EgoEimi's recent activity
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Comment on Uber and Lyft prices vary for the same rides in ~transport
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Comment on Iran's president says capital must move from Tehran over ecological concerns in ~enviro
EgoEimi LinkIsrael is a study in contrast, as it's also a rather dry place, but it goes to extreme techno-infrastructural lengths to produce, reclaim, and conserve water, like the Fremen in Dune. It gets over...Israel is a study in contrast, as it's also a rather dry place, but it goes to extreme techno-infrastructural lengths to produce, reclaim, and conserve water, like the Fremen in Dune. It gets over half of its water supply from unconventional sources, and the vast majority of its drinking water comes through desalination.
Their agricultural water practices are very efficient: the country pioneered the drip irrigation method en masse: using tubes to slowly deliver water directly to plant roots, instead of indiscriminately watering large areas where a great deal of water is 'lost'. Treated wastewater also gets reclaimed for agricultural use.
It's unfortunate that Iran's leadership has misused its resources and driven away its best and brightest for many years.
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Comment on What are the simple things in your life that you are thankful for? in ~life
EgoEimi Link ParentI always try to take pause and reflect on our incredible material prosperity. I sometimes get a little annoyed over the price of cappuccinos or insurance, and I can lose broader perspective of our...I always try to take pause and reflect on our incredible material prosperity. I sometimes get a little annoyed over the price of cappuccinos or insurance, and I can lose broader perspective of our material abundance. Virtually every single person in the developed world has access to a comfortable, clean bathroom with (hot) running water. Bidets are the best, but soft toilet paper would have been an unimaginable luxury to most of humanity for much of history, who had to make do with... hay, straw, moss, or—can you imagine—a communal sponge?
Tonight at a friend's home I held a jar of Heinz Turkey Gravy and thought about how it cost just $2, the cost of a few minutes of labor. In the end, we probably threw away 2–3 jars worth of gravy, nonchalantly. Once upon a time, that gravy probably cost hours of labor for material and preparation.
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Comment on GPT-5 has come a long way in mathematics in ~tech
EgoEimi Link ParentIn parallel is literacy education. Recently fourth graders in Mississippi have beaten their peers in Minnesota in Reading in the NAEP test. Black students in Mississippi have also seen big gains....In parallel is literacy education. Recently fourth graders in Mississippi have beaten their peers in Minnesota in Reading in the NAEP test. Black students in Mississippi have also seen big gains. All this despite Mississippi being the poorest state.
The main intervention Mississippi has done is... holding back third graders who don't meet reading proficiency + embracing phonics and rejecting whole-language theory. See this article on the Mississippi Miracle.
In liberal states, I think that good intentions around equity have led to corrupting incentives that cause schools to prioritize gaming metrics instead of actually educating their students.
- Schools passing along unprepared students so they can claim good passing and graduation rates.
- Colleges dropping SAT/ACT requirements in order to admit more students of color on the theory that SAT/ACT scores don't indicate academic readiness... but this has led to decreased academic performance, because scores do predict readiness. This train wreck is still in motion: I think it's a disservice to students to admit them into programs they're not prepared to fully utilize, and the consequences will unfold in the years ahead.
- San Francisco school district getting rid of 8th grade algebra in the name of equity.
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Comment on Google must double AI serving capacity every six months to meet demand in ~tech
EgoEimi Link ParentIt's probably a lot but less than we think. They cache AI summaries for many common queries, like "how do i get stains out out of the carpet?" When you input a common query, the AI summary is...It's probably a lot but less than we think. They cache AI summaries for many common queries, like "how do i get stains out out of the carpet?" When you input a common query, the AI summary is retrieved instantly. When you input something very specific and unique, then you can see the LLM output being written word by word.
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Comment on California Forever clears first hurdle in Suisun City annexation in ~society
EgoEimi Link ParentI'm rooting for it. Everyone wants the perfect unicorn solution, but here's a group that's offering a pretty decent solution. If they can achieve that aim, that'd bring some relief to the housing...I'm rooting for it. Everyone wants the perfect unicorn solution, but here's a group that's offering a pretty decent solution. If they can achieve that aim, that'd bring some relief to the housing market here. It'd be immoral to not build housing when tens of thousands of people sleep in Bay Area streets.
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Comment on SAG Awards change name to the Actor Awards starting in 2026 in ~movies
EgoEimi Link ParentSAG is such an unpleasant acronym too, immediately makes you think of “saggy”SAG is such an unpleasant acronym too, immediately makes you think of “saggy”
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Comment on The final straw: Why companies replace once-beloved technology brands in ~tech
EgoEimi Link ParentIt is a big simplification. I think that established players are very aware of this phenomenon, which afflicted companies of yesteryear (IBM, etc.) and try to mitigate it. Organizations within...It is a big simplification. I think that established players are very aware of this phenomenon, which afflicted companies of yesteryear (IBM, etc.) and try to mitigate it.
Organizations within companies are basically mini companies with their own culture. Sometimes companies set up a new org to be culturally separate.
Sometimes companies will acquire a startup or company and give them some autonomy. Microsoft didn't acquire OpenAI, but they did invest in them for access to their AI products because their own in-house AI product people were very meh.
Steve Jobs and Tim Cook both did a very good job of keeping Apple motivated and focused on making great hardware and software, though there is some slippage lately. From what I hear from my friends at Apple:
- Apple gives them lots of responsibility and resources to get things done. They have Directly Responsible Individuals, so people know their heads will roll if they neglect their responsibilities. Usually when companies get super big, responsibilities become diffused, so no one is singularly responsible for X or Y, and therefore no one feels responsible and motivated to make sure they do a good job with X or Y.
- Apple hires and fires carefully. They didn't go on a pandemic hiring spree, and they're the only big tech company that hasn't joined the current wave of layoffs, which is killing morale at other companies. Apple has relatively loyal employees genuinely committed to their mission, compared to other big tech companies like Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon, where employees often job hop around.
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Comment on The final straw: Why companies replace once-beloved technology brands in ~tech
EgoEimi LinkAs Steve Jobs once put it, the product people had the original vision and drive to create the product eventually get replaced by sales/marketing people and bean counters. By picking an upstart,...As Steve Jobs once put it, the product people had the original vision and drive to create the product eventually get replaced by sales/marketing people and bean counters.
By picking an upstart, you’re not just choosing software, you’re choosing culture. You’re choosing a younger company that has to care about what they’re building and are responsive and eager to solve your problems.
The old legacy companies are full of people hired after the product became a mature money printer and are now just there to make incremental improvements, shuffle the deck chairs around, and collect their paychecks and go home.
The young eventually become old and the cycle begins anew.
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Comment on McDonald’s is losing its low-income customers in ~food
EgoEimi Link ParentStock prices reflect, to a degree, expectations of how profitable a company is over the long term. As a case study, look at Amazon. For like 20 years it was unprofitable or barely profitable on...What seems to be the way of investors is to make a lot more money right now and future profits be dammed or more likely we will cross that bridge when we get there.
Stock prices reflect, to a degree, expectations of how profitable a company is over the long term.
As a case study, look at Amazon. For like 20 years it was unprofitable or barely profitable on paper — but that's because Jeff Bezos reinvested most profits back into the company, instead of returning it to investors through dividends or buybacks. But Amazon's stock price kept rising because its revenue grew quickly and investors expected it to eventually become very profitable.
Their investments made sense, now Amazon pretty much serves as the shopping mall of America, selling anything big or small you can think of and delivering it to every corner of the US in 2 days or sooner.
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Comment on McDonald’s is losing its low-income customers in ~food
EgoEimi Link ParentThe investors do take the hit. Investors are looking for assets that offer a rate of return they're comfortable with. (Most portfolios invest in a range of assets of various risks, including...Amazing how it's not the investors that need to take the hit, but it's the consumer and the labor that have to take the hit.
The investors do take the hit. Investors are looking for assets that offer a rate of return they're comfortable with. (Most portfolios invest in a range of assets of various risks, including bonds.) If McDonalds is unable to meet investor expectations, then more investors want to sell than buy, causing the stock price to lower to a new equilibrium price, thereby devaluing the asset. The remaining investors end up with a less valuable asset.
The free market now means freedom for monopoly, usury and rentiering to take hold, as opposed to the original idea that a free market meant freedom from those economic abuses.
The restaurant industry is one of the purest (i.e. least monopolistic) and most competitive markets. There are 1 million restaurants in the US, 1 restaurant per ~300 people. Of that 1m, 200k are fast food restaurants. The vast majority are independently owned. Margins are razor thin (single digit percentage).
McDonalds has the farthest thing from a monopoly. They are in direct competition with Subway, Chipotle, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Burger King, Panera Bread, In-n-Out, KFC, Chick-fil-a, Shake Shack, Jersey Mike's, Sonic, Steak n Shake, Jimmy John's, Panda Express, Potbelly, White Castle, Starbucks, Five Guys, etc. etc.
If they can't arbitrarily set prices like a company with true monopoly power can, like a utility (which are always heavily regulated). If they decide to raise the price of their burger by $1, it becomes less competitive to all the hundreds of other burgers offered in town.
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Comment on Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’ in ~society
EgoEimi Link ParentOk, right off the bat: local corner stores have local/geographic monopoly power, which is one type of monopoly, but it is not absolute. The corner store charges a premium: you the shopper can...And having been to more than one corner store in a poor neighborhood, you're talking about paying $4 for a box of plain pasta which would normally be $0.75 because the local corner store has a monopoly on groceries for a mile.
Ok, right off the bat: local corner stores have local/geographic monopoly power, which is one type of monopoly, but it is not absolute.
The corner store charges a premium: you the shopper can spend 10 minutes and buy a box of pasta for $4 vs. spending 20–60 minutes on a longer trip to a big grocery store where you can buy a box of pasta for $2. The former makes sense if you only need a few things, but if you need to do a whole grocery run, the latter makes more sense.
But if the corner store were to charge, say, $100 for the pasta, it wouldn't be worth the time you save, and, pasta being a substitutable good, you don't have to have pasta, so you'd switch to something else, like rice.
But the local corner store is not making $3+ off a box of pasta. Mainstream grocery store operating profit margins are around 1–5%, while small independent stores' are around 5–10%.
The local corner store has a small sales volume, low inventory turnover, and relatively high operational costs, so it must charge a premium. Costco, for example, manages to achieve cheap prices through high sales volume (and outsized purchasing power), high inventory turnover, and relatively low operational costs (they let customers grab goods directly off shipping pallets, reducing the need to pay staff to manually stock shelves).
I think Mamdani is a good person, but he fundamentally doesn't understand why food prices are the way they are.
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Comment on A review of Alpha School in ~life
EgoEimi Link Parentand spend the extra time doing fun stuff, like doing sports, going on field trips, and having adventures with their classmates. And why is there this assumption the one-size-fits-most public...and spend the extra time doing fun stuff, like doing sports, going on field trips, and having adventures with their classmates.
And why is there this assumption the one-size-fits-most public school model is the most perfect thing ever, and all it needs is simply more money and parental involvement? That model evolved from a need to train a literate industrial workforce, assimilate immigrants, compete with the Soviets to win the Cold War, and in recent decades shovel kids into college with the (until recently) unquestioned assumption that college is the most perfect, natural life path ever, en masse.
We should salute efforts to experiment with alternative models that might better nurture the individual.
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Comment on How Bill Gates is reframing the climate change debate in ~enviro
EgoEimi Link ParentI'm pretty sure the average non-Westerner would take an extra 10+ years of life, steady food, electricity, safe plumbing, basic medicine, motorized transportation, and a magical device that lets...I'm pretty sure the average non-Westerner would take an extra 10+ years of life, steady food, electricity, safe plumbing, basic medicine, motorized transportation, and a magical device that lets them contact anyone and access all human knowledge over there being fewer Bill Gates in the world.
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Comment on People with a very good memory: does that make it harder to forgive? in ~talk
EgoEimi LinkI have a very good memory and, yes, am prone to holding grudges. Back in my school days, I used to crush spelling bees, geography bees, you name it bees. And then in uni I excelled in my history...I have a very good memory and, yes, am prone to holding grudges. Back in my school days, I used to crush spelling bees, geography bees, you name it bees. And then in uni I excelled in my history classes and was a favorite of my history professors (and got glowing recommendations from them) because I had excellent recall of events, places, and names and could effortlessly weave them together.
I live very much inside my head, thinking about the future and the past. But I'm never present in the moment.
In contrast, my ex had a very poor memory and lived in the 'now'. At first it was endearing how they could be so present in the moment. But eventually it became a point of great friction: they were impulsive and would do things without thinking about consequences or how it'd make me feel. Then they'd forget that it ever happened, but I would remember everything with great clarity, and it made me tear my hair out because we could never share an understanding of reality.
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Comment on How Bill Gates is reframing the climate change debate in ~enviro
EgoEimi Link ParentDoes rising global inequality really matter if the wealth and welfare baseline is rapidly rising? The average modern South Korean is 7 inches taller than the average Korean a century ago. That...Does rising global inequality really matter if the wealth and welfare baseline is rapidly rising?
The average modern South Korean is 7 inches taller than the average Korean a century ago. That speaks to the astounding deprivation and undernourishment that Koreans historically experienced.
Since the 90s, an average Asian person now lives a decade longer; the average African, a decade and a half!
Also since the 90s, global extreme poverty (living on less than $3/day) has fallen from 43% to 10%: we lifted 33% or one-third of all humans from extreme poverty.
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Comment on How Bill Gates is reframing the climate change debate in ~enviro
EgoEimi Link ParentThe big coffee and cocoa producers like Vietnam, Columbia, and the Ivory Coast have developed rapidly into middle-income countries. The Ivory Coast is considered lower-middle income, but for years...The luxury the rich world has is predicated upon attaining resources from the poor ones at slavery prices. Otherwise, everyone who lives in the very rare chocolate and coffee producing regions would live like gods.
The big coffee and cocoa producers like Vietnam, Columbia, and the Ivory Coast have developed rapidly into middle-income countries. The Ivory Coast is considered lower-middle income, but for years its gdp has grown at 6–7% annually. These countries were extremely poor a generation or two ago.
The anti-globalization movement of the early 2000's has been ideologically defeated: global trade has massively accelerated the development of non-western countries and built a global middle class of billions.
Environmental degradation, on the other hand, is a different, sad story. But economically, the world is unfathomably wealthier than it was 20 years ago.
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Comment on OpenAI says hundreds of thousands of ChatGPT users may show signs of manic or psychotic crisis every week in ~health.mental
EgoEimi LinkIs this high or low? These figures need to be grounded. The CDC estimates that 4~5% of Americans experienced suicidal ideation in any given year. What percentage of them show explicit indicators...In a given week, OpenAI estimated that around 0.07 percent of active ChatGPT users show “possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania” and 0.15 percent “have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.”
Is this high or low? These figures need to be grounded. The CDC estimates that 4~5% of Americans experienced suicidal ideation in any given year. What percentage of them show explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent? I'm not sure.
I remember when there was so much controversy over worker suicides at Foxconn: "wake, up people are killing themselves to make your iPhones!" But critics overlooked the fact that 18 suicides in a workforce of almost a million people yields a suicide rate that was actually much lower than both China's and the global suicide rate, both rural and urban. The reality was that for many poor, uneducated migrant workers, work life at Foxconn — above average pay, free meals, and free accommodations — was much better than anything they had back in the countryside or than what they could find the cities, so they were generally pretty happy about the work — even though it appears undesirable to affluent westerners.
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Comment on How do you volunteer your time? in ~talk
EgoEimi LinkWhen I have free time, I like to volunteer with elderly folks or the homeless but only in roles where my time is primarily spent getting to know people, building connection, and helping people...When I have free time, I like to volunteer with elderly folks or the homeless but only in roles where my time is primarily spent getting to know people, building connection, and helping people forgotten by society feel more connected and less lonely.
But I think it's inefficient to donate pure labor. If you're a working professional, you should just make money doing what you're good at and donate that money to allow the org hire workers who are good at what they do. It's just more efficient that way. Unless you find the labor fun — I've volunteered with parks to do various landscaping work but really only as fun physical exercise. I did Habitat for Humanity for a short while but then I wised up and realized it was a waste of time, and that they should just let real professionals build houses.
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Comment on US kills three in second strike on alleged drug boats in the Pacific in ~society
EgoEimi Link ParentI'm in favor of the US instigating regime change, even though I think its past interventions in Latin America were wrong. Venezuela is unique in that its current government is deeply unpopular but...I'm in favor of the US instigating regime change, even though I think its past interventions in Latin America were wrong. Venezuela is unique in that its current government is deeply unpopular but only exists through violent oppression of its people, and there is a wildly popular competent opposition that is already democratically legitimated and ready to take over but is forcibly suppressed by the regime.
The Irish Potato Famine caused Ireland's population to drop 20–25%, and Venezuela's population has declined by 25+% from people fleeing its current regime. The situation is very bad. But military pressure by Trump could be the breeze to finally topple over the Venezuelan regime's house of cards and set up a velvet revolution, one with minimal bloodshed. If anything, this path probably saves many more lives than any other path (like an internal revolution).
I think it doesn't matter if Trump is doing it for the good of the Venezuelan people or not. I think he, in wanting to cater to his political base, is accidentally doing a good thing.
So that's... on avg $1.77 a ride. Seems quite insignificant.