ahah indeed! when I was young someone or something etched into my tiny brain that "thou shalt never abstract a DSL, it is wrong!".
I think I should have outgrown this by now, there is some truth to it but I feel it is certainly not absolute at all, and this is essentially a for fun project with no rules or greater intent beyond that.
The Treedix cable tester is awesome. Ordered one after reading Terence Eden's positive review* and went through all my cables the day it arrived. My favorite was the cable with only the ground connected; went immediately into the bin.
It definitely looks to be one of the better ones. Since many of these products use same generic Chinese platforms, I looked for a similar product on Aliexpress since they have better shipping for me, but didn't find a full analog. Had to use a forwarder to order from Treedix—only to have it shipped in a very roundabout way from China.
Xanthan is the best if you need non-toxic slime for artistic purposes (e.g. Halloween decorations).
Just make a stiff gel and hit it with a stick blender for desired consistency and lumpiness. This does introduce a lot of small air bubbles in it, so if you need clear slime let it stand for a few hours.
I'm in the EU and you absolutely can put a French building on a banknote. I'd much rather look at the Eiffel tower or the Tower of Pisa or Neuschwanstein castle than the European Court of Auditors.
Or if you like to have something modern, Paimio Sanatorium or Turning Torso.
But that defeats the purpose of having a boring glass building, or birds or modern bridges. The underpinning ideology is that europe should have no history, no culture and no identity, because suggesting anything else 1) will offend the hyper sensitivity of modern left ideologues who think that the said culture, history and identity is terrible and should only be condemned, apologised for, and buried, and 2) would be unwelcoming to immigrants as it would suggest somehow that there is a society they should adapt to rather than the other way round.
I remember a major French pro-european politician (Modem party) attempting to define Europe (in the context of integrating Turkey), as "the friends of democracy". When you can't (or rather refuse to) define your identity, the only thing left to represent it is birds, office buildings and bridges. Notre Damme de Paris or the Pantheon in Rome are just old embarrassing historical artefacts of an evil civilisation.
I as a random Pole with a lefty euroenthusiast stance would gladly accept the Pantheon or Notre Damme. I'd prefer Colosseum and Eiffel tower though.
The blandness comes from the fact that the EU has to tiptoe around the nationalists which will be upset that a country they don't like gets a banknote, and possibly even worse - they didn't get one.
Reading back both your and my post I guess it's the radicals of either stance who the EU desperately needs to cater to, resulting in generic designs. It's erasing itself like any institution with a 1-member veto.[1]
The underpinning ideology is that Europe (meaning the EU) should have no history, no culture and no identity because they are monopoly of the member States/nations. And, as always, if you put a monument or person from some country in the banknotes, the other states will complain
The conjecture assumes durable goods, so it doesn't apply to medicine. Also no resale, so that narrows the scope even more.
The gist of the conjecture is that if the customers can wait out for price drops and the monopolist wants to sell their thing, then after a few rounds of "he knows that we know that..." the price ends up to be the marginal cost.
Now, real world disagrees with the model, so next steps are to examine why this happens and maybe discover some new economic interaction.
The elegance of the conjecture seems overstated, and looks like dressed-up ideology.
The conjecture requires a theory of time in the form of periods/rounds to reduce price to zero - but wants to ignore time when it comes to information spread and product value.
Pinning a variable to any 1 extreme can be very informative, but when the variable has to both exists to justify the presumption, but also be ignored in the model - you're not going to find an elegant basis for a grand-theory-structure to add corrective terms onto.
Instead, you'll just get a mess of variables from over-fitted data.
Not really.
Game Theory (in this iteration at least) is about identifying equilibria, not about the process of reaching them. This is one of several "deviations" of Game Theory from "reality". The fact that equilibria are fixed-points and can be explained in some sort of bargaining process doesn't really mean that's how we should actually imagine them.
If we do so, we both overstate the theory (claiming some sort of actual behavioral process) and understate it being a (possibly quite general) fixed point to many possible market and non-market processes.
If you want to make Game Theory collide with reality, the actual convergence to an equilibrium is only one of many venues where there is a large divide. Other assumptions of these models - from rational behavior to uniform prior assumptions - are equally problematic.
Game Theory models are nevertheless very helpful because they require you to actually lay out your assumptions or - when you observe something else - reason about "what else is going on" in any of these areas. As it turns out (as another person has said), it is also immensely helpful when designing mechanism (i.e. games) like a Steam store or an ad auction, which is why tech companies hire quite a few Game Theorists.
But the point of the conjecture is not that "some equilibrium price exists and can be reached". The whole point is that even monopolists will actually sell this type of good directly at the marginal cost, at the fix point. That is the whole prediction; and/or that no one would buy if they did otherwise.
The monopolist would probably not even make the good in the first place if they knew they'd have to sell it at the marginal cost, because they'd make zero profit and be underwater on all of their development costs.
Sorry but what goods are more durable than a pill and cannot be resold?
EDIT: I now understand “durable” to mean “something that lasts long”, whereas I thought it just meant “non-perishable” (ie not fruit or
flowers).
Gotta admit I still don’t understand how the original theory resonated with anyone though. I can’t even come up with an example. What monopolist sells a durable good? Games aren't a monopoly. Most other monopolists sell subscriptions or consumables (eg a train ride).
EU has Aisler but what you win in shipping times you lose in production lead time (unless you pay for faster service).
And there are probably others but with even less visibility / willingness to interact with private customers. Hell, I used to live next door to a sales office for a local PCB fab, but they never bothered to answer my inquiry about prototypes.
(That's another thing the proto-friendly companies do right: instant quotes without log-in requirement)
> but with even less visibility / willingness to interact with private customers
It's honestly depressing. I could believe the theories (off vibes, since I'm not in manufacturing, just a hobbyist) that this is one of the reasons why China is overtaking the West in hardware. Manufacturers here just don't want to talk to you at all unless you're willing to buy a million units, it seems. From what I've heard, in China, it's far easier to get started (and that certainly matches my experience with jlc/pcbway).
Like, I get it, profit wise. But it's a bit of a sad state of affairs.
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