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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   3312 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Lately I've been reflecting and I think one of the biggest themes of change in my lifetime is the increasing efficiency of the world, and largely, it sucks. I think different people have described this in ways that suit their own worldview. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, Redditors might call this a form of late-stage capitalism, woke people would call a subset of this gentrification, I call it increasing efficiency. Let me give you some examples.

Airplane seats. Thirty years ago, a savvy traveler would know to get exit row seats, for the same price you got extra leg room. Over the course of my life airlines have recognized they had this little luxury and were effectively leaving money on the table by not charging more for it. Over my life they have created sub-designations like economy-plus to extract that little bit of value that they were leaving behind.

Some years ago I went to Kansas City for a conference and I was pretty excited to try the barbecue. I went to a couple places and overall, while it was decent, I'd had better in New York which obviously makes complete sense! If you were a world-class barbecue chef from Kansas City, why would you stay in KC where there isn't much money and the competition is fierce? Bring your talents to New York or San Francisco and you stand to get a much bigger payday and critical recognition that would never be available to you in KC. In some sense, having a great regional cuisine only available in Kansas City is just irrational. If people all over the world would like barbecue, why would it only be available in some relatively poor middle-America city? It should naturally be available the world-over in proportion to the money available in a locality. I think essentially the beautiful diversity of regional cuisines is an inefficiency or an irrationality waiting to be eaten up. At this point the only foods remaining regional are really ones that nobody else wants.. In the world I grew up in my dad would always tell me that you just couldn't get a good cheesesteak outside of Philly, that world doesn't exist anymore.

Or consider my hobby, daguerreotype collecting. When I look at older collections built in the 70s-90s, collections were more haphazard. People would have lots of mundane things I wouldn't look twice at today mixed in with some truly extraordinary things that would be impossible to buy now even if you were a museum. It seems like in the past, before the internet, price discoverability was basically zero, so with enough persistence if you were willing to hit the road and hit up dozens of antique and book stores you could turn up great things for nothing. Today with the availability of eBay, prices are more accurate and as a result collections are much more defined by how much money you have to spend. There is no shortcut, there isn't really a way for effort and luck to substitute for raw dollars today.

I think Tinder and OnlyFans are examples of the same phenomenon. Tinder, for women, is essentially a price discovery tool. If you are a gorgeous girl from some small town you no longer have to settle for some guy from your hometown. You can go on Tinder and find that there are 6'5" med students that do rock climbing a few miles away that are very much in-your-league. Regarding OnlyFans, if you were curious about ho'ing it up 40 years ago what was your option? Mail photos of yourself to Hustler and then potentially move out to LA for a giant question mark of a payday? Today if you are a moderately popular woman on social media you will have a very good idea of exactly how much money you would stand to make the very moment you choose to open an OF, which could be a very large amount indeed.. I think thirty years ago if you were some loser guy working at a small town gas station you could at least have the fantasy of getting the girl, because sometimes the world was just crazy and irrational and nonsensical things happened! Today I think that fantasy feels less realistic as desirable women have far more tools to get a sense of their true worth. Not to say the world is perfectly rational now, but it is more than it used to be. I think the popular SEC couples meme is celebrating exactly the wonderful irrationality of mixed-attractiveness couples that is increasingly rare to see.

I imagine if you are a guy that frequented strip clubs, hooters and escorts you probably view the glory days as behind you. 30 years ago you could probably find some seriously gorgeous girls with enough looking, today I assume any decent looking girl would be leaving those places for OF.

I would say gentrification is a specific subset of this same phenomenon. Essentially it is a majority/privileged/white group recognizing that a minority/marginalized group has something that is 'undervalued' and moving in to exploit that. This undervalued thing could be a food like oxtail, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, a hairstyle, whatever. Either way I think these are both cases of an inefficiency being ironed out, low-hanging fruit being plucked and the world becoming more rational and efficient. After all, shouldn't Williamsburg be expensive? It has a great view of Manhattan and is closer to the Financial District than lots of upscale areas on the Upper West/East Side. The fact that it was ever cheap was just an obvious inefficiency waiting to be corrected.

I think this kind of sucks because the theme across all of these is that the world becomes less irrational and by extension less hopeful. In the past you could dream of getting the girl, or finding that amazing daguerreotype in an antique shop, or coming home to a cheap meal of oxtail in your Williamsburg apartment with a great view of the Manhattan skyline. Today, as with collecting, the quality of your life is much more closely following the amount of money you have to throw around and opportunities for savvy or just plain lucky individuals are disappearing. Kind of sad imo. I think the human spirit and persistence of hope rely to a certain degree on irrationality and chaos to sustain themselves, the idea that anything can happen and it doesn’t have to make sense.

I would be very interested if people have more examples of this because I feel like it has swept across almost everything in the last 30 years

I'm reminded of a couple years ago when a friend and I stopped at a Texas Roadhouse. I had not been to one since college when it was the highest-end eatery I could afford. The place was packed. I often eat 80 dollar filets at high-end steak houses, but I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of my steak. For 14.99 I enjoyed a flavorful (if slightly chewy) eight-ounce sirloin, two sides, and endless rolls. If I recall correctly, the same meal cost 9.99 when I was in college 15 years ago, while beef prices have tripled during that time.

The biggest change was in how the service was provided. In college, Texas Roadhouse was a standard sit-down restaurant with waiters who served a small number of tables. While the trappings of this model were still in place, the methodology was far more optimized. There is a well-defined mechanism for assigning parties to tables. Once parties are seated, the server "tags" the table with a sticky-note receipt with the party name and number, presumably to assist the waitstaff in delivering the correct order and to facilitate accurate billing. Despite my rather dim assessment of the waitstaff's mental faculties, we were delivered accurate orders in minutes. Once our plates were taken away, we were able to pay via the mobile payment device connected to each table. We left within thirty minutes from when we were seated.

The efficiency of this process was evident. The crowded restaurant was staffed by no more than 4 or 5 waiters. Yet there was something tangibly missing from the experience for both the patrons and the servers. Waiting tables at a Texas Roadhouse would have been a good job for a high-school or college student: the student would gain experience and acquire a certain amount of responsibility. Now, the waitstaff is not expected or encouraged to show any individuality or responsibility. Any deviation from the process is a flaw. When we were being seated, there was a slight breakdown in this process. A wayward plate from another table had been set on the table at which were to be seated. Our seater was flummoxed. Eventually she and another waiter contrived to put the plate back on the original table, at which point she continued to seat us. Addressing a trivial mix-up like this should be done without a second thought by even the most inexperienced waiter.

When we were paying, our electronic payment device asked for a tip. Given the impersonal experience in which our only possible interactions with our waiter were transactional (except, oddly, for the monetary transaction itself), a tip seemed pointless. The waiters had no opportunity to independently provide a pleasant dining experience, instead relying on customers' habit and largesse.

While my natural inclination towards productivity and efficiency makes me appreciate what Texas Roadhouse has accomplished, as a diner I felt like a commoditized agent being pushed through an assembly line. I, too, was expected to participate in the well-run ordering of the establishment. If I had been a little quicker with the credit card, maybe we could have spent only 25 minutes eating and not wasted 5 minutes of a table meant for the next faceless consumer.

So what am I to take from this? The dining experience felt demeaning and dehumanizing to both the servers and the customers. It feels like Wall-E. It won't be long before we do have robot waiters. We will all have adequate, but unsatisfying, commoditized consumption experiences. The majority will be content to consume and over-consume. I only can hope that a few of us will not want to just survive, but to live.

And yet, while the experience may have been grotesque, aesthetics are a low priority in any hierarchy of needs. The clientele were much more concerned about getting a decent meal at a reasonable price. I believe that making steak relatively more affordable for more people is a good thing. Better to gorge on sirloin than to go hungry in the streets. Better to be in a cog in a machine than for the machine not to exist at all. The economic engine that drives us towards efficiency may not always be pretty, but it generates results.

I have a mental model for economic markets that they behave much like a stochastic gradient descent algorithm. Firms and entrepreneurs explore the economic domain and move ever towards optimization. Whether this exploration results in a globally optimal solution depends greatly on the initial conditions. Initial conditions such as culture, institutions, and societal norms can have a major impact on how close the market engine comes to global optimization. An optimization problem is considered relatively stable if many different initial conditions can result in similar minima.

While this mental model is useful, it is incomplete: the very act of economic optimization can lead to eventual changes in the topology of the economy. In the case of Texas Roadhouse, the optimization begets atomized consumption and labor. Neither buyer nor seller is being acclimated to experiences outside of a prepackaged box. This may well lead to a fragile stasis as we lose initiative and dynamism and as the economic system becomes incapable of accommodating any deviation from the norm. Hence I can simultaneously applaud the innovations that lead to greater abundance, and decry the resulting changes to our society that can lead to stagnation and collapse.

The clear intellectual inferiority of the waitstaff is a microcosm of the entire labor market. For the first time in history, most labor is sorted (roughly) by intellect. In the agrarian days, farmers were more or less intelligent, but as long as the farmers could plow their fields their intellect was sufficient for the job. The higher intelligent farmers would naturally become community leaders and occasional inventors. With jobs now bifurcated by intellectual capability the "lower skill" jobs are essentially only occupied by lower capability individuals. There is limited interaction among individuals of different capacity as many of our social circles are dominated by work colleagues. Lower skill jobs atrophy with no innovation and no leadership. Hence the gross incompetence of many fast food restaurants and the disaster of manual construction and landscape labor. It genuinely was better service in the old days, when a diversity of intellects occupied these jobs. Conversely, the "high skill" workplace is now almost entirely staffed by high intellects. The menial jobs that would still have required interaction across intellects have been replaced by computers.

AI may be the great leveler. Robots are increasingly good at "high skill" jobs, but can't (yet) perform the types of physical tasks that even a 70 IQ individual can do. If job loss in "high skill" industries occurs en-masse, we may see the intellectual class starting to perform "low skill" jobs, with positive benefits for all.

I may have been one of the few people who thought that Buy'N'Large was one of the greatest human achievements ever depicted in film

I'm currently looking to get into canoeing as a hobby, inspired by tales and aesthetics of it from preceding eras, and I'm very afraid that I'm about to arrive into a hobby that had all the discovery and enjoyment (for me) optimized out of it. People are already reporting that national parks have to be reserved at the opening of the season if you want to have a chance to get a camping spot. My plan to avoid this is to use my contrarian superpower to look for under-optimised strategies. Everyone's reflex when it comes to these things is to go to national parks, maybe I should look at private camp grounds? Or at hunting/fishing lands, which do regulate the recreational use in a different scheme than national parks.

Consider starting at a local river that offers multi-hour canoe/kayak trips before worrying about places and trips that require camping.

Yes, that's the plan. I'm planning on moving to a city next to a paddleable river this year, I want to practice in that river this summer, and then in autumn do a weekend trip not necessarily a trip down a river where I'd camp along the way, I'm also looking at campgrounds next to scenic paddleable lakes for daytrips.

Suggestion: don't sleep on county parks. I've found them to be very underutilized due to their lack of centralized (or any) reservation infrastructure, smaller size, and general emphasis on recreation rather than natural wonders. But while the quality is more uneven, some of the best places I've camped have been county parks.

I agree 100% on all this as someone who loves second-hand fashion and collecting obscure historical artifacts. Though to some extent boldness can still substitute for money.

I will put my hand up for one hobby this trend enables, though: credit card churning/airmilesmaxxing. This is the one thing I've found where you benefit from exploiting this trend, in that as airlines build systems to entice the ordinary consumer (and really, neither the airlines nor the banks are behaving particularly badly in this space, and they write off your pointmaxxing as a rounding error in their cost of doing business), a motivated and systematic person can get massively outsize rewards from exploiting the system. However, because the marginal cost of filling an empty airline seat is ~$0 (the largest cost to the airline of filling an empty first class seat is actually liquor), you get all the fun of intricately planned defection without actually harming the commons.

Except for all the people who get into massive credit card debt who these programs are actually trying to target and where the credit card companies make all their profit.

A) No, American Express, Chase, etc. do not "make all their profit" on bad debtors. That's why they have credit checks and you need a good credit score for premium cards, because bad debtors are a real pain in the ass for higher-market-segment banks. They make their profits off interchange fees (which tbh are kind of bullshit and should probably be illegal to do in the way they're currently done), and to get those fees they want stable customers who spend lots of money and pay their bills like clockwork. Get mad at bottom-of-the-market issuers, if you like, but that's a separate issue.

B) Not my problem. You're complaining about the existence of consumer credit. I'm talking about exploiting features of credit card reward programs, at the expense of the banks involved. If you want to make this about Late Capitalism and all that jazz, happy to have that conversation, but you gotta lay that out on the table.

I wrote a response to @sarker that also responds to your part A.

Not my problem. You're complaining about the existence of consumer credit.

Yes, I'm complaining about the existence of consumer credit (at least as it's practiced today). But even more so I'm also complaining about the "not my problem" attitude.

I do in fact care about the welfare of my fellow countrymen. I even care about the financially illiterate and irredeemably midwit among us. Every fancy financial scheme that exists makes these midwits feel like suckers for not taking advantage of it, and so they try to take advantage of it and get their lives wrecked because they're not equipped for it.

That's why they have credit checks and you need a good credit score for premium cards, because bad debtors are a real pain in the ass for higher-market-segment banks

Well, yes, but... The ideal debtor for the CC company is one that keeps the balance, for quite a long time, but pays most of it at the end. That's why you don't have to have 800+ score to get most of the cards, and in fact pretty much anyone with a pulse can get one (unlike, for example, bank loans which would ask you for many more documents to give you a loan at half the APR). They are even fine with occasional discharge - as long as you paid enough in interest over the life of the loan to cover it (or you neighbor did). And yes, they charge interchange fees too, but:

First, we find that, on average, the credit function makes up approximately 80 percent of the credit card profitability, whereas the contribution of the transaction function is slightly negative, as rewards and other expenses on credit card transactions outpace banks' interchange revenues. In addition, fees—in particular late fees—comprise approximately 15 percent of credit card profitability.

(https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/credit-card-profitability-20220909.html)

This is not how it works.

I disagree with Patrick McKenzie. I think are disagreement is probably at a philosophical level that I don't want to go into, so instead I'll share a personal story:

I teach a data science practicum course for economic majors where financial institutions "hire" our students. One of the projects our students were contracted for was literally optimizing the advertisement of credit card rewards programs to attract low income consumers who would not default on the loans but would carry a high interest balance. Another project was optimizing the fee schedule to extract the most money as possible from overdue payments on these cards from low income consumers.

I've sat at the table with the men and women who run these programs. I've asked them how they justify it to themselves. They fully acknowledged that some people were ruining their lives, but they did not have any moral qualms and said "everything we do is legal and fully regulated". So I think the folk that run these programs are every bit as evil as the worst communist propaganda would have you believe.

(I refused to work with these companies, but other professors chose to work with them.)

I haven't read this one (and I intend to) but I noticed that when Trump called for 10% APR cap, the stocks of major credit card issuers dropped instantly and several of them that are heavily dependent on consumer credit cards pretty much said it is not a sustainable business in that way. From which I derive that substantial part of their income is in interest over balance, which means it is how it works, at least for many companies.

That credit cards earn revenue on interest does not imply that rewards are funded from interest payments.

Yes, you are correct that this a-priory does not imply so. But The Fed seems to think so: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/credit-card-profitability-20220909.html

First, we find that, on average, the credit function makes up approximately 80 percent of the credit card profitability, whereas the contribution of the transaction function is slightly negative, as rewards and other expenses on credit card transactions outpace banks' interchange revenues. In addition, fees—in particular late fees—comprise approximately 15 percent of credit card profitability.

Of course, they are talking about profit and not revenue here, but I think one implies the other, and I think it is reasonable to say that if 80% of the profit comes from credit function, then the credit function is the one that "pays for" the enticement features - like rewards, is it not? It looks like if not for the interest, the rewards would outpace the transaction fees, and the whole business model would have been infeasible. The credit revenues, however, make it feasible. The original claim has been:

Except for all the people who get into massive credit card debt who these programs are actually trying to target and where the credit card companies make all their profit.

And according to the link I quoted, this sounds 95% correct at least. Of course, the link dates from 2022 so if you have more fresh data that amends the picture, please provide it.

I highly recommend reading the article I posted in order to refute this claim rather than demanding evidence without reading the evidence I already provided.

Here's one relevant excerpt.

We're looking at figure D, from the paper interchange income minus reward expenses, graphed against FICO score. And the upshot of this graph is that there is no part of the FICO score spectrum at which issuers continually rebate more rewards to customers than they earn in interchange.

I think I know what's going on here. This quote - and the data - comes from paper dating from 2013. And indeed, if you look at Figure 3b in my link, that was the case up to about 2017. When it changed, and rewards expenses started to exceed transaction income, and have exceeded it since. This also matches my own experience - a while ago, 2%+ no fee cashback cards either did not exist or were a rarity that required a lot of hoops to jump through. Now they are commonplace. As you can see in the graph, the rewards expenses went from ~3.4% in 2013 to about 4.5% in 2022, while the transaction margins decreased.

The article discusses (and refutes) the idea that rewards beneficiaries are "rich" and interest payers are "poor", but neither I nor thread-starter made such claim (it's not the fault of the article, obviously). In fact, both categories may be rich, or poor, it's irrelevant - the discussion about whether tx margins or interest is the main source of revenue does not require any specific income distribution among either category.

The article says:

I'll say, as an aside, this paper dates back to 2014, but it's the best available in field, in my personal humble opinion, and I don't believe the conclusions of it have materially changed.

Given what I have seen in my link, I must question this opinion and claim that while the conclusions of the article may have been warranted given the data from 2013-2014, the situation did materially change. At least a claim from the Fed to that effect strongly indicates it did, and one needs much more than an offhand "I believe" to counter that. Maybe the conclusions of the article - which differ from the initial claim - are still warranted, but I do not think that the old data in the article supports what you purport it to support anymore.

Your article opposes the claim that credit-card rewards are funded by poor people. PokerPirate made a different claim—credit-card companies are funded by people who pay interest on balances. I think your article agrees with PokerPirate's claim. This Supreme Court opinion does as well.

Amex competes with Visa and MasterCard by using a different business model. While Visa and MasterCard earn half of their revenue by collecting interest from their cardholders, Amex does not. Amex instead earns most of its revenue from merchant fees. Amex’s business model thus focuses on cardholder spending rather than cardholder lending. To encourage cardholder spending, Amex provides better rewards than other networks. Due to its superior rewards, Amex tends to attract cardholders who are wealthier and spend more money. Merchants place a higher value on these cardholders, and Amex uses this advantage to recruit merchants.

The article does not agree with PokerPirate's claim. It quite clearly explains that rewards are financed from interchange fees.

Great post, seriously. It hones in on a big part of what I think is the malaise of modern day society: either be the best or don't even try. A lot of people are choosing the second option.

One of my friends just complained about all the surveillance. FLOCK cameras are big news in certain right wing circles, but my friend was more complaining about everything else: dashcams, ring cameras, home surveillance systems that all tend to capture an entire street. For me, sure, I think that's not the best, but really, it's one of the absolute best ways to protect yourself and also fight crime, provided that crimes captured this way are actually prosecuted. I think they're pretty much necessary at this point, too, otherwise, there might be an even larger crime wave without them. So perhaps that's another way things have become much more efficient. Why use witness testimony when you can have a perfect piece of evidence? I wonder if it contributes to the background noise of the small percent of the population that goes insane.

I went to a couple places and overall, while it was decent, I'd had better in New York which obviously makes complete sense!

Yo, where the fuck do you think you can get KC grade BBQ in NYC. Please share.

I haven't found any place on the east coast north of the Carolinas that I think has acceptable BBQ.

One place in Jersey is decent but nothing compares to Joe's or Jack Stack.

Also, where the hell can you get a good cheesesteak outside of Philly? I've had Angelos a few times and nothing else I've eaten anywhere comes close.

While I agree with the thrust of your post I think the food bit is off base. Very few Indian place are nearly as good as what you can get in Edison, I don't think you can get decent Gooey Butter Cake outside of St. Louis,* Chicago pizza styles outside of Chicago are almost always trash, good Mexican food is impossible in many states etc etc.

*this one at least you can make yourself.

One place in Jersey is decent

Where?

I stopped by Red White and Que (Green Brook NJ) on a road trip and found it to be excellent for east coast BBQ.

...Still think the KC/Texas options or Pappi's in STL are way way better.

Yeah, there are lots of food culture things that are aggressively local. We aren't even close to peak efficiency.

Nothing is going to top fresh Maine lobster, Italian tomatoes, actual access to fresh fruit or whatever.

But so much stuff is straight up technique that can be duplicated elsewhere (yes the bread is important for most sandwiches but plenty of cities have good bread) - you should be able to make an excellent cheesesteak anywhere, they just don't.

Nothing is going to top fresh Maine lobster, Italian tomatoes, actual access to fresh fruit or whatever.

Every other tomato grown in the Mediterranean region. Same with olive oil. Italy is just better with marketing.

In fact, growing tasty tomatoes is not a huge task. It's entirely possible to do this on one's own backyard. Maybe not the best tomatoes on the planet, but great ones that beat anything you buy in the grocery store so much there's not even any comparison. And tomato is one of those plants which once it starts producing, there's no stopping it. Which may be why the store ones are not as good - they are optimized for mass production, preservation and remote delivery - making a fruit that survives this journey is much different business than making a fruit that is going to be picked up and consumed within hours.

In fact, growing tasty tomatoes is not a huge task.

What is unfortunately a huge task is growing tasty tomatoes, while - at the same time - making them fully machine-harvestable and giving them long shelf life while being tossed around in boxes and by customers in the produce section. Which is the actual reason large parts of Italy had access to excellent tomatoes - they still hand-picked a significant fraction of their tomatoes.

Notice the past-tense used above. Supermarket tomatoes in Italy today taste like anywhere else. From my informal data gathering, I'd guess they mostly faded out hand-picked heirloom varieties around 2010. Same is true for a lot of other "soft" produce, too. Peaches, plums, ect. now taste like everywhere else.

Farmers markets and restaurant suppliers still have the good stuff, though. The Italians additionally still grow a lot of heirloom varieties.

It's entirely possible to do this on one's own backyard.

Your backyard may vary. Rabbits and mice sneak under my fences easily, which I think explains why, although I can get tomato plants to grow like giant weeds, their fruits tend to vanish on me almost immediately after ripening, before I can pick them myself.

That happened to us with some things too. One year we lost almost all the cherries to fruit flies, another year squashes were all eaten... But somehow in our quarters, nobody is eating the tomatoes so far.

Salsa with ingredients straight from your garden you made yourself is life changing. Still prefer the high end canned stuff for my sauce though.

but, but muh volcanic soil!!!!

This feels so very true and depressing. I am a fan of capitalism. But man can it suck in some ways.

I remember seeing this process at the company I worked at between 2013 and 2020. Trips to visit coworkers in other offices became harder to justify. Nights out with co-workers used to be expensed or paid for by higher ups, and they did that less and less over time. Some of the fun co-workers that weren't necessarily as productive got kind of pushed out. The way per-diem worked shifted from a flat amount to having to submit all your receipts of meals. Amenities in the kitchen area became slimmer. It felt like the company was nickel and diming us constantly. Which was saving them a bit of money, but was mostly just making us miserable.

It led me to a big realization about politics and management at the time. That a good manager has two competing priorities. The first priority, which is their job, is to save the company money, or make sure that the company resources are being used efficiently. But the second priority, which is never spoken of by the company, is that the manager needs to save their people from the grinding destruction of all that is human and fun for the sake of the first priority. Managing that second priority is called "politics". Its a dirty word for the company and those who lose out by having a manager that sucks at it.

Politics is the desire to place the preferences of humans over the preferences of inhuman competitive forces.

The extent to how much an organization can get away with diverting resources to politics is a sign of how rich the organization is. An organization that is perfectly efficient with no waste or politics is probably a miserable place to work. I imagine Amazon warehouses are somewhat like this, where they have optimized things such as bathroom break frequency. An organization that is all politics can also be a miserable place to work, or an amazing place depending on whether you are on the winning side of the politics. Non-profits and some government organizations are both a bit closer to being 'all politics'.

Great comment, and yeah reframes the way I see politics in my big organization. I agree though. I work in a Fortune 500 company and we got $1,000 for our holiday party this year, on a team of ~50 people in the U.S. That's pretty much the only event budget we got this year, outside of celebrating a 20 year work anniversary for someone on the team.

Apparently we used to have much more funding for these sorts of events, but they've been slowly cutting back. IMO it's crazy because I doubt it's even strictly efficient, given how important it is to keep talent. But I don't make those decisions.

I think the type of efficiency we have is efficiency at maximising what can be measured. The causality between e.g. a fun sociable office and employee retention is hard to measure. It's somewhat obvious that there is such a connection, so it gets a little funding. But there's not enough numerical evidence to put it where it should probably be to actually optimise for success.

On X, I've seen this referred to as zero-sum hypercapitalism, and as you note, it results in the tiniest inefficiencies being ruthlessly engineered away wherever possible. Optimization uber alles, but "optimization" from the big line go up forever view, not any kind of human flourishing view.

My wife was just complaining about how second hand shopping has changed from when we were in college.

Time was, Goodwill priced everything the same: a men's suit was $12.99, a women's dress was $8.99. Didn't matter if it was cashmere from Saks or polyester from Sears, for the most part they just priced everything the same. As a result, in the sea of junk, you could find gold, and cheap. My wife and I were inveterate thrifters through our undergrad years, I still have a lot of really nice stuff I bought that way. My friends and family members often commented at the time, something like "FiveHour, Goodwill is for poor people who need it, you can afford to buy new clothing." Inevitably, when they came with me, they realized that there was essentially no demand from poor people for camel hair sportcoats, and that my consumption was orthogonal to the charity aspect of the store, and they started looking for the half-off items.

Over time, the stigma of "used clothes" broke down from people like us shopping there for fashion, and resale sites like Ebay and Poshmark became more prominent. Mrs. FiveHour, when between jobs, made tens of thousands of dollars buying at Goodwill or Poshmark and arbitraging to Ebay or TheRealReal. More and more people got comfortable with used stuff, and Goodwill noticed everyone else making money off of their work, and they started raising prices on good stuff to capture some of the value. With demand up as more people bought used, and the reputation appearing that you could get a great deal, people came in and paid higher prices.

Mrs. FiveHour whines that the used market isn't what it used to be, that it's no longer worth the effort. I'm an optimist, and pointed out that we had the best part of the wave: we got the low prices for designer goods when we were broke, and now that we're well-employed (and more set in our fashion ways) we have the money to buy what we want from the stores we like. And anyway, I've accumulated too many goodyear welted shoes and vintage cashmere sweaters anyway, I don't need to go buy more of them at any price. Though I will admit, I miss it as a fun date with my wife, I do think part of the reduction in fun comes from higher standards on my part rather than changing prices.

But if I were a broke college student today, I couldn't walk into a thrift store, invest three hours of my time, and walk out with gorgeous vintage designer clothes. It used to be that if you had the knowledge of clothing brands and construction, fashion taste and discernment, and time you could go to thrift stores and look fantastic without spending a lot of money. Now, that's a much tougher thing to do. Efficiency wins at all levels: Goodwill makes more money, or original purchasers on Poshmark get back some money, but for young or broke fashionistas the opportunity and creativity isn't there.

Mrs. FiveHour, when between jobs, made tens of thousands of dollars buying at Goodwill or Poshmark and arbitraging to Ebay or TheRealReal.

It's weird to hear you lamenting the decline in thrift stores when you actively destroyed what made them special :/

-- Is there anything more American than finding something new, civilizing it for the masses, only to lament and resent that the newly civilized space has no place for you? It's the plot of John Wayne's McClintock, where the old cowboy who killed the Indians and built the town regrets that both the daughter of his body and the son of his spirit can't experience pioneering the way he did, and the musical Rent where the hipsters who made the Village cool bitch that New York is cool now and they might have to pay money to live there. The pioneer tames the wilderness and makes it safe for civilization, only to find that civilization has no place for the pioneer, and that he can never step in the same wild river twice, that he isn't the same man and it isn't the same river.

-- On a more culture-war and less FFT basis, I can argue there's a difference between what my wife did and the modern scene. I was at the library book sale over the summer, and among the old ladies and college students there was two or three immigrant women with little barcode scanners attached to their phones. And methodically, mechanically, they would scan each and every bar code on each and every book, one at a time, not even glancing at the cover or the title, and picking up one book out of every fifty or so which the phone told them was valuable enough to resell. That's what modern reselling looks like: poor immigrants sucking every cent of value out of stuff they don't even care about. I'm generally averse to critiquing the poor for trying to keep body and soul together, but their presence eliminates the opportunity for a down-on-their-luck hobbyist to hustle a bit of money on the side using their knowledge and skill. This is one less way that an ordinary person can make a little money without debasing themselves. And there's a certain romance to a young middle class woman leveraging her knowledge and enthusiasm to arbitrage, that just isn't there for a drone who doesn't care about the stuff involved, that I think makes the former acceptable in a way the latter is not.

-- As part of the above, the level of stuff involved is different. Mrs FiveHour would find the odd piece of Gucci or Prada and buy it for $10 and sell it for $300. Nowadays it's Banana Republic and Abercrombie getting sold at Goodwill for $20-25 and then resold marked up to $30-40. It used to be I'd spend all day hunting for vintage Scottish cashmere, and get it for $8, but on the way I'd see a thousand Banana Republic sweaters and any day I wanted I could go over and buy a cheap sweater. Now the juice isn't worth the squeeze for the cheap stuff, I think you're better off waiting for a sale on it new at that price point. Nobody needs cheap Gucci, but it used to be nice being able to get functional nice looking stuff for cheap.

Is there anything more American than finding something new, civilizing it for the masses, only to lament and resent that the newly civilized space has no place for you? It's the plot of John Wayne's McClintock, where the old cowboy who killed the Indians and built the town regrets that both the daughter of his body and the son of his spirit can't experience pioneering the way he did, and the musical Rent where the hipsters who made the Village cool bitch that New York is cool now and they might have to pay money to live there.

Not really the same thing. It's more like shooting all the bison and wistfully remembering the days of the great bison herds without feeling any personal responsibility.

On a more culture-war and less FFT basis, I can argue there's a difference between what my wife did and the modern scene.

I am a discerning arbitrageur that leverages deep knowledge of the value of clothes with Gucci and Prada labels, you are a casual thrift store flipper, he is a drooling, smartphone scanning, drone NPC bugman.

As part of the above, the level of stuff involved is different. Mrs FiveHour would find the odd piece of Gucci or Prada and buy it for $10 and sell it for $300. Nowadays it's Banana Republic and Abercrombie getting sold at Goodwill for $20-25 and then resold marked up to $30-40.

Ironically, the first thing is obviously way worse. You're okay arbitraging away the opportunity to save 96% but think that arbitraging away the opportunity to save 17% is just going too far.

I'm good with the idea that the we can't always have a Wild West and that part of what made the West fun was the taming of it, and so we can't have it again.

But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way. It's either a commons that needs preserving or a resource that needs exploiting.

As an aside, my impression is that there is still a lot of finds to be had at estate sales (at least in CA). I think the real reason the thrift store market has dried up is not because of people buying the good stuff from the thrift stores, but because the suppliers have stopped sending the good stuff to the thrift stores. People now find the good stuff at the estate sale, and so the left over junk that gets donated has much less signal to noise. I suspect the higher prices at the thrift store are also related to garden variety inflation, where it is magnified tremendously by not being part of the official basket of goods tracked.

But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way.

Ah, there's the problem, I am cool with that idea.

Another great example! I've heard exactly this lament from vintage resellers I know endlessly and in many ways it mirrors exactly my experience with daguerreotypes and antique shops. Similarly it is hard to blame Goodwill for picking up the fistfulls of dollars they were leaving on the table. But as you said and as I said above, it is a bit sad for people that are broke but with aspirations of higher fashion. In the before time, a bit of effort and fashion-knowledge (as your wife had) could stand-in for money in a way that it can't today. Today if you're broke you're going to look broke.

I've heard this called "perfect price discrimination" and airlines try to apply different prices not just to different seats, but to different passengers. They can easily map you to your digital profile via fingerprinting your browser (that includes facts like "loves to switch on incognito mode when shopping for airline tickets") and estimate how much more they can charge you for a seat just because you can afford it and your fellow passenger across the aisle can't.

This has always been rumoured and it's possible but is there any actual evidence of it?

It's not true to my knowledge, though I also believed it for some time. If nothing else, if it was true, you'd have airmiles obsessives writing thousands of blogs about optimizing it. Try to navigate the website of an average airline and you'll have a pretty good idea of how good their tech is. The talented guys they do have are generally in the "keep operations from falling apart in the next 24 hours" department rather than the price gouging department.

I looked up a couples of research articles yesterday that had experimented with different profiles and VPNs (firefox/safari, PC/iPhone, different countries, profiles corresponding to 'rich' customers i.e. luxury hotel websites vs. 'poor' customers) and found that differences were $10 max and didn't vary substantially across different countries let alone different user profiles, so I think you're right. But open to hearing otherwise.

At this point the only foods remaining regional are really ones that nobody else wants..

You could have chosen surströmming, or balut, or nattō, or kholodets, but you chose a normal-ass hamburger.

That is not a normal-ass hamburger IMO. They don't normally have a bunch of filler added in addition to the beef.

Surströmming is less food and more chemical warfare.

No, it’s a great example. It’s an inferior good. There’s no direct alternative to natto other than just…not.

I think this is a major contributing factor in the oft-discussed "enshittification" of everything. The world has become increasingly flat, and increasingly bland. Car companies don't take risks, and everything they sell is some shade of grey with maybe some blue scattered in. Companies increasingly recognize that any small "lifehacks" or perk can be monetized, and our sense of hope and wonder fades away. Even Disney World has MBA'd itself into a place I would no longer remotely describe as the "happiest place on earth".

The phenomenon stems largely from corporate consolidation, as well. You used to have a bevy of media options and ownership groups, which could bring multiple flavors of radio stations and newspapers to even a mid-size town. Now they're all pretty much owned by the same handful of companies. And how many quaint local mom-n-pop stores have succumbed to Amazon and Wal-Mart?

Companies increasingly recognize that any small "lifehacks" or perk can be monetized,

My new car doesn't have cruise control, because I didn't think to check or choose the $2000 upgraded trim package (not that I could. It was used.).

I feel like that sort of thing is common with car makers... there's a "base model" with basically nothing - no cruise control, no power windows, etc. - and then there's the reasonably priced first trim upgrade that gives you all the things most people expect at a minimum in modern cars.

The steelman of price discrimination is that it enables a lower floor to a product's price than if it had to offer a single price point, which helps accessibility. It can even be good, in that the people who overpay for a few extras (especially for stuff like "color stitching" on seats or other visual upgrades which are pretty much just signaling that they could afford to pay for a fancy trim) are subsidizing the product for the people who get the cheaper ones. That if you made it illegal and that all cars had to have only one trim, it'd be a middle trim, it'd be more expensive than the current middle trim and the people who could only afford the base trim now just can't buy it anymore.

I feel like there needs to be a name for the steelman that like, obviously isn't true and is a fig leaf for the money grubbing that the company wanted to do anyways. Like, does anyone actually believe that advertising is "connecting people to goods and services that will better their life"? Or that price discrimination isn't immediately used to capture all the excess value of a transaction*?

* So in theory, every transaction has two winners; both people only made the trade if they believe that the trade is worth more for them than what they're giving away (tautologically - would anyone voluntarily make a trade that they thought was all downside?) The issue with price discrimination is that instead of both parties capturing some excess value from the trade, one party captures almost all the excess value, while the other captures epsilon (as in, just enough to make the trade worthwhile, but no more).

What makes it true or not is how healthy the competition and the market is. A company that only did this to extract more money from each sale would find itself having a hard time finding buyers compared to cheaper competitors. Companies that offer a genuinely good deal don't do it from the goodness of their heart, they do it because it's also a valid business strategy to aim at making a larger number of sales with a lower profit margin.

The issue with price discrimination is that instead of both parties capturing some excess value from the trade, one party captures almost all the excess value, while the other captures epsilon (as in, just enough to make the trade worthwhile, but no more).

In the case of "signaling" addons, it's quite possible that both the car manufacturer and the customer are happier with price discrimination. After all, the point of signaling is that you're showing everyone you paid for something expensive because you have money. If it was cheaper, or if it was available on every trim, that exclusive paint color or colored stitching the rich person paid for wouldn't be useful to signal how rich he is.

A company that only did this to extract more money from each sale...

That is literally every company that uses price discrimination. They don't get punished either because of market inefficiencies or because they sell goods that aren't interchangeable with competitors' goods.

The frontman :)

What car company? Just so I can be absolutely certain to never buy one.

Ford. They fixed it in later model years, but still. I'm kind of with you on that now.

Yeah, I'm glad I've never owned one. That's been standard on all but the most basic cars since at least the 80s. What money-grubbing bastards.

Good post. The internet really brought that efficiency everywhere. My example is ski mountaineering. The internet ruined it.

Even just 10-15 years ago, this was a niche hobby and an extreme sport. To plan a winter ascend, you had to buy guide books and stacks of paper terrain maps. The first few times you needed a good mentor or a hired mountain guide, just for judging the weather and the current avalanche risk (also for route finding and for teaching the techniques). But if you left the ski resorts behind, the mountains where empty and quiet, and full of untracked powder (that tried to kill you when you least expected it).

Then the internet told that every single resort skier on the planet, and it turns out they really already have 95% of the skills necessary to go touring. Now the back country is swarming with people. Mountains that used to be empty now have 10 different tracks leading to the summit the morning after a fresh snow fall. I can't even remember when I've had to break a fresh track the last time.

Decades worth of experience judging the weather? The daily forecast is much better than that, and it comes with live precipitation radar maps showing you where the snow storm is and where it's going to be, and when. The local guy tracking the layer composition of the snow pack all through the season? Professional avalanche reports online give everybody that information for every single valley. Route finding? Just load a GPX track someone else planned onto your smart watch. Want do check that guys work? Here's an app that shows slope angles and rates your track for avalanche risks. Local knowledge about a difficult couloir that has powder in late spring? It's all over Instagram, and there's 10 touring portal posts about its conditions this moth. Also, here's a 3D render of that entire mountain, in case you where wondering if there's any other skiable gullies.

There's upside, too, of course. All the information available actually is much better (especially if you buy guide books in addition anyway). It generally is so much safer now (but many more people die - because many more people are out there). The larger market hugely improved the gear - everything is lighter, more reliable, less finicky, more comfortable. The avalanche beacons now actually work.

I also have a counter example: the used market for commodity consumer products still works. All the kids here ride the same plastic bob sledge through the snow. It's a bomb proof design, tried and tested through the decades. They all get it from the same big box store, and it costs 140. Yes, for 4 pieces of injection molded plastic from China, made millions of times. Anyway, they go for 10 bucks on the local equivalent of Craigslist, and chances are the family selling theirs is about as far away as that big box store.

I can think of a few examples of how better resource optimization can make things less good.

  1. There used to be a lot more friction around moving people around; someone who is a top 0.01% engineer might not have ended up with Google or NVIDIA or whatever due to not being as keenly aware of their level of skills. As such, you tended to get more talented people in more diverse spaces (as opposed to concentrating them all into 1 or 2 big companies). By the inverse token, people tend to be a lot more interchangeable in jobs themselves, as anyone better will have gone to a better paying position, so you are necessarily stuck with a bunch of people who are approximately the same level.
  2. I'd argue that there is less room for disruptors too; for example, card and tabletop games (like, say, Magic the Gathering), or even early PC games (like, say, Starcraft) did not have as much penetration as to what the "best" choices were at any time. A very popular thing amongst CCGs currently is the presence of the "netdeck" - as in, someone who buys the exact deck that the pros buy, then plays exactly that. In ye olden days, it was much more likely to find someone who had simply been playing games in a different circuit than the pros were, and had completely different tactics and builds.

Overall, very good post.

I very much like both of these examples. I'll respond to reach.

  1. On careers. I will attribute to this my inability to find a good plumber. Here is my hypothesis. 70 years ago I imagine that if you were the son of a plumber there was a good chance you ended up a plumber too even if you had an IQ of 130. Today if that's your IQ, all you have to do is do well on the SAT and you'll get whisked away on a scholarship to NYU or something. And after that, well, how you gonna keep em down on the farm? The point being, if you shopped around enough 30 years ago you could probably find a pretty damned intelligent plumber. Sure, even back then most plumbers wouldn't have been the sharpest, but there were at least some. Today with the much more efficient sorting of people, how many common residential plumbers have an IQ of 130, approximately zero?

  2. The prevalence of metagaming and net decking is a great example. I played Vanilla World of Warcraft and loved it very much at the time, and I remember awaiting the launch of WoW Classic with great hype. Unfortunately I found when they relaunched it, it just wasn't the same. Of course it wasn't the game that had changed, but me, and us and how we approached it. I and other players were no longer content to bumble around in dungeons and group wipe repeatedly all night. We weren't 12 but 30 and we expected dungeons to be a polished and professional experience, and generally at the first sign of a wipe we were abandoning the group and finding something better to do with our time. But in our greater desire for time-efficiency in game we had somehow removed all the magic. My experience in WoW classic lasted a couple months before I gave it up, the magic just wasn't there anymore like it was when I was 12 and naive and just fucking around.

The prevalence of metagaming and net decking is a great example.

I don't play much but I've noticed people have very strong opinions on The One True Allowed Way To Play a game and what sorts of game types others should even be allowed to play at all based on their preferred play style. This is exemplified by the assumption that anyone who isn't a hardcore competitive gamer who's willing to invest in a $5000 gaming computer should only ever play ultra lightweight casual games. I think it was even on /r/themotte some years ago where I pretty much got jumped on for saying I'd like a version of Starcraft 2 that nearly completely eliminated "actions per minute" as a relevant metric in single player game (which is to say, a version of SC2 with the artificial stupidity of unit AI removed and some basic action automation features added).

I'm not quite sure if it's about the one true way to play, so much as it is fear of losing something people like. Take your SC2 example: I personally quite agree that SC2 would be a better game without the focus on APM. But to someone who loves SC2 as it exists today, they probably hear that and envision a world where vanilla SC2 is replaced with a version of SC2 where it has all the unit automation. So they push back on it because they don't want to lose the thing they love, and they're afraid that's what would happen.

I understand people who like the multiplayer aspect wouldn't want to play like that and I have no problem with it. Any implementation could essentially be just another variant of easy level difficulty purely for the single player campaign.

That wasn't what the comments said, though (in that and some other similar conversations elsewhere). They were all about me supposedly playing an entirely wrong game genre (as if single player RTSes are somehow inherently about braindead unit AI and twitchy mouse clicks) and I essentially got told that I should just play turn based strategy games (a completely different genre that I have zero interest in). Essentially that only people who people who have play with "proper" meta should be allowed to play games like that and everyone else should stick to simple casual games.

Everybody sees the dangers of cultural appropriation once it's their culture.

In an ideal world "StarCraft 2" and "SC2 but with better AI" would just be two different game variants, and a vanilla-SC2 player wouldn't complain about the AI options any more than a blitz-chess player would complain about someone else preferring to play without any clock.

But everybody's attention is a scarce resource vied over by competitors, and in a world where network effects make it much more enjoyable to have everybody else's attention go to the same target as yours does, it's actually reasonable to worry about whether an alternative is going to stop that from happening. If you actually preferred Betamax over VHS, HD-DVD over BluRay, etc, it sucked to be you.

I thought SC2 was popular enough that nobody should need to worry about splitting the player base, though; surely both sides of any split would be able to find online matchups easily for years to come? At the very least an experienced player who eschews better AI should be able to find a game against a noob who doesn't. Maybe video game fans have just been through so many iterations of the of "Sega Genesis vs Super Nintendo" fight that getting worked up about such things is a reflex now.

So they push back on it because they don't want to lose the thing they love, and they're afraid that's what would happen.

If you want to see these sorts of fights played out on Hard Mode, look at the worries some people have over driverless cars or vegan meat substitutes. The bailey is that driverless cars are unsafe or that vegan pseudomeats are unhealthy, and that no amount of technological improvement will ever make them good enough, but I think the (occasionally explicitly stated!) motte in each case is the risk that, once the new alternative actually is better for most people, there'll be pressure to make the traditional alternative outright illegal. Nobody's ever going to ban anyone's preferred versions of Star Trek or StarCraft, but animal rights groups or public safety groups might actually get some traction against real meat or human-error-prone cars once the main argument for them is pared down to "Freedom!"

The higher stakes version of vegan meats and driverless cars is going to be embryo selection

As a former national merit scholar with a STEM masters who's currently stuck doing manual labor in a medium-sized metro, here's hoping I can make some of that frictionlessness work better for me. I was just thinking to myself last night (yes, on Sunday night), while hammering together some outdoor timber steps that I'd seriously underbid, what a great deal the client was getting given that he couldn't have found anybody else both smart enough to do the job this well and dumb enough to do it this cheap.

Without going full Girard, I think this efficiency also leads us to target our desires more to what the market has made measurable, and limits discoverability of greater personal upsides in the course of removing risks of aggregate downside. The scope narrows for being pleasantly surprised in ways you may not even have known you could be surprised. Tinderella may actually have been much happier with a particular Mr. 5'8" for illegible Tinderella-specific factors, and now she'll never know because she's set the same 6'1" filter as everyone else without even really knowing how much it matters to her. Even if average outcomes are better, maybe some of the best outcomes have been closed off because they only aligned with desires that were particular to us, perhaps unknown to us, certainly not known to the market at large, and which the market is actually leading us to downplay in ourselves.

These are half-formed thoughts and I could write a whole essay on this but I have to go hang a gate on some frozen posts.

Come down to DFW. It sucks here but there’s a whole lot of STEM work. We’re basically trying to underbid California.

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