Drugs, anyone?

Does AI get that grammar right?

What if they keep going up?

ChatGPT:

Good follow-up from them. You want to acknowledge the force of the âoeno obvious alternativeâ point without conceding that auctions are therefore optimal. The key move is: second-best vs first-best under violated assumptions. Here is a clean plain ASCII Slashdot-ready reply you can paste:

The point is not that auctions are uniquely bad, it is that they are only provably optimal under very strong assumptions that we know are false. Once prices are noisy, "highest bid equals best use" is no longer a theorem, it is just a heuristic. Being better than random does not make a mechanism efficient in the welfare sense.

There are in fact many alternative allocation mechanisms already used in practice: long-term concessions, usage covenants, regulated rates of return, credit allocation via public banks, industrial policy, even outright administrative assignment in some sectors. All of these trade off price discovery against instability, speculation, or short-termism in different ways.

So the real question is not "do we have an alternative to auctions at all?" but "given mispricing, which imperfections do we prefer to live with?" Auctions are not neutral default optimizers once you drop rational pricing, they are one imperfect tool among many.

"Those are probably on the TANSTAAFL combined with "Pay it forward" level - letting someone else pay."

If advertisers pay for Matt's offroad recoveries, might they be getting the money from non-zero-sum stock market returns? Where does the money for NVidia's market cap come from unless TANSTAAFL is violated?

Investopedia: "most transactions or trades are inherently non-zero-sum games because when two parties agree to trade, they do so with the understanding that the goods or services they are receiving are more valuable than the goods or services they are giving up. This is called positive-sum, and most transactions fall under this category."

If a mood is so easily ruined, how strong is it really?

"repetitive essays,"

Remember how slashdot just recently repeated the same phrase in a summary? Would AI have been so careless?

"What exists are silos where people go to see what they believe repeated back to them."

Do trolls work to undermine the groupthink? Should we welcome trolls as they challenge us to troll-proof arguments supporting our beliefs?

If prices in asset markets, the crown jewel of capitalism, are as irrational as you (and famously Keynes) imply, what does that say about efficiency claims?

Aw, have you just been trolled? Can you have the best day?

Here is the plain ASCII only version of the second, more provocative reply, ready to copy and paste:

If you want a concrete case: I have watched foam at the top of ocean waves spatter forward and become part of the next crest, apparently advancing faster than the underlying wave itself. Tesla would have used that kind of behavior as an analogy for longitudinal effects riding on a transverse carrier.

I know the textbook answer about phase versus signal velocity. My point is simply that even in mundane physical systems, "the speed of a wave" is not as simple or monolithic as we often pretend when making absolutist claims.

Seeing as most of my life experiences seem to be outliers in any reported statistics, am I right to question the truth of nearly everything?

Are your feelings hurt?

Since communicating with real people has been stressful for 5+ decades for me, just how insensitive a clod did you just reveal yourself to be?

Do you realize you sound just like losing Republican Washington state gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp who said the election must have been rigged because no one he knew voted for winner Inslee?