all good, but why `5. install twitter`? > it's a huge time sink but everything happens there in the open.

... ok? i don't get why the tradeoff is worth it?

It's X, not twitter. That system is directly controlled by a single man for his own benefit; we should use the name that reminds us of that.

He openly promotes himself and those that pay him. If you think Musk doesn't have an admin dashboard where he can demote accounts he dislikes and promote his friends, I have some... unkind words for you.

It's about control. Control over your information intake is partial control over you.

We can do so much better than ceding that power to the highest bidder.

How do you remember your username?

Most likely he is using one of those randomizers that will generate a new account every day or hour or whatever. A lot of people in Europe has started using those when going to American sites

I’m American and do it too. There is no point to generating karma and credibility with an account when the winner is the most salacious or person who paid to get to the top. There is also no incentive to be apart of the herd of cattle of getting sucked up into the data and profiling and surveillance vaccuum.

The irony of your username

I laughed. Any recommended services?

You don't keep violent and intelligent animal as pets, you keep them in cages at the zoo.

Or domesticate them. A superintelligence could probably figure out how to do that with humans, _if_ they saw a reason for it.

To a mouse, a housecat is a violent and intelligent animal, as is a dog to a squirrel.

yeah for headphones, I also feel the same. But for food and coffee, I really cannot go back to lower standards. It feels like I put myself in a trap with this attitude. I have not found a way out yet.

Tell me more! I need to hear this! I'm fed up with being a critic. It feels like a trap I set myself into without realizing. I'm at the point where I can only enjoy coffee brew at home with expensive toys and I'm becoming miserable about it: Id prefer the freedom to have anything anywhere while being able to enjoy. Applies to coffee but also other things. So yeah, pls tell us more.

yeah sometimes it can be that. but most of the time it's difficult to step back once you raise the bar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill and all that

The hedonic treadmill is a choice

The entire concept of "comfort food" and "poverty food" is about people excusing the enjoyment of "low class" stuff that is eminently enjoyable and shouldn't need justification.

You can learn tasting notes in wines, and how to identify wines that are well balanced with good tasting notes or an interesting character. You can appreciate all the care and expertise that went into that process and how it meshes with the "flavor pairing" guides and cheese that it was served with. You can then buy an entire case of $6 wine from that winery because that wine tastes exactly like Welches concord grape juice and when you were a kid you always expected wine to taste like tasty grape juice but make you drunk and have always been disappointed that wine doesn't taste like grape juice.

That wine was so good and it was $6 because snobs hate simple pleasures.

Don't be a snob. Good is not the inverse of simple, and complex is not inherently good.

Nobody can stop you from drinking boxed wine cut with gatorade. Nobody can stop you from enjoying boxed wine cut with gatorade.

If you find you can't enjoy the simple things, you don't need to "upgrade" or get more expensive stuff or keep up with the Jones's, you need therapy.

with "dev wanting X" nothing happens. "leadership deciding X" then it needs to get done.

That was what I thought, but when the middle management also wants it, then it can become the 'obvious choice', a la 'nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM'. It seems that middle management + devs can make it seem inevitable to the people above them, especially if those people are non-tech.

> But the only recourse for an IC under a bad manager is to quit or find another team to work on.

Agree but nothing easy about that.

noice

Hey, I completely agree and I also suffer from this same bias: it's ruining me from enjoying stuff that I would like to buy but in the end I just give up because it feels that any profit is a scam. What kind of resource can I study for me to understand and accept other people making profits?

> it feels that any profit is a scam

It is so weird we talk about caring about an invisible variable that is actually irrelevant.

In theory we should only look at the price and judge whether our expected benefits are likely to exceed that price. And we get distracted by measuring things in $, when what really matters is our benefits which can't be measured in $.

We are also distracted by ideals of fairness (a foolish goal in a business transaction) and zero-sum thinking (am I getting ripped off?)

I don't mind spending money on quality. What I hate is the information gap, and the costs of having to learn how to judge quality myself (because price is no proxy measure). I am distrustful of so many biased signals, plus so many other people's opinions are either unhelpful or influenced.

Mostly we each just fall back on an A versus B heuristic. I find it absolutely mad that the world works at all.

And an answer: look at the bad buying decisions made by others, and learn from their mistakes. I watch my father with money to spare, he wastes 2 hours to save $1, or he avoids spending money on something that would benefit his life or the life of someone he cares for, or he won't buy a Toyota because he hated their adverts once, or he keeps buying a Nissan even after being burnt by a severe costly design flaw.

What do you mean? Excessive profit or _any_ profit? Haha. You'd prefer it people made things and just broke even?

I think I would like to be able to answer the following two questions:

1. what percentage of this object price is net profit? 2. is that percentage a "fair" proportion?

but atm, I don't have a "scientific" way to respond to those questions so I usually go with my gut, or do whatever other people in my circle do (which is not ideal and I'd like to change)

When you set pricing for a product, profit is a goal. You don't know how many devices will be returned, whether the device or its marketing will attract lawsuits, or whether you'll be able to sell all the devices at asking price.

You only know the actual profit margins much later, after you have sold the devices and seen them last through their warranty period.

If you'd like to minimize excess profit, take note of which products seem overpriced compared to their peers. Traditionally, anything Apple makes is a prime example. For a non-tech example, look at disposable alkaline batteries. Rayovac has been owned by Energizer since 2018 and their batteries have become increasingly comparable over time, yet Rayovac batteries are much less expensive than comparable Energizer batteries. The difference? Mostly marketing and profit margin, at this point.

Maybe reframing it can help you. You want the people to make money who produce the things/content you want to use and consume. It serves you as well as them.

sold for whatever you want. Supposing the other party wants BTC (wild assumption) and you want 1Mton of lead, I guess the exchange would happen.