I think one of the reasons the USSR centrally planned economy failed was because they couldn’t get accurate data from satellite sources, meaning there was no chance to make good decisions.
For food service, specifically waiting tables - how much of the tip is because of effort and better service - and how much is due to the attractiveness and general demographic characteristics of the server?
I personally top out at 20% no matter what. If the service is lousy I’ll go lower. When servers/bartenders are comping me then I know they get it and will up my percentage.
Fire/emergency stations are placed so they can get quickly anywhere in their assigned area. If they're at another call when a real fire starts, it's not statiscally probable to be closer than if they were at the base station. They could be delayed even more by the traffic jam caused by the car accident they're responding to.
So better send one of the vans to heart attacks and car accidents and keep the fire truck at the base stations for fires only.
A lot of places have centrally pumped steam, believe it or not! It's pretty neat, although difficult to control depending on the system install date. (Many places are quite old)
The problem here is that it’s testing the implementation details more than the generalized idea.
It’s as if I wrote code to process data in a certain way, write it for an old mainframe and to process a specific set of data. There’s not a ton of generalizability to other data, and how you implement the code on other systems will impact the outcome. Especially because there are few objective measurements to evaluate the success of legislation
> The problem here is that it’s testing the implementation details more than the generalized idea.
Well, the problem is that you can't test the generalized idea either. Even if a law is passed at the federal level, you're still only testing a specific implementation of a regulatory concept you want to implement.
Having a bunch of entities (the states) try implementing the same concept in different ways allows you to explore more of the solution space than if you only have a single entity (the federal government) do it uniformly upfront!
Yes, although this is expensive and harmful, there is little reason to think the bad experiments would adopt the winner, or that we can even measure the best outcome. Plus, for a lot of stuff - we don’t need experiments, we know what works!
As an example, is there any reason to think we need to do experiments on whether children are fed at school for free?
> little reason to think the bad experiments would adopt the winner
What does this mean? Not a coherent sentence.
> that we can even measure the best outcome
So, exactly the same as when it's done at the federal level.
> for a lot of stuff - we don’t need experiments, we know what works
In terms of legislation? Factually incorrect. Legislation/regulation is extremely difficult to get right and it's incredibly rare that there's precedent that is universally-agreed-upon to be beneficial in general, let alone when the states don't try their hand first.
> As an example, is there any reason to think we need to do experiments on whether children are fed at school for free?
Again, what does this mean? This isn't a coherent sentence either.
This is just not an appropriate response, but I'm happy you feel like you made your point. You can chalk up another internet point for p0wnage of someone you'll never meet.
It's entirely an appropriate response given that you made multiple factual claims without providing evidence, and you made several statements that just were incoherent and so I couldn't even understand what your points were.
> I'm happy you feel like you made your point
Factually, I did make my point. I made factually correct statements, and you responded with false claims and fallacies, and eventually realized that you couldn't actually refute my points and so started emotionally attacking me. That indicates that you don't understand the difference between feelings and things that are factually true.
> Was it your intent to shut down a conversation?
No, it was my intent to discover truth. Do you not realize that facts and truth matters and that you can't just lie about things? If you can't justify your positions with facts and logic, you're just a hypocrite and your opinions are meaningless.
Also, Hacker News is specifically about intellectual curiosity. I want to know if what you're saying is true, and engage with points that you make (feelings are not points), and so I ask questions and challenge. Emotional outbursts, like yours, are the polar opposite - they're anti-intellectual, and shut down curiosity.
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