Cipheron on 3/3/2022 at 16:02
Yeah, sometimes i find some amusing stuff to post but it's not politics related and i don't want to pollute Random Thoughts with links/jokes. I might post general conspiracy stuff here too, to avoid cluttering other threads.
This not an Onion article btw, but it's 100% Onion quality:
(
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/man-mad-over-hipster-photo_n_5c82cf2ae4b08d5b78619034)
Quote:
A man threatened to sue a technology publication for using his image in a story about how all hipsters look alike, only to find out that the picture was of a different person.
Last week, MIT Technology Review posted an article titled “The Hipster Effect: Why Anti-conformists Always End Up Looking The Same,” which discussed a Brandeis University study about “the hipster effect,” or how nonconformists often end up conforming to counterculture conventions.
The article featured an image created from a Getty stock photo of a bearded man in a flannel shirt and beanie. The Review used the image, duplicated it several times and added a purple and orange hue to it to illustrate the point of the article.
However, an unidentified man saw the image, thought it was a picture of him and sent the publication a pretty heated email, which, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., read:
“Your lack of basic journalistic ethics in both the manner in which you ‘reported' this uncredited nonsense, and the slanderous, unnecessary use of my picture without permission demands a response, and I am, of course, pursuing legal action.”
...
“They wrote to him and said, ‘We don't think this is you.' And he replied, ‘Oh, I guess you're right, it's not.'
...
“All of which just proves the story we ran: Hipsters look so much alike that they can't even tell themselves apart from each other,” Lichfield tweeted.
Pyrian on 3/3/2022 at 18:46
I remember that from when it happened, three years ago.
Cipheron on 12/3/2022 at 21:47
New study: 50% of Americans alive in 2015 were retarded due to leaded gasoline exposure.
(
https://www.sciencealert.com/lead-exposure-may-have-lowered-iq-of-half-of-americans-since-1940)
Why this is really important? Lead exposure is also strongly associated with violence and crime.
Quote:
Childhood lead exposure in the United States is ubiquitous and much more concerning than previous estimates have suggested, according to a new study.
When researchers analyzed leaded gas use from 1940 and combined it with data on blood-lead levels from the mid 1970s, they found more than 54 percent of Americans alive in 2015 had been exposed to dangerous levels of lead as children.
That's more than 170 million adults who are now at greater risk of neurodegenerative disease, mental illness and cardiovascular issues, because of the lead they breathed in, ingested or absorbed as kids.
As for lead exposure, in 1973 lead was allowed in amounts of 20-30 grams per gallon. By 1986 it had been gradually reduced to 0.1 grams per gallon. It was banned in 1996, but by then only 0.6% of American cars used leaded gas. So the big reductions happened in the early 1980s. So when talking about those 170 million people they're overwhelmingly older people - Boomers and GenX, not millennials and younger.
(
https://www.luc.edu/media/lucedu/hhhci/pdf/FactSheetDelinquencyandCriminalBehavor.pdf)
Quote:
Exposure to lead during pregnancy and lead poisoning when
children are young are connected to more arrests and/or arrests
for violent offenses in a study of 250 individuals that looked at
them from birth to ages 19-24 years old. The more lead in a
child's blood at 6 years old, the higher are the child's chances of
being arrested for a violent crime as a young adult.
Lead poisoning in children in preschool increased the amount of
crime over several decades in nine countries, including the U.S.
The impact of childhood lead poisoning is also seen in the increase
of arrest and incarceration over these years. This study further
suggests that crimes involving violence could be especially
connected to the more severe cases of childhood lead poisoning.
...
A comparison of 194 delinquent children with 146 non-delinquent
children found that delinquent children were four times more
likely to be lead poisoned than the non-delinquent youth. This
was the result even after looking at other problems that affect
delinquency, including the level of parent education and
employment, single-parent households, number of children living
in the home, and neighborhood crime rates.
Lead poisoning attacks the centers of the brain for reasoning, emotion, decision making etc. So it's not implausible that older right-wingers who get upset about "woke" young people actually have brain damage from lead that's affected their ability to feel empathy. "what is WRONG with these young people?" they asks. Uh, the young people didn't huff the lead fumes so have intact frontal lobes, maybe? I know it must seem weird to people who have pattern neurological damage that was society-wide when the new generation comes along and don't have the brain damage that they see as "normal".
I'm planning to write a couple of conspiracy theory posts later, but i think the articles explaining that everyone was poisoned by nerve toxins for decades could be the "oh that explains everything" moment.
Cipheron on 13/3/2022 at 01:43
I'm having a debate on another site about inflation. People seem to think companies are happily rolling in their pandemic bucks, because prices are high.
However, I'm pretty sure that the companies involved would prefer it if they *didn't* have supply disruptions that are causing high prices. After all, if the low supply is causing high prices and companies as a whole find this more profitable, then they would have colluded to ensure the supply was lower *in the first place*.
Some people don't get that high prices don't necessarily mean more profits.
like a common sentiment is that "oil companies are only using the Ukraine war as an excuse to jack up the price!"
firstly, they don't need any excuse to jack up the price,
secondly, if there was in fact wiggle-room to even "jack up the price", then that implies they were making less than the optimal profits at the point before jacking prices up. which seems kinda unlikely.
e.g. if the price spikes right up to $6 a gallon and someone goes "they only set that price in order to gouge people for more money!" then why was it in fact less than $6 the day before, or the week before? Were they not gouging people at that point?
Pyrian on 13/3/2022 at 04:22
Umm. It kinda sorta sounds like you have absolutely no idea how pricing normally works in the first place.
In a functioning sub-economy, attempts to raise prices are countered by purchasers not
paying those prices. Maybe they get it somewhere else, maybe they just use less of it. A competitor can undercut your price, and suddenly you're getting
nothing. But sudden (and "sudden" in most cases can be measured in
years, e.g. building new chip factories takes several years each) supply shocks make it difficult or impossible to find competition or alternatives. So, the price can rise until it's so high that buyers
do find alternatives, or just do without. If you institute price controls, then you get shortages, as buyers try to get as much as usual and it simply doesn't exist. High prices can effectively prevent shortages by forcing buyers out of the market until only the most desperate afford it. That's a standard supply/demand curve.
As a rule of thumb, companies try to set prices as high as they can get away with. Selling fewer units isn't a problem until you sell
so many fewer that you make less profit. But, it's ultimately more of an art than a science. At the end of the day, it's PR, really. Customers are "sticky" and it's really dangerous to drive them away. Having an excuse to give your customers makes it much better PR, and if everyone else is saying the same thing and raising the same prices, all the better.
Quote:
People seem to think companies are happily rolling in their pandemic bucks, because prices are high.
Profits are way up. That's just easily verifiable fact.
Quote:
However, I'm pretty sure that the companies involved would prefer it if they *didn't* have supply disruptions that are causing high prices.
Companies that can still source a scarce resource are
absolutely delighted when their competition stops being able to source that same resource. They get a huge increase in returns without having to do anything but crank prices. Companies down the line could go either way, but right now, they are by-and-large getting away with increasing prices more than their costs are going up, which leads to the aforementioned profit surge.
Quote:
After all, if the low supply is causing high prices and companies as a whole find this more profitable, then they would have colluded to ensure the supply was lower *in the first place*.
This is usually illegal and they do it all the friggin' time anyway. That is, like, OPEC's entire reason for existence. It's what Enron did. It's why diamonds are expensive. It's the whole reason why we have rules about trusts and monopolies; if you can control enough of the supply, you can raise prices and crank your profit without having to worry about competition.
demagogue on 13/3/2022 at 04:51
I guess more precisely it's the combination of anterior cingulate cortex and orbitofrontal/ventral medial frontal cortex via the striatum pulling the trigger (raising the price) until the firing rates mediating the utility benefit of pulling it again more or less are canceled out by the firing rates of the ACC's computation of the counterfactual costs of fewer customers, plus a few little details, and that system is pretty good at feeling out the local Nash equilibrium. There's your invisible hand.
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Profits are way up. That's just easily verifiable fact.
Profits are up, but so is the cost of all kinds of goods and services, which blunts its purchasing power on the whole. I wouldn't think it's so much delighted as relieved if they keep their heads above water, or pop it high enough above the water to match the rise that's going to come.
Well my brother is in the oil industry. When there's a price spike, first it's not going to mean anything to them until a few months later when the next round of purchases happen, but the costs of everything (equipment, labor, transportation, etc.) go way up immediately. Then there's a happy rush when the profits start coming in. But then over time those also start getting eaten into over time, and there's evidently a little uncertainty how it's going to wobble out after a year. It's a weird dynamic, and there's an offset between what you perceive and what you experience.
Edit: I'm making it sound like it's a monolithic thing. There are net winners and losers, or better and worse off, or er, less-worse-off and worse-worse-off. Oil companies are net better (maybe less-worse-off?), where the extra profit is going to be a lot more than the raised costs. But industries like I imagine trucking are going to be net worse-worse-off, where raising their prices isn't going to counter the rising cost of gas, not just for their own trucks but what the drivers themselves have to pay for their own cars back home, on top of groceries and sundries and the like...
Pyrian on 13/3/2022 at 05:00
Quote Posted by demagogue
Profits are up, but so is the cost of all kinds of goods and services, which blunts its purchasing power on the whole.
...I
knew I should've specified inflation-adjusted...
Cipheron on 13/3/2022 at 10:57
@Pyrian I don't disagree with anything you said.
But what I was arguing with these other people was that companies trying to max revenue were the entire cause of inflation right now.
That doesn't explain why there are periods, long periods, with low inflation. Companies were still working to maximize profits during those times. So my point was that maximizing profits isn't the 100% explanation of price rises. so when asking for the reason behind inflation being high it can't just be caused by companies maxxing profits since then you need to also have to explain why there was 10 years before that where it almost never got over 2%, despite companies being the same as ever.
how I'm starting to see that is that the high profits could be understood to be the net result of the unstable market conditions. once the market stabilizes those should approach the previous levels.
as for high profits, that also pulls money out of circulation. if companies are sitting on record amounts of cash then that's also cash that's not circulating: the net effect of not circulating cash is in fact anti-inflationary. so it makes sense to see that as the result of inflation, not the cause.
