From the article:
"Price gouging is generally defined as a situation where companies set the price above the customary level in order to prevent shortages from occurring."
That sounds like normal supply and demand, not "price gouging". If you only have N of something, you set the price level such that the demand at that price will only be N of that thing.
But people feel it as price gouging. If the price has been X for a long time, and now the price is suddenly several times X because the supply got short, that feels like price gouging rather than "supply and demand".
Well, but see, supply and demand works on both ends.
That is, I'm selling the thing that's in short supply. But why is it in short supply? Because if I'm the manufacturer, I can't make any more of them than I'm making. And if I'm the distributor, I can't sell any more than I can buy from the manufacturer.
And why can't the manufacturer make any more? Typically, because there's some resource that they can't get. So they get some more, but they get it by paying more for it.
So the point is, when the company selling you the widget raises their price, that isn't pure profit. Their costs went up too, because the price of what they need went up.
ODD has some really questionable aspects. Especially considering half of children diagnosed with it are also ADHD. I highly suspect the issue is more with the authority figures not knowing how to handle neurodivergence than the children themselves.
Many people tend to do the opposite of what they are told to do. In an individualist culture, this is normal.
A step back - I’d consider the possibility too that it’s a learned behavior where they have received enough pain in the past doing what they were told, so literally have been conditioned to do the opposite of what they were told.
And/or, never got attention or positive feedback when doing what they were told - but got lots of attention when they did what they were told not to do. Not necessarily positive, but something is better than nothing.
Which isn’t necessarily at odds with what you’re saying.
As someone who has some of the traits this is absolutely it.
When you spend your childhood being told by people to do things that will lead to, well, almost certainly being poor and having a shit life, you learn to just ignore advice and do the opposite.
It is really hard to unlearn this in adulthood. I tend to get by by judging the person giving the advice e.g. if they seem successful then they are more likely to be correct than if they are not.
I developed something like this, but it manifests more as "question everything until it makes sense to me."
I feel like I'm constitutionally incapable of taking anybody's word for anything, but it's vastly worse for anyone who reacts with hostility to my questions about points that don't make sense to me.
It was very much trained into me by my father that following the advice of those people leads to suffering and pain. He acted like he knew everything. He reacted with rage when questioned. And looking back on it, he was (and remains) wrong about every single point of substance I ever remember his having made.
> manifests more as "question everything until it makes sense to me."
This is called "critical thinking" -- at least when combined with a decent amount of existing topical knowledge to be able to ask good questions -- and is rather useful for all sorts of things.
It's surprising and disappointing how rarely it goes over well. It's led me to believe most people deserve to feel "impostor syndrome."
One of my favorite feelings is the one I get when I have an opportunity to change my mind because someone has better information about a topic than I do and is willing to share it with me so I can come to the same conclusion they have, rather than the one I had because I was ignorant of certain information.
I always hope professionals, whom I expect to be experts in their subjects, enjoy their subject enough that they are better informed than I am about it, so I tend to ask a lot of questions. It is extremely rare that I find one who takes this well.
My mechanic is a glowing exception on this front. He actually specializes in my kind of car (old Priuses, not something fancy), and when he tells me X, Y, and/or Z are wrong with it and what he needs to do to fix it, if I ask questions, he can easily identify what knowledge I'm missing, and happily just explains it to me. As an intelligent, curious person, I love interacting with experts like this and will happily pay more to do so. And he seems to enjoy talking about his subject, even with someone who knows a lot less about it than he does.
But my doctors? Especially "specialists"? Absolutely opposite experience on every front. They loathe my questions, and treat me with contempt for daring to question their authority, even when I'm trying to ask about recent research papers and have previously read all their citations. I'm not a doctor, but I do know how to read papers, and especially for a chronic condition I have, I've read a lot. I'm not some random person coming in with a file of advice from "Doctor Google." If anything, I know quite a bit more about my condition than I do about my car, even though my history with each is about the same length.
I don't know if it has to do with the respective systems the two kinds of experts operate in or what (my mechanic's education was not as long or as arduous, and since he operates independently, it's up to him to decide how much time he wants to spend with me and what to charge me), but it's a disappointing world for an inquisitive critical thinker.
All heart pumps damage the blood. So far we've not found a way to pump blood without causing damage due to various factors, sheer, pressure, heat, etc.
Impellers are particularly bad. Alternatives that use flexible membranes are better but still not perfect. Abiomed and Ventriflo both had pumps that use a flexible membrane. Abiomed had the first TAH (total artificial heart) to be implanted.
There are also other problems with blood pumps, such as stasis areas where blood can stagnate causing issues like thrombosis. These can be caused by valves or other issues in the flow path.
People on blood pumps need blood thinners and anticoagulants which can cause their own problems long term.
This is how I have operated ever since the Equifax breach. Once that happened, none of the others seemed to matter, everything important for identity theft is out there.
I've had no problems. Someone will try to run my credit, it will fail, then I ask which one they're trying to use, and I unfreeze it for a day. Some of them have the option to unfreeze for a single pull with a 1 time code (if I remember correctly), but when I tried to use that the person trying to pull the report seemed clueless, so I had to do the 1 day unfreeze.
Unfortunately it isn’t an option in every country. In the U.S., you can freeze your credit for free, but in the UK, you can’t. I think we should get rid of the CRAs entirely, but that’s a conversation for another day.
One interesting thing I ran into with frozen credit, is that you cannot sign up for USPS informed delivery without them running your credit as a method of address verification IIRC. If it is frozen the process gets stuck in limbo (at least it did many years ago when I ran into this situation)
I open credit cards for the bonuses frequently enough that freezing my credit would be more inconvenience than it’s worth.
Also, all the big bank websites seem to offer real time credit history monitoring for free, so I am betting I’ll just deal with any problem if/when they happen.
Keeping your credit frozen permanently is a great idea. Some of the credit agencies even encourage this with features such as a temporary unfreeze of your credit for a few days/weeks and then back to the permanently frozen state.
That's what I do. It also slows my roll. It's an extra step I have to take before making that large purchase or applying for anything that requires a credit check.
It's an extra step, but a surprisingly simple one. When I opened a checking account recently the bank told me which credit agency they'd use, and I unfroze that account and ChexSystems (another credit agency you should freeze with that is used specifically for new bank accounts) in five minutes using their automated systems. You can supply a re-freeze date when unfreezing as well so you don't need to remember to do that manually once you're approved.
Yep. This is what I did after the first Experian data breach, for peace of mind. I am probably financially lucky enough that I don't need to constantly be checking or using my credit... but honestly it seems like this is what everyone needs to be doing.
As someone else mentioned, some authentication schemes require your credit to be unfrozen. This can include insurance companies (really any company that needs to verify your identity)
That’s what I do. But it’s a little bit of pain to unfreeze your credit with three bureaus when you want a new credit card. Wish there was a way to do this in one place.
i don’t think credit freezing matters too much in this case because the leak wasn’t tied to SSN, name, etc. that would be used for identity theft. it was phone call and location data. much worse for privacy but less useful for financial fraud.
It sadly does matter for anyone who applied to work at advance autoparts , though. Their SSNs and the like are out there; the company's main database was hit.
I typically don’t “freeze” my credit but do have a handful of services actively monitoring my credit for free (have been involved with many data breaches) and it’s included with my credit cards.
> A credit freeze restricts access to your credit report
So if I freeze my credit, this will also deny access to the monitoring services AND financial institutions, right?
Side note: financial institutions often do “soft” credit pulls on active account holders to determine if they are eligible for credit limit increases. Have been growing my existing credit line for some time now without having to obtain additional credit cards. So far, close to $500K in unsecured credit.
It was recommended that I do this after a checking account was opened using my identity.
As others have stated, my default is "frozen." I put temporary thaws on when applying for credit, though in some cases, you'll be informed exactly which agency/agencies will be queried, and may not need to unfreeze all of them.
I keep my credit frozen all the time, but still keep getting alerts about new "no credit check" bank accounts from companies like chime.com. Then I give them my PII again just to verify and close those accounts, even though I don't have any business with them.
While this is good advice, it's important to remember that we shouldn't have to do this.
Credit companies take our data, without consent or compensation, then turn around and charge you if you want to prevent abuse of that collection. It's a racquet.
I was unable to get any of the three to verify my identity last I did this, and one of the three has never once in my 15 years of trying to get my free credit report let me actually get it.
This is precisely why breaches keep happening and will keep happening. It cost money to implement security. There's no cost benefit to spending that time and money since there are no consequences.
Businesses do not spend money unless it will make them money or save them money.
There needs to be a hefty federal fine on a per-affected-user basis for data breaches. Also a federal fine for each day a breach is unreported.
That money should go into a pool which can be accessed by people who have their identity stolen.
Or a lawsuit go through where someone can win quite a bit from from data leaks. If each person affected sued and won 100k or so, or even 1k, AT&T would definitely be spending money on security.
But it appears $5 or credit monitoring from an agency that also gets hacked is sufficient for class action lawsuits.
That requires people to be rich enough to sue. It takes a lot of money and time to sue. Almost no one has enough resources to do this. The courts are not an effective way to implement this policy. Unless you only want rich people to be able to get justice.
Class action suits regularly end up getting you "$5" worth of credit monitoring from the exact company who lost your data. It's a joke. Class action suits as they exist today in the US are an abject failure of justice.
Most companies now include clauses that force arbitration and prevent you from using a class action lawsuit. This type of sidestepping of the public justice system should be outlawed, retroactively, with retroactive lawsuits (by extending the statute of limitations), retroactive fines, and retroactive jail time.
Yes, but no amount of money will stop the data in a big database being stolen by someone sufficiently motivated to steal it. It's just bits on someone's disk.
The only true solution is to not create the database. But then what would all the data scientists and their MBA masters so with their time?
Its a interesting issue, its kinda of like software piracy, so what if someone steals the product, we will still make money on the product with the normal sale of the data in the first place. Its just making the news because it was a breach. It's not counted as a breach if the exact same party was to buy the data outright from ATT in the first place.
I don't see a reason as to recording who contacted who. If it's for billing, just record duration, if they're not an 'unlimited' customer and flags on whether it'd incur extra charges (i.e roaming, international call)
No two people are incompetent in exactly the same way. Hiring two developers to review each other's code leads to better code because they will often find problems that the other one didn't see. In a well managed organization (admittedly not a trivial caveat these days), more people working on security leads to better security.
Certainly, but for instance no sane developer should concatenate a string in a sql query unless there is absolutely certainty the string is safe. This should be reflex, not a matter of money or time.
People are alway going to make bad decisions. Sometimes that is out of a lack of experience or knowledge which can be fixed by better training (which also requires money). Other times it is out of apathy, laziness, or something else that can't be easily fixed. Either way, time and money can provide extra sets of eyes to find and fix those mistakes before they lead to a breach.
Also, our defaults are opposite of safe (most of the languages are still mutable by default, rigorous type systems wildly unpopular, there is a straightforward way to concatenate strings inside a query etc), our disaster prevention tools and practices seem most often to be targeted at symptoms instead of the causes (god forbid we rethink our collective ways and create/adopt tools that are much harder to use incorrectly), and all of this keeps happening because there is no pressure for it stop. What’s the incentive to?
I don’t think that there is a room for a meaningful and honest discussion about individuals in these circumstances.
Yeah sorry, it is still quite slow due to the traffic. It'd be much faster and robust to run locally via git cloning the repo and adding your own API key as shown in the README
For using other models it should be pretty straightforward to just modify the api functions to suit whatever model is being used -- would be fun to try out custom models! (Feel free to pull request the repo btw if you do modify such things)
An idea we had initially was actually to use an open-source model and fine-tune it using the DB of responses (including the hidden violation bot and refinement bot outputs) collected from people playing the game. That way the game could get better and better over time as more user data gets collected.
Disclaimer we actually did implement this via postgres and now have thousands of responses from players in case anyone wants to follow through on this idea.
It's another example of enshittification.
1. Find something that makes money and has "inefficiencies"
2. Buy a controlling share
3. Make it more "efficient"*
*Here efficient means: remove everything that makes it fun and unique and replace with the least expensive, low quality alternative. Add invasive advertisements. Charge extra for anything that can be carved off the original service or product.
If they used bridges instead of intersections where the roads cross over each other there would be no need for traffic lights and it would further reduce the chance of someone driving into oncoming traffic. The bridges could run on top of each other and further reduce the area needed for the interchange.
I'm sure bridges are more expensive than roads but it seems the obvious choice versus stopping four lanes of traffic at a light.
I'm pretty averse to working in any of Musk's companies, not just Tesla.
It's not his (pseudo?) conservative views, I'm actually somewhat politically conservative. I just have a ton of antipathy toward him as a person. I'm not proud of this, but he's a person I actively want to fail.
Pseudo conservative… I like that phrase. Of course it’s also worth saying that the guy hangs out with neo-reactionaries (people who literally want to install a monarch).
Even if he didn’t espouse whatever the hell he’s espousing publicly, his companies are known as incredibly toxic work environments—one friend of a friend talks about hiding whenever Elon visits their building so they don’t get randomly fired for no reason. Not to mention safety hazards, stupidly long work hours for no real reason (if they’re not succeeding, why are they working so hard?)
He’s gotten himself surrounded by some real nutjobs, then reveals some beliefs that he believes are left-of-center. But that’s true only if you measure based on what he exposes himself to.
> Pseudo conservative… I like that phrase. Of course it’s also worth saying that the guy hangs out with neo-reactionaries (people who literally want to install a monarch).
Honestly, I wouldn't call him a conservative in any real sense. He pisses off liberals, but that doesn't make him a conservative. He just has a few shared points of opposition.
And I'm with the GP, he's someone who I think should fail, but I'm also torn: I also don't like a lot of the people who dislike him, and I wouldn't like the schadenfreude they'd feel if he fails.
The guy has a dozen children with how many woman and seems to take any drug that anyone offers him. This is not what I'd have considered a conservative about 10 years ago, but now I don't really know. It certainly paints a picture of someone who is deeply unhappy despite (or perhaps because of?) his unfathomable wealth. I don't like him, but antipathy isn't exactly what I'd call my feeling. I'd almost feel sorry for him if he wasn't so rich and smug.
> At this point I have to believe that any significant tech talent is looking at Tesla as a poison workplace.
Wasn't that already clear, like, five+ years ago? When they were trying to get the Model 3 in production, I remember stories of Musk visiting the site, getting into people's business, and firing them impulsively if he didn't like something. Stuff like that and the repeated lies about FSD led me to write them off years ago.
Outside of the MechE space, I don't think they were that great of an employer anyhow. The wages at Tesla were always much lower than peers despite having most of R&D in the Bay Area.
They also seemed to overhire on boondoggles and not concentrate on execution.
Back in the day, I was constantly getting pinged to be a PM for their ML Infra team, but the pay was meh and they probably could have done better by acquihiring additional companies (similar to what they did with Deepscale).
Where would they go instead? Massive layoffs seem to be happening widely enough across the board that any real alternatives probably aren't hiring that aggressively.
On the supercharger side, there is a lot of battery tech work and providers now in the US, because Sequoia went gung-ho on GreenTech funding and most automotive companies are now working on charging tech too in order to avail IRA subsidies, so there is a growing Battery Tech and charging tech scene in the US.
For MechE, AE, and parts of EE you are not wrong - they definitely paid well above market rate because of the stock, but plenty of companies like Toyota, Ford, GM, etc began recognizing this and have begun raising salaries around the 2020-23 period while Tesla's remained stagnant, and we'll probably see the result in the next 5-7 years as these are lagging indicators.
For most of the 2000s and 2010s, salaries were fairly low in the automotive and aerospace industry compared to software or pure hardware, so Tesla and SpaceX absolutely paid miles above competitors, but that's changing in the 2020s now that there's more money in both spaces.
Ah yes, the HN bubble. The role at these companies are hell to get into, its not a 3 month bootcamp role. Web Dev being hilariously easy to get into was a function of free money.
This is not the definition as far as I know.
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