Imagine if hypothetically a supplier offered very competitive - maybe even loss-making - prices when they had 25% of the market; then once they had 90% of the market and most of their competitors had gone out of business, they planned to raise prices substantially, make back the loss, and produce a big profit.
Isn't each customer's decision to buy (or not buy) from the loss-making supplier a tragedy-of-the-commons situation?
I struggle for an example of that actually working. If it does it must be exceedingly rare. I can think of lots of example of having 25% of the market and then getting closer to the majority by cutting prices, but the part where they jack them back up usually doesn't work. For instance, Rockefeller did that to put his competition out of business, but then the price of Kerosene just kept going down.
The times where it actually worked (railroad) was because the people doing it convinced the government afterwards to "protect the market" (interstate commerce act) and created a violence enforced cartel that prohibited by law rebates and other methods by which cartels (and pre-ICA railroad cartels) commonly fall apart.
> Does placing by ability actually helps student learn and score better?
Yes, you shunt all the disruptive/obstinate kids into class 2 and they can spend 4 hours of math lessons every week rehashing arguments about how they have a phone so they don't need to know what 7x12 is.
This means the students in class 1 get undisrupted classes, learning more and raising their grades.
Because of the way these things are done, it does have the unfortunate side effect that the kid who struggles with math because he's dyslexic gets put in a class with the kid who doesn't give a shit about math. But they'd be in the same even if the school didn't place by ability, so they're not that much worse off.
> This means the students in class 1 get undisrupted classes, learning more and raising their grades.
That's pure hypothetical, and some disruptive kids are also good and could make it to the top class and still be a class clown. Unless you propose more splitting kids up by "disruptiveness".
I don't think any of this tells us of the quality of the method for actually teaching. It's like schools that have really hard entrance exams, and than assert they are the best school, yes in terms that they only allowed the smartest to come in, off course they will see that the students at the school is good, but those students would be good regardless.
and the montessori method is effective in lowering disruptive peer-behaviour. it's part of the point. it teaches children to not be disruptive by letting them focus on their activities.
These type of studies trot the line of cargo cult though. Incredibly small effects, weak causation, full of possible confounders.
I'm not going to say being in a class where you are trying to pay attention and others are being very disruptive, and interrupt the lesson is enjoyable, it's annoying, but if you take even the studies you link, say the second link, it finds a 2% correlated effect, that is peers had scores 0.02 times lower than the standard deviation.
So if we were to change and group kids based on disruptiveness, instead of a 80% test core, your kid would have a 79.7% test score...
Now before you respond to this, I want to reiterate the point of my argument, that none of these ideas focus on actual teaching method improvements. How do you take a child at any level, and more effectively teach them so they learn faster and improve their intelligence and knowledge.
These alternatives, grouped by disruptiveness, grouped by current abilities, etc. they don't really change the pedagogy, just the environment. It seems their known effects are really small, and the effect on the average are not known.
So I'm not against them, as just from a pure setup they seem more appropriate, but it seems unlilely to result in much improvement learning wise, the kind that I'd be interested in.
If the first plane needs 3 hours to return to service, you delay the first group of passengers by 2 hours and the second group by one hour. There's no need to delay the rest of the day's flights when the plane is fixed.
The person hours of delay is still 2x200 + 1x200 = 600.
It’s just a weird side effect that’s surprisingly difficult to prevent - online games have had gold farmers for pretty much as long as there have been online games with gold.
> Is 75 minutes really considered that long of a time? [...] When I worked on firmware we frequently spent _weeks_ trying to diagnose what part of the firmware was broken.
One might spend weeks diagnosing a problem if the problem only happens 0.01% of the time, correlated with nothing, goes away when retried, and nobody can reproduce it in a test environment.
But 0.01%-and-it-goes-away-when-retried does not make a high priority incident. High priority incidents tend to be repeatable problems that weren't there an hour ago.
Generally a well designed, properly resourced business critical system will be simple enough and well enough monitored that problems can be diagnosed in a good deal less than 75 minutes - even if rolling out a full fix takes longer.
Of course, I don't know how common well designed, properly resourced business critical systems are.
As far as I can tell, there's no level of satire so heavy-handed and unsubtle that it won't get a reply taking it seriously. If anything, the more obviously ridiculous your suggestion, the more urgently HNers want to disagree.
Yeah, I don't think "surely no one seriously believes this" is viable now, if it was before. Of course, what you choose to do with that conclusion is still up to you.
I've been on the internet a long time. There are enough weirdos out there to make you understand humor doesn't scale, and it definitely doesn't scale across cultures.
Things are different when you actually know people but we killed that when we killed forums.
tbf, there's also almost no level of satire about business ideas so heavy handed and unsubtle that some HNers won't think it's an idea worth pitching to an investor...
> Most of these companies value is built on the idea of AGI being achievable in the near future.
Is it? Or is it based on the idea a load of white collar workers will have their jobs automated, and companies will happily spend mid four figures for tech that replaces a worker earning mid five figures?
I think companies that expect to use AI to cut their salary overhead making the same products they were before are going to get clobbered by companies that use AI to grow. A few people may have to retrain into a different line of work but I don't really see AI putting people out of work en masse.
From what I've seen, the most-compelling thesis involves robotics. We're seeing evidence that LLMs tokenising physical inputs can operate robots better than previous methods. If that's pans out, the investment thesis is secured. No AGI needed.
On the other hand, the limited size of the British market limits Parliament’s ability to pressure foreign companies.
China may be able to bully Apple into letting it snoop on its citizens’ icloud backups, but when the UK wants the same illiberal snooping powers, with 10% the population it’s 90% easier to walk away.
It's quite ironic that they would have an easier time enforcing that if they were still part of the EU and could have been the deciding factor towards more regulation faster.
The EU is big and rich enough to force Big Tech into submission under threat of loosing the market.
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