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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldConsent machine
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    29 days ago

    Biden presided over a year and a half of unmitigated horrors and trump has presided over a ceasefire

    … That started under Biden. As far as US diplomats were involved, who do you think was in charge of directing them?
    If we want to give the US president credit for a ceasefire, why would we give the credit to the one who any involvement happened before they were in office, to say nothing of the one who wasn’t even in office when it started?


  • I literally linked you to a large collection of their statements on the matter, backed by data. “Appeal to authority” isn’t a magic phrase that lets you dismiss expertise entirely. “Appeal to authority” is a fallacy, but “deferring to expertise” is not. I’m not saying these tariffs are wrong because economists say they are, but that it’s reasonable to accept consensus opinion of regarded experts without walking through every step of their argument.

    https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/informal-logic/appeals-to-authority/F455E1D4279677917F379D9464A76060

    In general, the use of argument from expert opinion is a reasonable, if inherently defeasible, type of argument. Appeals to expert opinion can be a legitimate form of obtaining advice or guidance for drawing tentative conclusions on an issue or problem where objective knowledge is unavailable or inconclusive. It is well recognized in law, for example, where expert testimony is treated as an important kind of evidence in a trial, even though it often leads to conflicting testimony, in a “battle of the experts.”

    I specifically mentioned that they can be wrong, and that it’s maybe worth reconsidering when you’re disagreeing with the experts. Of course engineers can make mistakes. But if a group of them say “that bridge is unsafe, we can show you our calculations”, and a non-engineer says that they have an “intuitive feeling” that it is, I know who I’m listening to.

    Are you going to keep shifting to different topics? As far as economic arguments go “there’s a theoretical economist who thinks this is a good idea that I haven’t cited and that agrees with my intuition” is… Not very interesting.


  • I do ultimately think tariffs will be good for the US.

    Can you see how maybe it would be easy for a person to think that you thought tariffs would be good for the US? If that wasn’t your point, then I have no idea what you’re talking about.

    Why don’t you care what economists say? They’re people who have actually spent time looking at and thinking about these things. They have numbers to back up their claims and, while fallible, they’re likely the most qualified people to make assessments about the economic impact of policy changes.
    It’s like saying you don’t care what engineers say when what you’re doing is building a bridge. At the very least it should raise a red flag when nearly all of them say something is a bad idea.



  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldUnisex
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    1 month ago

    My only guess is an earlier start to wanting low cost prefabricated bathrooms, and then just momentum keeping it up. I’m seeing more places that do it right, but they’re invariably new construction.

    Not that Europeans didn’t want bathroom dividers, just that they decided to use non-mass produced ones a little longer for whatever reason, and then the prefab ones were more customizable so they went with the sane option.

    At least that’s my guess. I only read the history of American prefabricated bathroom dividers, and can only speculate on why so many others went a different direction.


  • So do either of those strategies apply to the manufacturing of physical goods as are being tarifed?

    Do you think that Ford is going to sell cars at a loss to make money on service contracts now that their costs are rising because some parts are fabricated in Detroit, assembled in Windsor, and then shipped back for installation in Flint? If it didn’t make sense to sell at a loss before, why would it make sense to do so now?

    Do you think that there’s money to be made on getting people hooked on buying wheat perks?

    We’re not talking videogame DLC, we’re talking about food, manufacturing materials, electrical power, and physical goods. The price of these things are going up, just like they went up with previous tariffs. This is a super easy case, because he did it to a lesser extent before, and it didn’t do what he’s saying it will. There’s no reason to believe that making the bad choice more vigorously will make it suddenly have a different outcome.



  • The way you increase productivity is via exports, not artificially increasing the cost of goods. A sin tax is when you want to stop people from doing things so you make it more expensive. If you want to increase American cement production, you subsidize production.
    Adding a tarrif to Canadian cement imports increases cost for imported cement, and encourages domestic producers to increase costs to match. If the competition just got 15% more expensive, there’s no reason for me to not raise my prices 14%.
    If the government comes in and says they’ll pay me $15/ton of cement I produce, that encourages me to produce more cement and lower the price to sell it. Now I’m producing more, and I need to hire another machine operator and the economy grows because the lowered cost of cement makes people more willing to do things that need cement.

    Tariffs are really only good for counteracting other countries subsidies. If Canada were paying manufacturers $20 a ton to produce cement, then applying a $20/ton tarrif makes the prices unbiased.

    It’s why our agricultural subsidies are viewed poorly by food scarce nations: we lower the overall market cost for food, and they can’t afford to subsidize their own production, and returning equilibrium on imports would starve people, so they’re trapped in a cycle of being dependent on imported subsidized food while living next to fallow farms.

    Canada and Mexico aren’t subsidizing their export industries, and a lot of what we’re trading is in things we can’t or don’t want to handle. You can’t increase American uranium production, off the top of my head.

    We had a position of trade strength, which meant that we could afford to import more than we produced because our intangibles were worth more, and what we exported was worth more. Import steel and export tractors. Now we’re saying we want to stop importing steel, making it harder to export tractors, so that we can bring back low paying dangerous jobs.

    If you want to see productivity grow trumps way, go get a job as a farmhand picking spinach. Because his policy is basically that we need less engineers and more farm hands.



  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldUnisex
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    1 month ago

    It started as a cost savings measure for prefabricated bathroom hardware. Tight joints need to be precise and loose ones can work around existing stuff. If your 1913 factory bathroom has rough cement floor, needing to cut wood for a tight fit is expensive, but installing some posts and hanging wall panels from them to the walls doesn’t change in price. If your plumbing hardware isn’t under the floor or behind the wall you can just put the panel over the pipe, or in front of it. No floor corner means no dust buildup, just spray the whole thing down with a hose and let it dry or flow to a floor drain if you’re fancy.
    For modern cost savings: if you have a 9" floor gap a much smaller bathroom qualifies as an ADA compliant accessible stall since it doesn’t block wheelchair users feet. Full length panels require a larger stall to allow the wheelchair user to turn the chair.

    All of that made it cheaper to have awful gaps, so people did. Now it’s cheaper to replace panels with equivalent ones, and use the most readily available cheap panel when building new bathrooms.

    All the moral panic reasons are also true, but they’re the last step before"… And that makes costs go up". Drug use and lewd activity occupy stalls, which reduces availability which means you need more. Relaxed environment makes people take longer, which reduces availability.


  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldUnisex
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    1 month ago

    I’ve been to a handful of old athletic buildings that had trough urinal setups that made having peripheral vision basically a guarantee that you’ll catch a glimpse. A couple others that were circular but I wasn’t sure it wasn’t a sink so I left it alone.
    Also improperly supervised kids who are almost tall enough for the urinal and entirely trop trow.

    Seeing random disinterested anatomy in passing doesn’t hurt anyone, so I don’t get why people get so worked up over it.
    Seeing a penis is harmless. Being shown a penis is what can be messed up.







  • Eh, it seems like it fits to me. We casually refer to all manner of data as “open source” even if we lack the ability to specifically recreate it. It might be technically more accurate to say “open data” but we usually don’t, so I can’t be too mad at these folks for also not.

    There’s huge deaths of USGS data that’s shared as open data that I absolutely cannot ever replicate.

    If we’re specifically saying that open source means you can recreate the binaries, then data is fundamentally not able to be open source, since it distinctly lacks any form of executable content.