Political Economy

Hit

Chill Culture, Political Economy

Did the quality of fast food take a huge hit?

For sure it did. Post-pandemic it’s quite a lot worse in general. There are a variety of reasons for this, I suspect. Among them is that fast food companies started using lower-quality (thus cheaper) ingredients to attempt to ameliorate the effects of wholesale inflation. Also, I’m guessing the ubiquity of delivery apps divorced direct feedback on food quality from the experience of its consumption so there are fewer complaints that make it to anyone who notices or cares.

It’s not just fast food, though. Food quality even at middle- and high-end restaurants has nose-dived too. Recently, I got lobster ravioli with fresh crab at a local mid-end restaurant. It was nearly $40 for just the entrée. The dish had nearly no actual seafood in it, was otherwise entirely mediocre and the portion size was also extremely small.

When I pay that much for something, I expect it to be better than what I can make at home. That wasn’t even close. I could’ve whipped up something similar but tastier in 30-ish minutes.

So this decline in quality is occurring in every tier of restaurant.

Healthy Skepticism

Chill Clowns, Political Economy

Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer).

Wow, this is full of fancy-looking and fancy-sounding absolute bullshit. I don’t have time to refute all of this (though it’s all just clownishly wrong and fairly easily refutable), but like a lot of BS, unfortunately my refutation would need to be 3x longer than the stupid article itself.

This is a great example of a high-IQ person using flimflam and $10 words to hoodwink those less intelligent. Because that technique really fuckin’ works, which is exactly why it is so often used.

Here’s something that’s a bit more sane and doesn’t launder and fudge the numbers to get the author’s desired conclusions.

I know that the quant clowns think it should be illegal to use qualitative anything, but by way of anecdote here’s a friend of mine’s experience of US healthcare vs. UK healthcare (she’s English) as best I can remember:

“I broke my ankle in the UK. I walked right in, they fixed it and it cost me £30. I cut my arm diving in the US and it was a 10-hour wait and it cost me $5,000. And they did a much worse job than the NHS doctors. I don’t know how you guys live like that.”

And that’s a very common experience of those who require health care in sane countries vs. the US. Only libertardians like whoever that fucking idiot who wrote the first article is can believe anything different.

Peer at This

Chill Political Economy, Rant

“Butts in chairs” is such a terrible, MBA measure of productivity. It’s just worthless. But easy to measure, I guess.

How do I know? Because I routinely complete items and projects in two hours my peers need 2-3 days to do. And I’m not even trying that hard. My productivity is astronomically higher often. So why again is it important that I sit in that chair all day so it pleases some useless middle manager?

Won’t see me there ever again, nope.

Clip

Chill Gutter Philosophy, Political Economy

Peter Thiel said somewhere that the age of AI will favor those with strong social skills over those who are great at math. I reluctantly tend to agree with that, for various reasons.

The reality is that AI is only going to get better, even if you don’t believe in the Yudkowskian paperclip maximizer scenario (I do not; at least not for 300-500 years). We are merely in the early stages now. Already, AI is better at many things than 80% of people. In 3-7 years, AI will be better at even more things and beat 95% of people in those areas.

That’s true even if AI is currently overhyped (which it is). No, it won’t be useful in all areas and in some areas it will hardly be useful at all. But the reality is that most people are little better most of the time than a next-word predictor and AI will be replacing the majority of them. For instance, there’s not a single interaction I’ve had with Microsoft Azure support that a modern LLM could not have handled in a superior manner. And AI will of course also replace people in areas where it doesn’t actually work but an MBA thinks it does.

So that should be something.

Bam

Chill Political Economy

That’s because for many people the 2008 recession never did end. Thanks to Obama’s total bowing to banker whims and wishes, millions of Americans lost their homes, their vehicles, their businesses and everything else. And many of those people never recovered financially or mentally.

Every last bit of that was preventable. But no — Jamie Dimon had to get just a little bit richer. If Obama had done anything at all about that, Trump would’ve never been elected in 2016.