I hear vending machine ppl often have 1-3 very profitable locations and 10-40 locations that only barely make sense often only because they already are in the business.
I imagine hiring someone to fix or restock them makes a lot more sense if you have 100 machine rather than just one.
It really depends what the goal is. Profit with fiber or fiber with profit?
Here public transport is required to cover all routes. Postal service is the same. Fiber doesn't seem that different?
For me it is more curiosity about what they are doing. If you work in the same field you should be able to have a chat. If it doesn't flow you can't work there if you get along perfectly it would be dumb not to hire you.
The actual problem with technocracy (if done right) is that the work of experts grows increasingly incomprehensible to average men. Even if things work out perfectly, experts can't properly take risks or make a leap of faith in other people's name. (Not to argue our current democratic model is any good at it)
The problem is that there's never any single "correct" solution for any engineering problem let alone social ones, and there's no single axis of "intelligence" or "expertise" that qualifies any single individual or set of individuals to make decisions in the long term on behalf of whole groups of people.
I am not a free market capitalist, I am a socialist; but I also believe in decentralizing decision making because centralized systems run by self-proclaimed people-of-merit always produces bad outcomes in the long run; left or right.
Having to find consensus is messy and difficult but always wins out in the long run.
> there's never any single "correct" solution for any engineering problem let alone social ones
as an aside, in my experience its engineers that love the one-size-fits-all and apply-it-to-everything solutions... or perhaps this is just indicative of working in top-down tech-land idk...
The actual problem with technocracy is that you create a formalized hierarchy of leaders and rabble based on some credential granting authority that the technocrats control.
That's a recipe for disaster. The technocrats define who can be a technocrat, and can design the process to benefit them. The incentives are towards elitist, racist, cronyist policies that would select for sociopathic tendencies.
What's the difference between a technocrat and a bishop in this case?
>Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that shows up at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech be removed from the daily lives of the children.
I had never even realized.
As a bonus I now also see cranks proposing to raise other peoples children in some kind of sweatshop calling it education and schools. As if that was ever the goal.
Yes, you can get books. I have hundreds of ebooks on my Kindle with pretty much any other book a moment's download away. Even LLMs can regurgitate 95% of Harry Potter with a single prompt.
I'm trying to think in the other (wrong) direction. If we can't escape funding things with advertising the document format can be improved to facilitate what people are trying to build. If each page view needs to be a full multiplayer auction it doesn't need to be this heavy. Not creating something like this will also exclude sane minds from what should and what shouldn't be included and put a price tag on questionable things. For ad platforms micro payments are normal. One can already pay for participating in the auction. If you fail to win the top slots your ticket is still good for less popular ones etc
Not entirely on topic: If pot is illegal people will grow extremely potent variaties. If it's normal you get very tasty variaties that give a mild buzz even if you smoke pure joints all day.
It's like comparing a casual light beer with the 90% moonshine or 45% bathtub gin sold during prohibition.
We can acknowledge that weed might be bad for people while also acknowledging that it probably shouldn't be illegal. There's no contradiction.
I think alcohol is bad for people but I don't think it should be illegal. I also think weed is probably bad for people but probably shouldn't be illegal.
I have found the exact opposite of that. Illegal weed was mild buzz and fun. Legal weed is EXTREMELY potent. They want to pack as much THC into the legal limit as they can.
For people using cannabis as medicine in both legal and illegal markets, the trend to buy higher THC potency products is all about stretching their medicine with their limited budget.
To continue your analogy, it’d be like buying 90% moonshine, diluting it 20:1, and then drinking it as a mixed drink the same potency as a casual light beer.
Of course, if only 90% moonshine is available, cuz of Prohibition or Post-Prohibition, then you’re going to have more people “binging” as opposed to “budgeting.”
The THC percentage variation in different varieties varies from say 0-35%. The better analogy for prohibition’s effects are for the explosion in concentrated forms like hash oil specifically. That is the same prohibition pressure that turned opium into heroin.
Idk, you can still find outrageously potent weed in states where it's recreationally legal. But maybe it's just a residual from the fact that it was illegal not that long ago and binge consuming it is still quite normalized?
I imagine hiring someone to fix or restock them makes a lot more sense if you have 100 machine rather than just one.
It really depends what the goal is. Profit with fiber or fiber with profit?
Here public transport is required to cover all routes. Postal service is the same. Fiber doesn't seem that different?
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