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BlandDuck

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This is a very good point. I think key issue is that it requires time and effort to evaluate and understand the final product.

Before I starting reading something to understand it, I want to have a sense that it is likely going to be worth my time and effort in the end. The more time and effort the author has put into the piece, the more likely it is that it will be worthwhile to read it.

I always found this statement to be rather wishful. Individual lowering of prices makes sense if and only if your competitor is capable of saturating the market. Otherwise, demand elasticity becomes very relevant. Sure, your competitor may take the larger share of the market, but then you can compensate with higher per item profit.

You should check the distinction between Bertrand and Cournot competition. Bertrand competition is price competition where the competitor can saturate the market, as you mention. Cournot competition, on the other hand, captures your intuition of competition on quantities rather than prices.

Scaling cuts both ways. You may also be underestimating the aggregate benefits of slight improvements added up across hundreds or thousands of employees.

For a single person, slight improvements added up over regular, e.g., daily or weekly, intervals compound to enormous benefits over time.

XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/

Standard theories of production clearly distinguish between fixed and variable costs. Moreover, it is well understood that this distinction depends on the time horizon, with more costs being variable for longer horizons.

Moreover, concepts like economics of scale (with low marginal costs of producing an additional unit, as you state as an example) are well understood for certain products in certain circumstances.

The distinction between and relevance of average and marginal costs is taught in undergraduate classes.

Whether or not you can draw a nice diagram of supply and demand is pretty irrelevant for professional economists and our understanding of markets, their dynamics, and equilibria.

I judge technical explanations of audio gear by their description of balanced signals. A common error is to focus on the positive and negative signals having opposite polarity, which is entirely irrelevant for canceling out interference (it may improve headroom, but what is actually important for eliminating common mode noise is to have identical impedance with respect to ground).

I would say this text fails this test, which gives me pause. The description is: "The two conductors carry the same signal, but with reverse polarity (meaning that one conductor carries a signal that is the mirror image of the other). If external noise and interference enters the cable, it will probably affect both conductors equally."

Exactly, if it had been obvious at the time that "the market" would deliver a better return, for certain, then nobody would have bought bonds at those prices.

Then bond prices would have declined (and their expected returns or interest rate would have increased) until, in equilibrium, the anticipation was that the stocks and bonds would deliver comparable expected risk-adjusted returns.

Totally. Also, an attenuator is easier and cheaper to implement, because it just requires normalizing V+ into the jack plug. An offset requires an adder.

My preference is: attenuator < offset < attenuator + offset. I see no benefit of having to remove the knob to get to the jack as proposed in the article.

I love old, well-written technical books, like these. There is something about the language, directness, innocence (for lack of a better term) and careful arguments that I find incredibly satisfying. They are not afraid to go technical and deep, when needed. They have humor and feel personal.

Somehow, I rarely find this in modern technical books, but it is hard for me to figure out why. Maybe something is lost in the "pedagogy" of many modern textbooks.

I'll read such books about pretty much any topic just for pleasure. An all-time favorite is "Stick and Rudder" by Wolfgang Langewiesche, although a very different topic, obviously.

I agree entirely. I have two wonderful daughters, and stories like this hit hard.

There is a fiction short-story called CHICXULUB By T. Coraghessan Boyle. It is one of the hardest hitting stories I have read as a parent. Still brings tears to my eyes. Recommended.

I agree entirely. As a professional scientist who routinely uses Bayesian methods to solve complex computational and statistical problems, with actual real world applications, I cannot stress enough how irrelevant such philosophical musings about the foundations of Bayesian Statistics are for getting actual science work done.

But corporate computing is also suffering from the deteriorating user experience.

I have access to large amounts of harware and software through my employer. And while Microsoft Office is unavoidable, I hate it everytime I open Word or Excel (daily), even if it is on my company machine.

The privacy concerns are arguable even more concerning on a company machine. I wish there was a feasible alternative.

I know there is a bunch of new DX7 implementations on more modern hardware, i.e., the Raspberry Pi.

When implemented on modern hardware, wouldn't it be possible to run the algorithm at a higher CPU processing speed, to reduce the aliasing at the higher notes, and avoid the need for keyboard scaling and thus preserve the timbre of the higher pitched notes?

Hayek makes no statement about the ability of market forces to stabilize prices.

On the contrary, his point is that the equilibrium price in a decentralized market is a good sufficient statistic that aggregates the current demand and supply situation.

Building on his example on page 525, if more screws of a particular size are suddenly in higher demand, then the price will increase, as it should!

The goal is not to stabilize the price but to have the price reflect the marginal opportunity cost.

And I think it's safe to say that that would not be a good long-term strategy.

Why is this not a good long-term strategy? What is a better strategy? It seems like the alternative may well have been to go bankrupt and go out of business, and that definitely isn't a great long-term strategy.

Is it right that I was filtered out by degree and not by capability? No, it’s not right, but it happened.

It is not obvious how to find a better way to filter.

In an ideal world, there would be plenty of time and resources to learn the personality and skills of each applicant, as an individual human being.

In reality, HR has limited resources and needs shortcuts to effectively screen applicants. Experience has shown that degrees and grades are useful summary statistics for filtering. It is not "right, and there are obviously Type I and Type II errors in this process.