I forgot to note why I put a * on “and cooking” before.

I absolutely eat meat. I eat all kinds of meat. I eat more kinds of meat that most people are comfortable with. I also eat a much lower quantity than most people from developed countries.

One of my favorite foods is Wienerschnitzel. It’s made from veal and if anyone tried to give me a guilt trip over that, I’d laugh at them, loudly and in their face.

My sister is Vegan and rather than give me shit, she just eats vegan food. So I developed a 100% vegan Wienerschnitzel recipe that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. I wash flour into wheat gluten (seitan) and flavor it with vegetable broth. Then I roll them out in a pasta roller until they’re the size of tenderized veal. Pick your favorite vegan egg subsitute (it just needs to be sticky), bread it, and fry it up.

I was willing to try a lot of vegan and vegetarian food because it was presented in a positive way. If someone had tried to guilt trip me and insist that I’d go 100% vegan I would just have written them off as a crackpot and never even listened to them.

Daryl Davis.

That entire line of reasoning only works if the person you’re talking to already considers meat consumption to be inherently cruel.

While those people certainly exist, trying to convince them to be vegan is a form of, "Preaching to the choir.

I’ve never seen accusations of cruelty change anyone’s behavior. I’ve personally gotten many people to reduce their meat consumption through dialog (and cooking *).

Look up the guy who is generally credited with convincing the most KKK members to quit the Klan and how he did it.

Ich ess’ lieber keine Orceier.
Und die Scwänze konnen sie sich auch behalten.

Haben Orcs 'leicht Plfaumen?

Are there any lab scientists that don’t hate their pipettes? My wife used to complain constantly about getting cramps from those things, especially those multi-drop dispensers.

Her explanation was always that biotechs can afford robots to do the pipetting but academia is budget constrained and grad students are (were) cheaper than robots.

<puts on nerd hat>

Normal people rarely see the above image.
When you look at Jupiter with the naked eye, you see a slightly brighter dot. The only way to tell it’s not a star is that it changes position relative to them from day to day.
If you look at it with a good pair of binoculars, you can see that the dot seems to be slightly bigger than other dots. You still can’t see the red spot.
If you look at it through a telescope with a 10" objective and 100x magnification, you can definitely make out the red spot and you can make out that the rest of the planet has some texture.

An image that clear and crisp takes some very expensive equipment.

Yeah. That Halloween stunt was a bit weird.

He could be but I’ve never heard about any sex scandals about him, just his characters :)

As far as I know, he is a faithful and devoted husband.

Sir, I’ll have you know that, “that blond guy” is none other than Neil Patrick Harris.

His acting range covers an immense range of characters; from teen heartthrob Doogie Howser, to the psychic GeStaPoesque Carl Jenkins, to comedy villain Dr Horrible, to playboy Barney Stinson.

He’s gay but he plays cis-het womanizing sluts so well that a lot of people assume he’s a cis-het womanizing slut IRL.

Unlike his fake slut persona, he’s actually a real magician and does the tricks in HIMYM himself. He even has his own card deck with a secret code in it https://store.theory11.com/products/neil-patrick-harris-playing-cards

“that blond guy” indeed. Herumph sir. I say herumph to that!

If China wanted to invade Russia. Why would they want Russia to win a war first? Why would it be easier for China to wait for hundreds of thousands of troops to be freed up. If China wanted to invade Russia, it’s hard to think of a better time than right now. They would be caught with their entire army on the wrong side of the country and most of the world lined up to support China, or at least stay out of the way. The only deterrent is Russia’s nuclear arsenal and that wouldn’t go away after a victory in Ukraine either.

It becomes fairly obvious when you think about what the likely effects would be.

Let’s say Russia achieves all it’s military obejctevies; they crush the Ukrainian military, the remaining civilian population offers an unconditional surrender, and Russia is able to completely annex Ukraine. Then what?

Then China’s biggest and most powerful neighbor would be even bigger and more powerful. Once hostilities ceased, Russia would slowly be able to start selling oil to the rest of the world again so China wouldn’t get as good a deal and the negotiations on Power of Siberia would get more complicated.

Where is the upside for China?

Yeah. It’s a shame she didn’t get together with all her teenage friends and face off against the SS. That definitely would have stopped them in their tracks.

Thanks. That sounds more like a joke aimed at non-programmers about people who think they’re programmers. If I’m willing to ignore all the valid use cases of AI, I guess it might be funny to assume that none exist.

I’m terrified of it.

I’ve talked to relatives on both sides of my family who have experience those times and they have nothing good to say about it.

My grandmother went from hoping the Nazis would ignore her, to hoping the American bombs would miss her, to hoping that the Russian soldiers wouldn’t rape her.

My grandfather had guys from both the KMT and the CPC point guns at his head to try to get him to join (on separate occasions) and ended up a refugee.

Both China and Austria are doing very nicely now but boy did it suck getting there.

Can someone explain this joke in programmer terms?

I just wrote an AI that is trained to classify image patterns and automatically creates bitmasks based on the pattern distributions. We tried k-means clustering and got garbage. How would I have done that without AI?

That’s clearly the NYTs intent in writing this article.

Do you think New Yorkers will buy the “radical Muslim antisemite” line?

My economics background is pretty formal and I’ve found that academic economists are very careful about how they use “efficiency” when it comes to markets.

Modern (in the last 100 years or so) economists don’t spend much time talking about Smith’s “invisible hand”. Instead they tend to use very precise definitions of efficiency and take great care to use them in the right place.

When economists say that “markets are efficient” they’re usually talking about the very specific case of “Pareto efficiency”, which is pretty far removed from non-economists think about when they hear “efficient”. Pareto efficient just means that we’re in a state where nobody’s situation could be improved without degrading at least one other persons situation. That’s trivially (trivial is academic speak for "it’s true but it’s so dumb it’s not really interesting) satisfied by giving all of society’s resources to a single person. Pareto efficiency specifically leaves out any concept of just how good the overall situation is. It makes no comment on how good an economy is for society overall.

Economists also have a concept called “market efficiency hypothesis”. It’s generally talked about in 3 forms; weak, semi-strong, and strong.
“Weak market efficiency hypothesis” states that all information from past stock prices is instantly reflected in current stock prices. The strongest evidence for that is that nobody has been able to create a stock picking algorithm based only on past prices that reliably makes money. If weak form weren’t true, everyone would make a killing and that’s not even possible.
“Semi-strong market efficiency hypothesis” states that all publicly available information is instantly incorporated into stock prices. The evidence for this one is shaky, at best and economists don’t pretend otherwise. If this is true, legitimate stock analysts wouldn’t be able to make money. We know that some of them do make (insane amounts of) money. The only experiments that test this suggest that those traders just got lucky.
“Strong market efficiency hypothesis” states that all private and public information is instantly incorporated into stock prices. Economists know this is false. If it were true, insider trading wouldn’t be possible and we know it happens.

So on to the more nuanced view of efficiency. People have some cost to switching houses; it’s a combination of easily measured costs like inspections, cleaning fees, moving expenses, etc as well as less easily measured costs, such as finding new friends, taking the time to learn the new neighborhood, etc. A landlord can certainly raise rent some amount over construction costs. If people have the option of moving to a place that is priced at construction cost, they will do so when the extra cost gets too annoying for them. That’s the beauty if this system, neither you, I, nor the landlord need to have a say in what the level is, the resident themselves gets to decide. We just need to make sure that they are actually able to make that decision freely and providing an indefinite stream of at-cost housing does exactly that.

I assume you’re responding specifically to my modified proposal.

Middle men do take a cut but they also provide a service. I own my home and it’s a huge PITA dealing with maintenance. It’s not just the cost, I need to do the research on regulations, incentives, materials, contractors. I also take on a ton of liquidity risk; when I rented I could leave on 1 months notice, there’s no way I could sell my house that fast unless I wanted to sell at a huge discount. Look at any homeowner forum and you’ll see that everyone is surprised at the extra work and costs that they never had to think about as renters.

Of course, there’s the question of if that cut is worth the benefit.

I proffer 2 claims:

1. If the government is willing to supply an indefinite stream of houses, at cost, consumers (residents) will never be forced to pay for a middle man unless they believe they’re getting their money worth. Ie it will be nearly impossible for middle men to “gouge” renters because it will be too easy for them to leave. (for some extra nerd flavor you can check out Akerlof’s “Market for Lemons”, it lays out the game theory for why consumers won’t overpay if they think they’re getting ripped off)
2. Given that they know they won’t be able to over charge, rational landlords will just avoid bidding on properties that they can’t profit from. Basic economic theory also says that the irrational ones will lose money and eventually go out of business and the government construction policy guarantees that consumers can wait out that market inefficiency period.

Unfortunately it’s not a simple problem.

Real estate is non-commoditized for a number of reasons. A big part is that people have wildly different needs when it comes to housing. They don’t just prioritize different things, they often care about completely different factors. In many cases a feature to one person is a bug to an other.

People have tried to build large housing blocks in the past with mixed success. It’s certainly better than being homeless. Particularly in areas where all the previous housing had been bombed to rubble, the prospect of any shelter is incredibly attractive.

The DDR economy isn’t exactly one we want to model here. Remember that the overall system was so bad that people risked getting shot just to get out. Yes, there were many factors to why their economy was terrible but part of it was a Soviet era belief that the government could make major economic policy decisions without having to think too hard about the individual level details.

I wouldn’t read too much into prices in a command economy. Energy was famously cheap because the USSR overproduced energy. It was so cheap that many public buildings didn’t have light switches, they just left them on. That was money that could have been spent on more productive things. I also remember visiting the USSR during “Glasnost”. They were opening up but they still had the old price controls. Bread and Vodka prices were in single digit Kopecks. 100 Kopeck to the Ruble. The official exchange rate was something like 2 USD per Ruble. If you paid more than 1 USD for 5 Rubles on the street, you were getting ripped off. If you were savvy, 1 USD could get you up to 20 Rubles.

I do like your idea of the government building lots of housing. I’d just modify it a bit. The government builds houses all over the place. Each one is put up for auction with the minimum bid being break-even. If there’s every a time when those auctions don’t get bids, pause new construction in that area until it does.

That algorithm prevents over production of housing, allows for housing in the correct locations (as determined by the residents), automatically adjusts as demand increases, and allows for varied housing to meet the varied needs of a diverse set of residents. It’s also largely immune to speculation. If some hedge fund tries to buy all those houses, they’ll just be left holding the bag when the government pumps out cheaper alternatives.

It would crush real estate as an investment vehicle. Real estate won’t just stop going up in value, we’d be actively working to plateau or even reduce those values. I see that as a feature rather than a bug.

Housing is generally cited as the canonical opposite of commodity products. Each one has to be valued independently and there’s often a huge delta between sales price and market price.