Donki actually has plenty of useful stuff. The quality might be cheap but I lived in a mostly donki furnished apartment for 6 years. Bookshelves, kitchen table, lots of utensils, no issues. I've also bought lots of foodstuffs, some clothing, stationary, and lots of toiletries and cleaning supplies.
If you want a company that makes completely useless landfill stuff see Flying Tiger from Sweden. That store is nothing but trash and deserves your wrath far more than donki
I absolutely despise Flying Tiger and its array of absolutely useless one-time use non-recyclable plastic-glitter-trash and am perversely gladdened by its spread across Europe as it means my partner can no longer use it as a one-stop shop for last minute gifts, as the recipients now have a branch in their town so she'd be caught out.
As an aside, it's from Denmark, not Sweden - either/or would be surprising to me - my ignorant British perspective is that Scandies tend to be more Calvinistically-prudent and Gaia-centric and not beholden to landfill crap.
H&M, the global benchmark for disposable clothing, also hails from Sweden. And Ikea's cheaper particleboard furniture ranges are also pretty disposable.
I've heard the complaint but I can't help but wonder if that complaint is propagated by expensive clothing makers upset their over-priced clothing is not selling.
I've bought clothing from H&M and had zero problems with it. Same with Uniqlo, Zara, and other cheaper/cheapish clothing places.
I feel like there is a big difference between H&M and Flying Tiger. H&M actually sells useful items. Shirts, Pants, Jackets, Jeans, Suits. They all work. I haven't found them to be of poor quality.
Flying Tiger on the other hand seems to sell mostly useless stuff meant to give away at a white elephant gift exchange and then thrown in the trash.
As some economists will argue, being able to by clothing for less allows poorer people to buy clothing and allows all people to spend more money somewhere else (food, shelter, education, entertainment, ...) so it's hard for me to see how H&M is hurting things but maybe I don't have all the facts. I know they do have a recycling program. I suppose you could argue that's part of the problem though.
> They all work. I haven't found them to be of poor quality.
It does works but the quality control is questionable. You will often find poorly done and finished sewing or pieces which are cut approximately. They also often use the cheapest fabric they can get away with. It leads to clothes which really don't age well.
Where I agree with you is that a lot of brands which present themselves as mid range actually don't do much better and are just selling over-priced pieces.
There's a difference between the junk that many countries pay Chinese factories to make and ship, which is garbage almost immediately upon manufacture, and particle board furniture and fast fashion clothing which, while lower quality, is still useful and in the common case gets as much use as the expensive stuff. IKEA is disposable but not quickly disposed of. Considering it uses less and cheaper material, and ships efficiently as flat pack, it's an ecologically sound alternative to heirloom furniture.
Its only ecologically sound if you throw away your heirloom furniture after 10 years just like you have to throw away the IKEA furniture. If you still use the same table your great-great grandma used the heirloom furniture is better ecologically.
Considering the amount of glues and plastic required to make IKEA furniture I'm not convinced even at the 10 year mark IKEA is better ecologically, but that is a complex question that I wouldn't know how to analyse (if anyone tries I expect a few years latter someone will find a significant factor they didn't account for, and again a few years latter...)
Arguably, hiring a moving truck just to ship my grandmother's dining table across the country every 2-3 years is less ecologically sound than buying a flatpack from Ikea when I arrive and selling the furniture used when I'm ready to leave.
Why? I don't have that much stuff to begin with, and I try to buy used when I arrive in a new place. The only added cost is the plane ticket, and I probably fly less than the average vacationer.
Even if you're right, moving frequently is a fact of life for young people who grew up away from the west/east costs. It's the only way for young people who grew up in the midwest to launch a successful career.
Hometown --> college --> internships --> back to college --> grad school --> first job --> second job --> etc.
anyone with particle board furniture that's breaking: get yourself a bottle of polyurethane glue. a dab at the seams and breaking bits and You can easily turn a 3 year lifespan yfurniture into a 10 year life furniture.... assuming you never need to take it apart again.
is it just uncomfortable to your non-japanese sensabilities? lots of things are small and cramped in Japan. They rent 4.5 tatami apartments for example. Toilet stall doors often open in with zero room for a person between the door and toilet to get out (50% of the time I end up rubbing my pants along the toilet since there's no room ... yuck!)
It's a neat simulation and great for seeing traffic ripples. But, I'm finding putting a cone in a single lane blocks cars forever. That would never happen. The car at the cone would force their way into an unblocked lane.
It depends which settings you use. If you turn politeness all the way down, then the people in the blocked lane will force themselves into an unblocked lane.
Guess HN needs to banned then. Their news feed is designed to exploit my need for novelty and it works. I'm here far more than I should be. I guess I should expect the government to regulate HN to save me from it's exploitative patterns
I don't see it to be honest. The website is plain and simple, downvotes are capped, the scores are not visible. I spent significantly less time here than on other forms of social media, and I never feel glued to the website.
What part of the HN design appears to you exploitative? It's much more like an old school web forum than a gamified social website.
what makes it awesome? reading the spec nothing sticks out. I often wonder if it's just ObjC survivor bias but if there is anything that makes it actually special I'd love to know.
> I often wonder if it's just ObjC survivor bias but if there is anything that makes it actually special I'd love to know.
It's definitely not just this. Swift is very similar in design to Rust, and has a lot of the same goodies like an ML-inspired type system, but without the complications imposed by the borrow checker / lack of GC.
Light syntax, algebraic datatypes, type parameters, very solid enumeration, the whole ObjC library ecosystem, semi-decent (compared to Haskell/OCaml et. al) pattern matching, immutable and mutable data structures (Array vs ArraySlice for example).
It has (IMO) pretty and consistent syntax for many programming paradigms. Most of the language decisions seem like they were given significant thought. Swift is a great language to read and write because it strives to be pleasant for both cases.
It's a decent language, if nothing particularly special. It's like a slightly fresher Java or C#. Survivor bias and standard-issue Apple fanboyism give it some extra shine.
well in some countries they don't allow prices that high for services and drugs. no idea what problems that caused but ATM prices charged for various services and drugs in the USA are 3x to 10x some other countries
> well in some countries they don't allow prices that high for services and drugs. no idea what problems that caused but ATM prices charged for various services and drugs in the USA are 3x to 10x some other countries
The problem it caused is that there is correspondingly less drug R&D and more people die world-wide because they're not paying their share of the research costs.
Given that pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than they do on R&D [1], isn't it more accurate to say that the rest of the world isn't paying their share of drug ads? How small would the fraction of revenue pharma spends on R&D for new drugs (excluding generics, which the analysis in [1] doesn't) before higher prices are no longer justified?
Pharmaceutical research is very broken. It is startling how ineffective all but a few drugs are. Medical Nihilism by Jacob Stegenga is a great book on the topic.
> It is startling how ineffective all but a few drugs are.
Presumably partly for this reason, a bunch of "new" drugs are minor modifications to some existing drug to secure a new patent and create a new branded product whose modest advantages over the old drug (if any) are inflated by the marketing machine into being some kind of revolutionary advance.
> marketing increases the number of "customers" by more than the cost of the marketing (or why do it?), and the extra money is what both encourages and pays for more R&D.
Does it increase the number, or does it just reallocate customers from one company to another? And I'll repeat my question - how high do drug prices have to get, before further increases can no longer be justified because some scrap of the revenue goes towards R&D?
> Does it increase the number, or does it just reallocate customers from one company to another?
The advertising is typically done by companies with a patent, where the competition is an existing generic with no real incentive to advertise, and a much smaller profit margin (leaving less for future R&D).
> And I'll repeat my question - how high do drug prices have to get, before further increases can no longer be justified because some scrap of the revenue goes towards R&D?
The premise of the patent system is that the customer decides this. You have a monopoly on the thing that wouldn't exist if you hadn't put in the money to research it, then the customer chooses whether that's worth your price over the alternatives. Without your research your option wouldn't exist, so the customer can't be worse off with it as a (temporarily) expensive alternative than the status quo which they still have the option to choose.
This is completely broken by low deductible insurance, because now the patient wants the insurance company to pay infinity dollars for only a small marginal benefit, and the drug company is happy to charge that much, and the insurance company gets flack for denying coverage.
But how does Medicare fix it, since it's still low/zero deductible insurance? There is no "negotiate prices" with single payer, it's just regulating prices. Which you could do regardless, but the whole point of the patent system is to let the market set prices so that the things most important to people get funded instead of the things most important to lobbyists.
If you're going to regulate prices you might as well get rid of the patent system and replace it with X prizes or something like that. And then you no longer have high drug prices even with private insurance, but you are also effectively having the government choosing what research gets done rather than the market, and suffer the consequences when they decide to divert the money to something else.
> You have a monopoly on the thing that wouldn't exist if you hadn't put in the money to research it,
My question was how expensive would drugs have to get before we could stop claiming they wouldn't exist otherwise. Is your answer infinity dollars?
> There is no "negotiate prices" with single payer, it's just regulating prices.
There's no "negotiate prices" with a single company having a patent/license to manufacture the drug either. Yet you were happy to count that under "market working as it should", but when people join together to bargain collectively (in the form of government), then the market is broken. How curious that the Market is only said to work when corporations have all the advantages and consumers have none.
> My question was how expensive would drugs have to get before we could stop claiming they wouldn't exist otherwise. Is your answer infinity dollars?
My answer is, the amount that it's worth over the status quo which you still have the option to choose instead.
> There's no "negotiate prices" with a single company having a patent/license to manufacture the drug either.
Sure there is, because there are other drugs. The fact that they're not as good is what makes the patented one worth more than them, but it's only worth as much as it's worth, which is not an infinite amount.
> Yet you were happy to count that under "market working as it should", but when people join together to bargain collectively (in the form of government), then the market is broken.
It's not collective bargaining in this case because the government is representing both sides of the table. On the one hand you have cancer patients who don't want to die even if it costs a million dollars, on the other hand you have taxpayers who don't want to pay a million dollars for someone else's treatment. It's an inherent conflict of interest.
You're not negotiating with drug companies to buy an existing drug here, you're negotiating with drug companies to decide what their incentive to research future drugs will be. "Pay less money" is what the taxpayer wants but not the cancer patient. The only way to make the conflict go away is to align who pays with who receives treatment, so that you decide yourself how much you're willing to pay, instead of someone whose incentive is to let you die so they don't have to pay as much.
> My answer is, the amount that it's worth over the status quo which you still have the option to choose instead.
You are justifying high drug prices by saying the drugs wouldn't exist otherwise, yet offer no proof or reasoning the drugs really wouldn't exist otherwise. No matter how high drug prices would get, or how little of that money would go back into R&D, you'd still say "the drugs wouldn't exist otherwise".
> It's not collective bargaining in this case because the government is representing both sides of the table.
Exactly like insurance companies represent both sides - the people who need the drugs, and the larger pool paying for insurance. If you don't like the government's version of health insurance, you can always get additional insurance, or buy the treatment individually - government-provided healthcare doesn't mean private options become illegal.
> You are justifying high drug prices by saying the drugs wouldn't exist otherwise, yet offer no proof or reasoning the drugs really wouldn't exist otherwise.
That is the basic premise behind the patent system.
The drug didn't exist before. Someone has to pay to come up with it, and also pay for the drug trials to establish that it works. So there needs to be some revenue stream to cover the high costs, above the one you get by waiting for someone else to do it and then going into competition with them and driving their margins down to yours.
Some drugs might have been discovered anyway, but it's hard to tell which ones. Disentangling preparation and skill and ingenuity from random chance is not an accounting we really know how to do. But the more expensive it is to develop something, the more likely a financial incentive is required in order to develop it.
Meanwhile the low hanging fruit in medicine is mostly gone now, so new discoveries are generally expensive, and the FDA approval process is crazy expensive to the point that that alone is enough to prevent known-beneficial public domain drugs from becoming available in the US when they can't be patented. So new drugs are the sort of thing you wouldn't expect to happen very often without a significant financial incentive.
> No matter how high drug prices would get, or how little of that money would go back into R&D, you'd still say "the drugs wouldn't exist otherwise".
The patent system is terrible. Monopolies are terrible, they're inefficient and expensive, everyone else hates them and they should be avoided whenever possible.
It sometimes leads to awful seeming inefficiencies like someone spending $10M to secure a patent which they then make $10B from. But the way that happens is that there is a drug worth $25B to patients which requires a $10M investment to make viable and no one will pay the $10M up front without receiving anything in return. So what the patent system is really allowing you to do is to pay $10B during the term of the patent in order to get a drug that creates $25B worth of better outcomes for patients over its lifetime, even though the underlying cost was really only $10M, because we had no other way to raise the $10M. That's terrible, but not as terrible as losing the $25B value entirely -- it's still net positive by $15B compared to the alternative.
This makes us want to put on our efficiency hats and figure out how to convert the $15B gain into the $24.990B gain we see should be possible. But then we need some other way to raise original the $10M. One obvious method is to pay for it with taxes. So let's do that -- we'll pay for it with taxes and not patent it and realize the whole gain. If we can get funding for that.
But there's the rub. If we got funding for it, all the way through to commercialization, then it shouldn't have been patented. (And if it was still patented despite 100% public funding then that was the problem.)
It's only when the government fumbles and fails to fund something worthwhile that it leaves the patent system the opportunity to profit like that. But in that case it's legitimately picking up the slack -- we're back to it producing $15B in net value compared to the alternative, because the alternative was that nobody else paid to fund it.
And more commonly it's companies making far smaller profit margins than that because their overall research costs are in the billions as well.
> Exactly like insurance companies represent both sides - the people who need the drugs, and the larger pool paying for insurance.
Yes, precisely, that is why all low-deductible insurance is problematic, whether it's public or private. The underlying problem is that healthcare is too expensive for most people to be able to afford to pay for out of pocket.
The idea that routine healthcare should be an expense so large that it requires filing an insurance claim is a tragedy. How is it worth paying thousands a year in additional insurance premiums (or taxes) to avoid paying what should be hundreds a year by paying for all ordinary healthcare entirely out of pocket?
> If you don't like the government's version of health insurance, you can always get additional insurance, or buy the treatment individually - government-provided healthcare doesn't mean private options become illegal.
Typically the result is effectively equivalent to being prohibited, especially when (as now) they disallow providers from charging Medicare the amount Medicare will pay and then charging the remainder to the patient. Because then the patient wants a treatment that costs 10% more than Medicare will pay, so the provider doesn't accept Medicare and you have to pay the full cost out of pocket, which you can no longer afford because you're required to pay $10,000+ in Medicare taxes every year despite them de facto covering 0% of your treatment cost.
> And before you claim that, because they must survive on the Market, insurance companies act ever so virtuously in defense of the insured, this is false
Nope, private health insurance companies are garbage. We should stop encouraging health insurance plans with <$10,000/year deductibles and then replace them with nothing. Then watch as healthcare costs fall to what people can actually afford, and the outcomes for people without any insurance improve dramatically.
I'm really curious where social anxiety comes from. I get it though not crippling most of the time. But for example public speaking I can logically see that I publicly speak any time I'm at dinner with friends or voice my thoughts in a meeting so it's strange to me that officially speaking would have so different a feeling but it does.
For me it's the anticipation of putting myself on the line. I can speak up in meetings where I know i'm an authority, but struggle to do so when I don't have that role. Social situations with people I don't know well will nearly always have me looking for ways to avoid it, even though I've been told repeatedly that I'm very personable. I've done group salsa performances in front of hundreds (possibly thousands) of people, but I need to get very drunk to do regular club (not salsa) dancing.
My best guess as to the origin is the environment at home when growing up. Without going into too much detail, it was very stressful and I felt like I didn't have a voice.
If you read through here, you'll get a sense for the various different IDs and tracking methods that Google is using. It's more than just the Advertising ID.
You'll also get a sense for the collection Google does about your environment. (nearby wifi, GPS position, etc.) And more troublingly, the fact that these services still collect data even when the user sets them to "off." A couple excerpts:
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"It’s hard for an Android mobile user to “opt out” of location tracking. For example, on an Android device, even if a user turns off the Wi-Fi, the device’s location is still tracked via its Wi-Fi signal. To prevent such tracking,Wi-Fi scanning must be explicitly disabled in a separate user action, as shown in Figure 4."
"Google can ascertain with a high degree of confidence whether a user is still, walking, running, bicycling, or riding on a train or a car. It achieves this by tracking an Android mobile user’s location coordinates at frequent time intervals in combination with the data from onboard sensors (such as an accelerometer)on mobile phones.Figure 5 shows an example of such data communicated with the Google servers while the user was walking."
"Google records the time and GPS coordinates for every photo taken."
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Anyhow, the fact is that much of this data is collected whether the user is accessing the phone, or not.
It's a bit complicated, and disabling the Advertising ID may limit some tracking in a few cases, but despite this extraordinarily prolific tracking is still occurring. There's a lot more detail in the document and frankly, it feels a lot like Facebook's privacy invasion in that:
- It's possible to mitigate some of the tracking, although this is intentionally made unintuitive the user.
- Conversely, the user will never be able to prevent a large portion of the tracking, and will have no intuitive sense of what is being collected by google at any different time, and;
- The default values and the data tracked will change over time, and the user will have to try to stay educated with every update about what has changed.
"An AP investigation found that Google saves your location history even if you’ve paused “Location History” on mobile devices. This map shows where Princeton privacy researcher Gunes Acar travelled over several days, from data saved to his Google account despite “Location History” being off."
Sorry -- I missed the point of your question. I don't think individuals can just buy the data the same way a bounty hunter can simply buy cell tower tracker information on an individual basis.
I'm not very informed here, but I suspect those purchase arrangements are made by very large companies, and that by the time small companies or individuals are purchasing data it's been resold and transformed.
it worked for video rental history back in the 80s