coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Trademarks are for authenticating products
That’s not what trademarks are for in practice. They are for signaling status. Any visible trademarked logo you see is for status. I’m all for manufacturer authentication, just not visible externally or too small to be noticed by someone else.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-the-stanley-cup-went-viral
In 2019, the brand’s now star product, the forty-ounce Quencher, was selling so poorly that the company had stopped restocking or marketing it. A partnership with the Buy Guide, an affiliate-marketing site based in Utah, where the Quenchers were popular among Mormon mothers, saved it. Coached by the Buy Guide, in 2020, Stanley launched a new Web site and an affiliate-marketing system through which fans could make money by driving sales
Outsourcing marketing is marketing
What might appear to be an organic phenomenon, though, is actually an engineered corporate crossover. Companies prepare carefully, and expensively, to cultivate their moments of ubiquity. They leverage our attention, the same way an influencer does, to convert online viewers into fans and customers.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I answered it but I understand you need clarification and don’t mind.
why does mdonald’s not need to lower for Wendy’s, but does for wholesale
Grocery stores will always need to have lower prices than an expedient restaurant like McDonald’s, otherwise few would eat at home. Consumers are more likely venture far away for groceries, because it can be cost-saving to do so. This is different from having only a few fast food places to go to on your lunch break. There may be dozens of grocers, some of which will not know their competitors’ pricings. And because the food is already purchased in bulk and perishable, grocers need to sell some food at a discount otherwise they lose more money in the whole. This is all very different than a fast food place with very efficient supply chains.
But if you’re wondering, “according to your argument, we should still see grocery stores pricefix with other grocers!” Indeed, we do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada
retailers and supermarket chains reached a secret agreement among themselves to artificially inflate the price of bread at the wholesale and retail levels from late 2001 to 2015[1] (some sources stated that the price fixing continued into 2017[2]). The Competition Bureau of Canada alleged, in court documents released 31 January 2018, that seven Canadian bread companies committed indictable offences[3] in what journalist Michael Enright later termed "the great Canadian bread price-fixing scandal" of 2018
the scheme inflated the price of bread by at least $1.50
The retailers who participated in the scheme, including Loblaws, Walmart Canada, Giant Tiger, Sobeys and Metro, allegedly "demanded" that the bread suppliers manage actively their retail competition by co-ordinating bread prices between the retailers.
Retail customers would call threatening to reject a price increase if another retailer was offside in terms of pricing alignment. None of them wanted to be the first to implement the price increase. There was always a negotiation process going back and forth between the four retailers where the supplier was trying to coordinate it, because somebody had to be the first to move.
I promise you, if grocers can negotiate price increases amongst themselves over a period of 15 years in secrecy, they can surely decide not to lower prices unless their competitor does so (guaranteeing rarely-lowering prices). So you need a place like CostCo whose entire shtick is an ugly experience for lower prices. Even then, CostCo makes 30 billion in profit.
A new analysis from the White House Council of Economic Advisers suggests that elevated profit margins among large grocery retailers could be contributing to the stubbornly high price of food on store shelves. The analysis, which relies on Quarterly Financial Reports data from the Census Bureau, found that food and beverage stores had increased their margins by about two percentage points since the eve of the pandemic, reaching their highest level in two decades.
I’ll edit and reply to other points in a bit
Trademarks should be used to compensate for the cost of innovation. The reason Stanley profited so much from their product is that they succeeded in manipulating female buying preferences by associating it with high status. That’s it. It’s a grotesque waste of resources and predicated on manipulating the public imagination. So in the case of stupid cups and other status items, there should be no trademarks (maybe a small number on the bottom of items to guarantee quality with a trusted producer only).
It’s funny that this is where the buck stops with capitalists. No no no, you can’t regulate like this, you need to regulate like that! Changing how we regulate is unthinkable!
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I agree with you that repealing IP laws would increase competition and lower prices significantly — look no further than Stanley Cups, why should one company make so much profit on cups just because they have the funds to psychologically manipulate the public’s desires — but economies of scale come in and demand centralization. One or a few factories producing Ozempic will always be more efficient than a dozen or two dozen, no? It could be this way with fast food giants, as well. McDonald’s and a couple other giants simply due to economies of scale and accumulated institutional knowledge can uniquely lower food prices, but it’s unlikely this will ever happen because nothing enforces the competition past a certain point (“lower than grocery stores and not painfully higher than competitors” is all their profit needs to be, but they will never willingly race to the bottom for prices because they can anticipate lower total profit as a result)
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I appreciate your advice to look at Khan Academy. I will look for a cost-efficient reading comprehension program to suggest you.
but how's that relevant to why McDonald's wouldn't set their price to $10
That wasn’t in the reply I replied to. You are asking me why my explanation for X does not reply to the non-existent question Y. In fact, you asked Y three posts up, and to that I replied
They can’t charge an amount that is so noticeably higher that you remember it and buy a pack of water for 1/20th of the price at a store.
Now clearly this answers your question as to why all fast food locations can’t arbitrarily raise their prices to infinity. They compete with grocery stores, which have more competition over prices due to the variety of bulk retail outlets, online grocery orders, and so on, and which the consumer plans trips to in advance. This is different from having a limited number of expedient food options near your work.
why is my experience[…]
I have no idea, you could have googled it
From the article:
At the moment, according to the site, the cheapest Big Mac in the country is being sold in Oklahoma for $3.49. The most expensive Big Mac in the U.S. will run you $8.09 in Massachusetts. That’s more than double the price of Oklahoma’s.
What you can do as a consumer is do research and, perhaps, support local stores,” Klyman noted. “Giant global chains are sometimes not being honest and bringing up their price 200% even though their cost hasn’t gone up at that rate, so do your research, and you might find that local stores and restaurants won’t upcharge you as much.”
Back to you:
Even if the private company earns so much profit by simply making an amazing product everyone wants to buy and can't produce enough supply to meet demand even when they try, e.g Ozempic or Nvidia?
We have to ask, (1) should the developer of Ozempic make as much money as possible, or (2) should the developer of Ozempic make approximately the amount of money that a reasonable developer would consider justifies his research. My position is the second one. (If this is too many words of commas let me know and I can rephrase). Imagine how evil it would be if the scientist who discovered penicillin tried to maximize profit.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
How is it possible that you don’t understand that it evades the point? That’s shocking, because it’s a very clear case of arguing against the substance — which should never be done because it wastes time (hence my terse reply, and now I have to waste time clarifying something so simple). It’s not just bad argumentation, it’s damaging to the whole discussion because of that.
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We are talking about the overcharging of goods with water as an example. The one example is not the substance of the argument.
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If someone wants a bottle of water they should be purchasing it at a reasonable price. Tap water has nothing to do with the claim. It’s not always possible to drive with an open cup of water in your car, depending on cupholders and road conditions
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If some locations allow free cups of water, what does this have to do with the locations which do not? Even if points 1 and 2 don’t apply, the simple fact that there are locations which do not give free water makes this whole argument a wasteful tangent. See here, here, here
move the goalposts
it’s crucial to understand the difference between substance and trivial details
to the substance that is single most responsible for the American pre-diabetic and diabetes epidemic.
Are you trolling?
This isn't just poor argumentation
I will read the rest of your post if you can confirm that you’ve understood why you are incorrect per the above
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
There’s a concept called “profit” and we look at profit when determining whether things are overpriced, not just gross expenditures
many companies that could've succeeded fail due to bad leadership
This has always happened. Even very highly paid corporate CEOs screw up companies.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Dockworkers rightfully fight automation because they know that there are not other jobs for them with high pay as many other jobs lack unions; the “efficiency” goes to just a few at top. This is different from a scenario where unions are the norm across industries — suddenly the benefit of being a dockworker would not so large as to prevent them going through with automation. But even if for some reason dockworkers maintain a disproportionately high salary, we can imagine a system where the union of one industry negotiates (and can be overruled) by a broader “related-industry” or “affected industry” greater union body. There are many ways to incentivize efficient economic decisions which involve unions and cross-union negotiation.
cup of water for free
This just evades the point, try again but for soda
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
New businesses typically lower prices so that consumers try out their business, as consumer behavior is based around habits and attachment to routine — lower prices break this cycle. If you’ve noticed this is why newly opened stores have sales / deals. McDonald’s also may be over-pricing an item and at the same time a new competitor can’t compete due to economy of scale
How would private investment into companies work
Thy will have to invest based upon the idea that the business they invest in is actually valuable to society. If it is valuable then it will grow and profit for a period, and if the profits are too extravagant than the Government steps in — and this is a good threat because it makes investors vote for boards that lower prices themselves, lest the government step in.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Why are you quoting me McDonald’s PR as if it means something? Are you going to quote me Wendy’s selling $1 burgers next, after their PR disaster of announcing a plan to do surge pricing?
Kempczinski didn’t offer details on the timing or size of any price cuts. But his focus on affordability marked a shift from just a few months ago, when he boasted that US menu prices, which went up as much as 10% in 2023 alone, weren’t deterring sales.
They may as well continue doing this cycle, raising then lowering when publicity gets bad / people notice.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
They can’t charge an amount that is so noticeably higher that you remember it and buy a pack of water for 1/20th of the price at a store. But they can (and do) overcharge on water, understanding that they can get away with it because it’s an inconvenience for you to get it elsewhere. That’s extremely economically inefficient, because McDonald’s surplus profit goes disproportionately to already-wealthy individuals. (It’s better for a nation to have more people with more money, versus some with extraneous wealth that doesn’t provide any benefit in terms of happiness or entrepreneurship or invention or culture.)
It would be more efficient if, for super-sized corporations, an agency stepped in and “auctioned” off the corporate positions and ownership according to who will do the job for the least amount of money, then pass the saved money to consumers. If that’s too much government interference, then allow the employees to form powerful unions, because the employees are more likely to identify with the interests of the consumer and stand to gain less as individuals from purposeful economic inefficiency.
There are a lot of problems with communism. People should be paid up to 10x more than median wages for performance, because humans have an instinct to be rewarded according to performance, that’s deeply evolutionary. Humans also have an instinct to care for things they own, and you see this in small businesses and entrepreneurship. The answer is a balance that accepts the importance of human instinct while also realizing that primitive capitalism can get harmful, antisocial and inefficient. For large corporations, no one should feel like they “own” it, and these trend toward pseudo-monopolies due to institutional knowledge accumulation and established supply chains. For a problem like used car dealerships, we should have some kind of Honesty Regulation akin to Cicero’s grain merchant at Rhodes thought experiments. The policy should make it so that even a very dumb person can immediately tell that something isn’t in his economic best interest.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Large companies have zero incentive to reduce prices when they know that their competitor will do the same. McDonald’s has actually sued 12 of the major national meat suppliers for price-fixing simply based on the fact that each supplier knew the others’ pricing due to a shared analytic tool. All it takes is one reasonably intelligent analyst at the meat supplier board room to ask “so what happens if we lower our prices” for all to realize it’s an unprofitable move.
https://www.fooddive.com/news/mcdonalds-sues-meat-companies-pork-price-fixing/637572/
If you are McDonald’s and there’s a Wendy’s across the street, you have two options. You can both keep your prices high and split the pool of consumers 50/50, knowing that stressed American consumers will continue to buy your slop because it is time-efficient and they have formed a habit to your addictive slop. Or you can lower your prices, which the competitor will do next week, which leaves you back to the first option only with less profit. Of course they don’t do this. But if a brand new competitor moves in who doesn’t play ball, perhaps they will do this to squeeze him out — no new competitor can compete with the supply chain and the institutional knowledge of McDonald’s.
It’s an entrenched mythology of capitalism that companies lower prices based on competition. This hardly ever works in the real world. There’s no reason, for instance, for OnlyFans to rake in billions of dollars when anyone can create a similar site. But OnlyFans isn’t profitable because their service is better, but because the pornographer who operated it made the site a meme among the public (a kind of psychological rentseeking), because he had the previous institutional knowledge and capital to do this. And you see with car dealerships, there’s no reason for any used car dealership owner to make tens of millions. But in an intensive competition what they do is compete over psychologically manipulating the vulnerable, so the car dealerships compete over misleading pricing plans, overpriced itemization that the customer doesn’t have the knowledge to dispute, etc. It is horrifically inefficient and immoral as a system and it is only maintained due to various mythologies in the public imagination.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
2022 is recent enough, though. It’s unlikely they can recruit 10,000 fighters in just one year, one third of their entire force. But they could still just be wrong about the numbers.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
In no previous conflict has the Gazan Ministry of Health overcounted mortality figures — they have proven reliable in their counting based on history. You need to prove that Hamas has taken control of the ministry of health when we know that the leadership of the ministry is more affiliated with other groups like Fatah and Palestinian Authority. If the ministry has a finite number of trained officials to verify deaths, which is probable, then the number of verifications has a ceiling. They would not be pulling random Hamas fighters in tunnels and putting a white coat on them and telling them to verify deaths.
the Shifa bombing hoax
Run a google search of my comments on that if you want. Did you forget that a month after this hospital bombing, the NYT put reporters in another hospital and were able to verify Israel bombed that one? Or did you forget that the hospital administrators — a hodgepodge of anglosphere Christians — confirmed that Shifa was attacked by Israel days before and warned of an impending attack? Israel and US claim it is a hoax, there has been no evidence that it was a hoax.
appeared to actually be a comparatively small explosion in a parking lot
The parking lot which we know, from tweets made before the event, hosted sleeping refugees. I made an archive of that tweet and you can find it in my original comments on the event.
30k
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
almost metronomical linearity
is what you would expect if the total number of daily deaths exceed what can be confirmed by a finite number of personnel in a given day. If a week-long heavy wind wipes out 3000 poles a day, and I only have the personnel to confirm 2000 a day, then we should expect almost metronomical linearity in the reporting of fixed poles. The article states that “the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%”, and that’s enough variability to align with the above.
on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported”
This only make sense if boys those under 18 are not sent by their mother to obtain goods. In fact, these boys are much more likely to be targeted by Israel when they are gathered in a group without women present. Additionally, per the above, there may be separate areas for corpses based on age — usually they try to keep the children alive as much as possible, or rescue them first, etc
Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low
There has never been any evidence that Israel is targeting Hamas fighters. They may very well be targeting the extended families of those who they believe could possibly be Hamas fighters. Israel has dropped 30,000 bombs just by December, whereas there are only 20,000 Hamas fighters. They could literally be targeting whoever they think are the smartest Gazan residents and we would have no idea because there is no evidence or verification of their attacks’ successes.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I forgot he posted on substack originally, you’re right.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
In the thread there’s the tweet:
dude is The Vitalist on the site that must not be named
And I think this phrase alone will bring a few thousand to the forum
acting like they're too cool
I think it’s totally reasonable to deny association with the forum given the content that is sometimes posted
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Do you think there will be a change in forum viewership after that screenshot was viewed three million times on Twitter?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Her (2013)
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
screed
This is my favorite thought-stopping word. It gives me some nostalgia for when it used to appear all the time in progressive editorials. It doesn’t really signify anything except that the reader was insulted by the writing (which also doesn’t signify anything).
intermarriage
This is complicated:
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the influential and regenerative kernel of Judaism is the orthodox/conservative, their billionaire funders, their political influences, their attachment to Israel. This cohort creates all the rabbis and most of the leaders of the Jewish community, eg run all the Chabad houses. Orthodox Jews do not intermarry, I think like 1% do. They have the highest birth rate and are inheriting Judaism. There’s lots of articles on this.
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It’s true that reform intermarry, but the data is still more complicated, because what counts for “intermarry” may be Jewish+JewishAtheist. I have yet to find data on the number of Jewish+OtherReligion marriages but maybe someone smarter can find that. From Tablet: “The Pew study offered respondents who were parents a wider range of possible responses. Among respondents with a non-Jewish spouse [[61% as of 2020, 53% when this article was written]], 20 percent were raising their children Jewish by religion, 25 percent partly Jewish by religion, 16 percent Jewish not-by-religion, and 37 percent not Jewish.” So 37% of 61% are being raised without Jewish affiliation, or about 22%. I would like more clarity by demographers on what the intermarriage rate is for “Jewish+non-Jewish-ancestry”, as this gives us a better picture on intermarriage given how many non-religious but self-identifying Jews there are. The question the polls ask is “do you have a Jewish spouse” which doesn’t really tell us the future of Jewish affiliation. From Tablet again: “Admittedly, the secret of Jewish survival may be the propensity to panic about our fate. The grim predictions made in the 1990s may have proved wrong because Jewish organizations, federations, and private foundations did what they needed to do to turn the tide. They funded massive new investment in Jewish summer camps, Hillels, Taglit-Birthright Israel, and innovative startups—all programs that reach a fairly wide spectrum of Jewish children and young adults”.
tell me you don't know anything about Judaism
Everything I have read indicates that the Orthodox love to convert by-birth-Jews into their conservative flock. This is why they do the man on the street interviews Jewish outreach campaign by asking Jewish-looking people if they are Jewish. Heck, this is why they fund Chabad centers all over the world.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Maybe calcium-rich foods, and I think sunlight is good for bone health.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Anyone want to try steelmanning these passages?
Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.
And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.
I believe that there are types of prayer that have benefits, but not this type of prayer. The elements of prayer that I defend are:
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mental rehearsal. If you are praying in ardent desire for an object then you are increasing your ability to focus with desire on that object, which trains the mind against distraction and allows the unconscious mind to form connections around an object. This is similar to rubber duck debugging.
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salience of longterm goals re: negative contingency. If you are mourning over a sin and continue to mourn over a sin, then whether you sin or not becomes much more salient (being associated with the contingent risk of further mourning). I think this relates to the evolutionary theories of depression in very interesting ways and I also think this is a major type of prayer in the Old Testament, but I digress.
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the cultivation of a good attitude (spirit). We all want to be more patient, more careful with our attention, more attune to our real identity, and prayer can help with this given that you are effectively practicing an attitude when praying.
All well and good, maybe I’m missing some other benefits, but the passages above seem to conflict with my interpretation. This seems like plain wishful thinking, which studies have shown to be harmful. Am I misinterpreting them, am I missing something? One possibility that came to mind is that while such an activity is bad for the individual prayeé, it increases one’s devotion to God under false pretenses, increasing the strength of the community in toto. However if that’s the case then I don’t like it. Another possibility is that these passages are “shorthand”, a super-simplification of how prayer actually works which is helpful to draw people in. I don’t know.
If I can quote a speech from everyone’s least favorite 20th century antisemite, not to be edgy but to demonstrate three separate points:
The Jew, who is himself a nationalist more than any other nation, who through millennia did not mix with any other race […] this same Jew preaches every day with thousands of tongues, from 19,000 papers in Germany alone, that all nations on Earth are equal, that international solidarity should bind all the peoples, that no people can lay a claim to a special status etc., and, above all, that no nation has a reason to be proud of anything that is called or is national. What a nation means, he, who himself never dreams of climbing down to those to whom he preaches internationalism, knows well.
This speech was made in 1920, two years after Hitler received his “punch a Nazi” treatment for giving a similar speech on German nationalism by a crowd disgusted by his extremism. The history of “white identiarianism” or whatever we wish to call it is not linear. Americans as late as 1960 overwhelmingly believed that “white” was a primary identity marker and wanted a white majority in their country. Yet Germany went through a period of progressivism in which German national identity was attacked, only to swing the complete opposite way, only to swing again in the complete opposite — and today it may be swinging once more with the rise of the AfD. Russians, too, went from nationalism to internationalism and back to nationalism. I think this precludes any possibility of a genetic explanation and instead shows that ideology and culture are what shapes these things. And I think this is also an antitode to doomerism because we can’t predict the future based on the past.
The content of the speech is interesting because it highlights the disconnect between American Jews and white American gentiles. I would argue that Jews are the most nationalist people on earth today. They engage in ancestor worship on a weekly basis, they are obsessed with bloodlines, they unite Race and Religion together and choose the former whenever questions of membership arise, their very nation bans religious intermarriage and protects the priestly bloodlines even from the (rare) convert. They put barriers in the way of orthodox conversion yet welcome any “born Jew” with ease. Secular Jewish culture has cross-pollination with religious Jews, and so secular Jews receive an implicit influence of positive racial identity.
As such, it may be hard for even a secular Jew to imagine what it is like growing up in a culture with no such positive identity indoctrination. A white gentile can’t get a free meal at his local university Chabad house where a racial leader talks about how important their DNA is and how the universe has specifically chosen their race to lead the world. He doesn’t go to a church that talks positively about the history of his people. And the stories told in school are not about the triumphs and glories of “the whites”, as a Jewish school teaches about the great Jewish sages and advisers. While his school does teach about great American figures without mention of race, when race is mentioned he learns that his are the villains, the enslavers and the oppressors. The Jews, of course, believe that they were the slaves and the oppressed, in Egypt before God freed them, in the Middle Ages despite opulent wealth, and in the holocaust, that “burnt offering” which established the state of Israel.
Now, to disagree with Adolf Hitler, I do not think that most of the Jewish internationalist voices both a century ago and today are involved in an explicit conspiracy to aid their race by reducing the solidarity of other races (although they would have every motive to do this, it would be morally permissible in their religion and perhaps even morally obligatory given that it helps Jews). Instead, I think it’s easy to push for greater immigration when you know that your host country is not your real home — your real home is every Jewish community and Israel. The Jew’s neighbor is never going to be the new Guatemalan, because the Talmud specifies that “love your neighbor” means only other Jews. So these voices don’t realize that they are blinded to many of the drawbacks of immigration, because their implicit or explicit identity protects them from ever considering the prospect of assimilation with potentially deleterious low-culture migrants. Dan Gertler may fund the Chabad House of Central Africa, indeed he may siphon off their blood diamonds and become a billionaire in doing so, but never in a million years would he consider assimilating there. And the wealthiest billionaire gentile families who push immigration for profit have a similar bias because they know full well that their childrens’ elite boarding school is far from Haitian gangs and Honduran cartels.
Finally, to answer the main question: why do the whites harm themselves? Because they are indoctrinated at a young age from the propaganda which (ironically) the arch-villains of the 20th century warned against. The neural circuitry of in-group preference is the same as familial love: you need to raise children up with positive identity, otherwise they will never truly establish the communal bond. It’s like how an abused child that doesn’t form a bond with his parents will grow up to be avoidant of relationships; even if he rationally understands that his impulses are illogical, they are still there. This is why — as you write — even the conservative Brits are too polite. They logically know something, but the instinct is not developed in the heart. Identity is not primarily rational but instinctive and emotional. And the religious Jews know this, so they fiercely protect their right to indoctrinate their children, such as by launching an international legal effort when Sweden wanted a Rabbi’s children enrolled in a public school.
The recent attack on Moscow has me thinking: the best anti-terrorism measures against Islamic terrorism is to do everything possible to make the terrorist an apostate, and then to record him stating his apostasy without duress. This is the only thing that would fully counteract the motivation to commit terrorism; the terrorist is motivated by a reward from god, but apostasy is an inexcusable sin. This, more than any physical retaliation or sentence, would make a Muslim terrorist afraid to commit terrorism in your country.
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