admiralteal

I think you may be forgetting that weed is illegal, federally. The product you’re buying is for tobacco – officially – because if it weren’t it would be a federal crime to ship it across state borders.

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And what might be the most important part cannot be elided over: market capitalism is HIGHLY efficient at solving optimization problems, but it only responds to incentives.

So if you can create the right incentives to reward the result you want and punish results you don’t want, a market solution is going to do a marvelous job. It’s great at, say, price discovery. But if the incentives do not align with the desired result, it’s going to grind you under heel.

The incentives the insurance companies are responding to, frankly, are the ones you have outlined and essentially no others. Collect more premiums, make fewer payouts. There’s no “breaking point” here because they have an absolutely vast customer base that has no choice to opt out of the system for a variety of reasons (ranging from the ACA individual mandate to the fact that it is not possible for an individual to make fully-informed financial decisions about their health even WITH advanced knowledge and training that nearly no one has).

Health insurance is pretty much a textbook example of the kind of service that shouldn’t be on private markets.

So over time, market capitalism is going to make them collect endlessly-increasing premiums and pay out less and less. It is going to continue to get worse because the incentives of the system have defined ‘worse’ as being the optimal result. Period. It will eventually get nationalized. Period. All the argument in the meantime is just over how long we want to continue to let people be sick and broke before we apply the only fix.

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The entire reason notepad still exists is that it edits and saves to plain text files. I do not see how an opt-in spellcheck or autocorrect interferes with that – though honestly, I don’t see who the possible customer is for those features either. It’s a waste of time, but it doesn’t undermine the application.

What reason, honestly, did Wordpad have to exist? Who was clamoring for an RTF editor but thought any of the free the full-featured ODF editors or online service a la Google docs were not up to the task? Seems a lot of people are salty that Wordpad was dropped, but I just don’t get who was using it. This from someone so frustrated and annoyed by pretty much all WYSIWYG doc editors that I’ve lately been doing more stuff in latex despite how irrational I know I am being.

There are no US roads I am aware of where the speed limit is over 80mph.

Why can a stock US car go faster than 80mph, then? Why does NHSTA approve of cars that can go double, triple that speed? Makes no sense to me, for sure. Especially when similar agencies are doing idiotic and pointless shit like banning Kei Trucks for “safety” reasons when these vehicles are objectively safer and better for the public than any current-model “light truck” 120mph+ road yacht.

Europe approached this same question with a pretty straightforward answer: Intelligent Speed Assistance. It’ll be mandatory relatively soon for all new cars, as far as I am aware. It’s already mandatory for new cars in the EU. There’s some nasty privacy implications of it, obviously. Very possibly nasty enough to bring me to a “no” overall on the idea. But the safety considerations are without doubt correct.

Assuming the label isn’t inaccurate, there is at minimum equal parts of the honey and corn syrup. The list must be in descending order by weight. I’m not sure what the rule is for equal quantities; I’d assume alphabetical, but there may be no such requirement.

deleted by creator

But like, what’s your point?

Setting aside all the practical ways this suit could be handled affordably (e.g., her actual damages were a much smaller monetary sum compared to that invoiced amount and probably eligible for small claims)…

Having a policy around cancellations in the invoices would not materially effect anything here. While it might be helpful to ensure a good-faith customer behaves in a professional and appropriate way, such policies have little effect on a bad-faith customer.

Even without an explicit policy, this is fairly straightforward promissory estoppel, or at least something very much like it. If she had a policy, she would have a very strong case. Without, I still reckon she has a very strong case – pretty much just as strong. Either way, the recourse is the courts.

Eh, if she really wanted to take it to court I’m relatively sure her case is sound. A reasonable man knows you cannot cancel such a large order of perishable goods on short notice. She probably had her own reasons, whether lack of savvy, a belief the media campaign would serve her better, or maybe even just that she doesn’t want to go to court.

Big “How much can a banana cost, $10?” energy here.

We’re talking about one of the cheapest brands of commodity pasta here. Think about how much effort you are implying the company put into this versus what 8g of major wholesale flour costs – the only cost they’d really be saving in this conspiracy.

Even at consumer retail prices that’s, what, $0.012 per box? And I bet wholesale prices are at least an order of magnitude less than that. Is the maybe tenth of a percent of cost savings worth a potential class action lawsuit and the horrific pain of Discovery that comes with it? And does that maybe tenth a percent of cost savings even come close to covering all the additional production costs involved in having that machinery calibrated so much more precisely? The juice is not worth the squeeze, my friend.

You think you’re arguing that they would do evil for profit’s sake, but you’re actually arguing they would do evil for evil’s sake even at the expense of profit.

And it would probably be more expensive to get precision-calibrated equipment to get you at the bottom end of the tolerance to save product cost than what it would cost to just aim for the correct value with less precise equipment.

This one is a conspiracy theory I struggle to get behind. It seems like the conspiracy would be less profitable than the “proper” behavior here.

It’s not a dumb question, but you’re presuming standards and exactness that do not exist in practice.

A pub pint is a pint glass that is deceptively smaller than a full pint, usually about 14oz. That’s all it is. This can is the same as a pub pint – both in spirit and practice – as far as I can tell.

330 and 440 are standard metric can sizes. 404 is weird.

Nope. The 4ml diff from 400 is within a margin of error I’m sure, so this size really seems arbitrary to me. Wolfram’s language model doesn’t recognize it as some obscure unit either.

It’s a pub pint.
There are a lot of beer can sizes.

Imperial, the common ones are

• 24oz (usually only VERY cheap beer)
• 19.2 oz “imperial” pints (often called stovepipes/smokestacks)
• 16oz pints (usually called tallboys, though larger sizes are ALSO often called tallboys)
• 12oz “classic”/standard cans
• and nips (8.4oz) which I don’t know the reason they’re the size they are.

However, in bar tradition, a “pub” pint is a typical size, which is what this can is – about 14oz. These happen a lot since they’re served in a shaker pint glass that LOOKS like a typical pint glass but has an extra thick bottom that makes those 2oz disappear. The commonness of this style of glass is why so much EU glassware has the mandatory 40cl line.

Metric cans come in a lot more sizes, but as I understand it the standard ones are 330ml, 440ml, and those same 568ml (19.2oz) stovepipes.

The point is, this ridiculous number is a pub pint. Why that can size exists I do not know.

Also, Spotify is actively trying to ruin and fragment podcasts by running exclusive content. Fuck them with a rusty rake for trying to ruin one of the last mass interoperable platforms with their walled garden horse shit. Fuck them so much.

Don’t use Spotify. Even if they fix the app and make it good, don’t use it. They’re evil little fuckers. Use literally any other podcast app.

Lockdown doesn’t require password unless your device settings require password – it normally just kicks it back to requiring pin. Which is still quite secure. I don’t know what you mean saying it is disabled by default – it is available by default if you long press the power button and click Lockdown.

Even better is to reboot the device. Then it will be in lockdown mode – pin required – and also encrypted awaiting the pin. A modern device fresh from a restart should be quite hard indeed to crack without some alternate access to the person’s Google account.

I really hate the attitude that everything is exactly the same and that nothing is ever worse than anything else.

There is nothing naive here.

Reddit changed policy and philosophy significantly and that’s what led to the backlash and lots of users leaving. You know that and clearly agree with it. And using my comments for display purposes as part of the community under the terms and understanding I had 15 years ago is very different than using my comments to train AI and their new attitude that started this year.

There was also that Greek flight where they killed an entire plane load of people with hypoxia because the alarm for cabin air pressure was the same as the alert for arriving at cruising altitude so the flight crew didn’t realize it was going off. And thanks to post-9/11 locked cabin policies, which has basically certainly killed more people than they helped, the captains weren’t in proper communication with the rest of the crew.