so is this a feint, a prod that maybe gets something or another renegotiated, or are they really gonna scrooge the holidays with a shutdown?
@Canevecchio it will, but will it do us with them? won't their peace be our desert too?
@keunwoo yes, i think this is mostly it. businesses observe that the elasticity of sales to skimping on customer service is low — especially in consolidated industries, where most competitors observe this more strongly if they observe it together. they just follow a profit minimization gradient blindly towards crappy customer service. they could still "afford" the expenses they used to afford, but why pay them? 1/
@keunwoo plus, in a capital markets sense, they can't "afford" expenses their competitors don't take on. share prices, continued access to credit, etc depend upon not underperforming their peers, so even if they might have the cash wherewithal to cover the traditional expenses, once control by capital markets is taken into account, they cannot. 2/
@keunwoo and then control by capital markets now often takes the form of insuring firms are highly leveraged, so they are ruthlessly focused on generating cash flows. then if this is the case, they no longer even have the cash wherewithal to cover the traditional expense, not because they are less successful as businesses, but because creditors and shareholders are more insistent about draining them of cash. /fin
@keunwoo i don't think that's right. Baumol is a story about the relative productivity of people. the machine comes in, because one technician might be as "productive" (ignoring a difference in quality) as ten customer service agents. the technician, according to a mistaken theory of wages, is paid her productivity, so is paid much more than a traditional CSR. 1/
@keunwoo if you want to hire a traditional customer service rep—who could, after all, in oversimplified theory, be retrained as a technician—you now have to pay the old-school CSR a wage competitive with the technician she should also be. 2/
@keunwoo the role of the machine is to change the productivity, and (in mostly mistaken theory) therefore the wage associated with alternative uses of the CSR's time. the Baumol story is about the relative productivity of people though, not the productivity of people versus machines. /fin
@keunwoo so, Baumol's cost disease means in relative terms things become more expensive, as other things cheapen. but in absolute terms, they do not. in absolute terms, we used to be able to afford human customer service. you can argue cheaper substitutes now "adequately" replace it, we've been made wealthy by better alternatives, but lots of us would dispute better or even adequate.
EDIT: I think I got this backwards, see the next post.
@keunwoo (is that quite right? low-productivity-improvement things have to be paid more in absolute terms in order to compete with higher productivity alternative uses. but that cost still renders them smaller relative to the pie enlarged from elsewhere-improved productivity. so i think i got this backwards! more expensive in absolute terms, but cheaper in relative terms. still seems like it should be affordable!)
ask your provider.
@akkartik yes. they very much are tacitly coordinating across a variety of dimensions on which they agree not to compete to reduce pressure on profit. your examples, shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, are good ones for some industries, i think.
Basically, Tesla will print money because it will be the only untariffed supplier of Chinese EVs. Great industrial policy there. https://bsky.app/profile/cronkhitemedia.bsky.social/post/3ldlwwqtois2m
@akkartik is it? it strikes me as quite instrumental, an important component of provision of even essential goods and services, or would be if vendors didn't tacitly coordinate on failing to provide it.
if we're so much richer now, why can't we afford someone to answer the phone when we call up a business?
“The U.S. government has never entered the World Series of Poker. Nor has it gone to Vegas to bet billions [of] taxpayer funds on roulette or built a strategic Powerball ticket reserve, but it appears to be genuinely entertaining the idea of rolling the dice on Bitcoin.” @jp_koning http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/12/after-twelve-years-of-writing-about.html
tech titans are like that joke about self-styled "non-conformists" ostentatiously converging on the same set of "eccentricities".
LLMs everywhere! nuclear announcements within days of one another! must contribute to inaugural fund of bold new administration!
truly these are independent minds.
“Either democracy was on the ballot in November, or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.” @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/18/opinion/democrats-trump-opposition.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ht @jeffjarvis
or maybe not, linkedin.
Screenshot of notification from LinkedIn: Marsha Blackburn: 0 followers You may want to follow Marsha, United States Senator at United States Sena...
weird how the we-have-to-introduce-incentives ed reform crowd has so little to say about a democratic party that hews strictly to seniority despite failure after failure by incumbent leadership.
do your kids get COVID vaccinations at their pediatricians, along with flu + other childhood vaccinations?
both here in Florida (stereotypically) but also in California, pediatricians who had every other vaccination did not have COVID, and we‘ve had to use Walgreens or CVS to get the kid a COVID shot.
weird social media person: hey, watch this. pennies fall upward!
professor of something: pennies fall downward
MAGA house member: the government is knows all about the antigravity devices and is hiding the truth
people on X: antigravity is real
people on BlueSky: i’ll never speak to those morons
people on Mastodon: here’s a cool CSS trick!
@jonathankoren you should always kick the tires on a new submarine.
“It is a sign of how corrupt political debate has become that these patent monopolies, which are equivalent to tariffs of many thousand percent, are referred to as the “free market” in most discussions. Patent monopolies have a clear public purpose, to promote innovation, but they are nonetheless a major form of government intervention in the market.” @DeanBaker13 https://cepr.net/government-granted-patent-monopolies-lead-to-corruption-47284/
collapse, civil war, the cause of these things won't be ennui. but even as the machetes bite, they will tell themselves it was.