drphungky

I just replaced the honk in my car today, so I can assure you they very much do.

In related news, Subaru has yet to do a recall on a very important safety device going bad, despite the Internet being awash with 2016-2018 Outbacks having bad clocksprings. At least it’s a relatively easy fix.

Well frankly I don’t think the original point was super well made, since folks are talking about entirely different points now, but I’d agree with soccer, and tennis and golf in particular really being comfortable with far more silence in broadcasting - but that’s true on both sides of the pond. But the idea that surface level analysis is unique to American sports coverage is pretty false in my experience. Every sport I know a lot about seems covered at surface level - every sport I don’t know a ton about seems covered great. But I’ll say despite knowing a ton about amfootball the broadcasting is still pretty impressive. The soccer analysis I’ve seen is pretty good too but I’ll admit my depth of knowledge is much shallower. But there is definitely a size of audience and sportscaster population issue as well, because small sports I know a lot about have much worse coverage.

I absolutely agree that US broadcast networks show more player centric fluff portions than English or Spanish broadcasts (the only other languages I’ve watched). But the original post was more about surface level analysis, and that’s more about audience size and quality of broadcasters IMHO. But yeah, fluff, particularly between plays/matches, is crazy annoying. I hate US Olympic coverage when I can juxtapose it with BBC.

This is hilariously false. It’s a major vs minor sport thing and having a population of talent to draw on. Top top top euro soccer announcers are just as amazing as top top top US basketball and football announcers, but as soon as you start watching a handball broadcast there is very little separating it from a rowing broadcast or a darts broadcast or whatever. Sometimes you get a good play by play announcer but color is almost always rough, because it’s insanely hard, not because Americans are bad at it lol.

I’ve done sports announcing, and come from a journalism family where my dad taught radio broadcasting.

Sports casting is hard. Like really, really hard. It is very easy to criticize the way someone does it, but it is incredibly difficult to fill hours of silence. I did live commentary for college wrestling, and I was a very knowledgeable high school wrestler, but frankly sometimes there just isn’t something exciting or even describable happening. Jockeying for control, positioning, or feeling out an opponent - sometimes the announcing is “they continue struggling!” Then you think of a sport that isn’t nonstop action like American football, or God forbid, baseball? Huge swaths of time where there is nothing to say. This is why professional sports casts on major networks have huge teams. They can pull up obscure stats that don’t really mean anything, instant replay analysis done nearly live, and a ton of graphics to keep things moving and exciting.

Then you have the issue others have talked about, where your audience may have almost no knowledge of what to you is a deeply technical sport. So every time you explain a wrestling move, or defensive pass coverage, you have to assume no knowledge. You have to explain why someone is doing something, but luckily that actually fills up a bit more time because God forbid you have dead air on a broadcast, so of course you do it. And the type of deep analysis a knowledgeable fan might want is actually really hard to not only come up with live, but while watching something live without the benefit of watching a replay or a better camera angle.

Anyway, my point is that you should try to do an entry level sports broadcasting exercise. Turn the sound off on a game, and try to cast it and record yourself. You will be absolutely shocked at how much silence there is, or how many asinine things you say. Even the “worst” broadcasters that you experience on any major network have such insanely deep knowledge and an ability to just keep spewing information and anecdotes out that I promise you would be so much more impressive if you heard an amateur, or better, tried to do it yourself.

That’s not a conspiracy theory that’s like entry level MBA stuff.

Wizards Of The Coast: Ha, it will never affect us if we change our licensing and hurt the little guy. End consumers don’t care and no one reads these things anyway. “We have an announcement about changes to our EULA!”

Internet and DND community revolt, Pathfinder 2 sees a massive boost, and content providers are scared now.

Unity: Surely nothing similar could happen to us if we change our licensing? “We have an announcement about changes to our EULA…”

I get that “man bites dog” is more newsworthy, as they say. But can we stop a tick and internalize that a human driven car hit and killed someone, and we’re talking about how it’s the autonomous car’s fault for adding a slight delay!

Give me a break. An ambulance being stuck in traffic by idiot drivers is nothing new. The autonomous cars may even kill people at a rate we’re uncomfortable with. They’re still gonna be better than humans. Humans are terrible drivers. Autonomous cars can’t come soon enough, and yes, I say that even as someone who prefers transit. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Why is a three year old article being posted in the news community? This is not news. This is just rage bait because the concept of trickle down economics is infuriating.

You realize economists wrote the paper disproving the theory?

Inflation is the devaluation of the currency. The definition has been muddied for a time now but ultimately inflation refers to the expansion of the money supply.

A quibble only because it’s what I do professionally, but that’s not really how people other than macroeconomists concerned with the money supply talk about inflation. It’s usually used as shorthand for the price change for a given standard of living. The importance of that matters quite a lot when you start talking about relative inflation between goods and services. We can very clearly say that textbooks have had massive price inflation in the last 20 years, and that has nothing to do with the money supply, it’s because they are way more expensive than they used to be relative to other goods. Another reason it matters is comparison across regions. If prices are rising faster in Asheville, NC than NYC because it’s a metro transitioning from being cheap to kind of expensive, it doesn’t make good economic sense to say that currency is being devalued at a faster rate in NC. What is actually happening is that prices are rising faster there, again, relative to the rate of change somewhere else.

You might want to read this comment I posted elsewhere on the thread, but greedflation objectively isn’t a thing, at least not in the US during and immediately after the COVID epidemic. It definitely feels like it, as one can tell from your…heated rhetoric, but that’s due to a lot of other issues, not because it actually happening.

So-called “shrinkflation” is definitely real, but I don’t think anybody is arguing otherwise, and it’s not exactly a new phenomenon. It’s been happening and being measured for decades and decades.

I think everyone should probably listen to this great report from NPR that dissects this issue. The Tl;dr: is greedflation is not really a real thing.

The deeper answer to your question of, “can one party increase prices in a market?” is sort of basic economics, and the answer is, “Usually, no.” In a competitive market, the answer is no. In a monopolistic market (meaning one company controls most of the market, think like Google with browsers) with no government oversight, the answer is yes. Things get complicated when you add in government regulation or oligopolistic markets (markets where only a few players control the market). In those cases, it depends on how strong government regulations on price-gouging are and any anti-monopoly or anti-anticompetitive practice laws are, and also depends on how oligopolists behave. Sometimes, particularly in industries with few big players, the big players will make the same decisions independently. If they do this cooperating it will usually violate antitrust laws, but if they both decide they’ll be better off say, not paying workers as much, or charging super high markups, them that can happen. A lot of economic research shows that kind of “tacit collusion” happens in real life, like in the oil and gas industries. But other times oligopolies will behave very competitively, only uniting through lobbyist trade groups if at all (think Microsoft and Amazon in cloud software).

So that’s the facts, but here’s my economic musing: The reason it feels like greedflation is a thing is a combination of factors:

1. Inflation was very real, and very salient.
2. Corporations (as mentioned in the NPR piece) crowed about their “record profits” in the short term, and also mention them when they are absolute record profits, not just record profit margins (something not mentioned but very real - a company can make twice as much money but also have spent twice as much, making way “more” money but with identical margins)
3. In the US at least, we are seeing the highest numbers of industry consolidation and monopolies/oligopolies since the Gilded Age, so it feels like companies should be able to raise their prices if they want to.
4. Media coverage and online spaces have become extremely polarized, so “corporations bad” is a very easy refrain to find if you’re watching or reading anything remotely left-wing, and it has been parroted by many democratic politicians as well, because it scores cheap and easy political points (also, and this is just my opinion, it helps vilify corps more in the public eye to help get more support for better antitrust legislation and enforcement, the actual end goal. I don’t think senators like Bernie Sanders don’t actually understand what’s going on with profit margins, I think they’re using it to generate political will, but that may be my own bias creeping in).

This is still my favorite pronunciation video ever. Gets me every time.

1999 and over 60%. No dice!

Because of those battery changes and demands for range, electric vehicle are way heavier than they used to be. https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/as-heavy-evs-proliferate-their-weight-may-be-a-drag-on-safety

They also follow the same growth in size as all vehicles, due mostly to consumer demand: https://www.fastcompany.com/90793619/evs-keep-getting-bigger-and-that-could-steer-the-u-s-down-a-dangerous-road

In 2005 at a top 50 liberal arts school, I was the only person in almost every class I was in using a laptop to take notes. Huge 200 person lectures there were definitely a few, and in later years I still remember being crazy jealous of a woman who had a laptop with a stylus for drawing econ graphs - one set of classes I wrote manually in - but she was a rarity. My notes were always highly sought after for sharing because I’d have 4 pages typed instead of 2 scrawled and not keeping up.

I know it’s just conventional wisdom, but among those who look back and forward and think about this stuff, it’s been common conventional wisdom for a century that 20 years is an exceedingly long time for change.

I like Bill Gates’ quote the best, “People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.”

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/01/03/estimate/

This thread title is unfortunately about what “you think will” not “you hope and wish and pray will”, so super hard disagree. Electric cars are actually going bigger to account for huge batteries, and heavier because of them. Given that’s the upswing I find it hard to predict a sudden shift to smaller cars.

The only way it happens (and 20 years is a very long time, so it’s possible) is if cars become so expensive and mostly subscription model based like everything else, that car ownership goes down. If driverless electric cars become fleet vehicles in cities, you’d definitely see smaller cars becoming more common to have more on the road and privately replace public infrastructure because we can’t invest in that in the USA. So like Uber just illegally ran taxi services in many jurisdictions until it became too popular to fail, expect the same thing from driverless car fleets, a couple of which will get bought by Uber or Lyft. Young people are driving WAY less, so if they prefer to hail a direct driverless taxi to their destination and not pay to own a car, then the bulk of vehicles on the road could downsize. Private passenger cars though, would start being used for more long haul driving instead of the 99% short trips they’re currently used in, so I don’t see any downward size pressure on those.

I am loving Darrow, and for some reason I just never bothered adding dislikes but it’s great to have them back.

Wondering if anyone knows of a script to get the likes and dislikes onto the video preview page instead of having to click on the video to see it. Would help me get a sense of the videos YouTube is recommending.