Cranky

I laughed for 10 minutes straight.

A friend just showed me one of their favourite academic titles are you ready (you’re not ready)

Okay don’t spoil it

For the next level, please consider these non-spoilery tags and try to predict what the research is about

“Caramelldansen” with every second beat removed

which one of my favorite fictional guy archetypes are you? :)

taxi medallions were fucked up. Like, in capitalism whoever owns the equipment takes a cut of the profit you make with it, okay. But to drive people around the required equipment is a car, which most americans have. Taxi medallions look like what you’d get if you treated that as a problem to be solved: the workers already have the means of production, what can we do about it? Ban them from using it, create a new form of property that represents the right to use it (taxi medallion). Purely destructive: it’s not that some people gained the right, but that most people lost it

I think taxi medallions and similar mechanisms can be useful in preventing a destructive race to the bottom, but only if they’re properly managed, and they weren’t: the number of medallions wasn’t increased to keep up with population growth, creating an artificial shortage of taxis and driving up the price to the benefit of the current owners.

there’s no need for it to be like this, and you don’t even need to do a detailed study to determine the optimal number of medallions to issue, you can simply offer an unlimited number for sale at a fixed price, say $100k each, and commit to buying them back at a fixed price, say $50k, and then the market price will float within that range and hopefully there will be more taxis on the street but not so many that the drivers are actually making a loss unless they skimp on vehicle maintenance and sleep.

medallions aren’t the only way of achieving this, especially today when cities could run their own transport app systems, but they can still be a functional part of a market-based mechanism.

(also important to point out that workers do not own the means of production in this example, which are public roads!)

I didn’t think of the public roads thing.

But what prevents destructive races to the bottom is people having other, better opportunities. If they don’t have them, well, the reason I’m bringing up taxi medallions is because they are one instance of a pattern in which people’s options for employment have been legally constrained. (another being difficulty licensing home kitchens, another being patent protections on inventions from publicly funded projects). So if taxi medallions are a good idea it’s only because of a bunch of other things like taxi medallions forcing people to fight for scraps, in which case I’m back to thinking they’re a bad idea

I mean, I don’t know enough economics to have a definitive opinion, but this sort of thing is basically the situation that exists in every other industry except medicine – you can go into any one of those industries with a few thousand dollars, some expertise, and an ambition, and get your dream job as a carpenter, electrician, plumber, chef, whatever, and earn more money with less risk, and you know there will always be room for more.

Whereas in medicine you need an MD, which is really very hard to get, and also you’re really expensive to treat, which is one reason why the people who run the industry have an incentive to keep you in a situation where they can still find a doctor to give them money, because if they don’t they will have trouble getting treated

The fact that you need an MD is the problem. It is, in a sense, the source of the problem. There is no other good reason that it is so hard to become an MD. If the system were totally free, there wouldn’t be this constraint, and if there was no constraint, the system would work differently. The MD system is very similar to a system of medallions, in that the “owners” are not in any way responsible for the scarcity, they just happen to have “ownership” of it. There are medallions, and then there are medallions! And if the medallion system were abolished and replaced by anything else, medallions would not stay abolished, because people who hold medallions have an interest in keeping them. If the system were completely free, we wouldn’t need them, and we wouldn’t have to think about them.

Medallions are a big part of why doctors are so expensive in the US – they are, for whatever reason, a big part of what it means to get a job in medicine. I could imagine medallions working as a way to incentivize good treatment in, say, a country where healthcare is much less expensive. But a country that was mostly cheap, and which provided free healthcare to all, would be free of medallions as well as free of MDs, because you would have other incentives not to need to run a medallion-based system at all

thank you for your input you steaming chunk of linear algebra

I’m not sure what you mean by that, but if you can find any way to be offended at my words, I want you to do so.

brb sending this to my entire history of science department

I literally cannot comprehend this

I’m by far not the only person reposting this but it’s uncanny how well this algorithm figured out what we find funny now. It’s only been 9 hours and this seems to be the definitive new meme of 2022.

it’s fun to stay at the Y

M

M

M

*smacks the side of my boom box to get the cd to stop skipping*

C

Your least recently used emoji is how people feel when they see you

ur first and last recent emojis are ur gender now. mine is 🅱👨‍❤‍💋‍👨

this is what ancient greek philosophy is like

Diogenes driving a mobile home into the symposium to ruin Plato’s day.

everyone check your kids halloween candy, i just found some inferior quality copper inside a kit kat??

cannot handle this at all pigeons are just. so ridiculous. and the owlets are just like. ovo i guess this is fine 

stealth 100

heres a link to the vid btw

I’m gonna try to channel this pigeon’s dangerously misplaced confidence in every job interview I’m in for the rest of my life

…

The sheer brass balls of this pair…

the cultural shift of how we all perceive tumblr fascinates me so much. it went from ‘home where all my best friends hang out’ to ‘horrible awful hellsite i hate it so much’ to ‘mess that’s shoddily taped together yet somehow the most bearable social network left’