human decision to override" (and have at least some camera-based enforcement to prevent abuse of that).
"But I think we’re seeing here that a lot of folks have the sense that “a criminal” is a certain kind of person, and that kind of person is simply not middle class with steady employment."
This does a ton of work in true crime discourse. People who think that, e.g., Scott Peterson is innocent aren't fairly evaluating evidence against him because he doesn't fit their stereotype of who might commit murder. People who think the Menendez brothers must have had a valid excuse think the same way-- they just don't "seem" like the types of people who might murder their parents to get the inheritance and go on a spending spree, even though that is what happened. People (and there are a lot of them including in the media) who think Amanda Knox is innocent can't believe this nice well off white lady could have committed murder even though she left a bunch of her DNA mixed with the victim's at the crime scene.
The other day in comments to your MLK post, Racists of course made an appearance with their statistical arguments about who commits crimes and its the same thing. They want cops to do bigoted law enforcement because they assume (based on their supposed command of "statistics" of course) that people like themselves don't commit crimes.
In the real world, though, whatever the statistics may say, it happens with reasonable frequency that someone you don't think might commit a crime does so. My father, as a sportswriter and sportscaster, knew OJ Simpson pretty well. He- and most of his colleagues- thought OJ was one of the nicest athletes they ever met. But he turned out to be a spousal abuser and double murderer. The psychological heuristic that we can tell the sort of people who could be "criminals" is just wrong. Anyone can be one.
Read their opinion! They found her not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by throwing out a bunch of DNA evidence, but also found she was at the scene of the murder and lying about it, and that there were multiple attackers (her supporters claim there was one).
So no, that court definitely is not convinced she is innocent and never says she is-- just that she wasn't proven guilty once key evidence was excluded.
Interesting - Wikipedia characterises their decision completely differently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Knox#Final_decision You're definitely talking about her fourth trial in 2015 and not her second trial in 2011?
I didn't actually want to have a fight about the object-level question, I'd just thought that "Amanda Knox is guilty" was now the fringe position, and was surprised to see you talking as if the fringe position were still "Amanda Knox is innocent". But now you've got me interested in the object-level question!
Wikipedia is very susceptible to people with large fanbases and PR teams.
Here's the actual translated decision of the Cassation Court. At section 9.4.1 it calls Amanda's presence at the murder scene a "proven fact" at trial.
I don't think you're characterising that correctly. Here's the first part of section 9.4:
> 9.4 Now, a fact of assured relevance in favor of the current appellants, in the sense of excluding their material participation to the homicide, even in the hypothesis of their presence in the house of via della Pergola, lies in the absolute absence of biological traces referable to them (apart from the hook of which we will discuss later) in the room of the homicide or on the victim’s body, where in contrast multiple traces attributable to Guede were found. It is incontrovertibly impossible that that in the crime scene (constituted by a room of little dimensions: ml 2,91x3,36, as indicated by the blueprint reproduced at f. 76) no traces would be retrieved referable to the current appellants had they participated in the murder of Kercher.
> No trace assignable to them has been, in particular, observed on the sweatshirt worn by the victim at the moment of the aggression and nor on the underlying shirt, as it should have been in case of participation in the homicide (instead, on the sleeve of the aforementioned sweater traces of Guede were retrieved: ff. 179-180).
> The aforementioned negative circumstance works as a counterbalance to the data, already highlighted, on the absolute impracticality of the hypothesis of a posthumous selective cleaning capable of removing specific biological traces while leaving others.
> 9.4.1 Given this, we now note, with respect to Amanda Knox, that her presence inside the house, the location of the murder, is a proven fact in the trial, in accord with her own admissions...
So they were present in the *house*, but cannot have been in the *room*, and therefore "It is incontrovertibly impossible that [...] they participated in the murder of Kercher."
The issue is Knox claims SHE WASN'T IN THE HOUSE. She says she was with her boyfriend at the time of the murders. When in fact she left plenty of forensic evidence in the house (which the Court throws out) and also her alibi is rebutted by computer records and eyewitnesses.
If she was in the house at the time of the murders, that makes her likely guilty of at least cleaning up after the crime, if not helping commit it, which is why her supporters and her go to great lengths to deny that.
So yeah, the Cassation Court is saying she's lying about not being in the house in 9.4.1. They also reject her lawyers' claim of only a single attacker. This isn't a court saying "she's innocent". This is a court applying Italy's exclusionary rule while being careful to say that Amanda was probably involved.
You'd think so, but I have no desire to spend any more time reading badly-translated legal Italian to find out what the judges thought of that possibility.
I’ve never understood before why you are so convinced the obviously innocent Amanda Knox is guilty, but now that I see it’s part of a wider crusade you’re on it makes more sense.
I defy anyone to read this thread and conclude Amanda Knox is "obviously innocent". She might not be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but "obviously innocent" are words that can't survive ANY interaction with the evidence.
It's OK to do statistical enforcment, but not all statistics are creted equal. Stop and frisk does not have to be -- should not be done on a racial basis. It's no great harm for even an old white guy like myself to be respectifuly stopped if I were walking late at night in a gun-carrying prome area.
The thing is, the people who really like stop and frisk tend to be really into statistical enforcement including based on race and ethnicity.
And the point of my comment is that if you really take that to its conclusion you absolutely do run the risk of assuming that you can tell who is or isn't a criminal based on what groups they belong to. That is an accurate and natural description of how many people's brains work (which is what true crime cases can show you). Whereas if you require cops to stick to the evidence you actually are likely to get better law enforcement.
a. The police (and probably other people who deal with a lot of criminals) absolutely do have a very good idea of which people are likely to be up to no good.
b. That group of people is skewed male, young, black/hispanic.
c. This means that focusing your enforcement on that group of people will automatically give you disproportionate frisking/following/hassling of young, mostly-poor black and hispanic men. But also, this is the best use of police resources to stop various kinds of street crime.
We just face a tradeoff here: hassling a lot of guys because they look kinda like the sort of folks who commit a lot of crime vs putting up with more crime at the same police budget. Both sides of the tradeoff are bad, there's no button for making the tradeoff go away, and all we can do is decide where on that tradeoff we want to live, as a matter of law and policy.
Here's the thing-- and this gets back to the true crime point too. You can absolutely have a general heuristic about who are more likely to be criminals AND be correct about that point. In other words, your sense of "this guy/girl doesn't seem like a criminal" may steer you right much of the time.
But "much" is not "all", and actually getting cases right and catching criminals who don't fit the "profile" of a criminal is quite important. E.g., you don't want your cops to be the sorts of people who think Scott Peterson must be innocent! You want your cops to be the sorts of people who prioritize the evidence over their background beliefs about who is "likely" a criminal, because otherwise they are going to make some errors in a field where we don't want errors! They will harass a bunch of innocent people who fit profiles, while also failing to investigate guilty people who defy them.
For optimal policing, you want the police to be Bayesians who incorporate well-informed priors to make better decisions, but not to have such strong priors that evidence can't move them off their initial assumptions.
But we may also want to modify that further and give up some efficiency in policing to accomplish other social goals. Stopping and frisking all the 15-25 year old black men walking down the street may optimize for finding the most illegal guns, but we may prefer a stop-and-frisk strategy that is a little less optimal because it kinda sucks when no 15 year old black kid can walk down a street without being hassled by a cop.
I think the best thing to do there is to surface the tradeoff we're making. I mean, we already accept that there are a lot of things we don't let the police do that would make them more efficient, but have other bad consequences, like requiring warrants for searches and wiretaps and such. I think it's important to be honest about the tradeoff we're making, and it would be nice if we could gather high-quality data to discuss it.
I don't really think there's that much of a tradeoff to be made here. The amount of extra efficiency you can get by explicitly allowing race in cases where that's currently legally illegitimate is pretty small in most cases. Police are normally stopping people due to probable cause, traffic enforcement and other situations where more than "they just look a little suspicious" is legally required.
If a shooter described as "young black male, around 5'5"" wearing red" is described as leaving a scene, the police can already use race as part of their efficiency in catching a suspect. But the number of situations where police are searching people based on less evidence than that is much smaller, and few people are arguing for them whether or not they might have a racial impact.
Probably ICE's recent court wins allowing them to use apparent national origin (accent, physical description) as a few factors among many is the best counter-example, but in that case it actually is a far higher efficiency gain than randomly stopping every young black male would be.
Agree. The statistics shoud not be on the basis of presumed group membership and I doubt that statistics fine grained enough for actual enforcement would show that.
I think this confuse the concepts of the legal doctrine behind stop-and-frisk, the concept of its application in NYC, and the mostly uninformed assumptions of how it was applied that most people here have.
Applying stop-and-frisk to target people racially was never a thing in NYC. Targeting neighborhoods with lots of shootings was. Then whether giving police such broad powers to conduct Terry stops is constitutional / a good idea is another topic. A person could support or disagree with all 3, independently of each other.
I can imagine secenarios in which it seems pretty reasonable and, if so, the person stopped should not object. If the area is realy dicey, it were I, and the officer behaves properly, I minght even find it reassuring.
Another example in sportswriting that crossed my mind while reading your comment is Jonah Keri. He was a very highly regarded baseball writer...until it was discovered that he was a vicious abuser of his wife. At least he was pretty much made a forgotten pariah after that.
My high school principal was NFL teammates with OJ and said he was "not surprised" to hear about the murders. I wonder if OJ, like Ted Bundy, was very likable in small doses but off-putting in larger ones.
> People (and there are a lot of them including in the media) who think Amanda Knox is innocent can't believe this nice well off white lady could have committed murder even though she left a bunch of her DNA mixed with the victim's at the crime scene.
Amanda Knox lived with the murder victim (along with two other people). The amount of her DNA found ostensibly around the victim was miniscule, and I say "ostensibly" because the police also screwed up the collection to such a degree that the court system eventually held that no inferences could be drawn from the DNA. Finally, there is an extremely obvious culprit, who's guilt no one seriously disputes, meaning that theories of her guilt have to claim that not only did she decide to murder her roommate for no discernible reason, but that she also decided to conspire with some random guy to do a rape-and-murder, also for no discernible reason.
An aside, but Bill Simmons had a piece on his podcast where he was trying to figure out who the closest figure to OJ would be today; i.e. a retired sports star who got into media, and was nice enough that everyone was blindsided by the murder.
He landed on Peyton Manning. Which as someone too young to remember the OJ chase would definitely be a shock!
OJ himself is not a good example of this, as he had a long history of abusing Nicole Brown before the murder. Granted, mass media reach and societal accountability for domestic violence were more lacking back then.
European here: we have price discrimination in cinema tickets! It's not very granular - here in the UK, there will typically be three or four price-bands for a given showing - but prices vary by time of day, comfiness of seat, and to some extent by how good the view is. Does this really not happen in the US?
Only pricing by time and day. The rest not. However, reserved seats in movie theaters is relatively new here, so maybe people will start demanding more differentiation in pricing.
Interesting - I can't remember a time when British cinemas *didn't* have reserved seating! Even in the pre-Internet days you'd pick a seat when you bought your ticket at the counter.
Restaurant below got World Restaurant of the Year in 2024. Next available table is 12 January, 2027. That's better than last time I looked when there were no tables available at all.
Honestly can't figure out who that's helping. Their menu isn't even expensive by the standards of such a prestigious restaurant. For some reason they're actively choosing to under-price.
(PS I was not actually planning on going, I was just curious how hard it would be to get a table at the World Restaurant of the Year given how hard it is to get tables at some more normal restaurants where I do live. In fairness, it is a lot harder than anywhere I've ever been)
Next in Chicago has this all figured out. They sell "tickets" just like a sporting event that are priced differently based on day and time of day. You can also buy "season tickets" to get priority booking for every menu. They change the concept 4-6x per year. It's embarrassingly ostentatious (e.g., would you like 1918 Chartreuse with dessert) but they've nailed the resi process.
Maybe they just like having a full house? Or maybe they prefer a clientele that isn't exclusively corporate executives?
*In general* (not specifically about this restaurant), Europeans are just less fussed on average about 'maximizing earnings potential' and often weigh other factors. Whether this is better or worse is beside the point, it's just a cultural difference.
The non-corporate executive part probably matters a lot. You price everything too high and suddenly food writers can't afford to eat there. Zagat and Michelin tend to send in their people undercover, so if suddenly every dish starts costing $10,000, then it becomes obvious that the guy wearing the cheapest suit there is probably awarding Michelin stars.
I see the same playbook at In-N-Out and Chick-Fil-A. If there's always a line around the block, then you get prestige and brand value as the hot place that everyone wants to go. Even if there are more people total going to McDonald's, it doesn't look crowded, so people think that McDonald's isn't as popular and therefore isn't as good. It's like a Veblen good where the price is the amount of time you have to wait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
It can be annoyingly hard to get people to think about time as another kind of price, one that is also subject to economics. There's certain topics where people (who otherwise show a good grasp of markets) just cannot conceive that a free good can still have a supply and demand curve.
People like that don't deserve to eat at trendy restaurants. They should be reserved for young people trying to impress the date they just got, so that we can boost marriage rates.
A lot of people seem to have a very deeply rooted intuition that all prces should be based on the cost of inputs plus some "reasonable" margin and anything else is unfair in a deeply problematic way that is practically a sign of impending societal collapse
My guess is that something like that is going on with the owner at this place.
I think so. Ambience is usually a category and having your place rammed with people super excited to finally get that elusive table and happy the value for money is unusually good must help achieve a good vibe.
If I had to guess how undercharging for food makes them money in the end, these places can sell $10,000 bottles of wine. Maybe if it's really hard to get a table you're more likely to go for that special bottle of wine. Might also help sell private dining options.
I think Matt Y's answer on wage compression is off the mark, Sure, it's true that wage compression raises the relative wages of young people, undocumented immigrants, and ex-convicts, i.e., people who have lower social status and/or are less likely (in case of undocumented immigrants, ineligible) to vote. But that's too abstract. Joe Average isn't saying, "I'm pissed off that an ex-con working at Dave's Killer Bread bakery now has slightly higher wages and therefore higher social status than before!"
No, Joe Average is probably pissed off for the very practical reason that wage compression means higher wages for the Doordash guy, the person preparing your Starbucks latte or Chipotle burrito, etc. and that translates into a higher cost of the kind of services middle and upper-middle class people enjoy. Nothing abstract about seeing your coffee become more expensive! As Marcus Seldon said in a comment below, wage compression means "higher cost of being waited on by other people."
So while I mostly agree with you, there is an almost non-ideological strain among American's that basically, service workers should be not that well paid because that makes them wary enough that customers get treated like kings. A lot of the 'nobody wants to work' stuff is really 'the server at my Applebee's isn't as attentive as they would've been in 2014' or whatever. Look how a cross-partisan complain of people going to Europe is basically, waiters or people working at stores ignore you.
There is also a 'EMT's make only x/hr while people flipping burgers now make x/hr and that's wrong' types who ignore a way the EMT people can raise their wages.
I see a second component as well, and it's the premium someone gets paid for work more valuable than minimum wage work. If you make $64,000 a year-roughly the average for an American-the minimum wage going from $20,000 a year to $30,000 a year means your education, experience, higher work ethic, and more important work is essentially worth 75% of what it used to.
All while a higher minimum wage means the sort of businesses you frequent raise prices and cut staffing, resulting in higher prices for worse service.
This is the second time Matt has been flat out wrong about energy efficiency. Energy Star and tightened SEER standards for air conditioning units have made for more efficient appliances that are just as good and just as affordable as their predecessors.
I live in Houston, where it is awfully hot and humid. I have a 16 SEER two stage AC unit that is a marvel of efficiency and keeps my house ridiculously comfortable. There is no tradeoff involved here at all. None. Zero.
The problem with light bulbs is we banned the bad incandescents when the only alternative was the even worse fluorescents. It took a decade for LEDs to become cheap and widespread.
> There are a few applications where the heat of incandescent bulbs is useful.
Then you could just add a separate heat source? That's about the simplest circuit you can make. If you're depending on heat from an incandescent light you are almost certainly doing something dumb.
Banning incandescents means that the rare applications that need them kind of get screwed. LED bulbs are just better technology for like 95% of cases, though, so the ban wasn't even necessary.
Sometimes getting new technologies accepted requires a bit of a regulatory nudge.
But yeah sometimes you just want an incandescent (I guess). That's what they invented the Dark Web where one can go to get all those illicit things, right?
The ones I have now are indistinguishable from incandescents and the strobing problem from what I can tell was an issue in early, cheap LEDs and not really an issue anymore.
In general neoliberals massively underrate the socially beneficial effects of technology-forcing regulations. E.g. they persistently suggest that raising the minimum wage will trade off with low-wage jobs without considering the social benefit (in the form of things like self-checkout and ordering at Shake Shack on an IPad that can't screw your order up and the like) that comes from some of those low-wage jobs becoming automated.
There are more complicated, but no less real, benefits that flow from things like the Clean Air Act's best-available-technology provisions, which is why the CAA is in fact a remarkably successful and effective law even though in economic theory it is ostensibly an economic drag.
Someone here red-pilled me on California's Prop 65 disclosures by pointing out they primarily affect producer behavior by discouraging use of lead so you don't have to affix a warning label.
I'm on the fence about plastic straw bans for the same reason; the paper straws that rolled out at first sucked, but there have been compostable plastic and agave-based straws which are basically as good as plastic.
I didn't think they had any effect on consumer behavior. For instance, they're posted in every parking garage - what are people supposed to do, not use parking garages?
Heh. It's funny how you say self-checkout is a *social benefit* while a couple of comments away, Marcus Seldon talks about how higher wages for low-paid jobs = more self-checkout and self-serve kiosks = *worse* experience for customers!
This is a matter of personal opinion, but as for me, I'm with Marcus Seldon on this. Self-checkout is annoying.
I hold the fully pluralistic take that both self checkout and assisted checkout are fine, people can have preferences on when to use each, which also might differ depending on what groceries people have, and we should have both and not slam people for preferring one over the other. (Looking at you, Erik Loomis....)
I guess if you really like wasting time jawing with rando store clerks it's worth it to wait 5 minutes to buy a Snickers bar? I hate that, so I much prefer the get-in-and-get-out ethos of self-checkout.
From an objective standpoint, however, it's clearly more efficient to not pay a bunch of people to basically stand around doing nothing useful. Up to a certain point you need to do that in order to stop people from stealing everything, which is why most supermarkets can efficiently run several aisles of assisted checkout, but past some threshold it's just a deadweight loss.
I have both, and they’re fine, nothing wrong with them. Any suckage is due not to energy efficiency, but to the fact that water in SoCal is hard as a rock. My tea kettle has mineral deposits all over it.
I detest mine. The dishwasher NEVER I mean literally never dries everything all the way. Instead you have top open it, shake it out, and then let if finish air drying
Our new washing machine is even worse. It doesn't want to fill all the way up with water, it constantly stops itself if it's out of balance etc.
We bought an extra large one for washing horse blankets and we have to fill it with a freaken garden hose. Just totally unacceptable.
Is your water heater hot enough? Dishwasher drying depends on your dishes getting hot enough to turn the last bit of water into steam (which is why plastic dishes always come out wet).
The water heater should have an adjustment knob on it where you can turn up/down the temperature. You can check your hot water temp at your sink; run the hot water at full blast over a cooking thermometer and see what it says. Most houses have it in the 115-125 range; I had to turn ours down when I had a kid so we wouldn't scald him at bathtime by mistake.
That assumes you should have to pay out the ass for a decent appliance. The washer we first bought in our apartment was an old school top loader. Cheap, and worked for many years without all these problems. But it didn't have all the stupid electronics either. It just worked.
But given our new house, it didn't work with our new laundry room, we had to switch to a front load.
You almost certainly have an energy Star certified dishwasher/washing machine that is both more efficient and better than what you could buy in 2005, 1995, or 1985. I have a Bosch dishwasher that is both very efficient and incredibly good.
What data could we look at to see if this is true?
My intuition is that there almost has to be a tradeoff, unless we're just looking at massively better technology such that everyone would build the super efficient ACs even without the regulations. I mean, we kind of got that with LED lights, which I think really are both cheaper (in terms of how many dollars you spend per year on lights, since they last a lot longer than incandescents) and way more efficient. But is that also true for ACs/heat pumps?
My take on DC speed cameras is that two things can be true at the same time. They're a great public safety tool, and they also can be used rather aggressively as a revenue grab.
This is anecdotal, but I've had one speeding ticket in the last 20 years and it was from a DC speed camera on a 4 lane stretch of highway that for some reason had a speed limit of 50. Without any signage, I would have expected a 65 limit on this stretch. Given that I've probably driven 200k-300k miles outside of DC over the last 20 years, and < 500 miles inside DC, I'd contend there's probably something going on with DC speed traps being on the aggressive side.
I had no idea the speed limit was this low until I got the ticket in the mail. I was clocked at 61 on a sunny Sunday morning when traffic was light. I should have been more attentive to speed limit signs, but I also can't help but wonder how many others have been caught by this and whether such enforcement actually increases public safety or is just more of a $100 outsider tax. I will give credit where credit is due, the ticket was very easy to get taken care of online and it apparently doesn't affect driving points at least.
I definitely think that fines from law enforcement should not provide dependence for any government program. There certainly is potential for abuse similar to how some police departments have directly benefitted from civil asset forfeiture. And there can be a perverse incentive to encourage *more* of the activity at hand (same reason why I hate Pigouvian taxes). The best thing to do strikes me to just distribute the money back to the taxpayers, functioning somewhat like a safe driving check that insurers hand out.
But last Monday, I did repeatedly ask if there's been any credible reporting that the DC cameras in particular have discovered to have revenue generation as their top goal, and I've yet to get a satisfactory answer.
Do you know if the DC ones are controlled/operated by the district itself, or if there's a third-party contractor that runs them and makes part of their profit based on ticket revenue?
The heaviest abuse I've read about doesn't seem to be from municipalities themselves, but rather from the government outsourcing operations to companies (that then bribe officials to win contracts). I think the most blatant cases used this arrangement. IIRC, some states have gone as far as to ban this setup after widespread abuse was uncovered.
"The main issue isn't the state itself, it's the tax farmers they outsource concessions to" is a problem that quite literally dates back to the Roman Republic, when poorly-controlled agents of the state would trash the economies of the budding empire's provinces by squeezing them for every sestertius they had.
Everyone keeps relearning the same stupid lessons about greed and neoliberalism over and over because nobody remembers anything or studies history.
Since governments are typically strapped for cash and voters almost always reject tax increases, this seems like a fairly decent and painless way to give those governments some of the revenue they need.
The dog leash answer is wide off the mark. The answer to why they behave that way is enforcement. If people were fined for off leash dogs then they wouldn't let them off leash as much. The problem is that this is a fairly inefficient use of police/park ranger time so it is obviously not allocated to fining off leash dog owners.
Shaming is also inefficient as it relies on wider social stigma. If everyone had a problem with this then it might succeed, but if you loudly complain about this you're apt to being called a Karen as most people like dogs and will tell you to chill.
So the answer is to make a big stink about any damage you suffer, make people pay for it, and widely circulate knowledge of that so people know that could happen to them and adjust accordingly. Is if a dog eats your picnic food demand they pay for the food and some, if you get bit sue them, etc and then post about it in Twitter/reddit/whatever. Obviously this is not ideal as you want to avoid suffering damages in the first place, but it's the only way out of the equilibrium I see.
It seems like there is a close correlation between people with youngish kids and people who want to make sure dogs are under tight control (chh wrote a recent article, jennifer lawrence suggested a reverse john wick movie with a mad mother going on a dog killing rampage...).
So, I'm not actually convinced by this? I'm not a park ranger, but I work with them and dog issues are always a problem, even with enforcement? The one actual complaint we had to deal with about park ranger behavior was a woman complaining that the ranger who ticketed her for having her dog off leash was racist...against her black dog? Now, that's obviously small sample size, anecdotes are not data, but people are weird about their dogs, I mean even Matt refers to them as pet parents in this piece?
I have an active dog and frequently take him off leash in hikes -- even in trails that technically ban it but where 90% of dogs are off leash and the other 10% are puppies being trained for it or they're reactive. I've never heard of anyone being fined for this.
Our very safety- and liability-conscious culture creates a number of rules which are more about appeasing faraway bureaucrats, lawyers, and actuaries than actually meant by people on the ground. The ability to practically do business and enjoy normal life requires navigating a degree of illegibility about which rules are real and which ones are Like That. This in turn invites disputes.
When I see people bring their dogs into restaurants and grocery stores, I think it is a wonderful thing. I mean, these are clearly people so bereft of real personal relationships in their lives, lives which themselves are so devoid of meaning, aspiration, and hope, that the only way they can find comfort, joy and happiness is to take their damn mutts to places where no dog has any reason to be. But if this simple act of selfishness and lack of caring about other people gives them fleeting moments of contentment and allows them to continue on in their dreary existence, who am I to criticize but rather should applaud them for, by this one act, shaking their fist at an uncaring universe from which they are completely alienated and declaring, "I shall not give up!"
P.S. I loved my dogs. And they loved being at home.
I think this is a separate issue. Many COVID puppies were not raised to be apart from their humans and now developed anxiety with them gone, barking a ton and destroying things. Their owners will instead take them everywhere. It's a training issue but these people are selfish and lazy and give legit service dogs a bad name.
That said, many places are dog friendly and people don't know. My local FedEx and liquor store give my dog treats so if I have an errand I'll combine it with the dog walk.
I believe this is partially fallacious as an analysis: "In fairness to Trump, this philosophy has worked pretty well for him in life. If you’d asked me abstractly about the idea of just refusing to pay his contractors back when he was a hotel developer, I would have told you that this kind of short-term thinking can’t pay off for a businessman. Sure, it’s probably true that most of the people you stiff won’t have much recourse in practice. But the damage to your reputation will be too severe to make it possible to continue doing business."
Since I come from the world of investment finance: Trump's philosophy in terms of Operating Businesses was a failure. There is a reason his operating businesses generally ran into bankruptcy.
He is not in the end of a successful real estate mogul in the normal sense (although not publicly generally visible as genuine real estate billionnaires tend to discretion for a number of reasons) if one is looking at increase in actual real net assets.
Where he has had success is not in running actual operational businesses - whether operations like his Eastern Shuttle fiasco, or casinos.
His success is in Marketing and brand franchising (his name) generating cash flows not from being operational (where he is a pathetic failure) but renting out gaudiness (which has its market) without having real operational exposure. Since about the late 90s or so his revenue success is in franchising-in-renting-the-name form (not the more applied operational sense of say McDonalds that brings operational backbone).
The Apprentice - Reality TV faux mogul is the example - actually operationally he was every bit the same disaster he is as President, blundering inconsistent incompetent - but marketing himself to the rubes, utterly brilliant.
Really if one understands his real - not claimed, real - business trajectory much of Trump II presidency makes much more sense than if one swallows the bait of he was successful in operational business via his Queens con-man style, which he wasn't. Disassociate the marketing from the operational.
When I was a young law firm associate many moons ago, we had a training on real estate law. The partner used Trump as an example of a developer who doesn't actually develop anything, but just slaps his name on the project and takes 10% or so. And all of us were surprised by this - we thought he was this uber successful developer. So its been out there for awhile, but you had to pay close attention to understand that Trump the "Developer" was and still is just BS.
Don't know how long many moons ago was but his Trump Tower here in Chicago was the last build he actually developed. Everything since has been licensed.
Yup.... the dichotomy from what one could understand of Trump if one was in NY finance or law inside on corp/invest and Trump imagery..... really amazing.
There is probably an underrated real dichotomy in how the politics of the Trump era has played out:
1) People from the Northeast/Not from the Northeast, with the former seeing him up close as a con man
2) People who have been around multiple successful business people / People who haven't, with the former knowing he had a bad reputation
Even kids in the 90's in the first of each category above knew not to take him seriously. When my mom told me all the way back in the 90's that he inherited a lot of his money and his business, it was surprising to me that anyone took him seriously. He's a successful entrepreneur for the type of person whose understanding of wealth and status come from reality TV.
which contains one of my favorite lines about Trump:
“ The less you respect Trump’s substance – and I respect it very little – the more you’re forced to admire whatever combination of charisma, persuasion, and showmanship he uses to succeed without having any.”
Carney has been -- by far -- the most thoughtful and persuasive leader against Trump and yet in these little 1:1 settings somehow the animus just isn't there.
The failure of reputation effects to which Matt alludes is arguably implicit in the part where you say “operating businesses,” plural. The point being made is that Donald Trump is not supposed to be a person you would entrust with capital, because he is a dishonest grifter. In fact, however, appears that reputation effects just don’t work in this domain, and thus he was provided the opportunity to run numerous businesses (dishonestly and poorly.)
This kind of analysis seems to be just finding a way to underbelly Trump because we don't like Trump. The idea that a man can become a billionaire in life and then we go "well technically he isnt successful for all of these esoteric reasons" is nonsensical. The vast majority of millionaires, and even 100 millionaires never become billionaires in thier lifetime. The discussion on whether he is successful or not starts and ends with the simple fact that he is a billionaire, all the rest is naval gazing.
Now I am fully on board with the idea that we shouldn't celebrate achieving success in the way Trump did. A world where being an gold standard asshole is a venerated path to success is a shittier world. Spending breathe trying to pretend 1 in a billion success isnt actually success isnt convincing though.
And let me add that this is basic management (of which I know what I speak, I am co-CEO of a firm that I co-founded and has grown to being multi-country operations)
If I have a staff member who is not competent in operational management but is good at sales, I am a bad manager - not "technical nitpicker" to put said person into an operational management role. And vice-versa.
It is really actually quite fundamental to understanding good business management to know the difference between capability areas and not confound being good at X being good at Y.
Trump was and is a failure in operational businesses, triggering repeated bankruptcies not due to market issues but due to his own operating management incompetence - and certainly not growing the inheritance from his father.
Trump was and is brilliant at marketing leverage and converting said marketing pitchmanship - even when heavily shyster tinged - into cash flows (and it is this cash flow that has saved his overall net worth, not operational management and real estate development success in the operational terms - where real actual (not bluffed and faked) billionionnaires have made real billions.
Trump's millions from his marketing and franchise-name leveraging are however a real form of success which is what I pointed to - it is however an utterly different skill set than what he pretends to.
Now middle American as evidenced by the Apprentice has broadly been taken in by his puffery, that's neither here nor there to me - but cold eyed analysis not hatred one has to understand where actual strengths and cash flow come from and what is faked.
From that one understands far better Trump, modus operandi as well as his real strengths (which in fact I find Lefties consistently do tear down - there is actual real genuis in his salesmanship and salesmanship to different people (as he's not a working class guy in reality) although looked down on by many or most professional class college educated is a real skill. The Democrats could learn something there about selling to People Not Like Us....
In contrast there is Musk.
Musk has historically attraced ill-informed Lefty critiques out of pure dislike of the guy (who is to be admited, quite dislikable) - based on misplaced founder-invester fetishisation whereas in reality Musk has repeatedly show brilliance in the critical stage of scaling on industrial investment (and this is operational management), that is fucking hard. But one has to locate where the real brilliance specifically is, and not either childishly hero-worship nor equally childishly tear the guy down over personality dislike.
This analysis is the analysis of proper investment people amigo.
First, Trump is not really a billionnaire, that is Trump puffery.
On a Net Net basis Trump did not grow his inheritance stake. What growth he's done is really Apprentice era onwards based on marketing and cashing on Apprentice leveraged name rental.
That is certainly not nothing but it is not either success in the areas that Yglesias noted - in real operating developed he did end up being dead-ended from his own incompetence and bad behaviour (even benchmarked against real estate development world).
If you want to be a gullible Rube and buy his pretending at being a real billionnaire nothing I can do to change that, but I am not personally impressed. I am in Private Equity. Trumpy pretense and Potemkin Village habits don't fool me.
Where I give credit is where he has real success and that is in a certain kind of marketing, there he has a real sort of brilliance and leveraging money out of that as he has done, now there he's made the real money. But that's utterly different than operational
If you were around successful business people in the 90s, they did not take Trump seriously because they knew he was a liar who depended on his inheritance.
Yeah - I mean the whole thing where he was calling up over years Forbes and pretending to be other people to push into Forbes journalists his own disinforomation so he could get into Forbes lists... that's not the actions of Real Billionnaire RE developer.
Well Trump's pre Presidency brand was essentially Queens outer-borough idea of Rich People in Manhattan (versus actual rich people in Manhattan). Apprentice continued it, the working class idea of what CEOs do.
I’ve had a pro-Trump family member say something like “of course Trump is not nice; he’s a successful businessman and they can’t be nice.”
It’s just a profoundly bleak worldview that this is how so many working class people see successful CEOs (and their conclusion is that this is good/cool and not a reason to have communism)
The ideal CEO we should hold up should be someone like Jensen Huang, who got rich by just making a better product and not by screwing people through unfair deals, and still maintains a relatively humble aesthetic…
You were pretty dismissive of David R and Geoffrey G's questions about consumer protections. "That's just the price we have to pay for living in the most dynamic economy in the world" does a lot of hand waving. People's complaints about expending mental energy trying to navigate through all the enshittification are legitimate, and I don't know who it serves (other than shareholders) for market economies to trend in that direction.
1. Enshittification may sometimes happen but it is vastly overstated. Is your smartphone shitty? Your new car? Your television set? Capitalism produces tons of non-shitty stuff.
2. Plenty of enshittified products are just consumers being cheap and stupid. E.g., flyers who insist on buying basic economy rather than paying for a bit of comfort.
<<flyers who insist on flying basic economy>>
People forget that the alternative is not being able to afford flying as a lower income person at all!
Basic economy is possibly the worst example of "enshitification" I can imagine. It's a very straightforward, and more importantly, *transparent*, trade-off of ancillary services folks might not find useful in exchange for lower cost.
The endless vetting, research, and savvy needed to buy a goddamned kitchen appliance that will last longer than 3 years is much more foundational to how the median American experiences a complexity tax. In order to buy a refrigerator you don't despise you must now know that Samsung has massive issues with defrost cycles and LG's compressors fail within the first two years at a rate 4-5 times higher than Frigidaire's. How you're supposed to know that without direct experience or being an anal-ret... sorry, "extremely conscientious person" like me, is beyond me.
The need to navigate endless pages of directly imported, uninspected, untested, non-regulatory compliant, barely QA/QCed housewares and small electronics on Amazon is a complexity tax. A large quantity of what's sold on any online vendor platform can barely be said to have added value compared to raw materials, a proportion that's even higher on Temu or Wish.
The entirety of the structure of our system of health insurance is a complexity tax.
The experience of a car dealership is a complexity tax.
By no means am I saying that tons more regulation is the correct response to every one of these issues, but it's pretty easy to imagine regulations that could better align the incentives of manufacturers, sellers, and consumers in many situations. And in some cases those regulations exist but are not enforced.
David, I'd offer a different perspective.
Regarding the experience of buying kitchen appliances: you're saying it's bad, but compared to what? Are you saying that a refrigerator manufactured in 2025 is objectively worse than one made in 2015? I don't think that's true. NYT has a good article on this question (https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/modern-appliances-short-lifespan/), and I'll lift some of their key points.
It's true that appliance longevity has declined slightly over the last few decades, but not that much (maybe 10% or so). This is for a variety of reasons, including government restrictions, but the biggest one is that people actually want new stuff with new features, and the pace of innovation has increased. Thus people are less inclined on average to own something for a long time. If people are going to upgrade their refrigerator every 5 or 10 years to get new features, there's not much point in making it last for 20 or 30.
So these modern appliances break down sooner, but they do way more stuff than the old ones, and people's purchasing behavior suggests they want that. If you want a feature-poor, inexpensive, but easily repairable and long-lasting appliance, those models are often still out there for purchase. They're hard to find, sure, but that's mostly because people don't want that.
Regarding the need to navigate endless pages of uncertified imported goods online: you don't need to do that. If you don't want to do a lot of research, don't buy things on Amazon, Temu, or Wish. If you buy all your things from upscale retailers, you can be extremely confident you'll get a reliable and high-quality product. Sure, it'll cost a lot more, and you'll have way fewer options, but that's not you being harmed. Prior to Amazon, the options weren't "cheap good stuff" and "expensive good stuff." In many cases, they were "expensive good stuff" or "nothing at all."
I think the "complexity tax" you speak of is just the fact that you have a ton more options now than you would have had in the past. It's not that LG appliances had no drawbacks, and now they do. It's that in a world where LG is one of only two options, issues with defrost cycles don't seem like market failures, they just seem like the inevitable nature of things, and so we didn't get as upset about it. You can avoid the "complexity tax" at any time, by either paying someone to do the research for you and ensure that you have a good experience, or by simply making a less informed decision and buying what's in front of you, accepting the drawbacks of whatever product you end up selecting. Neither of these are actually worse than the alternative universe where you just have fewer options.
Do you think governments should restrict the use of coupons and discount codes? Those, too, are a way for consumers to get a lower price at the cost of convenience. Isn't that also a complexity tax? But nobody seems mad about coupons.
In short, there is always a trade-off frontier between convenience/simplicity and cost, and you are free to move wherever you'd like along that curve.
Very well said, thank you for this
I know I'm stating the obvious just to get it on the record, but car dealerships very much exist overregulation to entrench rent seeking. There of course can be underregulated aspects of the automotive industry, some of which have been discussed in this subthread.
Yep, I specifically trotted out the example to prove that I'm not here screaming to regulate every aspect of the consumer experience to death, I just think there are some ways to better align markets in areas that have complexity/information asymmetry problems, or in which the savvy of the median consumer just isn't up to evaluating the options on offer.
My smartphone isn't shitty! Do I like having to replace it every 3-4 years because it slows to a crawl and crashes constantly? Do I like that I can't buy a high end refrigerator, microwave, or dishwasher that's built to last more than 10 years? Do I like that any car I buy now has a touch screen for basic functions which will break well before a knob or dial would? No!
I'm being a bit over the top because I do agree with your second point. But I really liked both of those questions and felt they deserved a more thoughtful answer. There's a middle ground between a Wild West of capitalism and Soviet Russia, and providing some consumer protections so that people don't have to expend every ounce of mental energy trying to find the best possible deal on the best possible product at every moment is worthwhile, and not incompatible with having a dynamic market economy.
My dishwasher is more than 10 years old and my refrigerator is 30, and while I do replace my smartphone every few years that's to get the latest features-- older smartphones still work and you can clear caches and offload data and unused apps to speed them up.
I have never had a touchscreen break on a car and I love the convenience of Android Auto, especially the maps and speakerphone calls.
Look how ridiculous you sound. This is not Soviet Russia.
My previous refrigerator was similarly old. I hope for your sake yours keeps working and you're not as shocked by the change in longevity as I was.
I was comparing us to the Wild West and not to Soviet Russia, sorry if that analogy didn't land.
Interestingly the 'right of repair' concept is one of the foundational ideas Marie Gluesenkamp Perez talks about. I have mixed feelings on it. On the one hand there's a very real sense in which certain appliances, hardware, and other consumer goods seems more fragile/not built to last quite like it used to be. Everyone has a grandma or uncle with a beer fridge in the garage that's been running for 40 years, inside of which you could survive a nuclear strike.
On the other I'm pretty hesitant to jump to conclusions without serious objective study. Again my go to example is that the power tools you will find today at every Home Depot are way better on nearly every metric and theres lots of stuff that wasn't even readily available or affordable to regular consumers in the not too distant past. Anecdotally I also feel like my Samsung phones hold up longer and better than the ones from 10 years ago. I actually got a call from Verizon last March to see if I was willing to replace my still perfectly well functioning 3 year old phone for a brand new one, essentially for price of doing the transfer. I of course took them up on it and when I asked the sales guy why this was happening he said that they've got too much inventory on annual releases, because they don't need to be replaced as often as before.
I believe a lot of the momentum behind "right to repair" is from farm equipment. Farmers, of course, have very tight margins, and are used to repairing their own equipment. With new equipment, repairs often can only be done by the dealers because of proprietary software.
Survivorship bias explains like 80% of this. Another 10-15% is easily explained by the fact that it is often less expensive to design something to go together once, work well, and be replaced at end-of-life.
Maintainability is actually expensive to design and manufacture into a durable good. Am I annoyed that the little plastic widgets in my dishwasher break down over time as they're exposed to major thermal cycling and aggressive cleaners? Sure I am. Would I pay 10x as much for each of those little injection-molded pieces to be replaced in the bill of materials with machined billet aluminum parts that would last longer than I will? No, I would not!
We don't have an entire industry of television repairmen anymore, and that's a good thing.
"Anecdotally I also feel like my Samsung phones hold up longer and better than the ones from 10 years ago."
If smartphones still broke when you dropped them the way they did 15 years ago I would break two a week. How were we so careful????
As far as government issues go, "right to repair" isn't high on my list, but I do agree with MGP on this one. I prefer to be able to tinker with things (hence my unreasonably strong aversion to Apple products) and it's frustrating that I can't do this the same way I could 30 years ago. But... there's a lot of truth to your comment (and others') in that you simply don't need to do that in many cases anymore.
Someone needs to make a dark comedy about a guy who suffocates inside a beer fridge during a nuclear strike.
Yes. The last time we bought an appliance, the salesperson straight out said, "Your last oven was 40 years old. Don't expect any new appliance to last that long. The standard is now 8-10 years."
For at least some stuff, you can buy commercial grade appliances that are more robust and will last longer, but they also cost a fair bit more.
Lucky you. The refrigerator I bought just two years ago has only lasted two years!
So far.
https://xkcd.com/2968/
I'm not sure how stating that your 30 year old fridge is very reliable is an argument against Gibbs' complaint that recently manufactured appliances aren't reliable like they were 30 years ago
I hate to say it but as Dilan points out, you are being irrational and the reason that some things like appliances built “in that past” allegedly lasted “forever” is that they were overbuilt. As a free market does, this over investment got reallocated to bringing you abundance in other domains. That said I think this is dramatically overstated—I remember stuff breaking *all the time* as a kid in the 90s. Also remember when cars would sometimes just not work and not last more that 100k miles? Exactly.
“appliances built “in that past” allegedly lasted “forever””
Also strong survivor bias. We remember the ones the lasted forever.
>...the reason that some things like appliances built “in that past” allegedly lasted “forever” is that they were overbuilt.<
TVs weighed a ton in the 1960s and 70s. Just brutal.
When I replaced my upstairs cathode ray TV I had to ask a friend to come over and painfully help me carry it out.
One of the killers in Scream was killed with a tube TV. Now that would just leave a bruise on his face.
I think things are getting cheaper and better while services are getting more expensive. The logic of this plays out in us buying appliances and electronics for a shorter time and then upgrading to the new rather than service or repair it.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is actually probably the best scenario considering the constraints.
One example is that a 30 year-old-fridge would probably have cost you several thousand dollars of extra electricity usage during the final 10 years of its life, more than the capital cost of most models models available 10 years ago.
"Overbuilt" in the sense that they were sturdier, but "under-engineered" in the sense that most of them were hugely inefficient with inputs like electricity, water, detergents, etc.
The kinda legit complaint about smartphones is that the battery is designed to be incredibly annoying to replace, and those really do lose a lot of capacity in 2-3 years. In Ye Olden Days batteries were detachable, but now while it's *possible* to swap them you either need to pay a professional close to the replacement value of the phone to do it, or have some pretty specialized personal tools.
You can get one of those external battery packs for like $30, but it's still an annoying situation, and I'm sure Apple et al realize that it's one of the main drivers for people to frequently upgrade.
Smartphones losing replaceable batteries and the 3.5mm audio jack were both tragedies.
People who miss the audio jack should do what I did and get one of the $15 Bluetooth receivers with an audio jack. They're easy to set up, they're cheap, you're no longer physically attached to your phone, but you can still use normal headphones. You just need to remember to stick them on charge (and they're cheap enough you can have a spare to extend the battery life). The audio quality is usually a bit better than a jack in the phone because the analogue circuits have less EM noise around them, but not by much.
You can get fancy ones (which call themselves DACs rather than receivers) if you want more audio quality; there are plenty of them in the $100-$200 range for the sort of people who buy $500 headphones.
The key strength of the in-phone 3.5mm audio jack is simplicity: there's nothing extra to charge, it can't be left behind, it doesn't require Bluetooth pairing that can be messed up. It's just always there and always works.
Isn’t an iPhone battery replacement less than $100?
Add in labor and you're not too far from the value of a 3-year-old phone.
That includes the labor. $120 for the current models. $69 or $89 for other models.
Which is another reason why I have no desire for a fully electric car
This is one of those areas where the lifespan in practice of typical electric car batteries has been several years longer than originally predicted. So far.
To add to that: while the US has tried to incentivize EV battery recycling, the EU has set recycled content mandates. Which means, in effect, the number of new EVs can't be more than a fixed number of times larger than the number of batteries reaching end-of-life in a given year. Which means longer battery life potentially both slows down EV adoption and is directly harmful to battery companies' growth, unless you can either bring in recycled content from elsewhere or encourage early replacement.
I regrettably did the iPhone update to OS 26 a few days ago and my phone is shittier now. I guess on the plus side, the graphics are so ugly I don’t want to use it.
ios 26 is a crime against UX.
"Liquid Glass." More like "Molasses Slow."
I have genuinely had the thought that this is Apple giving me what I want, namely to desire to use my phone less. My lock screen takes a noticeable amount of time to open now.
I was going to replace my tablet soon but since it doesn't have enough storage to accommodate the new OS I'm thinking of keeping it.
I cannot overstate how much I despise the new interface. It's like a toy for toddlers. I've been in the Apple ecosystem my whole life and now I'm starting to rethink that.
Setting > Display > Liquid Glass > Tinted
Yeah I changed my settings right away but the interface is still hideous
I'd start blaming energy efficiency regulations for appliance hijinks, aside from stupid things like putting giant screens on refrigerators, but you don't have to buy those.
There are high end brands of appliances that are well know to last beyond 10 years on average (e.g. SubZero for fridges, Miele for dishwashers). Obvioulsy YMMV, and there certainly are high end appliances that do have longevity issues. But with a bit of research it's pretty easy to discern the brands that last.
I'm not a huge fan of the touchscreens in cars replacing buttons and knobs (especially for climate functions), but I've had cars where the buttons and knobs start showing signs of wear a year in (I'm looking at you Jeep). So its a bit of a wash, but I think there is some happy medium of screens and knobs that was present maybe 5 years ago that I hope carmakers go back to.
You have no guarantees even with these brands, to be frank. Anything with a compressor or condenser in it is a shitshow in my experience.
My appliance repair guy (when the subreddit fails) tells me that many of the “high-end” brands (such as Viking) are actually less reliable and harder to fix.
Viking is well known for having reliability issues.
Don’t those have lifetime warranties, though?
Sure, there is always the chance that you get a dud. But that goes to any appliance. Not sure I understand your point.
I think my preferred solution on the appliance side of the fence would be that we bundle a 5-year parts and labor warranty with everything and the market price adjusts to sustain it, both in terms of risk coverage for the manufacturer and needed improvements to build quality to reduce said risk.
It'd more optimally align producer incentives and consumer needs even if consumers bitch about it when first enacted.
5 years is enough to heavily incentivize the improvement of QA/QC.
Sure. Five years ago there’d be at least two additional brands of dishwasher on that list, though. The market is not working to sustain those options. In some product areas no such options still exist.
It doesn't work for those brands because you, and the vast majority of consumers, are unwilling to pay the price to get them. A Speed Queen washer and dryer will last a lifetime or more but ther cost $2,500 each. Customers see that price tag and opt for the $500 -$1000 washer and dryer, or write them off because "for that price I can get the one with the IPad in it". If you look at inflation adjusted prices $2500 is just what washers/dryers used to cost back in the day and they cost more to operate and didn't wash/dry as well.
This strikes me as being an argument *for* minimum standards, precisely because we *know* the median consumer is not critically evaluating longevity and lifecycle costs basically at all and many of them end up deeply disenchanted with their purchases, but without the sophistication needed to avoid the problem next time.
Compounded by the fact that more expensive doesn't necessarily equate to better-functioning, more reliable, or longer-lasting.
You said this on a different reply of mine and I gotta push back again. Same Best Buy ad (https://www.reddit.com/r/90s/comments/n8j19l/best_buy_ad_may_24_1998/#lightbox) , dishwashers for $299, or $600 in today's CPI-adjusted dollars. I don't mean to suggest there hasn't been big progress on price--the cheapest full-size dishwasher I see on Best Buy's web site is still $299, which is amazing. But the inflation-adjusted price gap is not as big as you're suggesting. Whether today's products are better or worse is up for debate, but the price margin is not so large as to make the case a slam dunk without considering specifics.
I have the same windows computer i built over 10 years ago and have minimal problems, and I've replaced my phone twice, and not because i felt forced to do so.
The problem is that making good technical products is difficult, and it's even more difficult to credibly signal or evaluate that you're doing so. What's really missing is a better Wirecutter/consumer reports, and whole government could step into that, it would not be through regulations, but a technical version of death panels that would be difficult to defend from the populist mob.
The strongest signal a company can give is providing an extended warranty; I remember in the early 2000's Hyundai and Kia started offering warranties way over industry standard (10 year/100,000 mile), which I thought was a great way of them getting over a reputation for unreliability.
A lot of this is simply that the design cycle is accelerating, and appliances are becoming less expensive. To take the microwave as an example, modern high end microwaves combine a microwave oven, convection oven, and an air fryer; the air fryer became popular less than 10 years ago. I just bought a more modest microwave; I'll probably sell it on craigslist about a year from now, because I don't expect an appliance I bought with less than a day's pay to last me 10 years.
Out of curiosity, is there a difference between “convection oven” and “air fryer?” I thought they were basically the same thing, like “pressure cooker” and “instant pot” (ok one of those is actually a brand, but it seems like both of those are successful marketing and repackaging of old concepts and products, but I could be wrong.
An air fryer basically just takes the idea of a convection oven and leans into it. A convection oven uses forced air circulation to improve the performance of an oven; an air fryer speeds up that circulation to get some of the benefits of a deep fryer.
Appliances are shitty because of all the energy efficiency regulations.
Those require you to put a lot of electronics in to get the energy efficiency.
A clear case where government policy is making things worse.
Some of the shittiness is energy or water efficiency requirements, but also some is manufacturers trying to compete with low-cost producers by lowering their own production costs.
Yeah, a lot of this is replacing metal parts with plastic, which producers are doing to compete with Temu, not because Biden made them.
I like my appliances. I think they're great.
What magic electronic smarts do you think go into a resistively-driven electric range to improve its energy efficiency?
I'm thinking mainly of dishwashers and washing machines here.
Although anything else low flow would probably also qualify
My first-generation HE washer and dryer were bought used and have run 100% reliably for a decade for us after running for a decade for their previous owner. Meanwhile, our neighbors have just had their landlord replace the cheap, inefficient top-loader for the third time that we're aware of.
The center-right default to "overregulation" as the cause of all product-related issues in the car and appliance space is just grossly overconfident, overstated, over-discussed, and under-evidenced.
My proposal, as I said elsewhere, would be to mandate a several-year full-service warranty that would immediately align manufacturer incentives around longevity and reliability in the precise way that car warranties do.
The 'not built to last' microwave and dishwasher are partly *because* of regulations. Adding more isn't straightforwardly going to improve products.
Car touchscreens are more reliable than knobs or buttons. I have this on good authority from engineers I know personally who have worked in the space and have zero incentive to lie to me.
The real problem with touch screens isn’t reliability, but the fact that you can’t operate them without looking clearly at them. It’s easy to adjust a knob or physical button while looking at the road if you know roughly where the button is, whereas touch screens give you no feedback other than visual that you got the right place.
That middle ground is Europe and it’s bad!
Yea I also thought the use of enshittification was a bit off on this topic. Now I actually think it's a real thing- you can see it with the degradation of social media and certain types of automation (IVR customer support for example) but I don't think it applies for general purchase of goods and services. The fact that I can login to instantaneously buy tickets to an event or schedule an appointment or service of some kind is really convenient compared to how the world used to be. I may have a little nostalgia for being a teenager, camping out in a mall parking lot for HFStival tickets, but it's not the way commerce needs to work.
I also think your point about goods is a strong one. My go to example is to look at any half competent DIYer's tool bench and compare it to what was there as recently as the 80s and 90s. And on top of that if you aren't a DIYer it's way easier to find someone who was able to equip themselves and can do your home repair work for a fee.
My wife and I bought our first television as a married couple pre 2000. We've bought a new TV 3 times since and every single time paid less in ACTUAL dollars. And every time the TV was bigger and better.
I have a 60 inch Panasonic flat-screen thats been running perfectly since 2012. Every time we go to Costco and see the new stuff I'm tempted to replace it, especially given how cheap newer, nicer TVs are but I just can't justify it to myself while the one I have is still operating without issue, and after multiple moves.
Same. Have two Sony flat screens that are 15 and 9 years old respectively and can't justify replacing them as they still work well.
I do use an AppleTV instead of the TV software, which may make a difference such that I don't need to worry about TV software updates too much.
<flyers who insist on buying basic economy>
Companies have discovered there are a substantial amount of people who shop solely on price, not value, so why not give them what they want? And complaining about the product is just part and parcel of that mindset.
A lot of the complaints people have are real, but what you mentioned is an underrated part of what's going on. Turn back the clock 40 years and you simply paid a lot more for your fridge (or whatever else) or simply did not have one. You can buy a much cheaper one now, but it might be annoying and unreliable.
To the extent of allowing online sales platforms to blow off safety regulations and sell (literally illegally sell) electronic devices with greatly enhanced fire and shock risks? Really?
Shall we legalize opium, while we're at it?
Seems like there's maybe some distinction there between "this product will kill you if you step in a puddle while using it" and "this product will use 5% more water than we want it to in order to get your clothes cleaner."
We don't act like it, lol.
Virtually no household electronics goods on Amazon that aren't developed and sold by a US/Euro brand are vetted in any way. Some at least put fake UL or other lab stickers on them, most don't even bother. There's no enforcement at all.
So, are there a lot of deaths/fires/etc from those goods? I haven't heard of that, other than specifically some problems with lithium ion battery controllers (and those effected big-name brands too), but maybe I'm missing something.
A lot of enshittification is actually the end of a giveaway.
Growth phase: I give my product away for free or at a big discount in hopes of expanding my user base. During this time, I do little to monetize it, so no intrusive ads, prices are as low as possible if I charge anything, etc. The users are being subsidized by investors who hope to eventually make a lot of money on a huge user base.
Normal business phase: My product has to make enough money to support itself, plus pay back my investors. I want to cram in as many ads as possible, jack the price up to all the market will bear, make it very hard to use the platform in any way that doesn't result in my getting paid, jump on any sketchy way I can find to wring a few more pennies from my users or sell my users' data, etc.
Users experience this (correctly) as a big drop in the niceness of the product. But this is sort of like being mad that happy hour ended and now the bar is charging full price for drinks and appetizers.
OTOH, a lot of internet things are only worthwhile for most users in the growth phase when they're free/super cheap and relatively ad-free and nice to use. Turn them into something that can pay back the investors who subsidized the early service, and they become something like modern Facebook--just barely worth bothering with, since you're struggling to see anything from your actual friends among the ads, spam, "sponsored posts," weird videos crammed into your feed to try to make the service stickier, etc.
The other side of enshittification is what has happened to most free internet stuff over time: It's wonderful when the first set of users show up and (say) make a nice community. Eventually, though, successful systems attract parasites, so your nice web forum becomes a place where spammers will fill the message boards, crazy people will show up and do the online equivalent of a homeless guy crapping in the street and screaming randomly at passers-by, bored trolls will show up to pick fights/entertain themselves by disrupting the forum, PR/influencer types will show up and shill for their employers, etc. And then the nice web forum that was moderated as a labor of love becomes way more work than anyone is going to do without being paid, it kinda falls apart under the strain, and a previously nice thing is enshittified.
Seems like this is an argument for nationalized everything, then. Why are investors shouldering the costs anyway? That should be done with good old Monopoly money from the Fed. But no one should get super rich from it either
My tv and phone apps aggressively have shitty adds embedded within them. I tried very hard to avoid adds when I bought my TV, but it's extremely difficult, with a the best advice being "try to fine models built for demos on sales floors rather than for retail sale". And that's BEFORE trying to deal with the ads embedded in apps. Pause the stream? Get an ad. It's awful and ubiquitous.
Did you notice back in the day when you were entertained by TV and radio, there were ads there too (and many commercial breaks lasted far longer than the 10 seconds for a youtube ad?).
Best $10 a month I spend is YouTube Premium. No ads, downloads and podcast functionality when the screen is off.
Adblockers plus download sites/plugins allow me to do all of this on my web browser.
You don't feel squidgy about being a free rider? If you're looking for more cost-saving tips, a lot of transit systems will ignore it if you get on without paying!
Watch and listen a lot on my TV and in car.
Does the internet still work for you? I found that I ended up toggling the ad blocker off too much just to get a website to work that I got rid of it.
I'm not talking about ads during shows. I'm talking about ads when the TV is idle. In the background of the home screen, etc. This is shitty, and most of the time there's not even an option to pay to avoid it!
Reread what you just wrote. Your TV has a HOMESCREEN. You have a computer, which you use exclusively to watch media content, between live content, Youtube, and whichever streaming platforms you choose to utilize. You are living in sci-fi, and your biggest complaint is that during the downtime when your television is on but IDLE, it plays advertisements, part of which goes towards reducing the cost of the initial purchase.
Louis C.K. had a point.
My biggest complaint is that it worked better and was less shitty 5 years ago. That's the whole point of this discussion. Embedded ads aren't the make-or-break technology that you're highlighting here. They're an choice of pricing model designed to maximize producer surplus. They don't even offer a clear option to pay them more money to not have to deal with this shit.
I think the question is whether there is a version you can buy that doesn’t have the ads.
Nah, the monkey wrench gang did
And what about every website that I try to read on my phone. Ads popping up to cover the screen. And then taking up 1/3 of the screen area.
And Windows 11 with its embedded ads.
As the average person who is not buying that much, the trade off of focus for services is terrible.
The weird thing is that NPR has followed the trend, and has pop-up "ads" in the middle of reading a story to tell you "hey, maybe you ought to donate some money to us." It seems very unlikely to me that this convinces anyone to donate, and unlike an ad, nobody's even paying them for it. But I guess they're following the herd of "pop up ads in the middle of someone scrolling through a news article or essay" even when it makes very little sense.
Look into buying a Raspberry Pi (tiny, cheap computer) and setting up PiHole. Costs about $30. It’s a bit of a pain to follow the instructions, but once you have it set up you can block most ads on all devices connected to your network, including smart TVs.
"There's a work-around requiring additional time, money, and technical expertise," is exactly what folks means when they say things are shitty.
Can confirm, I run several piholes (in containers on my Proxmox server) and it's almost life-changing.
Raw internet seems almost unusable to me now.
The best defense I've found against this is to never connect my TV to my home network. I do all my streaming from a box that isn't enshittified and it seems to work ok for me.
I replaced my Roku with an ONN Google TV box from Walmart that cost like $50. It was easy to customize so it gives me no advertising at all and a separate google account means no tracking as best as I can tell.
I feel lucky that for the grand majority of my TV watching, I can patch it through the web and take control away from a lot of this crap.
We watch all our TV through the PS5 and I can’t remember ever being shown ads on the home screen or anything. It’s a great way to access all your streaming and games in one place, I’m happy with it
TVs are arguably a yes since they’re now adware vectors. ETA: See also Samsung fridges (nb: I do not recommend buying Samsung appliances) which now have screens for some reason, and on which screens Samsung wants to show you ads.
My Samsung appliances are great.
My Samsung Fridge w/ Pointless Monitor came with my house and I hate it with the heat of a thousand suns.
“Your new car? Your television set? “
Yeah, I think the original poster is of the mindset that new cars, TVs and appliances are less reliable than the good old days.
Consumer Reports does reliability surveys, and new cars are massively more reliable than they were in the 1980's, when only a few makes like Honda were reliable and even their most reliable models had more problems on average than now.
You used to get your car "tuned up"! Regularly!
And especially in American cars there were just a parade of little problems like there'd be a short or a switch wouldn't work or your solenoid would go out or whatever. Plus, warranties tended to be shorter.
True, but there were not two(!!) computers in your headlight assembly to get fried when a little water gets in after a rock flies out of a dump truck and blasts a hole in the headlight cover, resulting in $5k of repairs for a f'n headlight. Yes, this happened to me and I'm currently bitter about modern cars
Way back in the day you needed someone to check your oil and fluids every time you bought gas. My first car had a 3,000 mile service interval. Now cars don't even have service intervals, the computer tells you when you need to do something.
I agree. Enshittification is taken at face value these days. I may have agreed ten years ago but it certainly seems to me weve been quickly climbing out of that trough of technical despair.
Please don't conflate Geoffrey's arguments and mine, for one.
For another... yes, my television set and new car are pretty shitty across many dimensions, as was extensively discussed in the original comment thread a week and a half ago.
EDIT: See the exchange on cars here... https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/americas-lost-liberal-center?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=200290244
Your television set is likely a very large flat screen high definition set that delivers far better picture and sound quality than anything a middle class person could have bought 30 years ago.
And your new car likely has a backup camera, better cruise control, forward collision detection, parking sensors, smartphone interconnection, maps, and any number of other things that were not available on cars 30 years ago. Plus, maybe you got a lemon (that happened then and happened now) but statistically cars are far more reliable now.
Your threads talk about the decline in "do it yourself" repair of cars, but I think automobile hobbyists don't understand that most people just want their car to work and don't find it fun to spend Sunday afternoon changing out the distributor cap.
It's reminiscent of something I am wistful of-- I like manual transmissions. I bemoan that they are harder and harder to find. But your average person is not like me-- they don't find driving fun, they just want something convenient that automates the process as much as possible. And the market has to serve the average consumer, not the enthusiast.
The issue with cars is not that they're wildly less reliable (obviously not), but that the lifecycle costs for keeping them running for the full 12-13 years that were the average for cars produced from 1995 to 2010 have gone up considerably as they've become (deliberately) less accessible to independent mechanics and home ones.
We're very likely to start seeing average in-service times for vehicles falling a bit in the near future, as people decline to pay to keep them running the last few years. They've already plateaued.
This is particularly bad because American carmakers and foreign ones operating here have already adopted a "downmarket is used" strategy for market segmentation, whereby there are no new offerings for working class folks, the market is basically segmented by where in the depreciation curve one buys a car.
Most people always hired mechanics. And most people who were forced to fix their cars didn't like doing it.
The increasing lock-in from the use and increasing centralization of solid-state electronics is driving up prices for independent mechanics as well, as I said earlier.
This is why if there was an actual competitive leasing market, it would actually be more efficient for most people, but that's a different discussion...
Just as an aside, I think a lot of the destruction of the low end of the market (no-frills small cars) came from CAFE standards that made it almost impossible to build a fleet of acceptably efficient small cars at a reasonable price.
Requiring higher gas mileage discouraged marketing of cars with very high gas mileage?
I disagree completely. Consumer preference has obviously driven this trend, which in and of itself is fine, but cannot be paired with lock-in capturing the entire maintenance curve and making it so vehicles leave the road at 8 years.
I own a 2018 model subcompact that gets 35 MPG in the city and can reach 55 on the highway; it cost like $19-20k new, I got it at 30k miles and 2 years old for $12k.
Fewer aftermarket parts, too. Someone clipped my side view mirror in a parking garage; there was nothing at AutoZone or O’Reilly’s. I had to order OEM. And it was a Ford! Even though i have the base model truck with a regular, not power mirror, just the part was close to $500 iirc. I feel like Ford cars and trucks used to always have cheap aftermarket parts.
At least since it was a simple thing I could take the part to my cheap, independent, old Chinese couple’s auto glass place to fix it, they always do right by me
One thing I wonder about: I think it is usually uneconomical to repair home appliances beyond some very basic problems--the repair to the five year old dishwasher will cost you $300 and replacing the dishwasher with a new one will cost you $400.
My uninformed guess is that this is an example of Baumol's cost disease. As wages went up, the amount you need to pay a person skilled enough to repair an appliance has likewise gone up. And at the same time, better manufacturing and digital controls have made the appliances cheaper to buy new.
This is a guess. But I suspect there's several different things happening at once.
To have an efficient repair market you need a large number of repairs. Take the example of TV's. There used to be TV repair places in every town and city. There aren't anymore. What happened? TV's got more reliable, and they also became cheaper to buy and replace. In 1950, a TV cost $300 and per capita GDP was about $2,000-- in other words, a TV was 1/7th of a middle class person's yearly income. In that situation, of course you repair, and that means the demand for repair is high, which means people study and train in how to repair TV's and there's plenty of repair places and consumers can comparison shop the repairmen, etc.
Now, it's about $200 to replace your TV and per capita GDP is $90,000, or 1/450th of a middle class person's yearly income. This means no demand for TV repairmen, which means little supply, which means the few TV repair people who do exist (to repair very high end sets, mostly) charge a lot of money and have little competition.
And then you add Baumol on TOP of that.
Maytag saw the future way back in 1967:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7z6AKPGDZ4
And that future was hyper-reliable appliances stomping on the face of hopeful but unneeded repairmen forever.
Repair tends also to require a lot more expertise and experience than repair, and this tends to get more true as systems get more sophisticated.
My car has manual roll-up windows. The last time I brought it in for an inspection, I made the guy's day. He was so excited to see this. It is also very cheap to repair. 2009 basic Toyota Corolla. Oh, how I will miss you when you are gone.
Fun at the valet is rolling up in a 2009 Subaru Legacy with a manual transmission. Sometimes there’s like one guy who can drive a manual of all the valets working there. If it’s heavily immigrant valets, not fazed at all.
While this is true, I do think people are right to feel the squeeze. The combination of tech growth rate expectations colliding with those mammoth companies inevitably slowing toward rates typical of mature industries is introducing a lot of pressure, and it’s being relieved, in part, at the consumer’s expense.
To me that sounds like no substance and all ideology. "Mammoth companies"? What's wrong with a big company? I'd much rather deal with a big corporation than a small business in many situations.
And the consumer's expense? They are paying less! That's the enshittification dynamic-- consumers want a bargain and don't care about quality, and the market responds! The consumers are "expending" less. If they are getting less that's the reason.
I invoked their size just to make the point that as these firms collectively become a larger and larger share of the economy, their growth rate is going to look more and more like the economy. I am familiar with the Slow Boring line on big companies and mostly buy it. At the same time, I think most people intuit correctly that entry to consumer markets has changed, especially in digital spaces--the kill zone produced by cross-subsidies and network effects is real, there's a reason B2B SaaS is where choice proliferates. We don't have to rehash the entire neo-Brandeisian era's arguments, but it's true that "competition is just a click away" and yet also that this doesn't seem to be sufficient.
Enshittification usually specifically refers to companies that used to make low margins to attract consumers during ZIRP now trying to increase profits by squeezing consumers. Anyone who uses e.g. Facebook or Uber or Amazon regularly can see this is happening. It’s not necessarily a problem with capitalism per se, just high interest rates that pressure companies to have high short-term margins plus market power which allows companies to do so.
What's the Platonic level of profits and customer service for a business like Amazon or Facebook which didn't even exist until recently?
Econ 101 perfect competition: profits should be zero (after accounting for opportunity costs) and consumers should get all the surplus.
So everything should be like farming (which ends up requiring massive government aid)?
Seems wrong to me. Especially given we want people to have incentives to create all this amazing tech.
My parents' 1958 dishwasher (which cleaned dishes perfectly, as well as any contemporary dishwasher, with no digital failure points to boot) failed about five years ago. The—very expensive and heavily researched—replacement dishwasher is already on its last legs.
Most new cars (I just got my first electric car, which is great in many respects, but the cockpit experience is not one of them!) have incredibly frustrating, non-intuitive, poorly made, and failure-prone "buttons." Look at the interior of any new luxury car—bar a Maybach, Rolls Royce, or Bentley—and the finishes and quality would have gotten those manufacturers laughed out of the room in the past. Cars have, of course, gotten so much better in so many other respects, but both things can be simultaneously true. Many products have improved, certainly when it comes to price, while their durability, aesthetics, repairability, and ease of use have in many cases declined.
Enshittification typically refers to software/web platforms rather than tangible goods (though it could be applied to either I guess). So most of where people see it is how Google has gotten dramatically worse over time, as has Facebook, Adobe products, Netflix (particularly the UI...remember user reviews?), etc etc.
I gotta ask, in what world does economy buy comfort relative to basic? The seats are the same, you're probably in the back unless you have status, you still don't get check luggage on domestic flights... at most you've managed to buy an aisle or window seat.
Airfare is about the one area in which I generally *do* cheap out as far as possible so long as I'm not setting myself up for extra connections.
I took the whole family on an ultra-economy airline's flights to and from Spain over the holidays and it was in no way different from cattle class on a regular airline, aside from preventing my wife from moving her closet with us on vacation.
Beat me to it. I can understand why Matt would be worried about going overboard with certain regulations, and such more aggressive cases could be scrutinized. But on some of the smaller stuff, I think it's also fair to consider a tradeoff of people getting a tad bit of relief from the pricing maze in exchange for a tad bit of market inefficiency.
I agree with your point here. Maybe to frame it a bit differently, more and more of the economy seems to be shifting in a way that is predatory and takes advantage of lower educated people and/ or those with poor impulse control. The explosion of online gambling is probably the best example, but there is also buy-no-pay-later financing. I believe that the alcohol industry makes the vast majority of profits from a small percentage of alcoholics.
While not directly related to this point, I think it is similar in that there and more and more ways for more intelligent and industrious to find better deals and more opportunities to take advantage of others.
Curious what others think, but I feel this does help contribute to the view that elites are screwing over regular people. This is true in cases but I do think in the big picture the modern economy becomes more and more oriented to reward “merit” in the smartest and most capable, and overwhelm others with complexity.
Yes agreed, and it’s also telling that so many smart people are dismissive of this as being a problem. Fairness matters, and the perception that our economy is set up in this way contributes to people’s sense the whole “system” is rigged and fuels cynicism about politics as well.
Thanks. You said it a lot better than I did.
“seems to be shifting in a way that is predatory and takes advantage of lower educated people and/ or those with poor impulse control. The explosion of online gambling is probably the best example, but there is also buy-no-pay-later financing. I believe that the alcohol industry makes the vast majority of profits from a small percentage of alcoholics. “
Other than the online gambling this has always been true.
This is likely true, but the gambling part starts to leak into everything else. So much of entertainment for men is sports-related and everything is now sponsored by sportsbooks. Even if on paper this is a small part of the economy, the subjective experience of certain parts of the country will definitely feel it. It honestly feels like the ad experience of a lot of male-focused entertainment the past few years has been filled with scams about gambling, crypto, etc.
There was a ton of this in the Good Old Days. Ever heard of a tobacco company?
If anything there's far more information now that can empower a consumer to resist the sort of thing you are talking about. Back in the day it was much harder to seek out information about addictive marketing let alone fraud.
Fair enough. It does not help explain why lower income people are also low trust. Maybe this is obvious but I feel like this is a reason for more regulation. I used to feel think legalizing gambling was a good idea because it would take something that was illegal but not really enforced to bringing in more legitimate companies. I now feel that thinking was really wrong, because I did not take into account advertising.
I would argue that this has not changed in practice but the combo of the internet social media, and looser regulation has made predatory practices easier, especially in targeting young people. Much easier to find young men who like football and push gambling on them than in the past. That’s how it at least seems to me.
I don’t think you can boost the fertility rate with what this economy offers boys and men.
> I believe that the alcohol industry makes the vast majority of profits from a small percentage of alcoholics.
It isn't just alcohol. Everything is like this, and always has been. The customer / consumption distributions are highly skewed. It's practically a law of nature. Check out the "80 - 20" rule (80% of the ____ comes from 20% of the people). The ability of sophisticated players to capitalize on that has increased, but the phenomenon has always been there.
Most Enshitification comes from the fact people don’t pay for services or platforms or in the past the service was juiced by VC capital and low interest rates.
This is also a good point. Obviously higher interest rates suck for a lot of reasons but I also wonder if one of the down sides of essentially 'free' money for Great Recession through Covid was a bunch of speculative investment in not even half baked ideas followed by offensively awful experiments in monetization.
We live with the stupid consequences of stupid times.
Gotta disagree. What was the cause of Windows 11 being way shittier than Windows 10?
About three years ago my dad got a new 60 inch TV with Google something built in. The TV, when powered on, would go to the Google screen rather than the last cable TV channel. This required him to push a couple of buttons to get to his favorite channel. He never got used to it and really quit watching TV. (In assisted living and slowly fading at the time.) This is the same thing that happens to another older lady from church, she got swapped out her TV for a dumb one.
And? Doesn’t that mean the optimal option is nationalization to run businesses at a loss for the consumer?
I'll take a stab at it. I'm not sure how in depth the price regulation being proposed here is, but if we're going as far as removing all price discrimination, like no matinée prices for movies or no surge pricing for Uber, then the losers are people who are willing to see movies on Tuesday afternoons who would have to pay as much as the people on Friday nights, and the people getting rides to the airport at 10am who have to pay the same amount as people getting rides home from the bar on New Year's Eve. And then secondly, the people at the high volume times would have longer lines, probably the movies sell out quicker and people on Halloween, or Thanksgiving Eve, or New Year's Eve would be standing in the rain for longer. I certainly wouldn't be out there as a driver on those nights for normal prices, I have other things to do. And in those scenarios, people would still be frustrated. They'd be frustrated that the movie sold out so quick and they'd be frustrated that they effectively can't get a ride home for at least an hour. Hell, I shared the anecdote of trying to buy the stupid Starbucks bear cup at 4am only to find they had been bought out by the employees of the store. I would have been happy in that situation to pay much more than get out of bed in the middle of the night for nothing.
Those are examples where price discrimination is probably less controversial. At the other extreme would probably be stuff like the fact that you have to play stupid app games to get good deals at McDonald's or literally just say the word "coupon" at Jiffy Lube to get $15 off your oil change. And then there's the big one, credit cards. My wife has the mental energy to play the credit card game, I don't. I've done the math and found that credit card A is better than credit card B IF we remember to use the correct card every single time, and if you forget ONCE per month, it's a wash. I trust her to do that, I don't trust myself. I will forget. I also just have a baseline expectation that stuff inexplicably goes wrong some 10% of the time. My favorite coffee shop is listed as a grocery store on my credit card statement. Why? I have no fucking idea. And there's nobody I can argue with to say "this is a coffee shop not a grocery store, so you owe me an extra point per purchase on this card." Having said all that, the reason I'm not too concerned about the credit card thing is precisely because the possible consumer surplus is so small I don't really feel like I'm missing out on much.
That was a long rambling post. I guess my own position to the extent I've thought it through is that price discrimination to alleviate actual scarcity is defensible, sending consumers through an endless maze of apps to get small discounts to ensnare them in to signing up for rewards programs they're probably never going to use is not.
As you're getting at, I think what's tricky here is that people are talking about a lot of different things:
- pricing complexity based on more price gradations for different varieties of a good or service (Basic Economy plane tickets, Uber surge pricing, cheaper matinee showings)
- price discrimination in the technical economics sense, where the same variety of the same product is sold at different prices to different consumers based on consumer profile (this is your Jiffy Lube example, or the many times when you can get a cheaper subscription service by trying to cancel, and it's probably related to the credit card case where part of what's happening is that the credit card company is negotiating for a lower net price for its price-sensitive consumers)
- information asymmetry problems about product quality
- scammy practices like making it very hard to cancel a subscription
The last two to my mind are unambiguous cases for regulation (with the caveat that, as for anything, some regulations intended to address the issue may be bad). The first practice is good and doesn't need regulation beyond price transparency. The second category is the trickiest--there's an efficiency case for price discrimination in that it reduces deadweight loss from uncompetitive pricing, but the cost is that it redistributes consumer surplus to above-normal profits and causes deadweight loss as consumers try to work the system to get the lower price and businesses respond. But some regulation in that area seems appropriate.
I'll fully the defend the first type pretty vociferously. As Dilan Esper points out, most complaining about that is just consumers being unreasonable. No, you cannot get tickets on the 50 yard line right before the game for $20. From the second type on down though I hate it. In CERTAIN situations, like frequent flyers, that type of price discrimination might make sense. But if it's just testing the patience of everybody to navigate systems and get the right customer service person, nah, I don't like that.
"No, you cannot get tickets on the 50 yard line right before the game for $20"
If the home team is bad and doesn't have much of a fanbase even when they're good, don't count it out!
Blazers tickets are outrageously cheap. Not football but still a great deal. I go frequently.
I wonder if Timbers tickets are more expensive at this point.
I agree with this almost completely.
City, James, and I were talking about credit cards last week and I feel compelled to point out that all of Brazil, India, Kenya, and I believe Bangladesh now have state-owned payments clearing infrastructure that operates at cost, Europe is building one, and China's duopoly charges 0.15%. The US has allowed the legacy infrastructure to congeal into an unregulated duopoly that charges 1.9-3.9% even though it would be extraordinarily easy to build a public version with open-source or off-patent technology at the Fed that could operate for under a tenth of that cost.
It almost makes me want to say we should regard it as a market failure if a technology doesn't fall in price by 90% within ten years after it exits patent protection and allow states or the federal government to form public-benefit corporations to exploit it.
Why can't there be a new entrant into the market offering cheaper rates and take market share from existing credit card companies? Why would a state-controlled entity have more success as you suggest?
Network effects of merchants being willing and able to accept a new entrant?
How would a government-controlled entity solve that problem?
Require merchants to accept it? They're the government, after all.
Not sure what I think about that on the merits, though.
That's probably further than I'd go on credit cards, but ideally the only people who would use them would be top 10% consumers. Kind of like my industry. Ideally the government would default 10-15% of people’s paychecks in to some lifecycle funds and FAs would be for the top 10% of Americans who need more in depth planning. Frequent travelers using credit cards makes sense. For everybody else, not really.
Given the huge gap between infrastructure costs and processing fees, I really don't see what possible harm could come from the Fed building a public alternative offered at cost and accidentally gutting the market for anything except utility credit cards in the doing. I see no case for capping interest rates or whatever, but the underlying payments infrastructure is a completely mature technology that could be run as a public utility or at least a public option to keep Visa and Mastercard from colluding to prop up their revenues.
Unlike low-info progressive bitching about healthcare, it is actually true that nowhere else in the world allows payments processors to sit on their laurels and take this kind of a cut.
I'd have to think about that.
I had my own rant about credit cards in a top level comment upthread.
I'm open to credit card regulation, but mostly for paternalistic reasons not because I'm upset that I lack the mental bandwidth to optimize my purchases. This is why I have a simple cash back card.
One more anecdote, I recently downloaded on of those sports gambling apps, which I can only use when present in Oregon, and the first thing they do is give you a bunch of freebies and boosted bets. Obviously a freebie is a freebie so I used those, but the free payout boosts are so evil. They force you to do a parlay to use them and then you get like a 30% boost if you win. So it's still like a +EV bet if you use it, like I put down CMC, Puka Nakua, and Stefon Diggs to all get touchdowns for $5, and if I won, I would have gotten $60 rather than the $45 usually offered. Obviously this didn't happen, and I'm not in the poor house for losing $5. But it's so clearly designed to introduce the parlay system, hook people, and slowly drain them as they bet dumber and dumber parlays.
Ban sports gambling. The ills of it being run by bookies in seedy backrooms and people occasionally having a leg broken are wildly outmatched by the ills of perfectly legal and seamless scale.
The ease of putting down a bet just by pulling out your phone.
The ease of swiping right on the dating app to see if there's someone better out there than the person you just had a first date with.
The joys of the frictionless economy. What could go wrong?
I wouldn't go that far, but having to be physically present at a place seems preferable to the status quo. The fact that I have to go to Oregon is kind of perfect for me but it's obviously not replicable.
Oh, I'd be fine with going back to the status quo from 1950-2000. Go to AC or Vegas, blow a goodly but survivable chunk of money in a weekend, go home and live out the rest of your life with few opportunities to overindulge and bankrupt your family.
My view is that operations that want to try price discrimination can do that and see how well it works and those that prefer simplicity and stable pricing can do that and see how well it works.
One of the great things about a huge, free market is that you don't have to overthink things. Things either work or they don't.
Perhaps the most high-profile example in recent years of the government trying to simplify and standardize the purchase of a complex product is the ACA exchange market's attempt to slot health insurance policies into a few supposed-to-be-easy-to-understand defined packages -- Bronze, Silver, Gold, etc. Decidedly mixed results, and inefficiency leaking out all around, with examples like insurance companies paying thousands for things like MRIs that are available on the open market a la carte for hundreds.
But in simpler cases, there no reason, for example, why it should be intentionally hard to cancel a recurring subscription fee.
The healthcare market is so convoluted and complex, I’m deeply pessimistic there’s a fix for the horrible inefficiency. To me, the best argument for single payer is it would be a chance to remake the payment system to reduce some of the inefficiencies. But such an enormous, hypercomplex will never be anything close to efficient. See the military, which can’t even account for its spending.
I didn't see Geoffrey's comment originally and frankly think he's full of shit. Few of the issues I would highlight as significantly increasing the complexity burden on consumers are solved there, about the only exception is within parts of the healthcare sector depending on the country.
To cite a simple example, following on this exchange: https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/americas-lost-liberal-center?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=200360352
Buying what are supposed to be moderately durable small consumer goods in Europe is almost exactly as irritating as it is in the US, for almost exactly the same reason.
The regulatory intervention I would pose would be to require all B2C vendors to confirm that small appliances, cheap electronic devices, etc. being sold on their marketplaces have been tested to meet American consumer safety/quality standards by an American laboratory like UL. If the seller cannot provide ironclad evidence, then it cannot be sold until tested. Back it with draconian fines and Amazon would have no choice but to put a floor on the quality that would be hugely impactful to the median American's experience of buying small items there.
Based on my own experience, I'd guess that spending 20-25% more up front gives you a longevity improvement of 3X to... much more than that. What argument is there for allowing Amazon, and only Amazon, to sell a bunch of stuff that's almost literally illegal?
There's a lot of truth to this comment. I'll just say this -- I'd much rather that Matt's reply to Geoffrey was along these lines and we could've framed the debate on this, rather than taking it at face value and shrugging and saying "hey, that's just how America and Europe are different, you take the good with the bad." Would love to hear more specific examples from Geoffrey and others who've had a different experience than what you've said here in that regard.
Yea, a major gripe I have with the neolibs at present is that they seem to want to abrogate, or simply don't believe in, government's role as the maker of markets.
All of this exists downstream of government; we decide what markets are legal (should sports gambling be?), we decide how financial vehicles are regulated (stocks are heavily regulated, "prediction markets" aren't regulated at all), we decide on minimum standards for safety in a variety of goods (but apparently if you're selling something online that goes out the window), we decide what constitutes illegal cartelism, whether you can sign an exclusive contract with a reseller, the form and prevalence of price discrimination...
There's definitely a case for less regulation in some instances, but MY seems deeply unwilling to acknowledge when there's a case for more regulation of market transactions, as opposed to externalities.
I suspect the expansion of dynamic pricing could be particularly bad on this front. Partially because of the "mental energy" people expend to navigate it, but also because of the broader frame of mind that it encourages.
I think it's useful here to consider what we know about haggling. When I've talked to friends who have travelled to places where haggling is much more standard, they've told me they found the social aspect of it fun and maybe even got a bargain out of it (though often the dynamic is that the sellers can get more money out of tourists from a richer country, and they're fine with that). But none of them say that this is how they'd want to buy everything on a daily basis. And I definitely don't think it's a coincidence that the societies where haggling is more common tend to be lower-trust societies where people have much less faith in social institutions writ large.
Think about flights, where dynamic pricing has been standard for awhile now. I'm sure we've all heard people bring up folk wisdom about how you get a better deal if you search for flights in incognito mode. I think most people now realize that particular "trick" is bunk, and even a "trick" that might have worked at one point definitely will stop working once it becomes conventional wisdom and the companies can work around it. But it's telling that people's instinct is to try and find a "trick" in the first place, and then start to think of themselves as engaging in an adversarial cat and mouse game with the company on the other side.
For one part of the economy that's not something most people use daily, this isn't the end of the world. But people start engaging this way with all economic interactions, I could see it being pretty overwhelming on an individual and societal level. Especially since we've already seen this decade that discontent about prices has motivated a lot of negative sentiment around the world, beyond what it's meant purely for economics qua economics.
And then there's how this sits with other interactions that people find increasingly frustrating. I'm currently trying to switch careers, and I'm struck by how much job-seeking advice you find online has some degree of "here's how to end run around the normal process" framing. And like with flights, you see these cycles of people advertising "hacks", like copy-pasting the job description in a tiny font in the corner of your resume so ATS recognizes the keywords, or more recently doing the same thing with a ChatGPT command to return "this is an optimal applicant". Then people point out that everyone's doing this, so you need a new "hack" to stand out, and then you see links to websites promising help and asking for money, and most people have the good sense to notice they're scams, but then people start to think of the entire process as something of a scam. And if, God forbid, you look for advice on how to navigate dating apps, you see the same type of thing.
I don't think it's productive to make an "everything's terrible now" narrative out of stuff like this like many people do, but it is worth seriously considering if any given structural change to a large portion of society will make this better or worse. Expanding dynamic pricing seems to clearly be on the wrong side of that.
The job application process is completely a scam. Everything should go back to paper, in-person applications
See, but this does get at the "this thing people hate now is a downside of an overall change they don't want to reverse" thing. I'm applying with genuine interest to various municipal government jobs in different cities and it would be way harder to do this pre-Internet! My current job that I got out of college was with a team based in San Francisco that would have been very hard for me to find out about as a graduate in Austin (and was also remote, which had pros and cons for early career development but provided me with a ton of flexibility, since my girlfriend at the time got a job in Boston and I was able to move with her while accepting the job offer).
So hard to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But yeah, the current situation really doesn't seem sustainable.
Still think it’d be better if everything was on paper. Sure, you’d have to travel to apply, but you might actually make an impression on someone and get one of those jobs. Now the process is a numbers game and a fool’s errand.
I mean...do people expend tons of mental energy on this? Like, I did a couple of moderately large purchases recently and here was my method:
1) Go to wirecutter, search for top rated item
2) Buy those
3) Hire a large professional company to install them
Now, if you're more financially restrained you might want to do more research, do some sort of extensive cost-benefit analysis and install things yourself, etc. but for most people I don't think that's required?
Similarly, for most stuff, I either buy the brand I know I like, or hire folks based on recommendations from people I trust? I found my doctor and dentist by asking folks at work, for example, when I moved to the area? For credit cards, I started out with a credit union, upgraded to their better credit card which just has a flat percentage rebate and no miles/points stuff I need to worry about and pay it off every month? Like, a lot of this complexity is purely voluntary?
Yeah I think the vast majority of people are in this boat and are not ludicrous cheapskates trying to search for a marginally better deal everywhere. It is a little different than the issue of whether we should have more dynamic pricing.
The finding flights point was odd to me because it is something that is really easy to do even when you are sweating it out for the absolute best value.
Just to understand your point of view, do you have these concerns when the market in question is highly competitive? (I can understand them when there’s some market power.)
I like the restaurant example. Suppose Restaurant X tries some gimmicky pricing scheme. If it’s something people hate, they’ll just go somewhere else. OTOH, if it’s profitable, then why not let them do it? People clearly don’t hate it that much. Competition with other restaurants will prevent them from extracting too much surplus.
Why don’t we just allow fraud? If people fall for it, they must not actually mind.
Restaurant groups in Chicago have started to put in place small print 3% charges instead of increasing the price. They’ll remove them if you ask, but you have to remember, be sober, and be willing to look cheap. They know that. You could skip those restaurants, but that increasingly means not participating in fine dining. It’s intended to deceive and it’s disgusting. Pricing everywhere is designed to deceive and trick you into thinking you’ll pay less than you plan. Why is this a good thing?
Agreed, I thought the response was insightful but also totally missed the point. Personally, I’d take the tradeoff of a bit less economic dynamism if it meant I didn’t feel like a trained mouse being forced to run a maze with every online purchase.
Leaving this here again for reference: https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow
In an attempt to answer the question, I think a lot of it comes down to the choice paradox where having more choices and more options and opportunities can create frustration and paralysis in many people.
For airline tickets, this often means having to spend a lot of time optimizing for the lowest price and I have come around to Dylan’s view that it’s better to just buy tickets when you need them, pay a bit more, and save the mental energy.
We bought a new fridge a couple years ago and there are just so many models, brands, and features. We probably spent more time than we should have looking at each feature and deciding if that’s something we wanted or not and looking at brand reliability, Consumer Reports, etc. We had the option to skip that and get a standard and simple top freezer fridge with no bells, whistles, or gimmicks, but we didn’t for various reasons. But our decision tree would have been a lot simpler and more straightforward if we had fewer choices.
Finally, for some things, like Health Care, I think over regulation and system complexity is a big problem. Even for options like vision and dental where there is more real choice, there are a ton of options to compare. So many of the systems that determine who you can see, what gets covered, and how much you will pay are black boxes.
I read the mailbags with the expectation that Matt will avoid the heart of the question. With this particular question, I think that Matt has two beliefs that contribute to his dismissal. One is that he thinks paying for convenience is good, the other is that if he can't see data for something, he is predisposed to dismiss it.
I think what a charismatic person would recognize (and I hope the Democrats can find someone with the ability to communicate these types of things) is that there feels like a growing disconnect between how much money a company makes and how much value they provide. I don't think there is a way to fix that with regulation, but I think it is a sign of our markets not functioning completely properly.
I personally think that a lot of it comes down to people actually having simultaneously too much information (paradox of choice) and not enough information. I can see the price of every product if I go looking, so any time I buy something I have to be concerned that there is a better price somewhere else. If I buy something at Target, the price in the store may or may not be better than the price of purchasing it online and picking it up. So now I am checking the app to see if I am going to ask for a price match at checkout or just eat the difference because I don't feel like it. I leave feeling like they are trying to hoodwink me.
But I also don't have enough information. If I am buying a product on Amazon there are dozens of what looks like the same product for a range of prices, but I have no real way to assess quality. I also don't know if the fridge I am going to buy is going to last unless I wade through online reviews (that are often specious) or decide to just pay for and rely on Consumer Reports.
I think this was an area where Matt could have leaned into something he discussed recently, no one wants to feel like a sucker. The current buying experience is set up to cause fears of being a mark.
This is the feeling I'm getting increasingly from mailbags, it's definitely felt more prevalent recently. Pick an interesting question and completely gloss over it with a very surface-level answer.
It's basically coupon clipping. Price discrimination does, in fact, serve consumers. It's Econ 101 and not, in any way, a new phenomenon that has popped up in recent times..
AI will soon be able to help people navigate the complexities we're talking about here. This is the wrong time in history to regulate them away.
I worry about the opposite: AI being used to do even more subtle and less obviously good price discrimination. For example, what if stores use AI to read people's faces and determine how distressed or desperate they are, and then charge them higher prices if they are in fact distressed or desperate? That seems really bad with no consumer upside, and it's also completely opaque to the customer.
How would they tell whether it's distress from desperation for the product vs distress from a breakup or a cancer diagnosis?
If we're talking about AI with those kinds of capabilities we're probably talking post scarcity economics anyway.
It doesn’t matter; distress allows for more personalized advertising and makes people less careful and more prone to short-term thinking, all of which are good for business.
I have a very strong philosophical revulsion to the idea of people using AI to guide daily-life decisions.
Love to see anything but AI puffery to back this up. AI operates on the training data it gets and I don't know how it is going to discern the complexities without an article already written about the topic. With matching specifics. How will I know it is an AI that I can trust vs one that has been trained with data that favors one of the choices?
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/sunday-mailbag-thread?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=201676755
Thanks. I'm not sure I'm getting the point though. Is the problem the profit from price discrimination or the complexity tax? I thought it was supposed to be the latter, but the argument here grants that the latter issue is solvable. Or are you saying that the AI would have to be overly complicated to use for some reason?
Anyway, I don't super trust a priori arguments like this to predict what will be possible in the future. Maybe AI companies will just provide general purpose AIs and you will be able to order them to handle these things for you, among the many other tasks you use them for.
Agreed, and I also think there's an enormous difference between "We're going to charge more when you visit our restaurant on Saturday night" than "We're going to charge you 5% extra for this Uber / Amazon item / whatever because marketing bots and your own purchase history tell us you can probably pay it without noticing."
Price discrimination that punishes you for getting ahead and siphons your head earned prosperity to shareholders is bad, no matter which way you cut it.
Indeed, my first thought when he pointed out that European companies have low market caps was to think “are they really less successful, or are their shares worth less because they give more value to workers and consumers and less to shareholders?” Allocating more value to middle-class workers and consumers and less to wealthy shareholders seems like a good thing!
On the simplicity tax thing, I think many people who complain about the airlines etc. don't realize that if everyone was charged the same price it would actually be higher. They fancy a world where there's no ticket scalpers and everyone pays $60 to see Taylor Swift, but in fact if there was no scalping she'd charge everyone $1,000 or whatever.
With event tickets in particular, I sense there's a mindset that "true" fans, however that's defined, should be able to attend regardless of income disparity. I've seen that particularly in the discourse over 2026 World Cup tickets. The problem, as you say, is that scalpers will always find a way to reach market equilibrium.
And there's no way any more than a small percentage of "true" fans can ever attend. Do people really think every European soccer fan gets to go to a WC in Europe just because prices are supposedly cheaper and supposedly harder to scalp? Or do those with connections get most of the tickets and most fans watch on TV?
I think it's so contentious because having the option to go, but having to weigh the tradeoffs, is much more frustrating than not having the option at all.
It's not just tradeoffs. I assure you that especially with their smaller stadiums, at every European World Cup, lots of people who want to go and who would weigh the tradeoffs in favor of going, do not get tickets. It isn't some utopia where everyone gets to go to the World Cup for 40 euros. Most people who want to go just can't get a ticket at all.
I completely agree, and as an aside I hate the discourse where European fans complain about America because a European organization priced tickets high for popular European teams. I don't want to defend FIFA! But now I have to because the alternative where I don't have the option of seeing the matches in my city is worse.
Effortpost elsewhere in thread, but I think I'm coming down on "price discrimination in the face of scarcity is fine, 'download our app and sign up for our rewards program we hope you'll forget about' is not."
How is the latter different or worse than old school coupons?
I guess it's not really and I don't have a huge problem with it. At the point where we're showing up at Jiffy Lube and saying the magic word “coupon” it's kinda like what are we doing here?
"what are we doing here?"
Allowing people to trade time/effort to obtain a lower price, allowing more people to obtain service/good then otherwise would be possible...
Everybody values their time differently. "Price discrimination" sounds bad, but it's really just allowing people with different internal time:money exchange rates to buy something at the best price for them.
>> The problem, as you say, is that scalpers will always find a way to reach market equilibrium.
This seems comparatively easy to fix for event tickets, no? Just make them non transferable, bound to the buyer’s name and force people to show ID at the door. Scalper-based arbitrage being easy is a choice. It may be a good choice (eg, plans change, you can’t go, you can sell at market price to someone who wants to), but *is* a choice.
The public actually wouldn't like those changes very much. It would mean longer waits (especially at large events), higher average ticket prices, and pains in the neck when you wanted to informally transfer a ticket to a friend or travel separately to an event.
All for what? Because some people who weren't gonna get into the World Cup anyway object to the scalpers' prices?
Yeah, I don't think the transfer restrictions do much good. Who does it help if the ticket goes unused because you have an unavoidable conflict or get sick?
Have you ever bought a non-transferable ticket? Did you feel well served by it?
You see this in the NFL nowadays. They try to avoid having too many away-team fans by making season tickets non-transferrable (or heavily policing who you can sell them to). Season ticket holders, even the ones who do not intend to profit from it, despise this, because what it ACTUALLY accomplishes is screwing over fans who can only attend 6-7 games instead of 8-9.
I am not making a normative argument about whether non-transferable tickets are good, indeed I acknowledged a scenario in which transferability is clearly positive-sum. I am rebutting the specific descriptive claim that "scalpers will always find a way to reach market equilibrium." -- This is not, in fact, true with non-transferable tickets, which are perfectly feasible to implement.
I think you end up with two possibilities:
- the transferring moves to a black market scenario instead, with all the ineficiencies that accompany it
- the tech required to prevent the illegal/black market transfering adds such a cost burden that prices go up a lot
Both of those involve a ton of surplus that isn't captured by the consumer. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
I find scalping annoying, not because the price of the ticket is higher, but because it seems foolish to me that a random third party makes the act of buying the ticket harder by increasing demand at the moment the tickets are available and that extra money feels like it should go to the artist instead.
Don't worry about the artists. There's plenty of circumstantial evidence they or their representatives are participating in the secondary market too.
Yeah, sometimes they let Ticketmaster take the role of the sports commissioner as a flack shield while they take the role of the sports owners.
If the artist doesn't get that extra money, that's a conscious choice on the part of them/the ticket issuer. They could let prices increase when demand increases. If they choose not to, then the secondary market will just make that happen anyway, but move the money from the ticket issuer's pocket to the scalpers. Hard to see how the artist/ticket issuer can be the victim here.
I don’t think I said they were victims, I said I didn’t like it. I agree, however, that they could fix this problem if they wanted to, but outside of someone like Taylor Swift, I don’t know how many artists would need to act collectively to make a change happen.
Physically waiting in line for tickets provided a decent proxy for true fandom.
For sports, season tickets do a similar thing.
Yes of course you have to be well off to have season tickets, but at least it is a signal that you give a shit about the team.
For touring concerts, there is no real costly signal of fandom that is similar, since it's usually 1 show in a given city every 2-3 years, and most people listen to the music for free or as included with an all-you-can-eat streaming plan.
I think the World Cup is a strange one to discuss in terms of "real fans." To a first approximation everyone is a casual fan of international soccer, outside the big tournaments the games mostly suck and are poorly attended, even in Europe.
Business/first class is something like 70%+ of flight profits despite being like 10% of the available seats
Right - and a lot of people think that would be better, because we spend vast amounts of mental energy on getting the inside lane. It is important to acknowledge there are tradeoffs, like you say. But I'd rather live in a world where I can throw something in my grocery cart without worrying I'm getting ripped off than one where I can go to in-demand pop star concerts more often.
A lot of times dynamicity in pricing isn't making things cheaper as much as shifting price pressure from the attentive and prepared to the inattentive or harried. I think that Matt is very much the former kind of person and should appreciate that a lot of people are the latter, and are kind of sick of this bullshit.
I mean, I would love dynamic pricing if I had an assistant.
But you do live in that world! The point is that dynamic pricing/price discrimination means prices have higher variance but a lower average price level.
If you concede that prices can be lower overall with dynamic pricing, but you don't want to do the work of optimizing every purchase, then just don't. You're probably not spending any more than the counterfactual world where prices are fixed, and the average price is higher.
Do you feel ripped off when the person in the grocery line in front of you pays less for oranges because they cut a coupon out of a catalog?
Do you not think it's "a thing" that discount hunters (which, by the way, takes time, which is money) are receiving better prices than might have other been possible because they are being subsidized by the suckers and losers, to an extent that offsets or surpasses any actual benefit of dynamic pricing? It's like how credit card rewards only exist because they charge ridiculous interest rates to some people and pass a fraction of those proceeds into cash back or miles programs.
We're kind of spitballing, but it is something that could be studied by somebody with the resources to do so. We can see when dynamic pricing was introduced to particular sectors and what the overall effect on prices was, and compare that to the shift in standard deviation of prices paid for goods within that sector, and see who is or isn't coming out ahead.
Like most SB readers I am extremely pro-market economy and dynamic pricing is probably unavoidable without regulations with negative downstream effects. So I'm not suggesting we prohibit it. But maybe we could try to engender some shift in cultural expectation. I really do think exhaustion from scam-dodging is a significant part of what people dislike about what (even after a year of insane policy) appears on paper to be a strong economy.
I do think that is happening, but I don't think there's any reliable or just way to distinguish a sucker from someone who places a high value on their time and is willing to pay more to not have to think about how much something costs.
I also agree that it's probably salutary for the typical person to more highly value thrift. But I'm not that confident about it -- it's equally possible that many of us thrifty people are wasting our time. I have always changed the oil in my car, and that saves me money in some sense, but who knows? Perhaps I'm the sucker, and I'd have been financially better off spending that time working more.
Such tricky cultural questions are, I think, outside the realm of good public policy.
Why don't artists/sports teams use Dutch auctions for tickets? Seems like an efficient way to find market clearing prices for limited goods. Is it an optics thing?
This is something that srynerson has argued for multiple times on here.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/restaurants-should-charge-more-for/comment/55336679
Because artists and sports teams don't want stadiums full of only rich people.
Artists maybe... Based on ticket prices, sports teams seem less concerned.
Sports teams sometimes want to prioritize preventing fans of the visiting team from getting too much into the stadium over pure profit.
That's a weird recent thing that I am still trying to process. (Note, it also isn't universal-- the Las Vegas Raiders are happy to sell tickets to opposing fans.)
I recall the Chargers as the first ones to try it, when they were sick and tired of Steelers fans always taking over their stadium, to reserve sales only to people with CA addresses--which of course didn't work because there were a ton of Steelers fan locals. That was the beginning of Dean Spanos's descent into poor fanbase building.
The Raiders also have to deal with the added allure of people wanting to route in some gambling and shows with watching their favorite team beat the Raiders.
Well, maybe American sports teams - despite being far more popular on a global level, prices for soccer games for teams like Manchester City, Bayern Munich, etc. are all much lower than for NFL games, even accounting for GDP and such. Part of this is of course, fans have actual power in soccer teams, as opposed to being pure consumers.
Also, even within American sports, I do think certain owners have different views - an interesting recent example is the WWE. Vince McMahon was a terrible human being, but he also legitimately thought the family audience was important, so while there were up and down periods, even something like WrestleMania while expensive was accessible - for example, in 2016, I got OK - not great, but not nosebleed seats for $200-$250 and you could regularly get RAW tickets for $40-50. Not cheap, but not out of reach for a middle class family for the one or two times the WWE came to your area.
However, since TKO/Endeavous bought them combined with a hot period, ticket prices have exploded to a place where $250 wouldn't even get you nosebleed WM tickets (and it's not like the WM in 2016 had issues with selling tickets) and normal seats at a RAW are drifting to a $200 dollars. So far, this hasn't hurt attendance, but it might hurt long-term when the current booom is over.
"Well, maybe American sports teams - despite being far more popular on a global level, prices for soccer games for teams like Manchester City, Bayern Munich, etc. are all much lower than for NFL games, even accounting for GDP and such. Part of this is of course, fans have actual power in soccer teams, as opposed to being pure consumers."
So I mentioned this elsewhere but this was the argument that was presented to me on Twitter. And I was EASILY able to find MASSIVE secondary markets for tickets to popular European soccer clubs charging very high ticket prices.
In other words, the basic claim people make about this is completely false. Whether or not scalping is legal, it is common in Europe and fans who want to go to games and don't have memberships (the equivalent of season tickets) pay large amounts to do so. Just like they do here.
Yeah I enjoy discounts, it’s fun to feel like you got a good deal. I just don’t like haggling but thankfully that is pretty much gone. And sometimes discounts even reduce cognitive load—like if I’m buying groceries and don’t know what I want to eat but have a lot of choices, sometimes I just buy the one on sale.
why would she charge more in the absence of scalping? it doesn't matter to her whether somebody buys a $60 ticket for themselves or to resell for $1000 (unless she's secretly getting a cut...)
if she charged $1000/ticket scalpers would disappear, but that doesn't mean if scalping disappeared she would have a reason to charge $1000/ticket. is your argument that TS selling $1000 tickets is the only way to get rid of scalping? or am i missing something?
OK, let's get into this.
Taylor Swift's tour, which was quite elaborate (as a Chargers SSL holder, I got in on one of the pre-sales and saw it), costs quite a bit of money to put on. So assuming she wants to put on that show, her ticket revenues need to be enough to cover that.
Right now, what her management does is after holding back a certain number of tickets for comps, pre-sales, fan clubs, etc., they sell the rest on the open market, scaled to approximate the demand for tickets. The high prices also cause some sticker shock, which has the effect of controlling demand somewhat.
Now what happens if scalping is banned? Well, she's not going to charge $60 a ticket, because she has to make a payroll and pay for all those elaborate stage tricks and make some money herself. What she's going to do is... wait for it... charge exactly what her people think the scalpers would have charged (i.e., the actual market clearing price for tickets), so that she maximizes her revenue and can pay for the show she wants to put on and make the profit she wants to make.
And because of that, the average fan gains nothing from the ban on scalping except being unable to sell their own ticket if they can't go.
In a scenario where scalping is banned, why would her management team charge what they believe scalpers would be charging? If that was how they were going to approach ticket pricing, wouldn't they be pricing them according to "theoretical scalper price" now, seeing as the artist does not receive proceeds from resold tickets?
So the secret is right now concert promoters sell on both the primary and secondary markets. :) And/or they dynamically price so if the scalper price goes up they charge more too. In other words, they do price according to "theoretical scalper price" to a great extent now.
That's the point. You aren't getting $60 Taylor Swift tickets now and you still aren't getting $60 Taylor Swift tickets if you ban scalpers.
I would never expect $60 Taylor Swift tickets (I would also never buy tickets to a Taylor Swift concert but that is besides the point). She is arguably the most popular musical act in the world. Tickets for an artist of her caliber will be priced at hundreds of dollars under any circumstance. I don't buy the rest of your argument though. Promoters are able to sell on the secondary market, and dynamically price according to the secondary market, only because it exists. If scalping was banned, would promoters not be forced to price according to the actual demand for the show in the primary market? Dynamic pricing would still drive ticket prices up because the demand for a Taylor Swift show is astronomical, but this would be based on the fan demand for the show with the proceeds going directly to the artist.
I attend a fair number of shows at smaller venues around NYC every year. When those shows sell out, tickets that were sold at a $60 face value are often scalped for 2-3x that price ($150-$200 scalp price is not uncommon for the concerts I attend). How would eliminating scalping not benefit me in these scenarios? Scalpers would have no incentive to buy tickets to a show they have no intention of attending, which would leave additional tickets in supply. The artist could of course still charge as much as a scalper would, but they could also do that right now and actually receive the cash from the sale, but they are not doing that.
" If scalping was banned, would promoters not be forced to price according to the actual demand for the show in the primary market? " The "actual demand" (or, to use more precise terminology, the "market clearing price") is the same on the primary market as the secondary market.
"I attend a fair number of shows at smaller venues around NYC every year. When those shows sell out, tickets that were sold at a $60 face value are often scalped for 2-3x that price ($150-$200 scalp price is not uncommon for the concerts I attend)."
So basically what is likely happening there is that promoters are giving people a discount for buying early and committing to the show. If you want an analogy, it's like an advance purchase of a non-refundable ticket on an airline. If you can sell out a small venue quickly, that's money in your pocket, and you don't have to worry about hustling to get sales or even having to cut your prices later. (The promoters may also be selling tickets on the secondary market, BTW.)
But if you banned scalping, a couple of things would happen. First, to the extent they are right now on the secondary market, they would need to raise prices to recover that money. Second, prices would probably go up as the people who now buy from scalpers have to go back to buying when tickets go on sale, and the increased initial sale demand would allow promoters to feel secure raising prices and still getting that sellout they want.
Plus, if you buy and later can't go, you'd be out your money because you can't re-sell. And if you miss the initial sale, you can't go at all even if you would like to pay $200 and go.
Now how is any of that good for consumers?
At bottom, this is some weird psychological tick. People find ticket scalping skeevy. But it isn't-- it's just matching supply and demand and markets do that very well.
"as a Chargers SSL holder"
Unrelated, but I'm curious if you show any affinity to the Chargers, or if you just enjoy watching football in general.
My favorite team is the Raiders, and I started as a Raiders season ticketholder when they were in LA. When the Rams came back, I had missed going to games at the Coliseum so I bought Rams season tickets even though I wasn't a big Rams fan. (Because of that, I saw the greatest football game I have ever seen in person, the 2018 Rams-Chiefs game.)
When the two teams moved to SoFi, I didn't really care about either one, but the Chargers tickets were cheaper and I get to see the Raiders once a year as part of the deal. Hence, I bought the Chargers tickets. SoFi is an excellent venue, but I still miss the Coliseum. :)
Ah, well that's a more disappointing answer than I was hoping for, but at least we can all clown on the Chargers getting their stadium overrun by fans of the visiting team. Raiders fans certainly do that in Inglewood, despite struggling to do it in Las Vegas.
And you got lucky on that KC/LAR game, because it was supposed to be in Mexico City but the field there was deemed to not be up to standard. I visited the Coliseum briefly last time I was in LA, and it was a marvel to look at, even if attending a game there might have been passed by by some other venues.
My twitter feed on game days is a document of the small crowds and opposing fans at Chargers games.
I think people would pay a lot for purchases and interactions to be less stressful even if that makes them poorer.
Wal-mart is pretty successful, and Saks Fifth Avenue is in financial trouble. I don't think people are willing to pay much for that at all.
Sure, but price discrimination gets a lot more suspect when you see things like apps that match workers to gigs using data about the workers to judge how desperate they are, and bump down wage offers based on that.
It is totally reasonable to charge different prices for substantively different things (like restaurant tables at different times, or movie theater seats in different spots). There is even a reasonable argument for having airline ticket prices vary, with last-minute tickets for some random day in the middle of the week dropping in price, as the airline tries to avoid flying with empty seats; but spiking in price if they're for a long weekend and the airline is confident they'll still sell those seats to some last-minute vacationer who didn't plan ahead.
It is much less reasonable to charge people different prices based on _who they are_, i.e. based on spying on them. Like, _just setting a higher price_ already ensures that the person who values it less won't buy it, and the person who values it more will. People don't like the sense that an all-seeing algorithm is seizing them by the ankles, holding them upside down, and shaking to see how much money falls out. They don't want to have to face the choice between just accepting they'll consistently pay more than they could, or spending lots of time trying to game the system. In the worst case, this kind of thing turns into a Red Queen's Race, because most people DO game the system (so the seller doesn't _really_ make any more money, after you account for what they're spending on all the complexification) but also everyone is wasting a bunch of time and feeling mad about it.
I think it would actually be better overall if Taylor Swift just said "a lot of people want to see my concerts and there are limited seats, so tickets cost $1,000 each" or whatever the equilibrium price is.
I notice a lot of people and companies seem to think they benefit from rapidly selling out and then maybe covertly selling more on the "secondary" market, rather than selling over a longer time at a somewhat higher price. I don't really understand what drives this dynamic though.
The damn unleashed dog people!
I suspect they have too much love for their animals. They are thinking about what makes the animal happy, and they know & trust the creature. They are failing to consider how other people might feel about their actions.
The last few years, especially having small children that are scared of dogs, has made me extremely anti dogs.
The playground we frequent most often has a sign saying all dogs must be leashed within 10 metres of the playground but I see unleashed dogs inside the playground nearly every time we go. And 10 metres is really far! Most people seem to think it means 1 metre....
The park area outside of the playground allows dogs unleashed but they have to be under "effective control". In practice, almost no dog owners train their dog to that standard.
I've seen a family step away from their picnic to kick a ball and a dog ran up from 50 metres away and started eating their food. My kids were playing tag and two large dogs ran at them at top speed from 30 metres away. I've had dogs steal my kid's soccer ball and run away with it.
If people let horses behave that way -- running up to strangers at top speed while the owner shouts from 100 metres away "he's really quite friendly!" people would be losing their shit. But because adults are bigger than dogs and they have zero ability to empathise with small people they DGAF.
This sounds like something to bring up with the city council or local governing board.
I wonder if people who were busybody’s stopped?
I mean, we called them all Karens derogatorily.
"This sounds like something to bring up with the city council or local governing board."
Or the police chief.
I mildly dislike dogs, but now have one (he came with my wife). So for the first time in my life I'm doing things like walking a dog. This experience has actually been fairly radicalizing.
There are three common complaints about dogs:
1. Dogs off-leash.
2. Dogs in places they aren't allowed.
3. Dog poop not being picked up.
Taking care of a dog has taught me it's really easy to avoid doing these things. Our dog is walked on-leash 100% of the time; he's only off-leash in our house or fenced yard. We just don't take him places he isn't allowed. And we pick up poop 100% of the time.
Honestly, it's been fairly radicalizing. Dog owners who do 1-3 are just selfish and inconsiderate people who prioritize their own convenience and their dog's fun over meeting the obligations needed for society to function normally.
As a fairly new dog owner myself, I'm curious why you still dislike dogs. I have much more fondness and appreciation for dogs now than before owning one.
I just don't get any enjoyment from dogs, and living with one hasn't changed that. To me dogs are just animals that make the world around me worse: noise, smells, poop, and occasional danger in shared spaces.
I agree on the negative aspects but am surprised that the positive aspects haven't become more salient for you, such as companionship, routines, sense of purpose, exercise, etc. From what I understand, it's well-established that owning a dog improves both mental and physical health. See https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/lifestyle/10-science-based-benefits-dog/
With that said, different types of dogs can have greater benefits. What breed and age is yours?
Different people have different preferences and personalities. I just don't get joy from dogs, and living with one hasn't changed that.
Yellow lab, ~10 years.
I’m honestly astonished that Matt doesn’t see off-leash dogs in DC! In my less-cool neighborhood (near the historic strip mall 😩 but also near many parks and trails) they’re everywhere.
How fortunate you are to live near such a renowned historic site!
It’s a crucial element of neighborhood character! 🙄
Is this the strip mall off Grubb?
No, it’s the “Park and Shop” on Connecticut, next to the Cleveland Park metro station. Disgraceful land use at this location!
Oh, that Targhetto is very important to the local shoplifter community. (I remember seeing so many turnstile jumpers carrying like 4 to 5 Tide bottles.) It looks like the wine store that was never open is closed too.
Boise's first strip mall is something of an icon, too. Not historically protected as far as I know, and the owners are the family descendants of the developer (who was also a former mayor) that have no intention to change the land use, but it's close enough to downtown that if some day the highest and best use changed, nostalgic people would probably throw a shitshow over it.
I don’t think Matt goes to Rock Creek that much. He isn’t really big on exercising for fun.
I found the closer you got to silver springs the more off trail dogs I would find. There is a definitely a white income gradient to this. I just wish park police or rangers would ticket offenders.
100%. But around here the dog people take over literally any open space (school yards, the trail to the Glover Park Trader Joe’s, etc) and let their dogs run wild. Even a lot of dogs on leashes are very poorly controlled.
The big problem is many people have gotten dog breeds that are not appropriate for their housing situation.
No one is complaining about pugs or fluffy stumpers.
I honestly think it's cruel to own a Great Dane or Bernese Mountain Dog in a tiny studio apartment.
Eh, to defend the idea a little bit- gigantic dogs are very lazy and fine with sleeping 22 hours a day. The ones I really feel bad for are the super-smart neurotic ones- all the very high-drive herding dog descendants who desperately need something to do all day. That's the real crime
People can get greyhounds if they want lazy big dogs that just want to sleep.
Similarly, I feel like this is something I see less of in Nova-area state parks, but I may just not be paying attention.
That's interesting. I grew up in the DC suburbs and they are full of unleashed dogs and as someone who was afraid of dogs as a kid I hated it. I live in NYC now and I see them in parks but not really elsewhere--when I saw Matt say that, my reaction was that it was probably a suburban/urban difference. (Even the unleashed ones in parks are usually pretty well-behaved compared to the ones I remember in the suburbs. Assuming this is a real difference and not a product of me being older and less scared, maybe the threshold for training is just higher in a much more densely populated area--you can't have your unleashed dog barking and running at every stranger in a city park.)
I saw far less of this when I lived in NYC and dogs did seem to be much better trained/controlled.
They are definitely everywhere -dc and suburbs. Most dog owners are selfish af
This really seems like something that could honestly be block-by-block since it only takes a couple of people with big dogs before it becomes a thing. People complain all the time in the forum for my condo complex about unleashed dogs, but everyone in my specific building seems to leash theirs, so I don't see unleashed dogs running around like 200 feet from my door.
It’s just a lack of rules enforcement. Just like people playing TikTok on full volume on the metro. Fuck, and the people are old enough to know it’s rude! (So many middle aged people do this.)
The larger issue is that they're fucking morons who don't understand that they shouldn't trust the creature with anyone except themselves.
It should be legally permissible to shoot unleashed dogs on sight, not because I want them shot but because it's clearly the only way to get their owners to keep them on a leash.
why shoot the dog? it's the owner who should know better
I agree, but I suspect that shooting the owner would be frowned upon...
Well, both would be frowned upon, and people are crazy when it comes to dogs. Your proposal might actually be LESS popular (though I support it).
I don't even actually support it, it's just a convenient shorthand for us needing to have some kind of consequence that dog owners fear when they decide to be anti-social jackasses.
Whopping fines followed by confiscation for adoption would be fine too.
You have gone soft! Glue Factory Supporter in Name Only!
In most places it is permissible to shoot a dog if it is threatening you, some other person, or livestock. Just barking at you off leash would be enough.
(I'm a lawyer and I have a concealed handgun permit)
I would hesitate to say that off-leash barking alone is legal justification for shooting a dog. It might be, but self-defense cases turn on things like reasonable apprehension and are notoriously unpredictable. Discharging a firearm, even at a dog, is going to summon the police and a possible raft of criminal charges.
My general advice is that using a firearm in defense should be close to a last resort.
How many of these cases have you seen? I don’t think I have ever seen anyone get in trouble for shooting a dog. That looks far less like animal cruelty than other methods. And it does happen from time to time. I can’t imagine not seeing barking as a clear enough sign that a bite may follow. And the little ones can be just as dangerous. Any animal bite can carry disease.
I am from a rural area though. If you live in an area where animals are considered superior to humans beings, you might have trouble no matter what the letter of the law allows.
I suppose most of us don’t think about the fact that choosing where we live is choosing our jury.
I'm aware of one, and it ended up being a pretty big hassle for the person who shot the dog.
FWIW I give the same advice for shooting humans: pull the trigger only as a last resort.
That is good advice.
I don’t own a firearm, and I do enjoy the company of dogs from time to time. I’d like dog owners to know the risks of letting their dog off leash.
I agree completely with your first sentence but not your second. As a fairly new dog owner, I've learned a lot about dogs in the last couple years, and one of the big learnings is interpreting their communication. My understanding is that barking alone is extremely unlikely to indicate a threat. Instead, growling/snarling is the main signal you should look for.
How would a stranger know when the dog barking at them isn’t one of those barking-before-bite dogs? They can’t, and they would be legally justified in killing the dog.
That is why good dog owners don’t let their dogs off leash in public places. It protects the dog as much as the public. Dogs deserve better.
By that logic, how would a stranger know when a dog looking at them isn't one of those silence-before-bite dogs? Should shooting any unleashed dog in any circumstance therefore be justified? And even if the dog is leashed, how would a stranger know that the owner won't suddenly drop the leash? I guess the solution is to aim a gun at every dog you see, lest it get loose and suddenly attack?
Killing a dog is only legally justified if you reasonably believe the dog may harm you or someone else (or livestock). State and local laws may vary. We could get into all kinds of hypotheticals to test the boundaries of what would make a belief in the possibility of harm reasonable. I sincerely mean no offense, but I’m personally not interested in that exercise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr0bBuI8HKM
You’ve never met a child whose dog was shot, have you? It’s a very upsetting experience.
Then mommy and daddy can keep it on a goddamned leash like functioning, responsible adults.
Because I know people who were attacked by dogs as children and that’s vastly worse.
Shooting is fine, but aim your gun at the party that's actually responsible here.
Killing a threatening animal is justified. Killing an annoying human is murder, no matter how annoying.
For me, it’s the damned dogs in the stores. There used to at least be some pretense of them being “support” animals of whatever. Now they’re riding around in the grocery carts.
Interesting, in the last few years several of our grocery stores have put up conspicuous signs saying "your actual honest-to-god service animal is okay, your 'emotional support' animal is not".
I dunno if it's the sign doing its work, but there are no whiny cart-chihuahuas here.
Honestly, I'm inclined to just let the NIMBYs succeed in turning Philadelphia's demographics into Boston's so we can be a high-trust society.
This is the most wignat comment I've ever seen on this board
I’ve more or less given up. If the poorest, lowest-trust, least publicly-minded people in Philly think building housing elsewhere in the city is a plot to displace them, I am entirely out of sympathy when their neighborhoods become attractive to newcomers and they’re priced out to suburban Atlanta, or to Chester or Camden.
I want enough housing to make the lives of the working class decent, the underclass can get fucked at this point, they’re the source of all the problems.
Same. And no stores enforce their posted “no pets” rules.
It's not failure to consider, it's that the happiness of "man's best friend" is worth more to them than the discomfort avoidance of a stranger.
You were supposed to write "my fur baby"!
Under my administration, if you don't clean up your dog's excrement on a public sidewalk, you will receive life imprionment.
So it's the mad cow burger patties for you!
This comment is an example of a joke who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.
I was walking on a trail this weekend. I was going 2.9 mph and this other guy was going 2.7 mph. But his unleashed dog was running around ±100 feet behind and in front of him. This meant that while I was executing my passing maneuver, I was in the dog chaos zone for a full 10 minutes.
If the dog approaches you can tell it to stop. You can also ask the owner to leash their animal. You can also physically keep a dog off you if it is not controlled.
I was riding my bicycle once on campus where I work, and a guy was walking his dog nearby off-leash. Suddenly the dog lunged at me, not in a threatening way, but in an exuberant “hi! I want to say hi to you” way. Still, I lost my balance and fell off my bike. I wasn’t badly hurt; I scraped my knee and my bike chain fell off. The dog’s owner rushed over being super apologetic, like, “She’s never done this before!” I didn’t have the heart to chew him out. I hope he took it to heart and has been leashing his dog since!
Having been in similar situations, in my experience the dog owners takeaway is NEVER "clearly this is an animal, not a thinking person, and can't be trusted off leash, so I will never let my animal off the leash again".
My brother commutes to work by ebike and is occasionally chased by off-leash dogs. When this happens he rides slightly faster than the dog, whistles to keep it following him, and heads away from the dog's owner while they're desperately trying to call their dog back.
Wow, this is the only space where I have seen multiple people against unleashed dogs . They are everywhere where I live, but if anyone complains, the usual answer is "They are better behaved than kids." One of our suburban malls now has a dog-friendly policy, although I haven't seen nearly as many breakers of the leash rules there. (I also don't go there nearly as often as the sidewalks and parks in my neighborhood. Or even stores.) Maybe because mall security is ever present, and you can more easily kick people out of a private mall.
Liked but ugh why do owners treat them as “children”/expect you to fawn over their dogs?
A while ago I (generally an enthusiastic animal person) was thinking about getting a dog to accompany me on my many walks. Now I am so dog-person-averse that I’ve given up on the idea.
You see it fairly frequently in any parenting group with a lot of toddlers because a lot of toddlers are scared of dogs bigger than them, especially if they don't have a dog at home and can't read the dog body language signs of "friendly, just wants to play".
Noticing that someone's dog has pooped on my frontyard lawn and going through the security camera footage to find out whose dog it was, is one of the most annoying things ever.
A guy's dog pooped on my lawn and I confronted him when he was walking off. I still get a rush thinking about it months later.
I am shocked that Matt doesn’t see many off-leash dogs. I live in downtown Chicago and I see it all the time.
Some comments about this.
1. San Francisco (I don’t know maybe California) has recently had all the grocery stores posting signs about pets are not permitted (only registered service animals) likely because people were pushing the window.
2. Anyone that lets their dogs run around off-leash on the streets is an idiot, and I am sorry for the dog. (I was driving during rush-hour on Fell St near Divisadero and a large dog _bolted_ into traffic as we started to move and was hit by the car next to me. I heard the thump and the whimpering but didn’t stop just telling myself there was nothing I could do. [The dog was with its owners at the intersection.])
3. Londoners (England) seem much more “chill” about dogs although no one seems to push the window that much. I took my daughter’s dog (a black lab/Catahoula mix) walking on—leash several times:
a) I was able to take him into coffee shops to order to go. He was tolerated even when he would prop himself on the counter to see what was going on. (In fact, this always got a smile. Of course, I always pulled him down.)
b) Some people let their dogs off-“lead" on Paddington Green where others were casually playing cricket or football. This was posted as not allowed although no one was complaining since the dogs seemed well-behaved. (They also had specific off-leash areas where I let our dog run.)
c) Our dog was allowed to be off-leash in Hampstead Heath, which he really enjoyed.
d) I got a lot of smiles when people saw me walking him.
Regarding the wage compression question, there's the obvious tie in with inflationary conditions that pissed people off in many ways. Specifically with labor, there is the aspect of full employment, which is pretty standard to see as a good thing. However, one reaction I noticed that surprised me, and really so among certain people I know who I would take for otherwise being pretty labor friendly, were unhappy that the new leverage that workers got was causing them in their minds to deliver poorer service. Not sure how to deal with that.
Specifically, a lot of the best people working jobs like waiters and bartenders changed jobs during Covid lockdowns and found better opportunities outside the industry, while the people who replaced them were often worse at those jobs, so customers felt they were paying more for worse service.
There was also a lot of movement WITHIN service industries, though.
I don't think customer service has been any worse post-pandemic; I think people are just massively more misanthropic in a way they are extremely not self-aware about.
I've definitely noticed a lot more bartenders not knowing what they're doing since Covid.
I'm glad I'm just a beer and wine guy that doesn't add more complexity to the order.
The funny thing is I noticed it the most with neat pours of whisky and rum, which are arguably the easiest thing to pour (don't need to worry about head from a beer on tap or find a bottle opener).
Wait how do they screw up a neat pour?
Another thing that, like miserly low-end wages, people say they want fixed, but will be mad if it's fixed:
One can imagine a future where housing prices are finally under control, and people howl about their investment in their home not paying off with consistently increasing value.
“[T] midwit thing to say about Trump is that Trumpism is a much bigger phenomenon than one man.”
Here is a question for a future mailbag: what are the odds that in ten years we look back on Trump somewhat fondly, a bit like people look at Bush now compared to Trump? Yes, Trump is a malignant wanna-be authoritarian narcissist, but he isn’t literally a Nazi and he does (much as liberals hate to admit it) at times show good instincts or at least the ability to suppress his worst ones. (Hence the TACO nickname). From what I can see from conservative friends and family, the next wave of right-wing ideology is way worse than Trump! Tucker Carlson is a Nazi apologist, Candace Owens is insane, Nick Fuentes…I’m not even sure what he is. Even a lot of Trump’s worst decisions such as anti-vax stuff are really pushed from the bottom up vs being stuff Trump is passionate about. What are the odds that in a decade, we realize Trump’s cult of personality was stifling the growth of a much worse ideology?
Congratulations, you win this week’s Most Depressing Comment Award!
If I'm looking back fondly on Trump because the country has gone actual Nazi, I aspire to be either in prison or dead.
Or a member of the resistance, like an American Home Army, right?
To pivot from influencers to real politicians, I think J.D. Vance's political philosophy is worse than Trump's. Trump thinks that *he specifically* should get to do whatever he wants, but I'm sure he doesn't care what happens after he's gone. Vance actually supports authoritarian*ism* as a system of government.
Liked for thought experiment but IMO ... very low odds. Appreciated the point Yuval Levin made on Ezra's last pod that the most extreme actions be taken right now (e.g., ICE = domestic terrorists) are extremely unpopular. Like 80 / 20. So there's just no path for electoral victory.
But Trump's approval rating as a whole is still around 40%, so they aren't THAT unpopular.
But that’s because he’s a reality TV star. If someone else were to do the same things, they (probably?) wouldn’t have as much support.
Oh, Jeepers. Thanks for bringing me down before I even start my workday. :-)
I kind of agree with this. You can do all sorts of lawlessness, self enrichment, crazy tariffs, abduct foreign leaders, blow up Iran, etc, and there are no consequences. Like, zero. Why wouldn't someone else want to push the envelope further?
People were looking back fondly at Trump as an entertaining if misguided buffoon in 2024 lmao. Attention spans are short.
The reason for Europe being behind the US is not consumer regulation—we know this because US companies operating in Europe have to follow all the same consumer regulations as European companies, and European companies operating in the US get to follow US regulations. Yet this doesn’t prevent US companies from being highly successful in Europe or cause European companies to be more successful in the US.
And following regulations is actually less harmful to businesses than the way we regulate-by-litigation in the US—at least government regulators in theory are there to act in the public interest, unlike plaintiffs’ lawyers. Like read about how dumb some consumer class actions are—the case that led to the Supreme Court upholding arbitration clauses (Concepcion) was about a couple trying to get a class action against a company that gave them free phones because they still had to pay sales tax. And now there’s a whole trend of “mass arbitration” where plaintiffs file arbitration complaints against companies just to bury companies in arbitration fees (most clauses require companies to pay the vast majority of the fees whether they win or lose) so they settle. This is not technically “regulation” but is actually worse and doesn’t happen in other countries.
There may be a regulatory problem but if so it’s probably more on the labor or perhaps capital markets side.
Also what is up with middle-class people and dogs? I live near a literal homeless encampment and still almost all the litter I get on my property is from middle-class people’s dog poop…
I agree Matt's dodge on Europe was a bit weak. I think Americans dramatically underestimate how much not being a true single market hurts European companies. Even just something as simple as "we can't run the same ads because everything needs to be translated" sucks for a business trying to build scale.
Yep, there’s a reason the distant second in tech to the US is China and not the EU, even though China is poorer overall—China has a massive single market. Most successful tech businesses make a little bit of money off of a massive consumer base—that requires scale.
The best thing the EU can do is further integration and increase market size, e.g. remove some of these localization requirements, prevent small countries from using the EU to increase the reach of their idiosyncratic and sometimes corrupt regulations, and offer membership to Canada!
3x the languages for ⅓ the GDP seems not-great.
Keeping your language in exchange for lower GDP seems like a reasonable tradeoff
I agree. The point I'm making is that I think the language fragmentation of Europe does deter some investment.
You can't really lump the UK in there. Selling to the UK means your pricing team need to now deal in a new currency. Beyond just the bike shedding (if you charge €9.99/month are really going to charge £8.70/month...or some more consumer friendly number like £7.99/month or £8.99/month) you've also introduced another level of forex risk into your business. And as a small business trying to scale up you probably don't have a sophisticated finance team to help handle that risk.
To be a closer to apples to apples comparison you need to keep it entirely in EUR. But then you're down to just 60% the size of the US.
“The reason for Europe being behind the US is not consumer regulation—we know this because US companies operating in Europe have to follow all the same consumer regulations as European companies, and European companies operating in the US get to follow US regulations. Yet this doesn’t prevent US companies from being highly successful in Europe or cause European companies to be more successful in the US.”
This doesn’t follow at all. Just because Uber might be successful in Europe now, does that mean it could have ever started itself in Europe and moved the other way? Color me skeptical.
Uber was started by VCs empowering it to lose billions and billions and then some more billions of dollars until it was profitable. They could've done it in Europe, it just would've involved losing a few more billions first, maybe.
They would have probably been run out of town for violating taxi cartels. Or they’d still be litigating how they were allowed to compete with taxis.
They literally still are litigating exactly that in basically every European market.
There's a bit to be said for not allowing them to engage in regulatory arbitrage on insurance and safety regulations to the degree that they have, but the original very high bar to taxi services was clearly just rent-seeking/regulatory capture by incumbents and they were correct to break it.
Very fair point.
More specifically, the whole point of Uber was that they were going to engage in massive defiance of basic employment law and then dare the people who enforce those laws to stop them.
It should never, and in a society governed by the rule of law would never, have been allowed to exist in the first place.
This is true in one way. But you have to contend with the fact that the user experience that has resulted from the supplanting of taxis by Ubers is a massive improvement. People aren't going to be into your regulations if they can see that ignoring them makes their lives better.
The regulatory barriers for taxi service in most cities were absolutely ridiculous, and often corrupt, and without reform they were virtually assured of eventually being ignored.
It's kind of like people who demand boycotts of Amazon because of progressive politics. Why are people going to get behind progressive politics if takes positions like "that super convenient and easy thing you love? Yeah it's bad." To whatever extent there is a problem (and I'm certainly open to the idea that there is), it has to be approached from a different angle.
I mean, sure, yes, the US middle class is extremely complicit with wage slavery of all forms, both in goods manufacture (now outsourced to impoverished countries) and in personal services where there's a strong desire to maintain a repressed underclass to wait on them (hence why we harass illegal immigrants but not their employers). We treat wage theft like it's not a real crime, but an oopsie to be remedied with a slap on the wrist on the rare occasions the perpetrators are caught.
The political problem of how to get the PMC class to stop being selfish assholes for five minutes is a very real one, but it's not one I'm trying to address here.
"both in goods manufacture (now outsourced to impoverished countries)" very outdated talking point and one that was always silly anyway. Would those people be better off if those manufacturing jobs didn't exist and they had to go back to subsistence farming?
It sure isn't.
How do you mean "should"? Legally, or morally? Because I think it very obviously should have been allowed to exist, the taxi market was a huge rent seeking scam that sucked for consumers. And you can argue that Uber was bad for existing taxi drivers (of which there were far too few), but it's hard to make a counterfactual argument that current Uber/Lyft drivers would have been better off if those businesses were never allowed to exist.
I don't know how old you are but getting a ride used to really, really, really suck before Uber and Lyft existed. Like if you needed to be at the airport for an early flight, and ordered a 4am taxi the night before, you could basically flip a coin about whether they would show up or not. And if you picked up a cab at the airport for a 5-mile drive home, expect the cabbie to bitch and moan the whole way that they didn't get a 20-mile fare. Or if you took any cab in Vegas, they'd take the freeway to go 2 miles in 15 minutes instead of the strip to go 1.5 miles in 10, and charge you a higher fair.
The "Uber is evil, actually" sentiment will never cease to be silly.
Legally and morally.
You could literally just have an app that gets you a taxi-- those exist. Or you could just have a service that employs people to give other people rides.
The reason Uber and Lyft have outflanked those apps is that Uber and Lyft flagrantly violate employment law in order to undercut taxi drivers and car services (and even Waymo, somehow, which makes no sense) on labor costs. I like employment law and hate wage thieves like Uber and Lyft. Not a remotely hard call.
yeah, you aren't old enough to have actually needed a cab prior to 2010, are you? Or maybe you were lucky enough to live in a place like NYC, or with great public transport and never needed one.
Taxi hailing apps existed in the early days. but they SUCKED. they sucked because the taxi monopolies had no reason for them not to suck. The thing that made Uber/Lyft good was not just the software, it was the entire infrastructure behind the software that made it work. It was the first time that supply and demand actually were allowed to get to equilibrium.
It's not like "oh I can use an app instead of the telephone" was the reason Uber succeeded. And by the way, in the early days of Uber, the drivers made more than taxi drivers, not less.
>>And following regulations is actually less harmful to businesses than the way we regulate-by-litigation in the US—at least government regulators in theory are there to act in the public interest, unlike plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Is this true though? If to even start a company you need to hire a small army of lawyers to ensure you're compliant with 300 obscure regulations you never heard of then it's obvious why Europeans are less entrepreneurial and dynamic.
Regulations will always end up hurting small businesses more, which ends up in fewer start ups and more calcified large companies.
Yes it’s true. Small businesses can usually get away with doing what they want and they’ll get a warning first, unlike in the US where they get sued first. A lot of European regulations specifically exempt small businesses (what they call SMEs).
What regulatory issues are small businesses in the US getting sued for on the reg? Are they getting sued by regulators or plaintiffs' attorneys? From what I've seen, it's the large companies that get sued, as that's where the money is for the plaintiffs' attorneys (and the regulators).
I'm biased because I used to work with employment lawyers (and have done a small amount of employer-side defense work myself) but small businesses often face wage and hour and employment discrimination claims. The wage and hour laws are genuinely hard to navigate and employment discrimination liability is a bigger issue when you have a smaller and less sophisticated HR department.
It's both labor and capital markets, regulation and fragmentation.
Damned little to do with consumer protection laws, though some of those are ill-considered and annoying.
Forced individual arbitration is one of those insanely inefficient corporatocracy things that lawyers can explain to nonlawyers and the nonlawyers just literally will not believe that it exists because it's so obviously stupid and wrong. And yet.
Something I have been thinking a lot about recently is the unreadable fine print on our TV ads. When I say "unreadable" I mean that literally; you physically cannot read it in the time that it's on the screen even if your eyesight would be good enough to make it out if you freeze-framed it. And yet somehow we have fair-business-practice laws that treat that unreadable fine print as if it has some legal effect. That is precisely the kind of hyper-literal information asymmetry that is the theoretical use case for regulation and yet we have none and have to live in a fantasy world where everyone is recording their TV programs and pausing them in order to read the ads.
It's enough to make you want to go mad and talk about frogs all day long.
It’s much more business regulations than consumer regulations.
Hm good points. I've seen the claim that the big difference is at will employment?
There are all kinds of problems with European economic policy. I don't know European law well at all but for the particular issue of business size and development I would also look into how they regulate capital markets and corporate governance. But I am pretty skeptical about the problem being related to consumer price regulation.
IME, financial regulation in the EU is burdensome b/c the member countries get their say as well. So there are essentially two layers of regulation - one at the EU level and another at the country level. Whereas in the US, the feds preempt much of the state regulation. Its easier to navigate one set of rules.
The EU also loves reporting. The more the better, and no matter if its duplicative - reporting is good. I have no idea what they do with all the data, but it adds another layer of costs to doing business there.
D-D-D-D-Don't quote me regulations. I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation's in... We kept it grey!
Yes, like I said, labor regulations are an issue because a US company with a US head office wouldn’t have to follow them, but that’s different from consumer regulations which impact local and foreign companies equally.
Speed limits. I'd be fine with them being 100% enforced. But the limits would get changed, which would be good too. There are roads with 25 mph limits that I drive where no one is going below 30 and 90% of the traffic is 30 to 40 mph. The speeds are fine. The decision to penalize people though shouldn't be so discretionary.
It depends on each road. On controlled access freeways and rural highways, where usage is exclusively motorist or very close to it, I agree that higher limits would be warranted if consistent enforcement were implemented. But in more urban areas where there's heavy interaction with non-motorist traffic, the increasing argument is that slow posted speeds enforced strictly are needed to prevent death and serious injury. Obviously there can be cases in between that are more difficult to assess, as we saw in arguing this on Monday. And the argument for speed cameras in particular is that they can remove the element of discretion that you criticize here.
Once you are above 25MHP the risk of injury/death for a pedestrian goes way up.
Urban planners and road engineers have begun to take seriously in the last 20 years the idea that we can't just put up a sign that says "drive 25 mph!" We have to do things that make people uncomfortable driving faster than that. Driver comfort is dangerous.
Things like high curbs, on-street parking, shared transit lanes, frequent stop signs and/or well-calibrated stoplights, traffic-calming roundabouts and landscaping can disrupt that comfort and create both more cautious driving and increased vigilance. In extreme cases you can even go to speed tables or arbitrary road curvature within an alignment.
Also trying to consciously hover around 25 when there aren't any obstacles to slow you down is very distracting.
Agreed, as I replied to Bill Lovotti.
Thing is, rarely do you have pedestrians.
And also like with most crime the optimal enforcement rate may not be 100 percent. It just needs to be high enough that when it is dangerous to drive fast, drivers need to fear a ticket enough they slow down.
One thing that's puzzled me is that there's (in my perception at least) strong overlap between the "pro speed camera" crowd and the "Kleiman pilled" crowd, but nobody ever seems to combine the two viewpoints. We should have lots and lots of speed cameras, but make the fines low, at least for infrequent offenders - like start at $10, but escalate if you speed often. I think that would be an effective deterrent while also avoiding a lot of political backlash.
I once got a $0 ticket for speeding. No points either. It was from a camera. It's actually worked. I am more leery.
Reminds me of those electronic "slow down!" speed limit signs by the side of the road that tell you how fast you're going. I know those always get me to check my speed, and I usually observe other cars slowing down too.
They only work for so long before people realize there's no consequences, though.
I'd actually be interested to see if they continue to have an effect even after they've been there a while! All it takes is one person to think there might be a police officer watching to slow down and delay the pace of everyone behind them. We had one in my neighborhood in Concord and it seemed to work.
I've seen Highway Patrol park empty cruisers near construction zones so drivers take the lowered speed limit seriously. It seems like a good idea and you only need to staff them some of the time.
It always works for me. I don't like being outed
That's sort of what they do in NYC. The fines are $50 which is much lower than in the surrounding suburbs with no cameras and you only get dinged if you go over 10 mph above the limit. The safety features on NYC roads actually make me prefer them to driving in the suburbs (this goes for non-highways as the highways are the same).
My cruise control stays on 34 when driving around Manhattan due to this.
The fine is whatever. Most of what you pay is the administrative fees tacked onto the fine + doubling or tripling of your insurance at the next renewal.
Lots of cameras, but every dime of fine revenue goes into decreasing the federal deficit.
You want to federalize traffic enforcement?
No, I want to eliminate the financial incentives associated with policing. Every dollar taken as a fine or fee and every dollar seized needs to go somewhere far away from the police department/city government that does the fining and seizing, or you end up with some places where fines and fees replace taxes and the police are basically tax farmers.
The real problem is America has city (and country) police instead of just making it a state level capacity like in almost every other country.
Better to send every local resident a check in the mail every year saying “this is your fraction of the speeding fines we collected - it’s the least we can do to reimburse you for being subject to these scofflaws”.
The real solution is to redesign the roads so that it feels unsafe to the driver to go much faster than 25 mph. Narrower lanes, curb bump-outs, reduce/eliminate multi-lane one-way roads, etc.
Make pedestrian crossings in high conflict areas the same height as the sidewalk.
This is so much better than random speed bumps that are nowhere near a crossing, this actually pinpoints the places where slowing down is most appropriate.
My city has gotten really into traffic calming recently and did this with some crosswalks. It makes a HUGE difference, drivers slow down to about 15 MPH at the elevated crosswalks. As a side benefit these crosswalks stay more clear of puddles and slush.
Never seen this idea before but it sounds very smart. Surprised I've never came across it! Would also improve pedestrian visibility.
Some places do it. Saw it in Europe and Boston.
Yep, it’s all over the Boston/Camberville area
It’s great and should be much more widespread.
They did this recently with a new housing development (and even a brand new road) in my suburb and it works really well. It's bigger than an actual speedbump so you have to actually slow down, and it serves its purpose well for making you want to slow down for the entire stretch there. And I'm a chronic speeder who normally hates speedbumps.
I have one in my area that I regularly cross running, walking a dog, and driving. I've noticed that there is a significant visibility benefit, elevating the person (or dog) on foot by 8" makes them much more noticeable to people in cars.
The other visibility builder are bulbed out intersections, so the pedestrian is both clearly visible and the motorist can't sideswipe them with a wide turn.
It also helps to shorten the distance the pedestrian is in the street and at risk!
They are called speed tables and I think they were invented/made popular by Tucson.
I don't recall those from my time in university. You might be thinking of hawk beacons, which I think we're invented there.
They're not great but they're useful because Tucson has huge gaps between stoplights where there is nowhere to cross.
I am not. Lots of neighborhoods had speed tables and mini roundabouts to prevent morons from speeding through to avoid main roads like grant.
We have a ton of HAWKs in Boise.
Tables are an excellent solution.
I'm a big fan of road redesign and it should be part of the decision, but it's also something that costs and lot and may be impractical in some very built up areas.
Exactly. There’s a persistent belief in traffic engineering that the thing you want to do is design a road for 70mph and then post it at 25mph so you have a generous safety margin. If people speed, that’s an enforcement problem.
Understandable how an engineer brain gets there, but a recipe for misery and disaster given actual human psychology. Also makes for ugly, depressing places! No one wants to live near a road that seems like it could be safely driven at highway speeds.
Doing that in any single large city in the US would cost several hundred billion.
And the outliers who currently do 50 on one-way urban streets with on-street parking and pedestrian traffic would still do it. Design affects the median; enforcement is all that will ever curtail the right tail of the distribution.
Hot take: speed limits in densely populated areas are not for your protection, they are for the protection of everyone around you not themselves protected by a car. If you are in a city the speed limit should be 25, period, and the final penalty for exceeding it too often should be to have your vehicle taken and crushed in the public square.
The "punk-ass anti-authority teenager" that still lives in me regards the speed limits that we treat as speed minimums as effectively functioning as a system that allows police to pull over anybody, whenever they want, because hey, you were technically speeding.
The transportation engineer in which that teenager resides just really wants people to drive slower, please.
Yeah the norm of treating speed limits as minimums functionally makes police enforcement into stochastic highway robbery
There ought to be a trade-off of resources going to enforcement with the optimality of the rule being enforced (the marginal harm from violation. Speed cameras (very low cost) ought to be entirely calibrated to the optimal speed at that point/time of day.
Same principle as interior enforcement of no-visa residency.
Econ 101 just solves lots of problems. :)
Also, with higher enforcement, the fines could be a lot lower.
I think people who have motorized plate obscurers should have their vehicles seized and auctioned off.
Or crushed into a tiny cube, and then being told that they have 30 minutes to move their cube.
"Is it about my cube?"
Yes, it will be thrown into the East River at your expense.
If obsured/able plates were a vioation and citiznes were incintivized by a share of the fine -- as theyshoud be for reporting the location of vehicles with outstanding fines -- fot reporting it, the penalaty would not need to be so severe.
Counterpoint: but they’re asshats!
This. Justice by expected value is a bad idea. If you only catch 5% of perpetrators, and then you charge them a fine that's 20x larger to make up for all the people you didn't catch, it creates a bunch of bad incentives.
That means you need to apprenhed a larger percentage. "Enforcement" is not just the fine/punishment.
If Americans would accept speed cameras, there would be fewer interactions with police. Fewer police officers would be killed and fewer people would be killed by police.
It’s upsetting we prefer a sporting game of cops and robbers to cameras.
Agree. Also, having police enforce red lights and speeding is wasteful. Cameras are cheaper AND more effective.
The NYC speed cameras only ding you if you go over 10 mph above the limit which is fair.
I think the future is "enforcement" where your car knows where it is and refuses to go above the posted speed limit unless you hit some manual "something has screwed up and I am making a human decision to override" (and have at least some camera-based enforcement to prevent abuse of that).
That likely won’t happen until we have moved to the car doing most of the driving without your attention.
Interstate highway speed limits outside of cities should be 80-85 mph, with a guaranteed ticket for anything over that.
"But I think we’re seeing here that a lot of folks have the sense that “a criminal” is a certain kind of person, and that kind of person is simply not middle class with steady employment."
This does a ton of work in true crime discourse. People who think that, e.g., Scott Peterson is innocent aren't fairly evaluating evidence against him because he doesn't fit their stereotype of who might commit murder. People who think the Menendez brothers must have had a valid excuse think the same way-- they just don't "seem" like the types of people who might murder their parents to get the inheritance and go on a spending spree, even though that is what happened. People (and there are a lot of them including in the media) who think Amanda Knox is innocent can't believe this nice well off white lady could have committed murder even though she left a bunch of her DNA mixed with the victim's at the crime scene.
The other day in comments to your MLK post, Racists of course made an appearance with their statistical arguments about who commits crimes and its the same thing. They want cops to do bigoted law enforcement because they assume (based on their supposed command of "statistics" of course) that people like themselves don't commit crimes.
In the real world, though, whatever the statistics may say, it happens with reasonable frequency that someone you don't think might commit a crime does so. My father, as a sportswriter and sportscaster, knew OJ Simpson pretty well. He- and most of his colleagues- thought OJ was one of the nicest athletes they ever met. But he turned out to be a spousal abuser and double murderer. The psychological heuristic that we can tell the sort of people who could be "criminals" is just wrong. Anyone can be one.
> People (and there are a lot of them including in the media) who think Amanda Knox is innocent
Including, notably, the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation...
Read their opinion! They found her not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by throwing out a bunch of DNA evidence, but also found she was at the scene of the murder and lying about it, and that there were multiple attackers (her supporters claim there was one).
So no, that court definitely is not convinced she is innocent and never says she is-- just that she wasn't proven guilty once key evidence was excluded.
Interesting - Wikipedia characterises their decision completely differently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Knox#Final_decision You're definitely talking about her fourth trial in 2015 and not her second trial in 2011?
I didn't actually want to have a fight about the object-level question, I'd just thought that "Amanda Knox is guilty" was now the fringe position, and was surprised to see you talking as if the fringe position were still "Amanda Knox is innocent". But now you've got me interested in the object-level question!
Wikipedia is very susceptible to people with large fanbases and PR teams.
Here's the actual translated decision of the Cassation Court. At section 9.4.1 it calls Amanda's presence at the murder scene a "proven fact" at trial.
http://www.themurderofmeredithkercher.net/docupl/filelibrary/docs/motivations/2015-03-27-Motivations-Cassazione-Marasca-Bruno-annulling-murder-conviction-Knox-Sollecito-translation-TJMK.pdf
I don't think you're characterising that correctly. Here's the first part of section 9.4:
> 9.4 Now, a fact of assured relevance in favor of the current appellants, in the sense of excluding their material participation to the homicide, even in the hypothesis of their presence in the house of via della Pergola, lies in the absolute absence of biological traces referable to them (apart from the hook of which we will discuss later) in the room of the homicide or on the victim’s body, where in contrast multiple traces attributable to Guede were found. It is incontrovertibly impossible that that in the crime scene (constituted by a room of little dimensions: ml 2,91x3,36, as indicated by the blueprint reproduced at f. 76) no traces would be retrieved referable to the current appellants had they participated in the murder of Kercher.
> No trace assignable to them has been, in particular, observed on the sweatshirt worn by the victim at the moment of the aggression and nor on the underlying shirt, as it should have been in case of participation in the homicide (instead, on the sleeve of the aforementioned sweater traces of Guede were retrieved: ff. 179-180).
> The aforementioned negative circumstance works as a counterbalance to the data, already highlighted, on the absolute impracticality of the hypothesis of a posthumous selective cleaning capable of removing specific biological traces while leaving others.
> 9.4.1 Given this, we now note, with respect to Amanda Knox, that her presence inside the house, the location of the murder, is a proven fact in the trial, in accord with her own admissions...
So they were present in the *house*, but cannot have been in the *room*, and therefore "It is incontrovertibly impossible that [...] they participated in the murder of Kercher."
OK so you are an Amanda Knox fan!
The issue is Knox claims SHE WASN'T IN THE HOUSE. She says she was with her boyfriend at the time of the murders. When in fact she left plenty of forensic evidence in the house (which the Court throws out) and also her alibi is rebutted by computer records and eyewitnesses.
If she was in the house at the time of the murders, that makes her likely guilty of at least cleaning up after the crime, if not helping commit it, which is why her supporters and her go to great lengths to deny that.
So yeah, the Cassation Court is saying she's lying about not being in the house in 9.4.1. They also reject her lawyers' claim of only a single attacker. This isn't a court saying "she's innocent". This is a court applying Italy's exclusionary rule while being careful to say that Amanda was probably involved.
Wouldn’t her DNA be found at the murder scene because she shared the apartment with the victim?
5 mixed blood drops found all over the cottage, Amanda and Meredith's DNA..
No mixed blood drops found anywhere in the cottage with either of the other two roommates mixed with Meredith's DNA.
"She lived there" is a bad argument. Meredith's DNA didn't just magically mix with hers while magically avoiding the other two roommates'.
You'd think so, but I have no desire to spend any more time reading badly-translated legal Italian to find out what the judges thought of that possibility.
I’ve never understood before why you are so convinced the obviously innocent Amanda Knox is guilty, but now that I see it’s part of a wider crusade you’re on it makes more sense.
I defy anyone to read this thread and conclude Amanda Knox is "obviously innocent". She might not be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but "obviously innocent" are words that can't survive ANY interaction with the evidence.
https://x.com/dilanesper/status/1957875494671773739
This comment is just a a couple of strawmen.
In a trenchcoat?
It's OK to do statistical enforcment, but not all statistics are creted equal. Stop and frisk does not have to be -- should not be done on a racial basis. It's no great harm for even an old white guy like myself to be respectifuly stopped if I were walking late at night in a gun-carrying prome area.
The thing is, the people who really like stop and frisk tend to be really into statistical enforcement including based on race and ethnicity.
And the point of my comment is that if you really take that to its conclusion you absolutely do run the risk of assuming that you can tell who is or isn't a criminal based on what groups they belong to. That is an accurate and natural description of how many people's brains work (which is what true crime cases can show you). Whereas if you require cops to stick to the evidence you actually are likely to get better law enforcement.
I think the problem here is:
a. The police (and probably other people who deal with a lot of criminals) absolutely do have a very good idea of which people are likely to be up to no good.
b. That group of people is skewed male, young, black/hispanic.
c. This means that focusing your enforcement on that group of people will automatically give you disproportionate frisking/following/hassling of young, mostly-poor black and hispanic men. But also, this is the best use of police resources to stop various kinds of street crime.
We just face a tradeoff here: hassling a lot of guys because they look kinda like the sort of folks who commit a lot of crime vs putting up with more crime at the same police budget. Both sides of the tradeoff are bad, there's no button for making the tradeoff go away, and all we can do is decide where on that tradeoff we want to live, as a matter of law and policy.
Here's the thing-- and this gets back to the true crime point too. You can absolutely have a general heuristic about who are more likely to be criminals AND be correct about that point. In other words, your sense of "this guy/girl doesn't seem like a criminal" may steer you right much of the time.
But "much" is not "all", and actually getting cases right and catching criminals who don't fit the "profile" of a criminal is quite important. E.g., you don't want your cops to be the sorts of people who think Scott Peterson must be innocent! You want your cops to be the sorts of people who prioritize the evidence over their background beliefs about who is "likely" a criminal, because otherwise they are going to make some errors in a field where we don't want errors! They will harass a bunch of innocent people who fit profiles, while also failing to investigate guilty people who defy them.
For optimal policing, you want the police to be Bayesians who incorporate well-informed priors to make better decisions, but not to have such strong priors that evidence can't move them off their initial assumptions.
But we may also want to modify that further and give up some efficiency in policing to accomplish other social goals. Stopping and frisking all the 15-25 year old black men walking down the street may optimize for finding the most illegal guns, but we may prefer a stop-and-frisk strategy that is a little less optimal because it kinda sucks when no 15 year old black kid can walk down a street without being hassled by a cop.
I think the best thing to do there is to surface the tradeoff we're making. I mean, we already accept that there are a lot of things we don't let the police do that would make them more efficient, but have other bad consequences, like requiring warrants for searches and wiretaps and such. I think it's important to be honest about the tradeoff we're making, and it would be nice if we could gather high-quality data to discuss it.
I don't really think there's that much of a tradeoff to be made here. The amount of extra efficiency you can get by explicitly allowing race in cases where that's currently legally illegitimate is pretty small in most cases. Police are normally stopping people due to probable cause, traffic enforcement and other situations where more than "they just look a little suspicious" is legally required.
If a shooter described as "young black male, around 5'5"" wearing red" is described as leaving a scene, the police can already use race as part of their efficiency in catching a suspect. But the number of situations where police are searching people based on less evidence than that is much smaller, and few people are arguing for them whether or not they might have a racial impact.
Probably ICE's recent court wins allowing them to use apparent national origin (accent, physical description) as a few factors among many is the best counter-example, but in that case it actually is a far higher efficiency gain than randomly stopping every young black male would be.
Agree. The statistics shoud not be on the basis of presumed group membership and I doubt that statistics fine grained enough for actual enforcement would show that.
I think this confuse the concepts of the legal doctrine behind stop-and-frisk, the concept of its application in NYC, and the mostly uninformed assumptions of how it was applied that most people here have.
Applying stop-and-frisk to target people racially was never a thing in NYC. Targeting neighborhoods with lots of shootings was. Then whether giving police such broad powers to conduct Terry stops is constitutional / a good idea is another topic. A person could support or disagree with all 3, independently of each other.
I think there's real harm with stopping anybody.Unless you've got a real, reasonable suspicion for.
A stopping somebody because they're walking down the street for that reason Only? no that's unconstitutional
I can imagine secenarios in which it seems pretty reasonable and, if so, the person stopped should not object. If the area is realy dicey, it were I, and the officer behaves properly, I minght even find it reassuring.
Another example in sportswriting that crossed my mind while reading your comment is Jonah Keri. He was a very highly regarded baseball writer...until it was discovered that he was a vicious abuser of his wife. At least he was pretty much made a forgotten pariah after that.
Yeah, the "good person" who turns out not to be good is a STANDARD part of all walks of life.
There's also the inverse, where sometimes people are too suspicious of strangers that they don't (yet) know. Human psyche dissonance can be odd.
This is an interesting statement on OJ.
My high school principal was NFL teammates with OJ and said he was "not surprised" to hear about the murders. I wonder if OJ, like Ted Bundy, was very likable in small doses but off-putting in larger ones.
> People (and there are a lot of them including in the media) who think Amanda Knox is innocent can't believe this nice well off white lady could have committed murder even though she left a bunch of her DNA mixed with the victim's at the crime scene.
Amanda Knox lived with the murder victim (along with two other people). The amount of her DNA found ostensibly around the victim was miniscule, and I say "ostensibly" because the police also screwed up the collection to such a degree that the court system eventually held that no inferences could be drawn from the DNA. Finally, there is an extremely obvious culprit, who's guilt no one seriously disputes, meaning that theories of her guilt have to claim that not only did she decide to murder her roommate for no discernible reason, but that she also decided to conspire with some random guy to do a rape-and-murder, also for no discernible reason.
An aside, but Bill Simmons had a piece on his podcast where he was trying to figure out who the closest figure to OJ would be today; i.e. a retired sports star who got into media, and was nice enough that everyone was blindsided by the murder.
He landed on Peyton Manning. Which as someone too young to remember the OJ chase would definitely be a shock!
OJ himself is not a good example of this, as he had a long history of abusing Nicole Brown before the murder. Granted, mass media reach and societal accountability for domestic violence were more lacking back then.
Also some serious injuries from his time with Police Squad that may have affected his brain!
European here: we have price discrimination in cinema tickets! It's not very granular - here in the UK, there will typically be three or four price-bands for a given showing - but prices vary by time of day, comfiness of seat, and to some extent by how good the view is. Does this really not happen in the US?
Time of day (and week) pricing has certainly existed here.
Only pricing by time and day. The rest not. However, reserved seats in movie theaters is relatively new here, so maybe people will start demanding more differentiation in pricing.
Interesting - I can't remember a time when British cinemas *didn't* have reserved seating! Even in the pre-Internet days you'd pick a seat when you bought your ticket at the counter.
Rarely
Restaurant below got World Restaurant of the Year in 2024. Next available table is 12 January, 2027. That's better than last time I looked when there were no tables available at all.
Honestly can't figure out who that's helping. Their menu isn't even expensive by the standards of such a prestigious restaurant. For some reason they're actively choosing to under-price.
(PS I was not actually planning on going, I was just curious how hard it would be to get a table at the World Restaurant of the Year given how hard it is to get tables at some more normal restaurants where I do live. In fairness, it is a lot harder than anywhere I've ever been)
https://www.disfrutarbarcelona.com/bookings
Kinda wild they have tables available as far out as 2027. They should release reservations a month or two in advance
Like Casa Bonita!
Next in Chicago has this all figured out. They sell "tickets" just like a sporting event that are priced differently based on day and time of day. You can also buy "season tickets" to get priority booking for every menu. They change the concept 4-6x per year. It's embarrassingly ostentatious (e.g., would you like 1918 Chartreuse with dessert) but they've nailed the resi process.
https://www.nextrestaurant.com/season-tickets-2026
I read "Chicago", "season tickets", and "restaurant" all blurred together and immediately thought of Bill Swerski's Superfans.
'Honestly can't figure out who that's helping.'
Maybe they just like having a full house? Or maybe they prefer a clientele that isn't exclusively corporate executives?
*In general* (not specifically about this restaurant), Europeans are just less fussed on average about 'maximizing earnings potential' and often weigh other factors. Whether this is better or worse is beside the point, it's just a cultural difference.
The non-corporate executive part probably matters a lot. You price everything too high and suddenly food writers can't afford to eat there. Zagat and Michelin tend to send in their people undercover, so if suddenly every dish starts costing $10,000, then it becomes obvious that the guy wearing the cheapest suit there is probably awarding Michelin stars.
I see the same playbook at In-N-Out and Chick-Fil-A. If there's always a line around the block, then you get prestige and brand value as the hot place that everyone wants to go. Even if there are more people total going to McDonald's, it doesn't look crowded, so people think that McDonald's isn't as popular and therefore isn't as good. It's like a Veblen good where the price is the amount of time you have to wait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
It can be annoyingly hard to get people to think about time as another kind of price, one that is also subject to economics. There's certain topics where people (who otherwise show a good grasp of markets) just cannot conceive that a free good can still have a supply and demand curve.
The longer you have to wait, the better it tastes.
https://getwaitlist.com/blog/the-waiting-paradox-why-making-customers-wait-increases-willingness-to-pay
"Honestly can't figure out who that's helping". People who like planning and have very stable lives, I guess.
People like that don't deserve to eat at trendy restaurants. They should be reserved for young people trying to impress the date they just got, so that we can boost marriage rates.
A lot of people seem to have a very deeply rooted intuition that all prces should be based on the cost of inputs plus some "reasonable" margin and anything else is unfair in a deeply problematic way that is practically a sign of impending societal collapse
My guess is that something like that is going on with the owner at this place.
Does price affect them being considered for awards?
I think so. Ambience is usually a category and having your place rammed with people super excited to finally get that elusive table and happy the value for money is unusually good must help achieve a good vibe.
If I had to guess how undercharging for food makes them money in the end, these places can sell $10,000 bottles of wine. Maybe if it's really hard to get a table you're more likely to go for that special bottle of wine. Might also help sell private dining options.
first three words of today's dispatch: "I got laid".
oh, never mind. Damn.
I think Matt Y's answer on wage compression is off the mark, Sure, it's true that wage compression raises the relative wages of young people, undocumented immigrants, and ex-convicts, i.e., people who have lower social status and/or are less likely (in case of undocumented immigrants, ineligible) to vote. But that's too abstract. Joe Average isn't saying, "I'm pissed off that an ex-con working at Dave's Killer Bread bakery now has slightly higher wages and therefore higher social status than before!"
No, Joe Average is probably pissed off for the very practical reason that wage compression means higher wages for the Doordash guy, the person preparing your Starbucks latte or Chipotle burrito, etc. and that translates into a higher cost of the kind of services middle and upper-middle class people enjoy. Nothing abstract about seeing your coffee become more expensive! As Marcus Seldon said in a comment below, wage compression means "higher cost of being waited on by other people."
So while I mostly agree with you, there is an almost non-ideological strain among American's that basically, service workers should be not that well paid because that makes them wary enough that customers get treated like kings. A lot of the 'nobody wants to work' stuff is really 'the server at my Applebee's isn't as attentive as they would've been in 2014' or whatever. Look how a cross-partisan complain of people going to Europe is basically, waiters or people working at stores ignore you.
There is also a 'EMT's make only x/hr while people flipping burgers now make x/hr and that's wrong' types who ignore a way the EMT people can raise their wages.
This also feeds into a lot of the problems with tipping culture.
I see a second component as well, and it's the premium someone gets paid for work more valuable than minimum wage work. If you make $64,000 a year-roughly the average for an American-the minimum wage going from $20,000 a year to $30,000 a year means your education, experience, higher work ethic, and more important work is essentially worth 75% of what it used to.
All while a higher minimum wage means the sort of businesses you frequent raise prices and cut staffing, resulting in higher prices for worse service.
This is the second time Matt has been flat out wrong about energy efficiency. Energy Star and tightened SEER standards for air conditioning units have made for more efficient appliances that are just as good and just as affordable as their predecessors.
I live in Houston, where it is awfully hot and humid. I have a 16 SEER two stage AC unit that is a marvel of efficiency and keeps my house ridiculously comfortable. There is no tradeoff involved here at all. None. Zero.
Same for light bulbs. Would anyone want to go back to the crappy incandescent ones we were stuck with?
The problem with light bulbs is we banned the bad incandescents when the only alternative was the even worse fluorescents. It took a decade for LEDs to become cheap and widespread.
Fluorescent lighting was terrible.
Sure, but after that decade things are pretty great imo.
There are a few applications where the heat of incandescent bulbs is useful.
There's also evidence that people have reacted to LEDs being cheaper to operate by having a lot more lights, and more light pollution.
> There are a few applications where the heat of incandescent bulbs is useful.
Then you could just add a separate heat source? That's about the simplest circuit you can make. If you're depending on heat from an incandescent light you are almost certainly doing something dumb.
If designing from scratch, sure, add a resistive heater + thermostat.
Banning incandescents means that the rare applications that need them kind of get screwed. LED bulbs are just better technology for like 95% of cases, though, so the ban wasn't even necessary.
Sometimes getting new technologies accepted requires a bit of a regulatory nudge.
But yeah sometimes you just want an incandescent (I guess). That's what they invented the Dark Web where one can go to get all those illicit things, right?
Because we prefer the wavelength and the lack of strobing.
The ones I have now are indistinguishable from incandescents and the strobing problem from what I can tell was an issue in early, cheap LEDs and not really an issue anymore.
Which lights are you buying that have reliable incandescent light temps? I.e. 4k max? Everything I buy is obviously higher out of the box.
In general neoliberals massively underrate the socially beneficial effects of technology-forcing regulations. E.g. they persistently suggest that raising the minimum wage will trade off with low-wage jobs without considering the social benefit (in the form of things like self-checkout and ordering at Shake Shack on an IPad that can't screw your order up and the like) that comes from some of those low-wage jobs becoming automated.
There are more complicated, but no less real, benefits that flow from things like the Clean Air Act's best-available-technology provisions, which is why the CAA is in fact a remarkably successful and effective law even though in economic theory it is ostensibly an economic drag.
Someone here red-pilled me on California's Prop 65 disclosures by pointing out they primarily affect producer behavior by discouraging use of lead so you don't have to affix a warning label.
I'm on the fence about plastic straw bans for the same reason; the paper straws that rolled out at first sucked, but there have been compostable plastic and agave-based straws which are basically as good as plastic.
*lead-pilled
My grandpa's brother got lead-pilled in the 50s, they had to put him in a care home
I'm... missing... why discouraging the use of one of the world's most toxic substances would be a bad thing?
I didn't think they had any effect on consumer behavior. For instance, they're posted in every parking garage - what are people supposed to do, not use parking garages?
Heh. It's funny how you say self-checkout is a *social benefit* while a couple of comments away, Marcus Seldon talks about how higher wages for low-paid jobs = more self-checkout and self-serve kiosks = *worse* experience for customers!
This is a matter of personal opinion, but as for me, I'm with Marcus Seldon on this. Self-checkout is annoying.
No, no, no, no, no. I would gladly pay EXTRA to not have to interact with some person manning a cash register.
I'm co-signing Joseph instead of Drosophilist? Have I stepped into Bizarroworld? Self-checkouts are fantastic!
Automate everything but my local's bartender and I'm pleased as punch.
I hold the fully pluralistic take that both self checkout and assisted checkout are fine, people can have preferences on when to use each, which also might differ depending on what groceries people have, and we should have both and not slam people for preferring one over the other. (Looking at you, Erik Loomis....)
The great thing about self checkout is that it uses a better queuing system.
I guess if you really like wasting time jawing with rando store clerks it's worth it to wait 5 minutes to buy a Snickers bar? I hate that, so I much prefer the get-in-and-get-out ethos of self-checkout.
From an objective standpoint, however, it's clearly more efficient to not pay a bunch of people to basically stand around doing nothing useful. Up to a certain point you need to do that in order to stop people from stealing everything, which is why most supermarkets can efficiently run several aisles of assisted checkout, but past some threshold it's just a deadweight loss.
On the other hand energy efficient dishwashers and washing machines suck
I have both, and they’re fine, nothing wrong with them. Any suckage is due not to energy efficiency, but to the fact that water in SoCal is hard as a rock. My tea kettle has mineral deposits all over it.
I detest mine. The dishwasher NEVER I mean literally never dries everything all the way. Instead you have top open it, shake it out, and then let if finish air drying
Our new washing machine is even worse. It doesn't want to fill all the way up with water, it constantly stops itself if it's out of balance etc.
We bought an extra large one for washing horse blankets and we have to fill it with a freaken garden hose. Just totally unacceptable.
Is your water heater hot enough? Dishwasher drying depends on your dishes getting hot enough to turn the last bit of water into steam (which is why plastic dishes always come out wet).
If it's not, how would I fix this? My dishwasher often has the same problem. My water heater's only 3 years old
The water heater should have an adjustment knob on it where you can turn up/down the temperature. You can check your hot water temp at your sink; run the hot water at full blast over a cooking thermometer and see what it says. Most houses have it in the 115-125 range; I had to turn ours down when I had a kid so we wouldn't scald him at bathtime by mistake.
On my previous comment you dont need to run the sink the whole time. Just long enough to get the cold water out of the pipes.
Turn on the hot water at your kitchen sink until it coming out hot, then turn on the disheasher.
What brands and how much did you spend?
That assumes you should have to pay out the ass for a decent appliance. The washer we first bought in our apartment was an old school top loader. Cheap, and worked for many years without all these problems. But it didn't have all the stupid electronics either. It just worked.
But given our new house, it didn't work with our new laundry room, we had to switch to a front load.
You almost certainly have an energy Star certified dishwasher/washing machine that is both more efficient and better than what you could buy in 2005, 1995, or 1985. I have a Bosch dishwasher that is both very efficient and incredibly good.
Yeah, I'm sure it has a star on it. It also sucks.
I wonder how much water we save by washing everything in the washing machine twice to make sure we get the soap out.
That sounds like you’re using too much soap!
nope, we are using the recommended amount, maybe even a bit less. But my wife has really sensitive skin. any residue she breaks out.
The rest of us are fine.
What data could we look at to see if this is true?
My intuition is that there almost has to be a tradeoff, unless we're just looking at massively better technology such that everyone would build the super efficient ACs even without the regulations. I mean, we kind of got that with LED lights, which I think really are both cheaper (in terms of how many dollars you spend per year on lights, since they last a lot longer than incandescents) and way more efficient. But is that also true for ACs/heat pumps?
My take on DC speed cameras is that two things can be true at the same time. They're a great public safety tool, and they also can be used rather aggressively as a revenue grab.
This is anecdotal, but I've had one speeding ticket in the last 20 years and it was from a DC speed camera on a 4 lane stretch of highway that for some reason had a speed limit of 50. Without any signage, I would have expected a 65 limit on this stretch. Given that I've probably driven 200k-300k miles outside of DC over the last 20 years, and < 500 miles inside DC, I'd contend there's probably something going on with DC speed traps being on the aggressive side.
I had no idea the speed limit was this low until I got the ticket in the mail. I was clocked at 61 on a sunny Sunday morning when traffic was light. I should have been more attentive to speed limit signs, but I also can't help but wonder how many others have been caught by this and whether such enforcement actually increases public safety or is just more of a $100 outsider tax. I will give credit where credit is due, the ticket was very easy to get taken care of online and it apparently doesn't affect driving points at least.
I definitely think that fines from law enforcement should not provide dependence for any government program. There certainly is potential for abuse similar to how some police departments have directly benefitted from civil asset forfeiture. And there can be a perverse incentive to encourage *more* of the activity at hand (same reason why I hate Pigouvian taxes). The best thing to do strikes me to just distribute the money back to the taxpayers, functioning somewhat like a safe driving check that insurers hand out.
But last Monday, I did repeatedly ask if there's been any credible reporting that the DC cameras in particular have discovered to have revenue generation as their top goal, and I've yet to get a satisfactory answer.
Do you know if the DC ones are controlled/operated by the district itself, or if there's a third-party contractor that runs them and makes part of their profit based on ticket revenue?
The heaviest abuse I've read about doesn't seem to be from municipalities themselves, but rather from the government outsourcing operations to companies (that then bribe officials to win contracts). I think the most blatant cases used this arrangement. IIRC, some states have gone as far as to ban this setup after widespread abuse was uncovered.
"The main issue isn't the state itself, it's the tax farmers they outsource concessions to" is a problem that quite literally dates back to the Roman Republic, when poorly-controlled agents of the state would trash the economies of the budding empire's provinces by squeezing them for every sestertius they had.
Everyone keeps relearning the same stupid lessons about greed and neoliberalism over and over because nobody remembers anything or studies history.
Highways with unreasonably low speed limits should also come with big yellow signs that say "SLOW. NIMBY CROSSING"
The transition from the BWP to US 50/New York Ave is really tricky speed limit wise
Since governments are typically strapped for cash and voters almost always reject tax increases, this seems like a fairly decent and painless way to give those governments some of the revenue they need.
The dog leash answer is wide off the mark. The answer to why they behave that way is enforcement. If people were fined for off leash dogs then they wouldn't let them off leash as much. The problem is that this is a fairly inefficient use of police/park ranger time so it is obviously not allocated to fining off leash dog owners.
Shaming is also inefficient as it relies on wider social stigma. If everyone had a problem with this then it might succeed, but if you loudly complain about this you're apt to being called a Karen as most people like dogs and will tell you to chill.
So the answer is to make a big stink about any damage you suffer, make people pay for it, and widely circulate knowledge of that so people know that could happen to them and adjust accordingly. Is if a dog eats your picnic food demand they pay for the food and some, if you get bit sue them, etc and then post about it in Twitter/reddit/whatever. Obviously this is not ideal as you want to avoid suffering damages in the first place, but it's the only way out of the equilibrium I see.
It seems like there is a close correlation between people with youngish kids and people who want to make sure dogs are under tight control (chh wrote a recent article, jennifer lawrence suggested a reverse john wick movie with a mad mother going on a dog killing rampage...).
Fewer people have kids now, maybe our numbers dropped below the level needed to socially shame the dog owners effectively.
Yep — I only became aware of this issue when I started going to the park with my young kids, but now I am super aware of it
So, I'm not actually convinced by this? I'm not a park ranger, but I work with them and dog issues are always a problem, even with enforcement? The one actual complaint we had to deal with about park ranger behavior was a woman complaining that the ranger who ticketed her for having her dog off leash was racist...against her black dog? Now, that's obviously small sample size, anecdotes are not data, but people are weird about their dogs, I mean even Matt refers to them as pet parents in this piece?
That's kind of hilarious.
I have an active dog and frequently take him off leash in hikes -- even in trails that technically ban it but where 90% of dogs are off leash and the other 10% are puppies being trained for it or they're reactive. I've never heard of anyone being fined for this.
Our very safety- and liability-conscious culture creates a number of rules which are more about appeasing faraway bureaucrats, lawyers, and actuaries than actually meant by people on the ground. The ability to practically do business and enjoy normal life requires navigating a degree of illegibility about which rules are real and which ones are Like That. This in turn invites disputes.
This is why I always loudly comment on "service dogs" misbehaving. "Service dog my ass, that thing just tried to catch a pigeon!" I'll say.
When I see people bring their dogs into restaurants and grocery stores, I think it is a wonderful thing. I mean, these are clearly people so bereft of real personal relationships in their lives, lives which themselves are so devoid of meaning, aspiration, and hope, that the only way they can find comfort, joy and happiness is to take their damn mutts to places where no dog has any reason to be. But if this simple act of selfishness and lack of caring about other people gives them fleeting moments of contentment and allows them to continue on in their dreary existence, who am I to criticize but rather should applaud them for, by this one act, shaking their fist at an uncaring universe from which they are completely alienated and declaring, "I shall not give up!"
P.S. I loved my dogs. And they loved being at home.
I think this is a separate issue. Many COVID puppies were not raised to be apart from their humans and now developed anxiety with them gone, barking a ton and destroying things. Their owners will instead take them everywhere. It's a training issue but these people are selfish and lazy and give legit service dogs a bad name.
That said, many places are dog friendly and people don't know. My local FedEx and liquor store give my dog treats so if I have an errand I'll combine it with the dog walk.
I believe this is partially fallacious as an analysis: "In fairness to Trump, this philosophy has worked pretty well for him in life. If you’d asked me abstractly about the idea of just refusing to pay his contractors back when he was a hotel developer, I would have told you that this kind of short-term thinking can’t pay off for a businessman. Sure, it’s probably true that most of the people you stiff won’t have much recourse in practice. But the damage to your reputation will be too severe to make it possible to continue doing business."
Since I come from the world of investment finance: Trump's philosophy in terms of Operating Businesses was a failure. There is a reason his operating businesses generally ran into bankruptcy.
He is not in the end of a successful real estate mogul in the normal sense (although not publicly generally visible as genuine real estate billionnaires tend to discretion for a number of reasons) if one is looking at increase in actual real net assets.
Where he has had success is not in running actual operational businesses - whether operations like his Eastern Shuttle fiasco, or casinos.
His success is in Marketing and brand franchising (his name) generating cash flows not from being operational (where he is a pathetic failure) but renting out gaudiness (which has its market) without having real operational exposure. Since about the late 90s or so his revenue success is in franchising-in-renting-the-name form (not the more applied operational sense of say McDonalds that brings operational backbone).
The Apprentice - Reality TV faux mogul is the example - actually operationally he was every bit the same disaster he is as President, blundering inconsistent incompetent - but marketing himself to the rubes, utterly brilliant.
Really if one understands his real - not claimed, real - business trajectory much of Trump II presidency makes much more sense than if one swallows the bait of he was successful in operational business via his Queens con-man style, which he wasn't. Disassociate the marketing from the operational.
When I was a young law firm associate many moons ago, we had a training on real estate law. The partner used Trump as an example of a developer who doesn't actually develop anything, but just slaps his name on the project and takes 10% or so. And all of us were surprised by this - we thought he was this uber successful developer. So its been out there for awhile, but you had to pay close attention to understand that Trump the "Developer" was and still is just BS.
This seems like it could form the basis of an argument that People with Bad Taste are the Reason We Can’t Have Nice Things.
Don't know how long many moons ago was but his Trump Tower here in Chicago was the last build he actually developed. Everything since has been licensed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_International_Hotel_and_Tower_(Chicago)
Yup.... the dichotomy from what one could understand of Trump if one was in NY finance or law inside on corp/invest and Trump imagery..... really amazing.
There is probably an underrated real dichotomy in how the politics of the Trump era has played out:
1) People from the Northeast/Not from the Northeast, with the former seeing him up close as a con man
2) People who have been around multiple successful business people / People who haven't, with the former knowing he had a bad reputation
Even kids in the 90's in the first of each category above knew not to take him seriously. When my mom told me all the way back in the 90's that he inherited a lot of his money and his business, it was surprising to me that anyone took him seriously. He's a successful entrepreneur for the type of person whose understanding of wealth and status come from reality TV.
Except I seem to recall that Trump did particularly well in primaries in the northeast!
Yes - yes veyr much on both points.
Scott Alexander made a directionally similar point here
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/19/book-review-the-art-of-the-deal/
which contains one of my favorite lines about Trump:
“ The less you respect Trump’s substance – and I respect it very little – the more you’re forced to admire whatever combination of charisma, persuasion, and showmanship he uses to succeed without having any.”
What thinking of that quote when I saw this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yieDCn19Udw
Carney has been -- by far -- the most thoughtful and persuasive leader against Trump and yet in these little 1:1 settings somehow the animus just isn't there.
The failure of reputation effects to which Matt alludes is arguably implicit in the part where you say “operating businesses,” plural. The point being made is that Donald Trump is not supposed to be a person you would entrust with capital, because he is a dishonest grifter. In fact, however, appears that reputation effects just don’t work in this domain, and thus he was provided the opportunity to run numerous businesses (dishonestly and poorly.)
It ran out, by the late 90s only Deutsche Bank via one sketchily run sub-office in private banking was touching him.
and Deutsche was channeling funds that may be described as "opaque"
This kind of analysis seems to be just finding a way to underbelly Trump because we don't like Trump. The idea that a man can become a billionaire in life and then we go "well technically he isnt successful for all of these esoteric reasons" is nonsensical. The vast majority of millionaires, and even 100 millionaires never become billionaires in thier lifetime. The discussion on whether he is successful or not starts and ends with the simple fact that he is a billionaire, all the rest is naval gazing.
Now I am fully on board with the idea that we shouldn't celebrate achieving success in the way Trump did. A world where being an gold standard asshole is a venerated path to success is a shittier world. Spending breathe trying to pretend 1 in a billion success isnt actually success isnt convincing though.
And let me add that this is basic management (of which I know what I speak, I am co-CEO of a firm that I co-founded and has grown to being multi-country operations)
If I have a staff member who is not competent in operational management but is good at sales, I am a bad manager - not "technical nitpicker" to put said person into an operational management role. And vice-versa.
It is really actually quite fundamental to understanding good business management to know the difference between capability areas and not confound being good at X being good at Y.
Trump was and is a failure in operational businesses, triggering repeated bankruptcies not due to market issues but due to his own operating management incompetence - and certainly not growing the inheritance from his father.
Trump was and is brilliant at marketing leverage and converting said marketing pitchmanship - even when heavily shyster tinged - into cash flows (and it is this cash flow that has saved his overall net worth, not operational management and real estate development success in the operational terms - where real actual (not bluffed and faked) billionionnaires have made real billions.
Trump's millions from his marketing and franchise-name leveraging are however a real form of success which is what I pointed to - it is however an utterly different skill set than what he pretends to.
Now middle American as evidenced by the Apprentice has broadly been taken in by his puffery, that's neither here nor there to me - but cold eyed analysis not hatred one has to understand where actual strengths and cash flow come from and what is faked.
From that one understands far better Trump, modus operandi as well as his real strengths (which in fact I find Lefties consistently do tear down - there is actual real genuis in his salesmanship and salesmanship to different people (as he's not a working class guy in reality) although looked down on by many or most professional class college educated is a real skill. The Democrats could learn something there about selling to People Not Like Us....
In contrast there is Musk.
Musk has historically attraced ill-informed Lefty critiques out of pure dislike of the guy (who is to be admited, quite dislikable) - based on misplaced founder-invester fetishisation whereas in reality Musk has repeatedly show brilliance in the critical stage of scaling on industrial investment (and this is operational management), that is fucking hard. But one has to locate where the real brilliance specifically is, and not either childishly hero-worship nor equally childishly tear the guy down over personality dislike.
Eh?
This analysis is the analysis of proper investment people amigo.
First, Trump is not really a billionnaire, that is Trump puffery.
On a Net Net basis Trump did not grow his inheritance stake. What growth he's done is really Apprentice era onwards based on marketing and cashing on Apprentice leveraged name rental.
That is certainly not nothing but it is not either success in the areas that Yglesias noted - in real operating developed he did end up being dead-ended from his own incompetence and bad behaviour (even benchmarked against real estate development world).
If you want to be a gullible Rube and buy his pretending at being a real billionnaire nothing I can do to change that, but I am not personally impressed. I am in Private Equity. Trumpy pretense and Potemkin Village habits don't fool me.
Where I give credit is where he has real success and that is in a certain kind of marketing, there he has a real sort of brilliance and leveraging money out of that as he has done, now there he's made the real money. But that's utterly different than operational
If you were around successful business people in the 90s, they did not take Trump seriously because they knew he was a liar who depended on his inheritance.
Yeah - I mean the whole thing where he was calling up over years Forbes and pretending to be other people to push into Forbes journalists his own disinforomation so he could get into Forbes lists... that's not the actions of Real Billionnaire RE developer.
In some ways that’s an even bigger black pill, that you can be a huge a-hole and make that your brand and people will love it!
Well Trump's pre Presidency brand was essentially Queens outer-borough idea of Rich People in Manhattan (versus actual rich people in Manhattan). Apprentice continued it, the working class idea of what CEOs do.
I’ve had a pro-Trump family member say something like “of course Trump is not nice; he’s a successful businessman and they can’t be nice.”
It’s just a profoundly bleak worldview that this is how so many working class people see successful CEOs (and their conclusion is that this is good/cool and not a reason to have communism)
The ideal CEO we should hold up should be someone like Jensen Huang, who got rich by just making a better product and not by screwing people through unfair deals, and still maintains a relatively humble aesthetic…
Trump is not just not nice, he's a shyster. Simple as that.
When I started in private equity I got an advice, "want a friend, get a dog."
Not nice is not = to Trump. Trump is a shyster con artist.