@cshentrup the thread we're responding to was literally about week-by-week price and sale variation strategies used by grocers. if you wanted to make a good website even for a sizable local market to capture these kinds of strategies by physical visits, it would have to be at least somebody's full-time job. yet it is to a first approximation cost free to publish them in a standard format on the firm's exiting web infrastructure.
@cshentrup that is very expensive. and prices can change frequency.
creating those kinds of market frictions is how firms undermine the perfect competition neoliberal models rely upon, discrediting them as a practical matter.
i no longer call myself a neoliberal (i might once have), but if you want to support the cause, this is exactly the sort of intervention you should support, the kind that makes some approximation of perfect competition real.
@cshentrup All that the author is asking to "force" is maintaining the technical capacity to create the latter at large grocery chains.
Not much of a coercion by the leviathan, perfectly justifiable on orthodox neoliberal grounds. Prices should be posted. Here's the public space, the inexpensive modality, by which you are to post them.
Not much of a bite by the overweening leviathan.
@Alon @phillmv @adamserwer cf https://a.co/d/cVomaML blurbed by Lind
these are people with a lot of bad history suddenly conceding some important points. it's hard to know how much to rely upon the scorpion/frog fable vs the strange bedfellows maxim.
@cshentrup convenient information from a store is not price transparency. price transparency means that consumers know all the prices across the market so they can choose among competing suppliers.
i'm glad your store offers you convenient options and tells you the prices they will charge for them! but having the price at the point of sale is very far from price transparency. (it's astonishing we have markets — e.g. health care — where we don't even have that!)
@cshentrup That's... not neoliberal. Perfect information is an assumption of the models. There are not well supported models under which superior transparency is a reliable competitive advantage.
The author of the original thread literally did create a platform to track this stuff. What he wants to "force" is publication of that information online so that chains can't obfuscate/opt their way out of it.
@cshentrup The prices are only transparent at the point of sale, and there are tremendous frictions to aggregating them across the market and over time. Price transparency, and only price transparency, is precisely what the proposal would "force".
@cshentrup @badlogic information asymmetry is a very basic market failure, from an orthodox neoliberal perspective. perfect information is an assumption of market efficiency.
@phillmv @adamserwer Most definitely. Also note where and by whom it is published.
Lind is… complicated at best. And compactmag...
Nevertheless I thought this a notable piece, perhaps all the moreso for its provenance.
"Against the Eugenicons" by #MichaelLind https://compactmag.com/article/against-the-eugenicons via @adamserwer
"There is no great mystery as to why eugenics has exerted such a magnetic attraction on the wealthy. From god emperors, through the divine right of kings, to social Darwinism, the rich have always sought an uncontestable explanation for why they have so much more money and power than everyone else." @adamserwer https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/richard-hanania-racist-pseudoscience-woke-silicon-valley/675335/ ht @binaryphile @philipncohen
"My wife and I experienced it as a miracle drug for coughs and colds. A box cost 8€. Why is ambroxol not available in the US? A…review published by NIH…found it safe and effective. But no drugmaker has…sought FDA approval… Why not? [They] could not make enough money with a generic to justify the expense. It’s obviously crazy to require this laborious review process for a generic that has been widely used in Europe since 1978, but this is how our system works." https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-09-15-how-do-you-spell-relief/ #ViaRSS
how my child praises his food: “it’s good enough that i won’t puke it out.”
Why we need a much deeper state #LeeDrutman #StevenTeles https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/when-congress-cant-think-for-itself-it-turns-to-lobbyists/387295/ cc @DetroitDan
On Gingrich's role:
Text: From the 1980s to the mid-1990s, congressional capacity flatlined. Then, when Newt Gingrich and the Republicans swept into power after being in the House minority for forty years, they decided that what Congtess really needed was less professional staff. Some of this was driven by a belief that such capacity allowed Congress to do too much, or that the staff was a third column of liberals pretending to be experts. Whatever the motivation, Gingrich cut committee staff by a third, reduced the legislative support staff by a third, and killed the Office of Technology Assessment. Historians differ on whether Gingrich was a successful speaker, and how deep his impact was on public policy. But his impact on Congress as an institution is unquestionable. The changes he wrought in the analytical capacity of Congress stuck, with staff levels still more or less at the level he helped cut them to. And this understates how durable the Gingrich-era reforms have been, since the flatlining of congressional capacity has happened at a time of exploding social complexity and lobbying demands. With staff numbers fixed and the demands on them increasing, the actual capacity of congressional staff to engage seriously with issues has gone down—and stayed down.
throwing stones will turn your house to glass.
@gimulnautti (thanks! i’d love it if you’d give it a shot and let me know whatever’s not so awesome!)
@camille @lne @nonlinear if you do, let me know if i can help.
it's amusing that, etymologically speaking, manufactured means hand-made.
"In a git repository, where do your files live?" by @b0rk https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/09/14/in-a-git-repository--where-do-your-files-live-/
@dave it's great to have a onopoleemay today.