I think they make a lot of good points, and the post doesn't sound too emotionally charged to me.
Frankly, the left should start to go lower, and speak more emotionally. It turns out that clinical, sterile statements are not a good way to sway a majority, and they don't make good sound-bites.
At some point, you have to fight fire with fire to avoid becoming yet another victim of the paradox of tolerance.
In my experience, this usually happens because an exec sees a presentation or comes up with an idea and is like "Let's do this, we'll throw some good people at it and they'll figure out how" and then it turns out that after the org is built, hundreds of people are working on it, and they've investigated all the constraints, it's not actually possible to build the idea. The ideas that actually work usually get developed in the opposite direction, an engineer says "We can build this, let's put an early version in front of some people and see if we should."
Innovation is path-dependent, and communication/adoption/organizational/economic constraints are just as real as technical ones. It's like how pretty much any skilled programmer could've built the first version of Facebook in a weekend, but to take off, it needed to start in the highest social-status campus (Harvard) of the most networked population (college students) of early adopters (young people). That limited the pool of entrepreneurs to basically just Mark Zuckerburg and the Winklevii, and Zuckerburg got there first under somewhat dubious circumstances.
Same with a lot of discussions in politics, climate change, renewable energy, and Hacker News. An uninformed layperson looks at the problem as a whole, says "We should do this, let's throw money at it and someone will figure out how", and then we end up with a financial bubble and not a whole lot of solutions.
That people within an organization wrap their careers around an idea is a huge hazard. There is so much incentive to present success, to project positively.
We talked about Jobs' "reality distortion field" but there's a much much more mundane almost sycophantic hyping up of the future & success that is deeply deeply deeply woven into most company's genes.
Related reading: The pre-CIA OSS "Simple Sabotage Field Manual"
When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans they've been saying for years whenever these problems are raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going to change."
Then we add a step 5 where middle management goes away and gossips about how everything is f*cked.
>Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans they've been saying for years whenever these problems are raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going to change."
This. I've learned to completely ignore what companies state their values are and/or these slogans they trot out. Culture isn't a poster you put on the wall.
Quantity is usually more expensive than quality in the long run, though. This idea has been succinctly popularized by the "boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness":
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
That's BS and everyone who's not trying to justify a bunch of money they sunk into "premium" products knows it.
There is some relationship between price and quality (and I find this to be most true with things that are short term consumables vs longer term ones like clothing, home goods, etc). Namely you never get more than you pay for. But even assuming you're not getting less than you pay for (which happens a lot) the relationship is still rarely close enough to linear to work out in favor of anything but the cheapest goods or the cheapest goods that meet some specific criteria or feature that yields longer life.
Rich people's stuff lasts longer in large part because they can afford to over-provision and objects that are getting used at a fraction of "what they're good for" whereas poor people are buying the bare minimum and using it at 10/10ths right out of the gate.
Think about where a clipboard warrior on a construction site goes and what they do. Of course their clothing lasts longer than the general laborer who's climbing/crawling all sorts of places over all sorts of things and moving all sorts of material. They could buy the crappiest boots money can buy and still have them outlast anything the laborer wears.
The wealthy person buys a premium mixer that's more than up to the task of mixing what they want to mix. The poor person mixes bread dough with their Amazon-China special and hopes it's good enough.
The wealthy person pays for delivery or rents a truck. The poor person paid for the bump stops he's gonna use the bump stops.
And by wealthy here I mean HN white collar class people vs mid range blue collar type stuff.
I really hate that quote. For one, it is frequently hard to tell when you are actually getting quality by spending more. Sometimes you might just be paying for the label. For another, nice things often require expensive maintenance. Boots you will keep must be resoled periodically. Or you might not need or want to wear the same boots for years and years.
It's not at all uncommon for the cheap thing to be much cheaper in total cost of ownership (TCO) than the "quality" item. Take a look at Edmunds TCO numbers for cars, for example. And back to Harbor Freight: I've heard of shops switching to Harbor Freight air tools because they're 1/10 the cost of the good stuff and last, I forget, something like 1/4 as long.
Price is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for quality, but that's no reason to throw out the idea. Harbor Freight is also not a bottom-barrel brand these days.
Cars are actually a great example. $30k will set you up with a Camry hybrid for >20 years. If you can only afford to finance a $15k econobox, you'll end up paying extra on interest, maintenance, and fuel while your car spends more time in the shop.
IMO this theory gets unfairly maligned by a strawman of "price == quality".
Cars are a great example when you compare just about any used car to being able to finance a new $15K econobox - the econobox will win on TCO. (And at low interest rates, you are better off holding on to your cash and financing). But not when comparing new cars. A $16K Chevrolet Spark LS has a five-year TCO of $26460. Your Camry Hybrid LE (at least twice as much as a Spark in cash outlay) has a five-year TCO of $31903. The Corolla L, which is a sort of benchmark of frugality, has a five-year TCO of $28814.
That was true more often in the old days, but I feel like by ~2000 top brands realized they can just mark up everything 1000%. Linked to rise of the 1% it seems.
Annoyingly, the USB-C midplate is specified at 0.7mm. In my experience, 0.6mm boards are too thin to make a reliable connection. Going thicker has worked perfectly with all of the cables I've tried. I suppose there might be some risk of damaging your cables, but it doesn't seem too likely to me (the spec is 0.7 +/- 0.05), and I haven't had any problems.
How has Carvana been doing over the past year? They focused on reducing the friction in buying/selling used cars, right?
I wonder if they could have suffered from the supply crunch. Last I checked, 5-year-old Corollas were pushing $20k, and a new base model is about the same price.
Anecdotally, I checked Carvana and local dealers when I was looking for a car recently, because I usually buy $5k beaters and drive them into the ground. This time, it didn't make sense to risk a lemon when I could get a bumper-to-bumper warranty for the same price. So I waited until I could find something new at MSRP, and that was that.
A friend of mine was in the market for new(used) car and was shopping offers for his old car and Carvana was the highest by a significant margin while Carmax effectively told him "thanks but we've got used vehicles coming out our ears". This was also shortly after the whole Zillow/Opendoor debacle - we started talking about how ridiculous it was that they were offering so much for a depreciating asset, plus covering storage and transporation costs and all the other attendant overhead. He opened a short position and I think closed it after he made about 4x or 5x his initial investment (I think they were at like 70 dollars per share at the time).
Carvanas pricing was ridiculous. They would offer top dollar. Alue without ever really seeing the car. I think it was very heavily algorithm driven, and wasn't being watched enough by human eyes to looks for anomalies, or just to look at a car and realize that maybe they are offering too much. They have made some sellers very happy with the money they were offering for used cars, but I really think they have been overpaying for a good chunk of thier inventory.
I sold a car to them the other day that was 10 years old for 18k.
I dont think inventory is their issue, but rather the fact they are a lender more than a dealer. They just make a lot of questionable loans and repackage them for sale, sort of.
> I wonder if they could have suffered from the supply crunch. Last I checked, 5-year-old Corollas were pushing $20k, and a new base model is about the same price.
There are no new base models available at dealerships and they're not expected any time soon. The list price hasn't caught up to the market conditions so they don't ship any base trim models. The higher trim models are available but dealerships charge 5-10k on top of list price.
I got a new hybrid for around $23K in late 2020, when it looked like I might be commuting again in the near future, and car sales and gas prices were both in the toilet.
For some incomprehensible reason people were buying the nearly-identical non-hybrid model for essentially the same price. It makes me think of the Bloom County cartoon: "Louise, dump the milk! The cat drinks unleaded from now on!"
Now, cars like mine, with 12K miles are being advertised for $30K, sometimes more.
In the meantime, my employer has just eliminated the health-based accommodations that let some people telecommute full time, just as we've got a solid month or so of rising covid cases and the governor setting policies tested positive.
Frankly, the left should start to go lower, and speak more emotionally. It turns out that clinical, sterile statements are not a good way to sway a majority, and they don't make good sound-bites.
At some point, you have to fight fire with fire to avoid becoming yet another victim of the paradox of tolerance.