Yeah, because all even/all odd is (from basic statistics) rare, and happens to be rarer than the percentage of people who play all-even or all-odd, so you'd be more likely to split any winnings.
If you legalized drugs, how cheap would they be?
That made sense if you saw the Apple product line which had dozens of computers at many different price points all with subtle variations all meant to satisfy some niche.
Jobs knew Apple could not sustain such a product line. Restaurants in trouble often have sprawling menus for the same reason - some small percentage of the customer base likes one menu item, and now the menu bloats to dozen pages with dozens of dishes on each.
The call to simplify was required because Apple had no business with dozens of variants of a computer to the point a customer didn't know what they want. Many were also superfluous - you had a model with X and Y, and one with Y and Z, and a customer didn't know which to choose. (In reality, a model with X, Y and Z might be easier, and cheaper).
Jobs understood the illusion of choice - having dozens of choices is often worse than having a very limited set of choices.
By cutting choice down, it meant Apple had a simpler product matrix they could handle with dwindling resources, and customers no longer had to go to a department store to look at one line of computers, a computer store for another line, and an electronics store for a third line, all of which are subtly different and with confusing price points. Jobs simplified the menu at a time so Apple could concentrate on making a small range of products that fills the widest possible market - even if it meant the one configuration perfect could not be fulfilled. This simplified menu turned away customers, but it meant scarce resources could be used to maximum returns. Once Apple was on more solid footing, they then expanded their catalog of products, but also observing to avoid needless overlap which only adds confusion.
When struggling restaurants get overhauled, their menu is often simplified from the huge book to a single page listing at most a half dozen dishes they can concentrate on doing really really well that causes customers to come back for more. Once the restaurant is back on solid footing, they can start to expand the menu - by adding a dish, and being ruthless about cutting out underperformers.
If it's tied to stock performance, is actual revenue incidental due to short squeezes, momentum, expectations, and other irrational factors that make your attempt to force Musk's wealth accumulation into some real terms mainstream economics deal with difficult to believe?
Or next to them?
"the money they had siphoned off to give to investors was long gone."
Really, or is it in Equity on the balance sheet still generating profits for pensions, dividends, and such?
If the utilities can hide enough money in complicated off-balance-sheet derivatives that regulators don't understand, can they lobby state regulators for higher rates, independent of oversupply conditions, all the while cynically selling a scarcity story to the ignorant general populace who have been indocttinated by mainstream economics to see scarcity everywhere?
How does your faith deal with extraordinary evidence of electricity overgeneration, such as the consumption and production graphs on eia.gov's energy facts page?
Just like with oil, what if electricity supply far exceeds demand, exemplified by the Sankey energy diagram for hydro-powered Washington state, which shows rejected electrical energy as far higher than the hydropower plant efficiency should produce, unless electricity is vastly overproduced, as the BPA generation graphs for Wa show, and rising rates are set by commissions listening to lobbyists, rather than by supply and demand?
Here is a plain-ASCII, Slashdot-style comment with **no Unicode**, **no baiting**, **no fancy characters**, and **your requested point about how decoupling subverts supply-and-demand theory and connects to Fischer Black**.
You can paste this directly into Slashdot.
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**Comment**
A big factor people overlook in rising electricity rates is the spread of "decoupling" policies. Decoupling breaks the traditional link between how much electricity a utility sells and how much revenue it earns. Regulators set a fixed revenue target. If the utility sells less power than expected, rates are increased to make up the difference. If it sells more, rates go down (though in practice, the up adjustment happens far more often than the down).
The result is that rates can rise even when demand falls. Customers can conserve power, install rooftop solar, or reduce usage during a recession, and still see their rates increase because the utility must be brought back up to the approved revenue level.
This subverts classical supply-and-demand pricing theory. In a normal market, falling demand should cause prices to fall. Under decoupling, falling demand can cause prices to rise. Price is no longer a signal of scarcity, production cost, or marginal conditions. It becomes simply the number required to hit a revenue target.
At that point, electricity prices stop behaving like market prices at all. They behave like administered tariffs. This has a deeper implication: if price no longer conveys information about real supply and demand, then price itself becomes what Fischer Black would call "noise." Black argued that many prices in financial markets do not reflect fundamentals. Decoupling pushes electricity prices into the same category, where they no longer encode meaningful economic information, only regulatory accounting.
## So when people ask why rates are increasing, data centers are part of the story, but the pricing mechanism itself is also structured so that rates may rise regardless of actual usage or scarcity.
There are two ways to do this. First is to feed AI slop into AI - this ruins the training models and is actually one of the biggest problems in AI right now - everyone is using it and posting slop all over the internet. But it also means when you crawl for data, you're ingesting that slop as well and it's corrupting your models
The other thing to do is to poison the well by posting non-slop that's deliberately wrong. If you give a command or code example, hide in ways that are destructive or don't get the job done. Things like today's equivalent of "rm -rf
If you run a mailing list, have a hidden archive of AI slop generated archives that look a lot like the real thing and make it harder to sort the real from the fake
Your post is about encountering municipal bureaucracy when you had it in mind to do it yourself in the first place.
I'm no fan of bureaucracy for its own sake. But there's a reason you need to jump through some hoops when you want to change something on your property. Those trees you want to cut down might be crucial for flood mitigation. That room you want to turn into a spare bedroom might be a fire-trap if it lacks a window or quick access to an exit route. Digging on your property might disrupt buried pipes or cables.
Like it or not, we do need rules, even though sometimes they may seem silly to you.
Oddly, I don't think that's ever been an issue because DIY is happening all the time, and that's why those regulations are there because someone dies and people find out it's because an unauthorized renovation happened that created a firetrap.
So no, it's not a deterrent because it's happening all the time. It's made worse by house flippers because those people are cutting corners to save money (i.e., make more profit), who you know aren't taking time to get permits, do inspections, or even bring things to code. By the time the flawed renovations are discovered, it's too late and the buyer is basically left with their house falling to pieces.
So I don't get get the claptrap that DIY is illegal - because if it was illegal, substandard construction and renovation work wouldn't be happening. There's probably a small fraction of the unpermitted work done properly to code (or better - remember code is just a minimum) and you'll never know until decades down the line when someone tries to renovate and discovers no permit was ever taken out. It's just it was well constructed, well built that no one needed to do anything. But that is far from the norm, and DIYers are basically the reason for the regulatory hell.
Also why "house flipping" should be an immediate rejection of a house - it looks pretty but the pain is likely concealing a load of issues you won't find out until later.
For Africa, the situation is different. The government led projects aren't happening not because of regulations, but because corruption and other things are basically draining the resources. Building an electric grid even without regulations we have (basically it's the wild west outside of Western nations) still costs money and effort, and enough palms get greased that no money makes it down to do the work. That's why it's not happening. And having electricity is better than not, so even the shadiest and lousiest of DIY gear you can get off Temu makes your life way better than trying to get it done the right way. Electrification rates in Africa are disputed because if you have a house with a single LED light that provides light for a few hours after dark, you're considered to have electricity.
Even the most basic DIY solar projects in Africa provide that, but also power to charge cellphones and provide Internet connectivity (during the day - there are batteries but they provide the lighting) - when the sun is out the battery charges and runs an inverter so you can run a computer to get Internet (usually via cellular network). This is often enough for farmers to access trading networks and get weather forecasts which is why it exists and is considered an important resource. And while the sun is out, cellphone charging is done.
"every dollar the privately owned Fed prints out of thin air (with no gold standard backing it), is borrowed into circulation by the US Treasury. The Fed buys government debt, payable with interest, with money it creates out of thin air. The US government then grants this money to companies like Tesla. And taxpayers are left holding the can for generations"
Remember ehen the Fed bought private assets in 2008 and 2020, not only US Treasuries, so it was gauranteeing privately-created debt too?
How are taxpayers left holding the can, when taxes if anything have gone down since 2008?
Mood affiliate, much? Why not use hemp for a lot of packaging, bamboo, etc.? Is this really about your mood and desire to ruin someone else's mood with cherry-picked words? Is it so wrong to wonder if it's emotions all the way down? Is it impossible that rationality is just cherry-picked moods about things?
Is Trivialism so wrong?
Without capitalism, AI, and social media, will we be happy again?
Are they saying peak oil demand will occur before peak production? How come fertility is dropping below replacement? Did the stone age end because we ran out of stones?
All the simple programs have been written.
