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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Sellers raise their prices because they have buyers ready to pay that higher price.

    Say your have the best restaurant in town and you have a line down the street and everyday you sell out of food before lunch. If you raise your prices the line will get shorter as some of your more price sensitive customers decide to go elsewhere. Keep raising them and your shop will be empty as nobody wants your food at those prices. The “right price” is where you get the most money you can for the work that you do in a day. Right?

    You should be looking at your wages exactly the same. Ask for 10k per hour and you’re going to be jobless. As for 5 per hour and you’re gonna have lots of offers but not make enough money. Try to find the “right” wage. This is why wages have been going up faster than inflation pretty much every quarter since some time in 2022.

    And no, we shouldn’t punish you or our hypothetical restaurant owner for setting your prices properly.

    Also, taxes don’t remove money from the economy so it would be neutral from an inflation standpoint. But that’s a much longer story.


  • This comes from a memory of a digression during a lecture in an ecology class I was in 20yrs ago… so you know, grain of salt.

    From this particular professors point of view. Symbiotic was the term to describe mutualism until recently. And then. A few papers started using symbiosis as an umbrella term for all relationships with sub-terms to describe the “benefits math”. This, to him, was annoying pedantry. But eventually all the textbooks adopted the new hierarchy of terms and the world moved on.

    If you took a biology class with a text published pre-2000s, it’s very possible that your book described symbiosis as a mutually beneficial relationship between species.

    Long story short: the language is fluid and ever changing, even in science fields.




  • This year we deployed a CURE for sickle cell! Cured a congenital disease with gene editing. It’s hard to do and crazy expensive, but the end of suffering from this disease is actually in sight.

    The mRNA vaccine tech that got a boost from Covid is now being used to cure certain melanoma cancers. This is a potential sea change in the fight against cancer.

    More and more of our energy is coming from fully renewable sources. We are behind (way behind tbh) but humanity is actually moving the right direction at this point. We could honestly be seeing peak carbon in the next few years. The climate will change, probably already has, but we might actually survive this.

    We’ve got problems, lots of them, and some pretty nasty. But you are almost certainly better off living today than just about any time in human history.


  • If you ever needed a lesson in the difference between power and authority, this is a good one.

    The leaders of this coup read the rules and saw that they could use the board to remove Altman, they had the authority to make the move and “win” the game.

    It seems that they, like many fools mistook authority for power. The “rules” said they could do it! Alas they did not have the power to execute the coup. All the rules in the world cannot make the organization follow you.

    Power comes from people who grant it to you. Authority comes from paper. Authority is the guidelines for the use of power, without power, it is pointless.


  • Stardew Valley will probably be the game that looms largest in my kid’s nostalgia. They have both played the life out of that thing. Other things that come to mind: Minecraft, phasmaphobia, fnaf, Skyrim, duck game, BOTW, and Nidhogg 2.

    There is no guiding aesthetic driven by the technology, just whatever is available and cool.

    Re: loot boxes, there is no denying that fortnight is(was?) a huge deal in this gen of kids. I’m sure at least some kids are going to have fond memories of getting v bucks for their birthday.


  • So. If I understand this correctly it’s possible I do not)

    Your mastodon account is on a server that is federated with threads

    A threads user, your mom for instance, decides to follow your mastodon account.

    When you mother sees your cool post, she will probably have an ad in line with it.

    Is meta monetizing your content, or your mother’s attention? Is there a difference?

    Is the optimal outcome 1: your mom cannot see your cool post, or 2: your mom joins a mastodon server?

    Is 2 likely? Seems to me the real concern here is that non corporate fediverse systems are finally getting some traction and the users (us) are afraid that meta will steal all the users away. I’m not sure if defederating them from a server will make a damn bit of difference.

    Meta is going to win the fight for user numbers. Full stop.