A big point of seeing a tailor is getting yourself fitted for custom clothing that is specifically made just for you. As someone who's bought $200 off-the-rack suits and $2,000 tailor-made suits, there's a world of difference between the two, especially when you have an atypical body type.
(Granted, to the main point, I still think a tailor could be automated in some distant future, but we'll need robots to perform physical interactions, not just software.)
Tailors are a niche thing for weirdos, now. It's not exactly a growth market. Most folks only wear a suit to weddings and funerals, and maybe job interviews. They have basically no need for more than two suits, and many try to get by with just one (in black, probably). Lots don't own one at all, maybe just a cheap fused-construction blazer or two, if even that. Outright bespoke clothes are a niche of a niche.
Normal people wear clothes containing minimum 2% elastic and perhaps never, ever visit a tailor in their whole lives, except maybe one at a tux rental place or a wedding dress store, for their own wedding. If they repair clothes, it's sewing on the odd button at home or using iron-on denim patches. Past that, it's just not worth fixing, normal folks' clothes are so cheap.
The whole market for tailors is practically an affectation. It's not serving much actual need any more, not from the perspective of the overwhelming majority of people who are happy with stretch-denim jeans and polyester sportswear jackets and such. It's basically 99% of the way to being an obsolete job, kept from total death by a few enthusiasts. Only a bit more lively than the market for, say, authentic regency-era footwear or something like that.
Yes, I am one of the people who has a preferred tailor who can do more than just let trousers waists out. I also know where the nearest cobbler is. That’s not normal, though.
A dead industry often doesn’t entirely disappear, it just shrinks a bunch and comes to rely entirely on enthusiasts or very rare actual need, rather than broad need or appeal. Consider the draft horse breeder, or the carriage driver. There’s a market for both professions! But they’re itty-bitty. The day-to-day need for both is gone.
Tailoring is hovering right in the edge of that kind of status, today. It’s dying, killed by $10-30 shirts and $20-50 trousers and $50-100 jackets all from largely synthetic materials, and a society that no longer expects anyone to wear anything “fancier” outside certain events.
I mean, outside very unusual circles, dinner jackets are essentially ceremonial costume-wear, and business suits aren’t far behind on that track. You gonna wear a tailored wool hacking jacket or breathable linen Norfolk suit on your camping trip, or a bunch of polyester and nylon stuff from REI? LOL. All the situational tailored clothing but the business suit and blazer are near-extinct unless you want to look like a cosplayer, and those are on borrowed time.
Yes, your message is coming from the pov of economics and business, as makes sense in this thread! That's my mistake, I took your message more sentimentally. I've used tailoring probably 5 times in my life, with the only recurring need being to hem pants.
"There is no money in tailoring" seems right. It's the "not all things need to make maximum $$$" that I speak to. You didn't pick this fight though, I did heh.
My (successful) friend tells me all about how amazing it is to collect very expensive watches. I just need to be a "watch guy" and I'll come to understand. Once my eyes returned from rolling out of my head, I did concede a great point he made: there is no reason for watch makers to exist anymore. The fantastically amazing history and evolution of time-keeping and personal time-pieces is now purely supported by rich people that care to subsidize the art form. And so, maybe I really do aspire to be a watch guy after all... hmm.
A romantic perspective I still try and hold myself, however the point about the watch and the cloth and the dwindling appreciation for such is presently experienced in reference to decades or centuries of disruption and are intrinsically tied to the demand of attention. I don't trust the acceleration will leave much, but I am continuing to paint and taking writing more seriously in great fear of the time scales we are navigating today. I find myself confronted with nihilism in so many facets of my life but perhaps this is simply the smell of the air in my particular milieu.
A huge part of the tailoring business are making small adjustments to cheap clothing to get them 90% of the way to bespoke.
If you’ve never done it, I strongly recommend getting your jackets tailored. Even a casual jacket will fit and look non-trivially better for $50-$100 and an afternoon at your local tailor. You can even get things like cycling gear tailored.
Rich people still get suits custom made specifically to their measurements and preferences. They cost about $20,000 USD. It would be cool to have this process automated and affordable to the masses.
Usually when one talk about sorting, without specifying closer, one means comparison sort [1], which indeed has an average-case lower bound of O(n*log(n)). In more special cases all kinds of other runtimes are possible.
But with power the final product it's the same, the production method is different.
So it's more like this: I make a product for 5 and sell it for 6. My production facility is maxed, but there is still much demand. So I (or someone else) sets up another factory, making them for 8 and selling for 9 (there is demand enough). Now, will I keep selling at 6? No, my prices will also increase (to maximise my profit), and the final price will be where the demand curve crosses the supply curve.
I am wind, the new one is gass. We both make the same product, we sell at the same price, but I make a larger profit.
Makes sense. But in a normally functioning market, production at 5 will rapidly ramp up to capture the excess profits to be made by selling at 8. Eventually this will drive everyone's prices to 6 and the ones stuck producing at 7 (natural gas) will be driven out of business.
According to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982118 there's additional "treasury" (is that the tax authority in the UK?) weirdness that prevents renewables from capturing these profits.
> But in a normally functioning market, production at 5 will rapidly ramp up to capture the excess profits to be made by selling at 8.
Not if your production is effectively random. If your factory produces a product at $5 this week, but next week your production is halved for a few days, someone else needs to step into that market who doesn't have a factory which produces like yours. You don't have any warehouses, and your product is consumed immediately. If there is not enough product for the market at any given 1 minute window of time Really Bad(tm) things happen to society.
You can build all the $5 factories you want, but when they tap into the same source of unreliable inputs then it really doesn't matter there is massively more cheap production than needed when the timing is fortuitous.
Once someone figures out how to build a different type of factory (battery storage) to buffer your good days of output into a warehouse for that $5 or less cost, then those $6 factories will simply go away over time as they can never sell their output on the open market.
The problem is that this is the market that absolutely cannot tolerate lack of supply for even a second or else everything falls apart, and that the goods are instantly consumed on purchase. (minus whatever is bought by entities storing and reselling it I guess)
Treasury is the name for the government's economic ministry, ie the people who "have the money" (except that of course all modern governments run a huge debt) if you're American your equivalent department is also named Treasury.
The UK's tax authority is HMRC, His Majesty's Revenue & Customs.
It takes a lot of time to build electrical generators, so "rapidly" here means what... decades? Years at least. I think wind farms generally you need to do a bunch of paperwork and then if you get an OK (after the paperwork) maybe 3-5 years to build.
The weirdness you're talking about is the other side of the Contracts for Difference subsidising the off shore (and historically onshore too) wind farms. A CfD works like this: You auction off the right to build generation and in the auction people can bid down for the price they'll be paid for say, 10 years of their electricity, this is called the Strike Price. Whatever they sell their electricity for, they always get that strike price. When the sale price was lower, the government is giving you free money - that's why this is obviously a subsidy. But when the sale price was higher the government (effectively the treasury, though actually via a for-purpose government owned company) takes every penny above your strike price, too bad.
This subsidy is cheap for governments because it's about certainty, something they have and which private investors lack. The British government knows it will have tax revenue in 2036, but a private investor would want a fat premium to cover that.
Now, CfDs run out. If you have 10 years of CfD obviously the wind turbine you bought doesn't magically explode after exactly 10 years, maybe maintenance prices get out of hand or the main blades reach end of life in 20 years and so it doesn't last forever, but eventually there's an unsubsidised generator, the situation today though is that there's a lot of very new generation, and so most of it is subsidised.
Another issue is that it makes sense to build off-shore wind farms in particular on the Scottish coast, whereas it didn't make sense to build e.g. coal generation there, so the UK isn't set up to move a huge amount of power made in Scotland to the south where much of it is needed. This results in a situation where there's say 15GW of almost free electricity, but 5GW of it is the far side of a 2GW transit point, you can only have 12GW of that electricity, even though you made 15GW. Fixing this will take years and political will.
I have been going partially down the same road, getting my own domain for email, so I can switch between providers (or self-host) in the future. A couple of notes:
- You dont actually own the domain, you kind of lease it, and will have to pay every year for renewal. The renewal price can be significantly higher than the "purchase" price, so be carefull to pick one with a low renewal price. I dont really know if there is any guarantee against the renewal-price increasing in the future, so you might end up kind of stuck.
- The email provider must support using a custom domain, which many do on their paid plan.
- Some support "catch-all" feature, that emails sendt to any adressess @yourdomain.com goes into the mailbox. Then you can register at places with e.g hackernews@yourdomain.com or possiblespamsite@yourdomain.com. But if you do this you can only move to other providers providing the same in the future. You can not neccesarrily send from the same adresses though!
This is a good point. Made me think about how I will usually read if first, but in the browser. And it's easy for the server to check the user agent, and serve me a different version in the browser!
Not many numbers in there. I would be interested in some measure of energy and effect per volume, e.g how many kWh of heat are we talking about at e.g 1 liter, and how fast (kW) can it produce it?
On the other hand, there is not much office work which could not have been done almost as effective in office 97.
I don't think the right explanation of MS monopoly is technical superiority, but rather the natural forces of monopoly. They are extremely hard to break with free market competition, but can definitely be broken with legislation.
I am convinced that 99% of office use can be replaced with competitors if needed, and it would work out OK.
Yes, we need a posix of productivity tool. You want to work with a EU government, you have to use this and that open standards. This is the way to break that particular monopoly.
'Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM (now Microsoft)' has been an important factor around my neck of the woods. A cheaper European alternative would never even make it to the comparison. That is changing now though.
FYI, as a center left from a European perspective that is a beautiful picture of just how right-leaning American politics is. The Democrats is such a big tent it contains pretty much the complete political spectrum in Europe, but for the actuall politics they have been doing, at least regarding economics (excluding identity politics) they are pretty solid right / center right from a European perspective.
From another European perspective I think it says more how absurdly left leaning European politics have become. The US is much more in line with historical norms as well as with non-western societies today.
From my perspective right-leaning economic views have won. We have new public management, we have privatisation, we have death of unions, and we have reduction in wealth and inheritance tax over the board (with some exceptions), and increased inequality.
What you describe seems to fit the term 'Dual State', and you live your day to day life in the normative state. I hope foe your sake you don't get much contact with the prerogative one.
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