Life isn't zero sum. If you look at the state of civilization now vs 2000 years ago, it's clear that we've played enough positive-sum activities to create much more wealth for the average person.
Yeah, this. Free trade (voluntary exchange) is inherently non-zero-sum, because each side gives up what they want less in order to get what they want more. That cannot be zero-sum.
That is not completely true. The parties can incorrectly value the items being traded resulting in a non-positive sum trade for either or even both parties.
However, absent intentionally deceptive information (i.e. the overwhelming majority of modern advertising and marketing), that is expected to be fairly uncommon in total-value terms.
If your trading partner has the ability to manufacture something with a better cost structure than you can, say, because they have iron ore mine, a smelter and a gigantic hydro electric dam all in close proximity to each other, then you get a benefit from buying their cheap steel and performing the higher level manufacturing to convert that raw steel into goods that you can sell to other markets.
Now, if you self inflict 25% tariffs on that steel, you'll have to find other more expensive steel to replace the cheap steel previously imported from the neighbour. Maybe there's nowhere in your country that has the same confluence of inputs required to make steel as cheaply as your trading partner did. Now you've got a permanent cost disadvantage.
Or maybe you're just not willing to spend $20 billion to build a giant hydroelectric dam that gives you a cost advantage. How many decades of lost market share are you willing to give up before you think you might come ahead?
Thinking that trade is always zero sum is bullshit. There are benefits outside of the balance sheet of goods moving across the border.
How long do you think that other countries will wait until they decide to start taxing electronic services that the US sells so much of? Do you really think the short term gains of going after smelting steel are worth losing that market share? Blocking Google and Facebook is not all that hard to do.
People who peddle ideology love to sell complex problems as having simple solutions. Well guess what: we've built a society that is so complex that nobody understands how everything interacts. One thing is certain: everybody's going to hurt.
I think that only applies if people have the option of selecting the things that they actually want. From what I've observed it's more often the case that people don't give up the things that they value less for the things that they value more. Instead, they give up the only option they have to trade (e.g. labor at jobs that they despise) in exchange for the only option they can trade for to survive (e.g. products that keep them alive but provide little satisfaction).
Sure, but to what degree does that wealth include the things that really matter? Everyone has more widgets but there's not enough room in the places people want to live, most people are working unsatisfying jobs, and many people can't find love.
We are doing much better in terms of food availability, lower chance of dying early from diseases, one can communicate with people over the entire world, travel easily to all sides of the globe, and many more things.
That people find ways to be less-than-happy regardless of material conditions. That does not mean the world is fundamentally zero sum. Actually I would argue that choosing to compete for the same things that everyone else wants, like living in the same places, is choosing a zero sum game where it is not needed.
It's possible that material conditions aren't nearly as important to happiness is commonly believed. Perhaps people are happier dying younger with a family and a degree of autonomy than they are living more years alone with little autonomy.
That is also the tale of humanity. 100 years ago an “unsatisfying job” was working on a farm with your abusive uncle. “Can’t find love” meant that all the men died in a war so…
In developed countries, there’s not much in the way of mass starvation anymore, and normal people have at least some chance of being able to spend money on things not directly required for survival, of being able to retire, etc. They’re generally literate and have some freedom to move between jobs. They’re unlikely to freeze to death if there’s a bad winter, and so on.
None of this was the case for the vast majority of people two centuries ago!
People not being able to find love seems largely beside the point; that’s not an economic issue, it’s a personal one. You could have a society as fabulously rich or grindingly poor as you like for that.
I don't think that one can separate the economic from the personal. Economics has a huge impact on the way that people interact socially, influences physical health which influences physical attractiveness, has a major impact on mental health, etc.
As far as I can tell, people in the past (at least post serfdom) also had greater opportunity to travel in search of greater opportunity. Today immigration controls make it difficult for people to leave failing countries like the US.
> As far as I can tell, people in the past (at least post serfdom) also had greater opportunity to travel in search of greater opportunity.
... Eh, different challenges, really. By the mid-19th century, adult death rates on transatlantic emigrant ships had fallen to a mere 1-3% (~10% for children), with some spikes into double-digits for adults due to disease. It was a one-way voyage; virtually no-one ever returned.
I disagree with the notion that life isn't zero sum. It only looks this way using a definition that conflates wealth with value, or from a viewpoint far from the limits of nature that would otherwise make this kind of nature obvious. Arguably what we've done, is merely transformed wealth into other forms we valued more.
Certainly value isn't zero sum, as we can always change our minds and value something else more, but I don't think this is a good argument for life (or wealth) not being zero sum. Anything we create, takes energy or resources from elsewhere (zero sum). Every path you choose to go down in life, is a path you didn't go down (zero sum). Simply put - everything has a cost. Sure we may not value costs equally (not zero sum), but remove our arbitrary valuations for things from the equation, and it is zero sum.
It seems like your conflating the meaning of zero-sum. It's specific to limited contexts where one party's gain must come at an equal loss to another party. "Every path you choose to go down in life, is a path you didn't go down" has nothing to do with the concept of zero-sum.
Our entire civilization is built on non-zero-sum cooperation. Technology is the byproduct of non-zero-sum cooperation.
If you're going to try and argue against game theory, your going to have to bring a much better argument.
^^ Redefines meaning of life to be dollars, accuses opponent of redefining zero-sum.
Silicon Valley is built on the attention economy. That term is a euphemism for making people spend their waking hours on addictive crap, taking away from the useful sum total. That's my definition.
Silicon valley is built on transistors, and by extension computers and software. The media industry is built on the attention economy.
Competing for people's attention is a zero-sum game, but building technology that helps people be more productive and do new things they couldn't before is not zero-sum.
Are you accusing me of redefining the meaning of life to be dollars? If so, I completely deny that accusation as it doesn't remotely align with my beliefs or what I said in my comment.
That import is 240,000,000 eggs if my math is right. If it is spread over a few months we will barely notice it. If it were achieved in a single month, it might be more noticeable.
I am reasoning mostly based on significant figures. I did not compare historical lows to production figures to try to get an idea of what actual demand is and I assume there is a bit of a smoothing effect that allows a surplus and shortfall in adjacent months to cancel.
Much of the rise in prices has occurred in January and February. Seems likely to me that culling has continued due to bird flu and production has dropped.
I would also guess that demand is fairly constant for eggs, so large changes in price are needed to deter a small number of consumers from buying (low elasticity of demand).
"rebuilding" a laying flock is a fairly quick change, if the infrastructure is already there.
At a previous job we manufactured fairly large trailer-mounted generators. During design engineering testing, you would want to power a load with the generator to check performance. The test load we had was a giant resistor bank, in a pallet-sized enclosure about 4 feet tall, with fans for active cooling of the oodles of resistance heat being put off by it. I talked to one of the electrical engineers about how ludicrous this device was, and he said that we used to use something even weirder. A giant tank filled with salt water (can't remember for sure if they were using NaCl or a different electrolyte) with probes just dumping all that current right into the water. Wish I had seen it.
I've worked in a rail yard where we overhauled locomotive engine & traction alternator sets, which were generating upwards of 3.3MW so we used a big saltwater resistor as a load bank.
It was the only bit of equipment that scared me, because the plates and tank were fairly rusty. I was waiting for it to let go midway through a test and flood the place with boiling salty water (and who knows what chaos the suddenly unloaded generator would have caused)
At a previous job, we ran a nuclear reactor but didn't want much electricity, so we'd use the power to turn a giant water wheel with all the surplus steam...
No, the water wheel ("water brake", they called it) was real, it was for wasting energy, and we didn't go anywhere; but also, yes, it was a submarine, in form, albeit not exactly in function.
I'm not sure what's ludicrous about this setup though? For testing you want the simplest possible setup - which a giant resistor bank really is. Power is power when you run it through simple resistance - no AC shenanigans will hide effects.
The electrolysis rig seems a bit ridiculous, since it generates a bunch of flammable gas you have to deal with. A big resistive load for testing stuff seems pretty normal though.
I see your point, though we barely ever had to top the tank up with water or salt. The amount of gas created was minimal, at least with our setup - admittedly not as fancy as a battery and a dish of water ;)
Any inventory warehouse can choose how much inventory to stock. If it maintains, say, 1 month of monthly demand instead of 3 months, it is more likely to run out of inventory during a supply chain shock. The fragility of the system is more related to this aspect than to anything else.
In the USA the EPA will fine you for intentionally venting refrigerants to the atmosphere instead of using a refrigerant recovery system for recovery/reuse/disposal.
I think that when people are jealous of others, they cloak this motivation.
To give an example with interpersonal relationships- never in my adult life have I encountered an adult who freely admits that jealousy is their motivation for attacking the reputation of a friend, but it happens all the time.
In other words, this problem was caused by a progressive regulation intended to help the environment that had the exact opposite effect intended. They set aggressive targets for MPG that were not able to be reached and still produce a car that people want to drive.
Remember the tiny Ford Ranger or Chevy S10? If they were produced today, they would be expected to have a very high MPG, which would require an engine unsuitable for the task as a truck.
The end result is that vehicles are forced to be unnecessarily large to get put in the class where low MPG engine can be installed.
> In other words, this problem was caused by a progressive regulation intended to help the environment that had the exact opposite effect intended.
It was caused by the legislature undermining progressive regulation. Congress was the one that required the EPA to establish different standards for “non-passenger automobiles” and allow SUVs to classify as light trucks.
It’s the only thing that saved the American car companies from bankruptcy post oil embargo shakeup so now its too entrenched a policy to remove.
Check out the Ford Maverick hybrid. Similar size to trucks 30 years ago with 38mpg. The 2025 gets 4000lbs towing capacity. You can park it in normal sized spots.
The old Ranger could tow 5000 lb, 9000 lb combined. I wouldn't want to tow 4000lb on Maverick (which I respect for what it is) for very long. That engine is a little high strung.
I don’t understand why cafe standards are brought up when all the evidence indicates people are, by and large, willingly spending extra money to sit higher up in larger vehicles, when there are plenty of smaller vehicles available for purchase.
Cafe could not exist, and we would still be in the same situation. The root cause is too low fuel prices (meaning too low fuel taxes).
In the video clip at the top of the article, the carrot is placed at the location closest to the window. Given the location of the hinge for the closing mechanism, this is the place where the hinge has the maximum mechanical advantage. The torque imposed on the motor from the load required to smash the carrot is minimized at this location, and any load-sensing feature designed to prevent this sort of injury would have the most difficult time detecting the load here.
The best comparison for an automatically closing tailgate on other cars would be at the very top of the tailgate. I would like to see this comparison. Comparisons made with carrots placed in other locations are not quite as similar.
The risk also depends on where the potential pinch point is. I doubt that many people put their hand on the top of the roof when the tailgate closes. The Cybertruck's danger zone is exactly where you would put your hand if you were leaning against the car.
It is also debatable how much damage a normal tailgate would do. I have seen several fingers pinched in fully closed car doors and have done it myself at least once. It hurt, but no fingers were chopped off. The latch and door material have enough give to allow space for relatively unhurt fingers. The single sheet metal of the Cybertruck's bonnet looks very sturdy, much to the chagrin of trapped fingers.
It would certainly be possible to increase the safety of the bonnet while maintaining the design and choice of materials. This would probably require a more complex hinge. The bonnet could close normally, but leave a uniform gap of a few centimetres and then pull itself closed. The load sensors would sense resistance equally on each edge and detect any misplaced fingers.
