E.g., suppose I'm grocery shopping online and get put in behavioral histogram bin #1. You're in bin #2 because of stuff like impulsive browsing habits and low battery. Your bin's price for chips is consequently x% more expensive than mine.
Now, suppose both of us get separate uber rides from the same location. Similar data bins end up with your low battery generating y% higher price for your Uber.
Seems to me enough consolidation and behavioral data-based pricing practically impedes the fungibility of currency. Because while you and I can still borrow and pay back the currency directly to each other with impunity, the literal price of goods and services we can buy with that currency will be different. I.e., if you buy me a sandwich on Monday and I pay you back with a sandwich on Tuesday, you're losing money.
Edit: for the steel man of what I'm saying, imagine most grocery and convenience stores have shifted away from static pricing to something like qr codes. Also, assume pricing based on personal data is rampant across industries for most basic private goods and services.
The truth is, price differentiation is something we've been doing for centuries, just with much worse heuristics.
People are triggered when you frame it in terms of one cohort paying more than the rest. However, if there's a sticker price that basically nobody pays, with most customers getting a discount based on how rich the heuristics say they are, that's suddenly fine.
Transit tickets work this way in most of Europe. There is a sticker price, but most people don't pay the sticker price. In practice, most tickets are purchased by school children, university students, seniors etc, and they all have varying levels of discounts. Whether you think of it as a "student discount" or as a "probably-rich-person surcharge", it doesn't really matter, in the end, the result is the same. Same applies to cinemas, museums, amusement parks. Here, you even have some grocery store chains that give you discounts if you have a "large family card."
If our cash system deems dollars with certain serial numbers worth only $0.80 because they have history in the illicit drug trade, that cash is no longer fungible.
How is that functionally different than a system where a dollar of essential goods suddenly becomes $1.20 across most sellers for a particular consumer due to reliable inferences from an digital dossier inaccessible to the user?
In both cases, consumer confidence suffers. The biggest difference I see is that there's a rabid contingent who correctly yell, "Don't fucking mess with that!" with regard to currency fungibility, and a bunch of people saying, "It's complicated," with regard to surveillance capitalism.
Edit: again, to be clear-- I'm talking about individually tailored prices insidiously affecting large numbers of consumers in a consolidated industry for essential goods.
Edit 2: I know surveillance capitalism isn't the same thing as making currency be non-fungible. I'm looking for insight on what the difference is in terms of consumer confidence and other economic impacts.
Edit 3: clarification to narrow my question. If you can't tell yet, I'm earnestly looking for knowledge from someone who studies economics.
You know what else we've been doing? Replacing 2 consumers with 1 consumer when the 1 consumer has more money and is easier to statisfy. Eventually it'll be a couple of billionairs selling a few boner pills for a few million dollars.
> The faith was that if they could’t pay, they’d let me know because I was actively digging their asses out of a hole they’d dug, and doing so tirelessly and professionally, without complaint.
I get what the author is saying here. But it's a bad idea to treat one's work team with deep communal devotion in this way, as if they are a kind of dysfunctional family-- or, in the author's case, apparently higher in status than real family.
Doing this without proper remuneration creates a market distortion, and that is bad for capitalism.
> Switzerland and California have the same population density. Why can’t CA build high speed rail?
Go find the last major Swiss route that was built, and compare its land acquisition difficulties to what happened with the California project. I'll rankly speculate that difference will be the meat of your answer.
Building infrastructure is a skill, a skill you have to constantly work on. If you do it enough and not once then you can learn to get good at it. There is a difference between a long term consistent execution of a infrastructure plan and a 'lets build high speed rail'.
I don't think rules and regulation in California are actually worse then in Switzerland.
This is missing the most important step: get out there and practice.
You're not going to succeed at steps #6 and #7 in situations as dire as what the author describes without practicing a bunch. You have to choose low stakes, real situations to gain experience:
* a cashier asks you if you want to round up by donating to charity
* a friend asks if you want to do an activity with them, and you do not want to do that activity with them
* someone suggests splitting the check down the middle, but you only had a tiny side salad
* etc.
You can of course handle these however you want. But if you want to learn to set a line when it's important, you should have already practiced in a dozen or so cases like this, without apologizing: No, thank you / No, I'm not into that / I'm leaving enough to pay for my tiny side salad plus a nice tip
Practice doesn't guarantee you won't buckle in tough situations. But you'll definitely buckle if you don't.
Someone needs to create a kind of JSON for care homes, if you will. Something like a super simple spec of what a goddamned care home object is for, and the minimum number of actually fairly-paid full-time staff one needs to achieve that in practice.
Then it doesn't matter how many baroque shell companies it takes represent the thing internally. Either the thing can output a response in Care Home Object Notation, or it's just a bunch of crafty bullshit disguised as a care home.
You'd just walk in with your one-page CHOM spec and read down the sheet: "Number 1: Can I speak to a full-time nurse, please?" If they respond, "No, but here's two high-school interns in a trench coat," you can just be like, "Not a care home. Got it," and move on to the next one.
Once upon a time, I heard someone tell me a fairytale about this thing called a ‘law' and they said that laws could be used to enforce compliance with standards across an entire country. Pure fantasy I know, but a man can dream.
I emphasize that I'm not excusing the stories of clear mistreatment in the source article. But the central challenge is that this kind of care is incredibly expensive, which poses awkward and sometimes brutal tradeoffs that people often don't want to honestly discuss.
For example, the article blazes past a claim that £550/week/bed was too little to provide good care, but a super simple spec suggests it might be. Subtract the UK average rent of £1367/4 = £342, divide the remaining £208 by a fully-loaded nurse cost of ~£20/hr * 1.3 * 168, and even with no other costs you're left with a completely inadequate 1 hour of nurse time per resident per day. But if Guy Hands had produced a worksheet like this proving that pumping more taxpayer money into his pockets would achieve adequate staffing ratios, would that make even a single person more willing to do it?
in the US a sickening % of marketing for SNFs is actually describing state-mandated requirements. "...and we even have a community led residents' association!"
depends on your state ofc. none of them are a single page tmk. this makes sense, regulations are famously written in blood. don't do this if you're unprepared to be in a terrible mood, ofc.
You want consensus from non-experts for a plan to use 20 smart bombs.
Your opponent wants consensus for a plan to live-stream a demo of 1 smart bomb, and then use 19 dumb ones.
Your team has more expertise.
Your opponent's plan saves enough money to buy a better PR team than yours, and is still more cost effective than your plan.
Who wins?
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