The free market solution to this seems to be making it easy / easier for competitors to arise. Then, when private equity does this, the customers, and workers, just hop ship to a competitor that's better managed and the original clinic goes under.
I don't expect this happens in reality though. In general the things that happen in a healthy free market are NOT happening in our society.
This completely discounts the work involved to find service providers you trust. I spent a long time finding a Doctor I trust, finding a Vet I trust, etc. I don't want a "free market" solution where I need to switch providers every 6 months because some rich dude is being a dick.
This is the problem with so many market focused solutions. They discount the burden put on the consumer.
Participating in a market is work, the only way a market (or life in general) works is if you hold your counterparties accountable.
> I don't want a "free market" solution where I need to switch providers every 6 months because some rich dude is being a dick.
Nature does not have a mandate that good quality services and products be available at low prices at all times. The rich dude being a “dick” was a tired vet owner who wanted to sell their equity, just like anyone else who sells their SP500 shares or their house.
The only thing that can be done is encourage government policies to ensure more sellers exist.
If the market is healthy, there will already be two or three providers in town instead of one that has any sort of monopoly, and the LBO won't be lucrative to begin with.
In a perfect world we'd have antitrust enforcement all the way from the top of government down to the municipality, so that this kind of behavior could be curbed. But I bet few cities bother to try at all.
You’re confused because you are treating free-market and capitalism as the same thing.
Capitalism is about who owns the assets, free markets are about how they are transferred. They don’t require each other. State owned enterprises can participate in the free market, an example are municipal utility companies. Private enterprises can operate without a free market, an example would be Lockheed Martin, whose defense business is mostly cost plus contracts.
The US hobbled the free market with deregulation since the 1980s. We encourage monopolies with strange reactionary legal precedent, use tax and other policy to establish price floors on residential units and health procedures.
The behavior that these firms are able to carry on with in veterinary, dental, dermatology, hvac and plumbing is anti-competitive and predatory.
Fewer businesses. But that aside when people say regulations are costly without providing specifics typically they are upset they can't rip off the public, pollute the environment or perform other acts to the disadvantage of the population.
I've noticed I write a lot different because of combative online arguments. I have a problem.
So much of my communication is directed to people who don't want to hear me or understand me. So I've become very punchy and repetitive, trying to hammer home ideas that people are either unable or unwilling to understand.
I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me.
It's hard to find other people who actually want to hear and understand though. People have different interests, and even when people appear to be working towards the same goal, they often aren't; like a boss who just won't understand the bad news, because it's easier to ignore the problem.
One of the worst habits distinctive to online discussion-board writing (especially the sorts of places with lots and lots of people and where it's fairly hard to get permanently kicked out—like here) is too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers. It's all over forum posts, and it's poor writing, but without moderation that slaps down responses based on plain mis-reading you have to write that way, or your post will spawn all kinds of really stupid tangent strings of posts (and they still do anyway, sometimes). And, yes, the excessive and too-close-together repetitiveness you mention is part of that.
The result is that a ton of web forum/social-media posting would, in any other context, be fairly poor writing (even if it's otherwise got no problems) simply because of the the extra crap and contortions required to minimize garbage posts by poor readers who are, themselves, allowed to post to the same medium.
This is in addition to, though not wholly separate from, the tendency toward combativeness in online posting.
I totally agree with this. I would add that it's well beyond the discussion boards. It's probably most clear there and it's well possible we learned it there and then took it into our social interactions everywhere, but the majority of my irl interactions—except with my closest friends—are sorta like this. Sometimes I think its ADHD, other times I think it could be any number of things, but I think to say anything that isn't dead simple (or in dead agreement with the other person), you need a few sentences. Often, you need to hear the third sentence before the first will make sense. But if you get distracted by the first one or can't suspend your disagreement enough to get to the third you will think the person is mistaken. You'll think that about both their first point and the larger one, which you didn't really hear or even get to but thought you did. So the speaker does the hedging each sentence in hopes of getting to the third (or whatever) sentence.
To add to this: another sign of posting on online boards is starting your comments with "I agree" because otherwise the other person might default to assuming you are disagreeing (as is the norm for replies), leading to a comment chain of people violently agreeing with each other without realizing it
>too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers.
yeah but if the OP doesn't do that and you confront their argument they can retreat into definitions and ambiguity without addressing your rebuttal. i think its good manners to be hyper-specific particularly on HN where there tend to be a lot of martian brained people who need it to engage with you. the fuzziness just won't do.
No, this goes beyond that. A well-written article or book doesn’t need to be padded with junk to cater to bad readers, or to preempt trolls, because they can’t scrawl all over it such that it disrupts others’ experience. You have to go to e.g. the Amazon reviews to find people complaining that an author didn’t address something that they very definitely did, or claimed something they certainly did not, that stuff doesn’t show up on the page in footnotes or turn into flame wars on the page where everyone sees it.
One thing that helps: remember that there are many people reading your response, one of them possibly being the person you replied to. Write for the audience, not specifically for the person you're responding to. It's a rare thing for someone to change their mind; it's a much more common thing for others to read your comment and gain something from it.
I just wanted to tell you that I read your comment immediately after writing mine and it's almost eerie how similar they are. There's the proof, if we needed any!
It might not mean much, and it won't lead to an interesting conversation, but here's one that has read your comment, and every single word resonated like a tuning fork.
I find that a little faith goes a long way here: assume that you have a higher audience and speak to them accordingly.
Don't let the loud ones confuse you: normal, reasonable people (with normal, reasonable thoughts, just like yours) might not always reply, but they also read you.
I'm guessing you mean politics, but surely this is topic, person, time, and space dependent.
For example, I abhor talking about modern politics. If it’s election season and I’m being asked to cast a vote or take some other specific civic action, then I understand it’s my civic duty to understand the situation and make a decision accordingly and I do.
But if it’s March and there’s really nothing specific I can do as a result of this particular conversation, I would probably also be in your camp of the “unwilling”. I would much rather chat about something else, or nothing at all.
I'm also assuming you're referring to in-person communication. If it's online communication, all bets are off. It's unlikely you're having a linear conversation and these days you're probably not even talking to a person.
> I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me.
Ask more questions. It takes work when dealing with smart people who think beyond the question you asked, adding their own context, and then replying with a different question. But those are the people who are willing to engage with you. Statements without questions can be ignored, and people who engage with different questions than the ones that you asked can be safely ignored as those who don't want to engage.
The cure to a purely adversarial conversation is educated curiosity. The educated part being being able to differentiate the threads that will lead down a tribalistic path vs those that will lead down an exploratory one.
More important than all of the above, is knowing when to walk away. It's barely a majority, but that barely majority "want" to waste your time. Ignore their DOS attempt, and save your time for people who want to engage, fairly. The fairly part being the most important.
> I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me.
I'm told blogging works for some. I don't really know how you build an audience, though, and it's hard to keep going (first-hand experience) without one.
There's a tension (imo) between deciding to only spend time trying to talk to people who immediately agree with you or are open to hearing you out vs those who immediately disagree such that they will fight hard to not hear, not understand, misinterpret, or "not have time for this". The latter is a specific form of disagreement where they've "noise-canceled" the possibility of learning or understanding (even if it would be perfectly reasonable for them to disagree with it afterward).
Is your life easier to not waste time on them? I guess. But obviously you're going to put yourself in a similar bubble, and to whatever extent the issue is important it's now become undiscussed. As you've hinted at, they could be right and you wrong, but the difference is (at least in the premise) that one is willing to talk and listen and so really only one side has the potential to change and it's not based on the merit of the argument—because of course no conversation took place. How hard does one try to encourage someone else to listen? Or rather continuing pursuing a conversation that's being denied? That's the tension. I don't know other than it seems like the side unwilling to listen wins a little bit each time they've successfully evaded it and wins a little more when the other has decided to let it go. I don't just mean they've won a proverbial argument, I mean the issue or decision in question tilts toward their side.
Reinforced flight deck doors are sufficient. See: the rest of the world. TSA is a jobs program and to soothe the irrational and those poor at risk management.
> But TSA itself has filed in court documents that they’ve been unaware of actual threats to aviation that they’re guarding against, and they haven’t stopped any actual terrorists (nor with past failure rates at detecting threats were they deterring any, either).
TSA was never necessary, it was all theater to begin with. The median number of terrorism deaths per year in the U.S. for all years between 1970-2017 was 4 [1]. You have always been about 10x more likely to die from being struck by lightning than by being killed by a terrorist.
That, and the knowledge that hijackers are going to kill you, so you need to fight back. 9/11 only worked because the passengers on three of the planes "knew" that being compliant was their best chance of survival in a hijacking. When passengers on the fourth plane discovered this was no longer the case, they foiled the attack.
But even if you want to keep security/scrutiny as it is now, that doesn't mean you need TSA. We had airport security before there was a TSA. We currently have airport security without TSA in some airports, such as SFO.
I say this as somebody who regularly travels around EMEA and the US: there is airport security at the same or higher level all around the World, and yet fewer people travelling in those countries seems to have the same level of problems.
My hot take is that its almost certainly a recruitment and training issue: there seem to be just enough bad apples getting through and not having poor behaviours trained out of them to mean the self-reported "these guys are idiots" numbers are higher than in other parts of the World.
Yeah, it is security theater, but other countries are way more relaxed than the US, especially small airports with few international flights.
When i was ~17, i had a friend with a false leg, with metal in it. We were late to our plane at a Moroccan airport (Agadir i think), we burst through the scanner gate that started beeping. He looked at the agent, tapped his leg, the agent made a "you can go" sign and we managed to get to the plane without any issue. I have seen very similar scene at Porto, it might be the mediterranean temper but i really think it has more to do with airport size (Lisbon airport agents seems more thorough)
What is the smallest level of additional security such that, if you assumed that the TSA only provides that much additional security over the alternative of not having them, you would regard it as worth it?
And, is the actual amount of security provided greater than that amount?
Judging by how every single TSA agent is horrifically trained and doesn't have a drop of care in the world, abolishing the TSA would be a step up from having it.
That is already the case with datacenter "GPUs". A A100, MI300 or Intel PVC/Gaudi does not have useful graphics performance nor capabilities. Coprocessors ala NPU/VPU are also on the rise again for CPUs.
This is kind of true back in the day though. Uninformed people would buy Quadro cards because they were the most expensive GPU on Newegg only to realize this thing sucks for gaming.
Even the latest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs are general purpose, albeit with negligible "graphics" capabilites. They can run fairly arbitrary C/C++ code with only some limitations, and the area of the chip dedicated to matrix products (the "tensor units") is relatively small: less than 20% of the area!
Conversely, the Google TPUs dedicate a large area of each chip to pure tensor ops, hence the name.
This is partly why Google's Gemini is 4x cheaper than OpenAI's GPT5 models to serve.
Jensen Huang has said in recent interviews that he stands by the decision to keep the NVIDIA GPUs more general purpose, because this makes them flexible and able to be adapted to future AI designs, not just the current architectures.
That may or may not pan out.
I strongly suspect that the winning chip architecture will have about 80% of its area dedicated to tensor units, very little onboard cache, and model weights streamed in from High Bandwidth Flash (HBF). This would be dramatically lower power and cost compared to the current hardware that's typically used.
Something to consider is that as the size of matrices scales up in a model, the compute needed to perform matrix multiplications goes up as the cube of their size, but the other miscellaneous operations such as softmax, relu, etc.. scale up linearly with the size of the vectors being multiplied.
Hence, as models scale into the trillions of parameters, the matrix multiplications ("tensor" ops) dominate everything else.
I'm not aware of any major BLAS library that uses Strassen's algorithm. There's a few reasons for this; one of the big ones is Strassen is much worse numerical performance than traditional matrix multiplication. Another big one is that at very large dense matrices--which are using various flavors of parallel algorithms--Strassen vastly increases the communication overhead. Not to mention that the largest matrices are probably using sparse matrix arithmetic anyways, which is a whole different set of algorithms.
AFAIK the best practical matrix multiplication algorithms scale as roughly N^2.7 which is close enough to N^3 to not matter for the point that I'm trying to make.
Yes, this has already been the case for years on mobile devices, CoPilot+ PC design requires this approach as well.
Additionally, GPUs are going back to the early days, by becoming general purpose parallel compute devices, where you can use the old software rendering techniques, now hardware accelerated.
I worry that the effective evil stuff, perhaps almost by definition, won't be nearly as comedically ham-handed for the benefit of audience understanding.
One day I'd like to create a server in my basement that just runs a few really really nice models, and then get some friends and CO workers to pay me $10 a month for unlimited access.
All with the understanding that if you hog the entire server I'm going to kick you off, and if you generate content that makes the feds knock on my door I'm turning over the server logs and your information. Don't be an idiot, and this can be a good thing between us friends.
It would be like running a private Minecraft server. Trust means people can usually just do what they want in an unlimited way, but "unlimited" doesn't necessarily mean you can start building an x86 processor out of redstone and lagging the whole server. And you can't make weird naked statues everywhere either.
Usually these things aren't issues among a small group. Usually the private server just means more privacy and less restriction.
Amazing how analogous this is to the early Internet when people started running web servers out of their basement and then eventually graduated up to being their own dial-in ISP…
reply