I'm not the poster you replied to but I appreciate your clarification. However, I still don't understand your argument. I don't think anyone has argued that supply and demand don't apply to the labour market. However, it seems that you do agree that there are externalities if workers are paid extremely low wages. Is your argument that the government shouldn't put in laws to mitigate or prevent those externalities? Are you saying that minimum wage laws don't actually address the externalities and should be removed? Are you trying to promote other solutions to solving those externalities? If so, what are they? Is there some other point you're trying to make that I'm completely missing?
Many people argue that supply and demand don't apply to the labour market!
Often because they're not even aware of the concept. The more sophisticated claim that it doesn't apply to the labor market.
The minimum wage discussions are dominated by this view.
The supply/demand analysis is simple: If a worker has skills worth $12/hour on the labor market, and the minimum wage is $15, that worker will be unemployed, making 0$/hour. They'll also not learn new skills, since they can't get a job.
Try bringing that up in a minimum wage discussion, and you'll be called many nasty names. Often equalling market wage to human worth, which means you think the poor are lesser humans. A few sophisticates will bring up vague externalities arguments, as if they negate the whole supply/demand concept.
From my perspective minimum wage laws is one of the main factors keeping people in poverty, but that concept is impossible to even explain to most people.
My main thought about externalities is that they their effect is usually minor, and can be ignored. Many of them are also positive. For the bigger ones, it's a case by case analysis.
Is the externality you're thinking of something around the government paying money to the working poor?
That's a strawman. I don't doubt that you've read these things that bother you so much that you bring it up in unrelated discussion, but to the extent serious people critique supply and demand, they don't say it doesn't apply at all (literally all things have supply/demand curves) but that the market distortions in our concentrated economy lead to suboptimal outcomes for society and that the simpler market model (in econ 101 you learn this model is optimal under many assumptions including "perfect competition" that is rarely true of the real world) is an incomplete model of reality which leads to the wrong answer. If you're going to argue against anything please argue against a serious point like one found in an introduction to the topic such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage and characterize it fairly. If you don't understand this graph then you aren't ready to debate the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#/media/File:Monop...
To demonstrate that this is a strawman, I will parrot back what that basic wikipedia article provides as a critique of your point: often in the real world that $12/hr number you provide is depressed by a one-sided monopsony (few large employers vs many small employees, a fact known as market concentration that has grown stronger over decades) and minimum wage can provide effectively a mega union against it to put it simply. When a market is dominated by a single entity what is something "worth"? You may say whatever the market will bear but in noncompetitive markets that is absolutely not the most efficient allocation of resources for the broader system. If insulin were a complete monopoly would it be worth $1M/vial because a billionaire would happily pay that much to save their life? I use the extreme to demonstrate the concept of market failure to you. By pointing out monopolistic forces am I saying "supply and demand don't apply"? Maybe in a way, but putting it that way is reductive and unproductive for our collaborative search for the truth in this discussion.
Or, for a totally separate but less abstract argument, say someone has no skills except for an ability to dig a ditch at $5/hr - it is low value because you could pay someone $50/hr to rent and operate a trencher and be 100x more productive at less total cost and a better overall outcome to society (I think these numbers are probably roughly reflective of reality), but this low skill person is unable to run that trencher. Is it better for society to "learn new skills" as you say by digging ditches for years? They probably would get a bit stronger but obviously never get close to the trencher's productivity or bang per buck. This is an exaggerated toy model but it demonstrates the point that many sub-minimum wage gigs teach negligible skills compared to formal education. I point this out just to object to your example - many people turn to education if possible when they fail to find employment, so to say sub-minimum wage employment will teach them skills whereas unemployment will be worthless just doesn't map on to most people's experience in the real world and to be frank sounds out of touch.
I don't disagree with you and think that UBI and universal health care are better alternatives. However, there is a much easier path forward to getting higher minimum wages and we shouldn't stop making incremental changes just because there is a potentially better solution that we will probably never implement.
My understanding is that that's pretty common in that part of the car market. I know you can't get the really high end McLarens unless you've bought one of the cheaper ones already.
Also common in certain parts of the watch and jewelry markets.
If you go to the Rolex subreddit, it's full of people getting waitlisted for watches they want to buy and excitedly posting when they finally "get the call" from the dealer — sometimes years later — that they are now allowed to buy the watch. It's a common "strategy" to buy lesser watches to ingratiate oneself with the precious Authorized Dealer™ demigod so that one day you might be able to buy the watch you actually want.
Go search /r/rolex for the phrase "got the call" and prepare to cringe.
This is the exact same thing that’s happening for folks trying to buy a Porsche 911 GT3, GT3 RS, or S/T. Unless you buy multiple cars you don’t want, you’ll never get an allocation from Porsche. The end result is that most folks have to spend $100k-$300k over MSRP to buy one from someone who did get an allocation. The craziest part is it’s probably still cheaper to pay that insane markup than it is to buy the cars to get an allocation.
Isn’t the thing with Rolex that the cheaper watches are some of the hardest to get? You can walk in to a dealer and walk out with a gold or two tone watch, but ask for a plain stainless steel model and they’ll laugh at you.
>unless you've bought one of the cheaper ones already.
You don't even get a foot in the door with 1 from Ferrari.
I read a Reddit post from someone who had an acquaintance that speed-ran the process (clearly a 9 figure+ individual), and it was ludicrous.
I think it took him something like 3-5 years, while it normally takes double that. I think right out the gate he had to buy a few of them, then he could buy the nice ones, and the special editions, then he bought a used f40 or something like that which was 7 figures, and started participating in the racing experience they have, so there's a parallel track where you have to buy some track focused cars as well. Along the way he made sure to show up at all of the events, and it's important to, because to get on "the list" there is a scoring system behind the scene where everything that a customer does is assigned a point value, and only the customers with the highest level of points get the allocations. That includes things like maxing out options on every curve you buy, and paying up for the bespoke personalization services.
I think it was something like 3 years, 10+ cars, and 10 million dollars to get through the gauntlet.
The entire Ferrari Challenge "race series" is guys shipping their cars around the country and participating in "races" exclusively so they can stay/be on the list for future allocations. It's wild.
It's even a thing in a company as "downmarket" as Porsche. Which is kind of joke, because during the pandemic, practically every 911 sold was a high-margin "hard to get" GT3RS.
> a nation that treats dogs as children is a nation that cannot possibly hope to condemn childish bickering, name-calling and flat-out toddler lying in its ruling class
I don't see how the two are related. How does treating dogs as family members prevent people from being politically active?
A couple years ago I got a puppy. At the time I worked from home. A few months ago I got a new job and now I have to go into the office. She spent the first two years of her life with me being used to me almost always being around. It would be cruel to suddenly leave her alone all day five days a week. What are you suggesting people should do in similar situations? Should I only work remote for the rest of her life? Should I have taken her from the only home she knows and given her to someone else who works from home?
So instead I should uproot her and move her to a new home with people she doesn't know. When they go through a life event like changing jobs, getting injured, having to move to look after a family member, having children, etc they should repeat the process and shuttle her off to another strange place.
> will you continue paying doggie day care out of consistency for her, or will you stop?
In that situation I'd probably continue but cut back. I've always paid for classes, private training, and other enrichment activities for her so this wouldn't be any different.
> Because if you stop, you're taking away someone and somewhere and maybe several other animal friends who she's formed an attachment to. For your own needs.
Parents do this to their children all the time. Should parents not move to a new city because their children would be cut off from their current friends?
> it's no different to dumping a child in boarding school
No, it's no different to dumping a child in public school or daycare. They get taken care of while I work and when my work day is done I can spend time with them.
> I think doggie day care is a sign of a society in ethical decline.
You've made a number of comments about doggie day care being immature or a sign that society is declining but you've never made a coherent argument for why that is. What is immature or unethical about wanting my pet taken care of when I'm unavailable, planning for that, and paying someone for the service they provide?
> I think doggie day care is a sign of a society in ethical decline.
If anything, it's a sign of the opposite. Before, people would just leave their dog at home all day regardless of the impact to the dog.
The fact that more people are now willing to spend money (and time to get the dog to daycare) so that their dog isn't left home alone is unarguably more ethical.
I accept that one can make this argument, but since not leaving your dog alone can be implemented in other ways (arranging to leave them with friends and family, arranging swap relationships with one or two other dog owners, etc.) I am not convinced by the whole dog parent/furbaby/school bus BS, which is infantile and indicative of a society that now prizes immaturity and low compromise.
I will start by saying I don't have much experience with the latest AI coding tools.
From what I've seen using them would lead to more boredom. I like solving problems. I don't like doing code reviews. I wouldn't trust any AI generated code at this stage without reviewing it. If I could swap that around so I write code and AI gives me a reasonable code review and catches my mistakes I'd be much more interested.
To optimize for fast nearest neighbors, I chose 256 dims. Notably, this actually hurt some of the pre-training classification losses pretty severely compared to 2k dims, so it definitely has a quality cost.
The site uses cosine distance. The code itself implements Euclidean distance, but I decided to normalize the vectors last minute out of FUD that some unusually small vectors would appear as neighbors for an abnormal number of examples.
In the sense that you can measure it as a whole, such as what governments do with CPI reports. For example, if prices go up for a widget A, then maybe consumers switch to widget B. Prices for something went up, but inflation depends on the whole of things people actually buy.
American steel companies just raised prices a week ago in anticipation of tariffs (not even passed tariffs), and the tariffs wouldn't even effect them. Everyone is going to want their share of higher pricing power, so expect domestic producers to follow higher import prices (well, its already happened).
If there was a lot of domestic suppliers and (more importantly) a lot of domestic competition, inflation might be avoided. But none of that exists, so expect consumers to pay for the tariffs directly and then more.
My question was about the evidence. For example, Trump introduced a 25% tariff on steel in early 2018, and yet we didn't see any unusual inflation until after the COVID stimulus.
No, I think you remember it wrong. US steel companies raised prices back in 2018 as well. It was just that it was one tariff at the one time, and many companies were able to avoid it by moving production overseas (the tax didn't apply to goods made with steel, just steel itself).
This time, there are more tariffs coming at the same time, and the trick of moving production abroad to avoid steel tariffs is no longer viable.
In this comment chain, I have already clarified that by "inflation," I'm not referring to how an items price goes up after it becomes subject to a tariff. I'm referring to overall inflation in goods and services. You can see the rate of inflation from March of 2018 to the beginning of the COVID stimulus here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
If you tariff a small section of the economy, you aren't going to see much movement. Producers can adjust by moving production abroad (to avoid raw input tariffs) and by moving production to home (to avoid final assembly tariffs) (often a combination of both).
Trump's 2018 tariffs were narrow enough that they were easy to digest. Trump's 2025 tariffs are fairly broad and we won't be able to move production around in multiple places to deal with it, so much of the economy is going to eat the cost directly. So if money supply stays the same, Americans simply reduce their lifestyle to compensate (buy 25% less stuff, eat 25% less food), but I don't think that Trump (as someone who is addicted to excess) will see that as viable, so money is going to be printed and injected into the economy somehow.
I was able to find an article[0] showing job losses from Trump's first term tariffs but nothing concrete about inflation.
Despite not having concrete proof, I think there's a fairly plausible chain of events from tariffs to broader price increases. Trump's tariffs include a 10% tariff on Canadian oil and gas. If you're in a region that relies heavily on these things coming from Canada you're going to see prices go up on your monthly energy bills, fuel for your vehicle, etc. This also affects local businesses and directly increases their costs. Businesses can only absorb so much of an increase before they raise prices. Now you're able to buy even less between your increased monthly expenses and the higher prices in stores. This makes you go to your boss and ask for a raise just so you can keep up with what your purchasing power used to be. If your boss gives you that raise, the business sees their expenses go up again and may need to raise prices as a result.
In the scenario I described above, what step do you think won't happen that allows us to prevent higher energy prices from leading to inflation?
I believe taxes in general have a cooling effect on the economy and are ultimately deflationary. I also think it's possible we could enter a recession. If so, it would trigger fiscal expansion, which usually triggers inflation in turn. But tariffs in a vacuum: deflationary to neutral once the economy has time to react and adjust.
I'm going to rephrase your position to make sure I understand it correctly. Please feel free to correct anything I get wrong below.
Tariffs result in higher costs to consumers in the short term due to the additional tax consumers have to pay. This extra tax is harmful to the economy. The reduction in economic growth is deflationary and sufficient to counter inflationary pressure from higher prices on tariffed goods. As a result, tariffs should lead to deflation or have at most a neutral effect on inflation.
> and sufficient to counter inflationary pressure from higher prices on tariffed goods.
I'm not sure there is overall inflationary pressure from the higher prices on tariffed goods, but yes. It's a dynamic system, and I believe that people change their behavior and buying patterns in response to taxes. This is my belief, and I have no real evidence other than the fact that the rate of CPI growth did not increase after the 2018 tariffs until after the COVID stimulus came into effect.
When the talk about tariffs started I wondered why no one was doing something like this. With exporting there's a risk that people will find ways around it but infrastructure for power, oil, gas, etc takes years to build so it's not like the US has a viable short term alternative for some of these.
I spend way more time troubleshooting than I do building new things. I'm a lead programmer on my team. I regularly hop on impromptu zoom calls to help people out with thorny problems or jump into slack conversations. I don't get a lot of focused time for building new stuff. I'm more valuable to my team keeping them running smoothly and enforcing standards that avoid some of the nastier troubleshooting.
