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> If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers?

In some sense, sure, any time you buy something you apply some upward price pressure. Of course, whether the resulting price changes measurably depends on many things, like the scale of your purchase relative to the scale of the market, the price elasticity of demand, who the marginal buyers and producers are, etc.


What makes this argument less compelling is that “year 1 AD” also didn’t exist at the time, and this isn’t a great reason to abandon the arithmetically sane approach of zero-indexed year numbering.

The calendar was back-dated 500 or so years after Jesus, by a European guy before Europe had the concept of zero, leaving us with 1-indexed years. Then, 200 or so years after that, another guy (still lacking the concept of zero) made the even less venerable decision that the year right before 1 AD would be 1 BC.

We could just decide today that 0 came right before 1 AD and was the first year of the first century AD. Then we’d just have to shift all BC dates by 1 year in all our history books.

The upside would be that arithmetic on year labels starts working again. The downside is that there are way too many history books and no one will ever do this.

Of course, the easier way out is to just decide today that either 1) the first century began in 1 BC or 2) the first century had 1 fewer year than all the other centuries.


We could also just define that 0 AD = 1 BC and don't have to rewrite any BC dates.

That ignores the actual issue here, which is the change in rules. Index funds already seek to own the entire market, and when most people chose these index funds there were rules about when newly listed stocks get purchased by the funds. And now those rules are being changed.

Index funds generally try to match the performance of the index, but most are not required to hold the same companies as the index itself does. They typically do, but managers often have choices.

> Index funds already seek to own the entire market, [...]

No, it depends on the index in question.


Yes, most index funds don't literally intend to own the entire market for any sufficiently broad interpretation of the word "entire."

But the point is that we have notable index funds which are marketed to customers as having the intention to own segments of the market according to certain rules, and they are changing those rules with relatively short notice and for reasons that seem suspicious to many customers.


> Yes, most index funds don't literally intend to own the entire market for any sufficiently broad interpretation of the word "entire."

I mean that your index doesn't even have to own a segment of the market. Just look at eg how the Dow Jones Industrial Average is constructed. When a company has a stock split, it changes its weight in that index. That has nothing to do with 'the market'. (Stock splits have approximately no influence on your weight in the S&P500.)

Or you could have an index that captures all the stocks whose ticker starts with X minus those that start with Y plus the current temperature in Frankfort, Kentucky, in Rankine degrees.


It's a bizarre distinction, because "tool" does not imply "highly customizable" or even "repairable." In fact, even the distinction between "appliance" and "tool" is odd, since those are nearly synonymous in everyday usage, and both strongly imply a device designed for a narrow use case.

I kinda wish that the industry norms changed such that it wasn't so taboo to just name and shame these companies.

I do think sometimes the interview process can be weird as hell, but if one is to name and shame it doesn't help really, they could change their processes and even take feedback but if there's a constant record of the oddities it can turn off potential perfect fits. I've been shocked how many people will base their approach off of Glassdoor reviews from 5 years ago for example. I think it's fair for a company to improve, plus it makes for funny posts like this!

Also I'm not sure it's such a tabboo as it is a stigma on the applicant!


It’s not just innocent ignorance of statistics. There’s also deliberate lying in mass media, both for partisan political goals and simply because sensationalism attracts eyeballs.

While Spain does sound lovely, I don’t think “having anything to do” was really in my generation/demographic’s mindset while we roamed around the neighborhood. This was small town Midwest in the 90s. We just roamed around doing nothing.

But there was a place in which to do nothing - whether it was a scrappy patch of land that's now a big-box store, or a permissive neighbour's garden who has now put up a fort knox of ring cameras, or a mall that used to tolerate kids just screwing around that now has a fleet of rent-a-cops. Third spaces aren't just trendy urban cafes, especially as a child. Having a place that feels like "your bit" is increasingly rare.

You think malls didn't have security on the past?

I came up in malls in the past. They did but it was also different. You could be a kid there and it was more tolerated. You weren't treated like a suspicious person by default. (Unless you were not white, or a punk. Then security tailed you the whole time.)

Have you been to a mall today? They are still shockingly busy with gaggles of teens roving around.

They are either shockingly busy, or complete ghost towns, depending on how much power the anchor stores had. A lot of malls were kept afloat by the big department stores, and those are doing bad now that those stores are on the ropes. Like, really bad, think "less than 50% occupancy of stores, air conditioning being run at a bare minimum because it's too expensive" bad. Others (notably the ones that Westfield bought after their success with Valley Fair in San Jose) focused more on the "affordable luxuries" segment, with small stores selling specialized stuff, and are doing fine.

Also you'd take your bicycle and pretend it is a motorbike, hacking stuff likw mounting a playing card to the seatstay so it hits the spoke and make revving sound when you accelerated or looking for planks and construction material to build ramps

No one wants to live in cities any more. They’re too crowded, housing is too expensive, and the traffic is too bad.

Lots of types of contracts bought and sold between individuals are prohibited by law.


They problem is the federal government considers these particular contracts are generally legal, and the states have no authority.


The datalist examples definitely work on my iPhone. They integrate into the autocomplete suggestions above the native iOS keyboard. There’s no way to browse all the suggestions, but I suppose that’s not an intended use case for datalist.

However, the disabled attr on group definitely does not work!


It seems the autofill bar only populates with the first three items in the datalist and also does not clear when navigating to a regular text field like this one. Kind of an interesting way to have screwed it up.


It initially populates with the first 3 options, but it also updates as you type, with what appears to be a case-insensitive prefix filter.


That’s funny, in my case it tries to autofill my contact information


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