You can simulate grayscale with dithering, similar to drawing with a pen or pencil. If you really need grayscale or color you can buy eink displays that support it, even ones up to 300ppi. I don't know if 1w would be enough to power them though, and they're a bit more expensive.
Considering these types of displays don't require active energy input to function, I don't see why you couldn't update any size display with 1W. You'd need to progressively update parts of the display at a time, which likely requires extra engineering effort, but in theory it should work.
OK. Then why not any of those places become the innovation engine of the world? I heard people would become more creative and innovative under those circumstances.
You might now know this if you live in North America because Australia hardly enters our consciousness or our news cycles, but in many parts of the world Australia has a reputation of being a very innovative country, especially in physical engineering and software. Part of it has to do with their anti-authoritarian heritage and survivalist mindset--they don't take hierarchy too seriously. Whether their creativity is helped by a generous welfare society or not, I'm not sure, but you definitely can't say Australians aren't innovative.
> I heard people would become more creative and innovative under those circumstances.
That could be one of the possible outcomes, yes.
Remember too that Australia only has a population of 25 million - only 7.5% of America. So even if Australia was twice as creative and innovative as America, it can still only innovate and create 15% as much as America can simply because of the size difference.
Another outcome from all this might just be that you create one of the best places to live on the planet... i.e. one of your cities has been voted world's most livable city (or second place) for decades.
Australia is doing pretty damn well. The pay there is fantastic, and it's one of the few countries where you can work any honest job and still get paid well (I can attest that this is not the case in the U.S.). Many foreigners flock there in large part for this reason. 1 month+ vacation, strong healthcare system, good benefits, etc. And remember their population is only 24.6 million.
I'd say having a higher standard of living is more important than being the "innovation engine of the world", however arbitrarily defined that is.
It's literally not a UBI, did you not see the OP spell that out?
Means-tested welfare is misaligned with productivity because the money stops coming once you make more. A UBI is a more pragmatic, efficient approach to reducing wealth inequality.
He's speculating on a commodity, it's just not corn or potash.
Nobody expects that there's going to be an acute, worldwide shortage of wheat and that it will be unavailable anywhere.
Demand goes up, prices go up, same as anything.
Now - this kind of arbitrage has very, very limited value for society (there's an economic argument for price clearing), so we can think of it as 'gouging', but sometimes this is not the case.
I think at this scale, price arbitraging for normal household goods provides zero net value (in fact negative value because it involves work and effort without net value creation). Amazon, Wallmart etc. should probably clamp down on this because it's their customers who pay by having middlemen in between.
People's willingness to pay for the service suggests otherwise?"
No - 'willingness to pay' is not 'value creation'.
The net surpluses to society are the same with a middleman, it's just they've been distributed differently.
Assume:
$1 cost to make good
$5 average consume 'highest price point'
This means, a bottle sold for $2 to a consumer, means a $3 surplus for the consumer.
If there is a middleman who buys for $2 and then sells for $3 to the consumer, the consumer surpluses are reduced. Consumers only get $2 instead of $3 in surplus, because $1 went to the middle man.
The 'economic pie' is not increased by basic arbitrage.
Now, the caveats:
1) In large liquid markets, price clearing and discovery actually ads some financial value. Even providing liquidity has material value. So in some cases, there is some systematic benefit from arbitrage. There is some 'growing of the pie' and 'more surpluses' for everyone at this point.
2) If it's 'more than arbitrage'. If the 'middleman' was doing shipping, buying in bulk and selling in units, special shipping/packaging or anything else, then there's possibly value creation. Even buying ahead of time, sitting on inventory and smoothing out the supply during demand peaks - this is not so much arbitrage/middleman - this is actually wholesaling. Again, they are creating value.
3) The demand curve has shifted quite a lot over the last little while, but I don't think this changes the arbitrage, it's really just arbitrage. It has a 'caveat' in that this middleman guy may very well have not known the real extent of a supply shock.
4) Even when there can be 'value creation' it doesn't mean 'everyone wins' necessarily, for example, the wholesaler could increase the real value of a product by $X but then sell it for exactly that much more, so the 'net economic pie' is increasing, but they were able to 'grab all of the increase' meaning consumers don't win anything.
Most capitalism involves quite a bit of economic surplus for consumers, this is why capitalism works really well and makes almost everyone rich. That you are able to buy a 'dishwasher' for $500, saves you probably $10's of thousands of dollars in labor, i.e. there are massive surpluses to you. Similar for most commodity goods - consumers win big time, even if they don't get direct dollars to put in their bank account as a measure of that value capture.
Different consumers place different amounts of value on goods. Normally, market prices react to balance this out.
When prices don't move (or are not allowed to) this no longer works. Let's investigate the situation with an example: we have one bottle of sanitizer (produced for 1$) and two people willing to buy. Alice values the product at 5$ and Bob does so at 50$. The retail price is 2$.
Without an adjustment in the price, randomly Alice might snatch up the sanitizer. For a consumer surplus of 3$. If Bob had managed to snatch it, there would be a surplus of 48$.
If a 'price gouging' middle man came in and raised the price, the likelihood of the product going to the consumer who values it more goes up by a lot. 45$ (= 50$ - 5$) of value for the economy are created.
In addition, a common way people deal with these situations is by queuing. What queuing does is to add a time cost to the monetary costs of the purchase. Queues increase until the total cost of the marginal person who could join the queue is at something like a market clearing price.
Unfortunately, that price will mostly be made up of wasteful queuing effort that no-one benefits from.
(PS: I didn't downvote you. I actually upvoted you after I saw your comment was in the negatives. The HN crowd can be pretty knee-jerk with their votes. Any topic around economics (or politics?) is especially fraud with that.)
"Your analysis is too simple.
Different consumers place different amounts of value on goods. "
My analysis is not 'too simple' because the 'averaging assumptions' I made are valid in the context of illustrating my point.
Obviously, there are 'supply and demand curves' and that everyone is going to gain different surpluses - but it doesn't matter, and just confuses the issue.
.. which is why I used an 'average consumer' with some arbitrary, made-up price points.
Your example is flawed:
"the likelihood of the product going to the consumer who values it more goes up by a lot."
This is not true, in fact, just the opposite (given the same supply/demand curves), when a middleman 'buys low and sells higher' there is definitely a lower chance that consumers will yield greater surplus on any given transaction, all things being equal.
Now - in any given random transaction, sure there will be greater/less surplus, but that's beside the point.
In fact, when the market clears fully there's a 100% chance that fewer surpluses are going to consumers with a middleman.
There is a special assumption in your example that's not overt which is 'when prices don't move' - I suppose you're hinting at a change in the demand curve, given the 'new calamity' of coronavirus. Whereas people valued Purell 'less before' and 'more now' there's the possibility that a 'middleman' has created 'value for society' by buying up Purell when the did not need it a lot, and selling it when they really did need it a lot more.
The problem with this argument is 'inventory'. There was already quite some inventory of Purell 3 weeks ago. The 'middleman buying it all' would have only decreased usage of Purell during 'nonessential' times very marginally, the overall supply really wouldn't change.
So even with a shifting demand curve, it's still no material value creation by a middleman.
If you were to expand this activity across time - for example, the US stockpiling of Oil reserves etc. - I would say this isn't really arbitrage, and the US is not acting as a 'middleman' - there are very real working capital costs involved in doing this, with measurable strategic advantages.
Finally - your note about 'queuing' is flawed as well:
"that price will mostly be made up of wasteful queuing"
No - it's not 'wasteful queuing' - they are queuing because they get better prices! They are 'playing with time' instead of 'paying with money' which is absolutely a choice many people might take, depending on how they value their time.
Again - pure arbitrage doesn't 'create value' for society, small caveats aside as illustrated in my previous note.
If there are acute shortages, yes lives can be at stake because of major disruptions in the food supply.
Several weeks ago, nobody assumed that 'Purell' or 'toilet paper' was going to fully sell out everywhere, rather, simply that there would be increased demand for it.
All retailers who sell Purell have their buyers clamoring to buy as much as possible because they know their customers want it, and there's no reason to think that the price won't be increased somewhat.
In fact, given the excessive demand and challenges in production, Purell will probably be increasing its wholesale price ... and then some.
So are retailers - buying up as much Purell as possible and probably selling for a little bit of a markup considered 'hoarders'? So long as they have the intention of selling it for not-some-crazy-price, then it's just normal business.
There's no reason individuals can't do the same.
As long as this guy was not price gauging, and he was in fact selling, then what are they going to charge him with exactly?
It's reasonable that the government put restrictions on certain goods during a crisis, such as margin limits, the requirement to not hold inventory etc. but the same would have to apply to this guy.
If he bought his inventory before any emergency crisis or calamity ... then again, what's the legal crime? Buying Purell 2 months ago was normal, but 'having Purell inventory' now is illegal?
I have no lost love for this guy, but that he gave his inventory away is punishment enough.
He stopped being "supply and demand" when the state of Tennessee declared a state emergency.
Upon the declaration of a state emergency, charging "grossly excessive" prices for food, construction services, emergency supplies, or other vital goods or services.
Subject to civil penalty of between $1,000 and $3,000 per violation.
The definition of "excessive" or "unconscionable" pricing is generally determined by looking at average prices in the affected area over a given look-back period prior to the emergency, typically six months or so. If prices are 10 or 15 percent higher (some states have different thresholds), then it may be determined that price gouging has occurred.
*He was making good money while the going was good.. --BUT-- he should've known the laws the surround his entrepreneurial endeavor. He should've known that he needed to stop selling over 10% ~ 15% when the state declared an emergency.
Because there was clearly no sort of distribution infrastructure to get hand sanitizer to people without having to go into the stores. Right.
NPR's talked about retail arbitrage before and sure there are all sorts of crazy reasons people buy stuff at inflated prices through Amazon and eBay. What's missing though is that typically the sellers are capitalizing on things that are difficult-to-impossible to find elsewhere (e.g. Trader Joe's products, none of which are otherwise available from other vendors or online from TJs) or to capitalize on sale pricing.
Neither of those things are true here with the guy hoarding hand sanitizer. Whether or not he donated his stockpile to charity under duress or not he still deserves to be punished.
Sure, and ostensibly the United States has some sort of don't legislate morality doctrine. Just because I think he deserves to be punished doesn't mean our legal system will punish him.
I'm certainly not above public shaming especially when the guy has very publicly and unequivocally explained what he's doing.
Judges and juries decide criminal penalties. Fellow citizens decide social penalties. Nobody should be banging on his door, but I'm fine with both his neighbors and the world at large telling him what they think.
Second rules out cause though. If you have A=>B and B=>A as possibilities, and you can rule one of them out with a very simple question, that's a good way to start.
If computers came after electricity, they didn't cause electricity. That says nothing about the possibility of electricity causing computers, but it brings us forward nonetheless.
"geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition"? Really? This author is not qualified to speak for geneticists.
Dawkins: It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.
Crazy woke activitists like this author is not qualified to speak for science. They think if something is politically wrong must also be scientifically wrong. It is not.
Yes, scientifically rigorous does not equal moral. And the eugenics debate is coming up in a different form now with Gene therapy. From a moral perspective, I don't know of any genuine and sincere arguments that we should not genetically engineer an infant who was born with a devastating genetic disease. If we can cure sickle cell for example, we of anything have a moral imperative to. But, that technically lies under the umbrella of eugenics. It raises questions of what is a disease - if blue eyes (or, more realistically, dark skin) lead to discrimination in society, is that enough of a disadvantage to be worth engineering a child to have brown eyes or white skin? In general the consensus is no. So where is the middle ground? Or, is it a false question and fixing sickle cell is not even on the same sliding scale as changing skin color? We don't know the answers yet, but these are active moral and ethical questions that are technically under the umbrella of eugenics that we need to answer.
Dawkins hasn't been relevant in the field of evolutionary biology for 15+ years and I don't know why people pay attention to whatever he says just because he built a brand about being an an edgy atheist.
There are literally dozens of arguments as to why 'eugenics' (beyond very basic hanging fruit like eliminating monogenic diseases etc.) wouldn't work and doesn't make sense to begin with and many of them have been spelled out in the tweet's replies and blog posts, I'll let you do your homework.
> Just because you can breed fragile animals for narrow purposes does not mean you can breed a better human.
Note that your whole argument hinges purely on the meaning of the word "better". Once you rephrase the issue in terms of "can we bread a human that's more like X or less like Y", the answer is "obviously, yes". Your whole argument is based on some subjective judgement as to whether these are "better", but it is completely irrelevant insofar as answering the question whether artificial selection in humans is possible, and whether it could significantly affect trait distributions -- the answers to these questions are yes, and yes.
By the way, we are already breeding humans more fragile, precisely due to increase in medical state of art. If medicine technology helps significant number of humans to survive and reproduce that otherwise wouldn't have, and it clearly and obviously does so, it will result in observable increase in traits that would significantly decrease the fitness in the context outside of human civilization, just the same as farm animals. I don't think that this complex issue of not just letting those people die without reproducing can be neatly wrapped up in a single word "better", but make no mistake: selection for more fragile humans is very much happening, right now.
Removing the word ‘Better’ makes this into a straw man. Nobody argues that humans aren’t subject to selective breeding.
It’s not Eugenics if it doesn’t involve someone’s idea of what is ‘better’. In that instance it’s just genetics.
Given that we are already producing humans who are more fragile, it’s easy to see that further directed evolution could push us more in that direction.
Civilization itself has many fragilities, which we are currently insulated from to the degree that we ourselves are anti-fragile. It’s easy to see that directed breeding could lead to a more fragile civilization.
That would be a failure of eugenics. Dawkins foolishly oversimplifies and fails at his argument because he doesn’t take the time to understand the meaning of the word.
It is not at all obvious how we could avoid this failure. Dawkins silly examples actually show the direction to the failure mode, not the direction to successful eugenics.
Actually this event may also become a test of the validity of those measures / indicators. One may argue those measures / indicators are not setup for this purpose.
