>Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.
Your approach leads to exploding federal budgets, which are already the bane of the US, Canada, and the EU. When will you learn? Everything is not the exception, everything is the problem.
>while failing to realize the value it provides to the rest of the economy by being cheap
but that "value of being cheap" is provided to the people using the mail (or other delivery services) for that transaction; it does not benefit people who are not involved in the transaction but have to pay the subsidy. The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.
what Microeconomics is about is calculating what is cost efficient and what is not; free mail services are not; less free mail services are not; rationally priced mail services are.
This is how it works in Denmark. A letter costs 23DKK ($3.44) within this small country. A fast letter is 36DKK ($5.39).
I think I've received two letters in the last year. I haven't received any individual junk mail letters.
The letter volume last year was 90M for 6M people, so about 15 each. I assume elderly people and others who have opted out of receiving government and business mail digitally drive that number up.
(Someone still delivers a bundle of leaflets from local businesses all together every month or so, and a local newspaper, but I don't think it's the postal service. Every home gets the same bundle.)
>The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.
When things cost as close as possible to their MARGINAL cost. The marginal cost of mailing a letter is very low, almost certainly closer to $0 than $0.83, especially if you accept letter carriers have to run their route every day regardless.
The problem of course is the USPS has enormous fixed costs, including I would argue the pensions (honestly not sure how they would be accounted for in a GAAP sense, I'm absolutely not an accountant)
Federal funding has long distinguished between the two for other things like transit. You're only allowed to use federal funds for capital expenses, not operational expenses. USPS getting a taxpayer subsidy for their fixed costs doesn't seem that nuts.
I personally get a massive benefit from USPS being cheap, despite the fact that I send no mail. It provides a massive low-cost physical delivery network across the country, with service to every address. This is a benefit to me because it makes business and personal communication simple and reliable. If I need it personally, it's there. If I don't, I still rely on thousands of parties who do.
Your position is like claiming the interstate system is useless because you don't have a car, ignoring how all those goods your life relies on actually get to you.
Parent poster is exactly the kind of person who argues that using tax dollars for school is wrong because they, personally, do not have kids. Because they can't realize that they indirectly benefit from it.
John Green: "So let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools, even though I don't personally have a kid in school: It's because I don't like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people."
We (the public) have already been forced to accept that students' education is directly linked to the property taxes. In other words, students only deserve the education linked to an average the the worth of the community. Its some of the grossest discrimination against student, based purely on family and locality worth.
Poor community? Sorry Timmy, your schools SUCK.
Rural community? Get to farming Timmy. You dont deserve a GOOD education either.
Living in a rich suburb of a big city? Congrats, your schools are well funded and low student:teacher count. Your education will actually be pretty damned good.
I'm not describing a theory. I'm describing the world in which I live every day. It's much better for me, right now, in the real world, for the service to be cheap. Even though I've mailed nothing for at least the last year.
what are people suggesting is the "right" way for prediction markets to indicate that they are accurate? what should prediction market prices be if they are predicting accurately?
if you can predict accurately, you will win all your plays. If who you are predicting is the favorite, and the favorite wins, you will earn less money than if you can predict the upsets. That's what the markets do, you do the predicting, the market rewards you.
>Hungary had a revolution against Soviet control that was brutally suppressed
The "Prague Spring" was not what is generally described as a revolution, hence its "poetic" name. It was people's protests and Hungarian government acceptance/compromise/accomodation that loosened the strictures the people lived under
The Soviet Union did send in troops to undo these changes, and it was brutal, there just was not an insurrection underway.
"Prague Spring" was in 1968 and has absolutely nothing to do with Hungary, notably due to being the capital city of a whole other country.
The Hungarian revolution we're talking about happened in 1956, was intended to make Hungary leave the Warsaw pact altogether, and was indeed brutally suppressed.
I think the author jumps around a bit in the piece muddying the facts. A 200 MHz Intel Pentium Pro he's talking about had a single core and a supported single thread, so while this may be true of a modern x64 computer:
>Chess engines like Stockfish, running on silicon instead of our human brains, dominate us at the first of these and analyze millions of positions per second.
the 200MHz Pentium Pro he's talking about was capable of 1.5 million instructions per second, which on it's own is not quite millions, and how many instructions would be required to evaluate a position, let's say very optimistically it's 10 for "valid move", now we're at 150k positions per optimistic second.
200Mhz PPro can theoretically execute 600 MIPS (3 instructions per clock), assuming only high-throughput instructions are used and no cache misses. (the average IPC for realistic workloads is ~1.0 though)
The Pentium Pro is an out-of-order, superscalar processor (that started the lineage of modern x86 processors).
yeah, i just looked it up again because I started to doubt what I found the first time and you're right. Still, a good estimate of how many instructions are required to evaluate a move/position is needed and I can't imagine that would be a small number (I just moved the bishop, i still have my finger on it :) what is it attacking now, what is attacking it?), and I don't see a promising way to "factor" that across multiple positions without hardware support as Deep Blue had or the parallel circuits in the human brain.
It's a different process altogether as you become stronger at the game. Chess becomes much more like a language where you no longer really need to consciously think about such things so much. Like when you read these words you are, at some level, 'remembering' the definition of each word, how to spell each word and so on. But it all happens at a subconscious and basically instant level, such that you aren't consciously exerting much of any real effort even though you're drawing on a knowledge base of many thousands of words, spellings, grammar rules, expressions, and more.
Exact same thing happens in chess. Here's a video of Hikaru playing puzzle streak [1]. He's definitely a freak of nature in terms of speed, but all strong players are going to be capable of similar displays, even if to a less extreme degree. You obviously can't do anything remotely like this when you're still consciously thinking about what attacks what.
this is not a data point that confirms that exercise and lifting is good for you. think of it like telomeres: they give you a choice, "cancer or youth, pick two or don't play"
science like this is very useful like one puzzle piece is very useful: only in the context of many other puzzle pieces, but they're also jumbled together from many different complete puzzles.
but it's not important whether it's true or not, it was used as an analogy for helping understanding of a different topic; its truth value does not affect the truth value of the point being made. If you disagree with the point, don't attack the analogy, make a point about the subject in question, perhaps by using a different analogy to make your point.
Sure, and telomeres have function. I was pointing out that the trade-off hypothesis has been debunked. Telomeres are not modulators of longevity. KO mice data is convincing. There are at least two Nature papers.
I have heard and I do believe that there are countries that use other colors for babies, but wouldn't trust wikipedia nor its selective sources on any topic like gender; wikipedia is no longer enslaved to the truth.
You absolutely should trust wikipedia unless you can provide some evidence to the contrary; in fact, the linked article even has a whole section to support your doubt about the claim*('s veracity), which was interesting to read!
> In a 2017 letter to Archives of Sexual Behavior, researcher Marco Del Giudice commented on earlier claims about a supposed shift in pink–blue color associations or preferences sometime around the 1940s, from pink for boys and blue for girls before that period, to the opposite alignment afterward. He summarized his earlier work from 2012 which found "no evidence of either reversed or inconsistent usage prior to the 1940s".[41] Del Giudice called this theory the "Pink–blue reversal" (PBR), and said it was "usually attributed to [Jo] Paoletti", and quoted from five academic articles that reprised the theory of "pink is for boys" prior to the 1940s. However, he found upon analysis that it was exceptionally difficult to actually document such a shift, and exclaimed upon "the thinness of the evidence presented in support of the PBR".[42]
> In his 2012 paper, Del Giudice quoted from four articles published in academic journals which all echoed the claims about PBR theory, many relying on Paoletti, including Chiu et al., 2006: "Prior to that decade, Paoletti ... noted that the sex-dimorphic color coding of pink and blue was inverted, i.e., infant boys were dressed in pink and infant girls were dressed in blue";[43] Frassanito & Pettorini (2008): "At one point, pink was considered more of a boy's color ... blue was considered more for girls";[44] Cohen (2013): "the current stereotypical American assignment of pink to girls and blue to boys was reversed a century ago";[45] and Zucker (2005): "Yet, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there is evidence that the gender-dimorphic nature of these two colors was inverted, that is, blue was judged to be stereotypically feminine whereas pink was judged to be stereotypically masculine."[46][47] But Paoletti never made the claim that pink and blue reversed, only that there was inconsistent usage that took until the 1950s to resolve[42] starting from the first appearances of gendered pink and blue color associations around the 1860s.[7]
tl;dr - gender is very clearly a social construct and we shouldn't get hung up on colors or names
>gender is very clearly a social construct and we shouldn't get hung up on colors or names
Why? Is there some reason we shouldn't get "hung up" about social constructs? Can you argue a reason for this without reference to other social constructs?
The reason is we already do, humans like to get hung up about social constructs, we do it all the time, just like we’re doing now talking about social constructs. Talking about social constructs is itself a social construct. So no, I can’t without reference to social constructs and I don’t need to, I’m not the one arguing that social constructs are somehow not worthy of getting hung up about, my point was the opposite, we do so all the time and only for some social constructs do some people feel the need to say that we shouldn’t engage about it because it’s a social construct, even while they are engaging in a social construct (conversation) in order to do so.
It absolutely is, you're just clueless about pragmatics. There's a whole branch of linguistics centered around the idea of conversations as a means of human communication and it is decidedly a social science. Maybe don't assume you know what you're talking about and form impressions about people while missing basic ideas yourself. I also distinctly get the impression of you being a pseudo-intellectual given you use vague terms without clarifying your own idea of them. How about you define "what people mean"? Sounds very similar to Trumpian "people are saying" imo.
In that case, please help me understand your initial objection:
>> gender is very clearly a social construct and we shouldn't get hung up on colors or names
> Why? Is there some reason we shouldn't get "hung up" about social constructs? Can you argue a reason for this without reference to other social constructs?
How does this question relate to the initial quote? You seem to interpret "we shouldn't get hung up" in some way I don't understand, e.g. as "we should get rid of all social constructs", when it obviously doesn't imply that? Still, why would you ask for something you define to be impossible, without sharing that definition?
You could just voice your critique from the start, and then others could argue with your actual position and interpretation.
Sure, in this context I feel that using something like a color or a name to infer characteristics about the individual person is arbitrarily decided, prone to inaccuracies, and generally does not provide much material benefit. I’m not saying all social constructs are not worth getting hung up on - I do rather like governments / modern social contracts and would not advocate for anarchy - but recognizing and dismissing or deprioritizing some constructs should occur more often. Organized religion largely fits in that bucket, at least to me.
i asked you first and you didn't answer what I asked, so why should I do what you ask? I am prepared to refute your point, but we need to stick to the agenda as set down.
for people from languages that mark gender with an ending (romance languages for instance), putting the "wrong" ending something like a noun would sound odd or change the meaning
AWS/cloud is 18% of it's revenue. I don't get people in here trying to claim that it's consumer revenue is a small portion. Profits from AWS are high but this is revenue, the thing you count every time a sale is made on amazon.com.
Your approach leads to exploding federal budgets, which are already the bane of the US, Canada, and the EU. When will you learn? Everything is not the exception, everything is the problem.
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