FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
"We need scammers to get vigorous economic development" is such a weirdly cargo cult reading of that story.
I frequently stop at a local convenience store, and buy an Arizona diet iced green tea, which costs $1. The store is tiny, normally there is only the owner or his wife present, and when I walk in they're frequently making a sandwich at the counter, stocking something, etc. When they're somewhere else I wave the tea at them and the dollar bill, tell them I'll leave it by the register, and leave.
Now I could definitely steal the tea once, maybe twice. I could probably steal a candy bar or something a few times.
But I would definitely go there less if buying the tea took me three minutes longer.
Which would probably also reduce my purchase of higher profit items like Zyns and hoagies and ice cream at the store.
The way you get a high trust society is because when people trust each other, there's so little friction in economic transactions that you become so rich that the odd scam can be ignored, societally, without serious consequences.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
Life is fragile and can be snuffed out at any moment. The day she crashed her bike I hugged her as tightly as her scrapes would allow. Not all parents are so lucky.
Ok, cool, but what policy do we implement to fix it? Because there are very much people out there trying to use this tragedy to implement a variety of policies. It's amazing how many anti-gubmint conservatives turn into nanny state liberals when a natural disaster occurs. Which is why it's important not to get too caught up in tragedies, it quickly becomes a con designed to get you to buy into an agenda.
I'm sure the crash was awful for your daughter and you both, but I'm having trouble parsing how you told the story. Are you taking an excessive parental responsibility when you say that you "forgot" to teach her about the brakes? Because it's just hard for me to imagine not going over the brakes before you even get on the bike in a "parts of the bike" kind of way, or a curious kid just asking what x does. I'm kind of assuming you did tell her about the brakes, but didn't drill using them enough that she remembered how to use the brakes quickly under pressure.
But regardless, what policy could prevent such a bike accident? Kids can't ride bikes! Parents can't teach their kids to ride bikes, they have to be enrolled in a Licensed Bicycle School! Kids can only ride bikes with complex and expensive Automatic Emergency Braking systems! The latter two are of course equivalent to "poor/disinterested kids can't ride bikes."
So sure, hug your kid. But keep your priorities straight.
Sure, I think of myself as a fairly honest person. But in my life I have shoplifted, perhaps three or four times, by accident or out of pure cussedness. Certainly if the owners of the store maintain a policy to trust people similarly situated to me, they will suffer additional losses over time compared to what they would if they sought a "zero shoplifting" policy. But they will probably lose more business than it's worth.
We aren't arguing that shoplifting isn't bad. We're arguing that some risk of shoplifting is better than no risk of shoplifting, because in order to achieve zero shoplifting, the convenience store must undermine it's own raison d'etre: convenience. Hence the optimal amount of shoplifting for a convenience store isn't zero. More shoplifting isn't better than less shoplifting, but as the amount asymptotically approaches zero there's a point where the security procedures become too much, where the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
We see this all around us. Self checkout leads to massively increased losses, but not enough to balance avoiding paying a cashier. EZ Pass and toll by plate on highways leads to significant lost revenue compared to toll booths, but reduced costs and increased traffic flow make it worth it. If I put on a pink polo shirt and a white baseball cap with a finance logo on it and throw my golf clubs in my truck and drive to a nice country club and walk out and start hitting balls on the range, no one will stop me, because staff can't constantly be harassing members and it's not worth the risk.
The optimal point isn't zero.
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