We all know how much local PDs like collecting traffic fines, but I wish they would enforce the laws around yielding to pedestrians with the same enthusiasm as speed limits. I walk a lot and pretty much every day someone blows by in front of me while I'm in the crosswalk or takes a right on red into me because they're not looking. It'd be trivial to set up a sting for this sort of driving, just have one plain clothes officer cross back and forth with another cop parked on a side street ready to flash their lights.
Both things can be true. If you're truly pessimistic this is the only thing you would expect, and not the other stuff that happened- a globally coordinated vaccine rollout to every country on earth.
CPI functions to obscure disproportionate price increases in essentials by lumping them in with cheapening commodities (e.g. electronics) that have a high demand elasticity. It's as much a choice to to use CPI to come to the conclusion things are fine, as it would be picking "arbitrary items" such as the essentials: food, shelter, medical care, and transportation that would paint a picture distinctly less fine.
>CPI functions to obscure disproportionate price increases in essentials by lumping them in with cheapening commodities (e.g. electronics) that have a high demand elasticity.
Right, because it's not "essentials price index" or whatever.
>as it would be picking "arbitrary items" such as the essentials: food, shelter, medical care, and transportation that would paint a picture distinctly less fine.
The BLS makes the constituent price indices available as well as their weights, so you can easily vibecode an "essentials" index.
I hear this all the time as a rationalization for why people don't go out anymore, but I don't buy it. You're afraid people on the internet might see you having fun? I've had people shove a phone in my face and take video while I was out dancing. It's rude, but it's not a big deal. The reason people don't go out is because Live Nation/Ticketmaster made live music outrageously expensive and strangled small venues.
I don’t buy that as the or even a reason. I’m older and we had raves before any legit venue would touch them. I remember once a venue was forced to cancel due to local law enforcement pressure. It happened the day before. Word spread real quick that we would just meet in a field on someone’s private land, a place we regularly had keg parties and most teenagers were aware of. We always found a way to party in those days. It was the number one objective every week, knowing where we would party on the upcoming weekend. This all was in 90s before anyone I knew had a mobile phone and the internet was not very useful yet.
My observation is that we were just bored a lot. It has been a long time since young people have been as bored as we were back then.
Totally different decade, but my 90s high school experience was very similar to the movie Dazed and Confused. It’s odd how similar those experiences were versus what has come with the tech disruption of youth.
> My observation is that we were just bored a lot. It has been a long time since young people have been as bored as we were back then.
Eh, I think it depends more on the location, than anything else. I grew up rural, we did basically exactly the same thing as you described, hosting raves in the forest, beaches and what not until we get word that police was on it's way (tiny place, everyone knew everyone, police coming was big news as we didn't have local police).
We did have cellphones, the internet and more, but still, we were bored and dancing all night in a forest was the most fun we could have :) This was between around 2008-2011 sometime.
I dunno, we were "social mediaing" back in 2000s sometime, that's when most of the youth started posting pictures of themselves on the internet and using computers+webcams for communicating among ourselves, many of us used our Sony Ericsson (or similar) phones for taking pictures. I think that particular website that started it all, peaked around 2007 sometime, and was shut down by 2010 already, because of lack of activity. Plenty of sites between 2000-2010 that was the predators to modern social media too, some of them literally centered around sharing and commenting on images, kind of like Instagram, but way before.
For the impact to be felt as a generational shift that is observable IRL, the social media had to reach a certain point of critical mass. The apps/algo needed to be tweaked for addiction. It also become a firehose of content that was pretty realtime, so as to induce FOMO
Things like Flickr was a social site that had absolutely no impact on anyone’s behavior. There was no FOMO because it was just something you browsed at your own pace. Async web forums and email became synchronous chats. The phone started spending more time in your hand than your pocket.
Even things like streaming television wasn’t a binary but an evolution. Netflix streaming started in 2007. It wasn’t until 2012 they became a producer and started the binge phenomenon by releasing a full series all at once. Those first five years practically didn’t matter for Netflix. Many people saw no advantage over the traditional DVD shipping service. Once binging began people were jumping onto the streaming service in droves. It still took a few more years to really reach a point of saturation. Then, there was massive cord cutting and birth of the streaming service landscape of today that is heavily fragmented. But also provides an unlimited supply of entertainment that keeps people appeased and out of meatspace.
Sure there’s always a lag between city and rural on most things, even fashion trends and whatnot. That being said, I think the lag is gone and has fully saturated most places and demographics by now. The tiktokification is a huge factor that only hit in late teens in the US.
Watches are the commodity of choice for corruption in some circles. I know people in jewelry and a significant portion of their transactions are watches to Chinese businessmen, formerly through Hong Kong, now through Singapore. They're high value items with razor thin margins.
I collect watches worth >$100k and I promise you that most collectors in this range are just watch nerds that have more money than they know what to do with.
Singapore is a big watch market because it has a very tight knit and wealthy collector community.
Margins on most watches in this range are around 10% on the low end. I wouldn't call that razor thin.
Collectors are the end buyers, who ultimately create the value; but the existence of collectors as a predictable sink, permits the trading of the thing they collect as a medium of exchange and (short-term) store of value.
Similar to fine art. For every purchase of a painting by a collector who's actually going to display it, there are 10-100 being purchased by people who're going to keep them in freeport awaiting resale.
Basically like commodities futures. You don't buy onion futures because you have anything you would personally do with multiple tonnes of onions.
What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches? Is it kind of like art collections, where its a decent store of value while maintaining a collection of something you are personally interested in? Or is it more for "love of the game"?
Not saying its not a cool thing to collect, well made watches are a very cool piece of engineering, I'm just curious if there's any "special" appeal outside of "i like this thing and have the money to enjoy it" :)
> What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches?
You can carry them on your person through airports and other places reasonably unmolested in a way carrying a bunch of cash isn't so easy.
> Is it kind of like art collections, where its a decent store of value
Art doesn't store value: It trades whatever number the parties exchanging it want it to have, so those parties can manipulate their total annual revenues, which might be confused with value if you cannot think of why else someone would want to tell other people they made more or less money in a year, but is not valuable to anyone else.
> It trades whatever number the parties exchanging it want it to have
I'd argue that that's the very definition of (economic) value. Someone puts a cost on a good/service, and someone who values and can satisfy the cost gets said good/service.
Sure it is, but that's not a way to store value (what economists specifically call store of value if you want to read more about it), which is a little different:
If you buy a €100k rolex, you probably can't be sure you can sell it for more than €100k anywhere at anytime in the future.
You probably can't even find a bank that would take that €100k rolex you just bought as collateral for €500k on a 30y mortgage.
That's why a €1m watch collection is never going to be worth €1m unless we're talking raw materials.
> > What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches?
> You can carry them on your person through airports and other places reasonably unmolested in a way carrying a bunch of cash isn't so easy.
Now I have to ask, why do you need to carry a bunch of cash through airports, and why so often that you need a method of doing so?
I'm of course assuming you're doing this for legal reasons, I understand all the reasoning for less legal ones, but then that's hardly comparable to the original question, so I think this is a fair assumption.
Sure, some people use them to signal status but I'd say the vast majority of the collector community does not buy expensive watches for that reason.
At the $100k range you get a lot of things that appeal to a watch enthusiast: true high-horology hand finishing (like handmade anglage and sharp interior angles), some of the more advanced complications, more interesting escapements, etc.
More this. I love wearing what are basically highly complex, mechanical works of art on my wrist. It appeals to both the engineer/nerd and the romantic inside me.
Some watches hold value, others don't. I have some watches that have halved, others that have doubled. But I don't really intend to sell so it's immaterial.
Obviously, per definition a collector is probably a watch nerd.
But I think the point is that if I want to transport money from one country to another, I can buy a watch for 30k, take it to the other country, and sell it to a collector relatively easy for probably the same amount of money.
Same if I wanna give a bribe to somebody, I can give them a watch for worth 30K and they can easily sell it for cash to a collector for 30K.
So that person would not be a collector. They would just use it to transfer the value.
If you're buying new, there is almost no dealer on the planet that will let you return watches this expensive. They lose so much value the moment you put them on.
I say "almost" no dealer because some domestic dealers have a 24-48h return policy but they are pretty strict about these things and care way more about their business than any money laundering attempt. They will be very suspicious of you buying in one country and asking for a return label from another.
Most of the time you can wear a watch through customs and move $250K without anyone blinking an eyelid. If it has a box and papers you mail those ahead of you. (Don't have them in your luggage)
> The question is whether we feel air travel is as essential to everyday life as busses and trains are.
Anywhere I can get to by train in the USA I can go faster and cheaper by plane. By bus I can go "cheaper" if I ignore the value of my time and the people offering me meth at the bus-stop.
> Specifically, for the least happy group, happiness rises with income until $100,000, then shows no further increase as income grows. For those in the middle range of emotional well-being, happiness increases linearly with income, and for the happiest group the association actually accelerates above $100,000.
Exactly. There are other things you can do to be happy and some personalities are simply miserable, but there's nobody who's better off with less money. I'd be curious to see if this holds in societies with better social safety nets for whom money isn't as directly tied to survival or options in how to live.
The state of the UK suggests to me that Orwell's writing was as much an expression of British post-colonial anxieties as it was an indictment of the USSR. His books are no doubt pushed in US education system for their nonpartisan anti-communism.
1984 was surprisingly prescient about automatically generated propaganda. The slop deluge we're going through certainly echoes the "Novel-Writing Machines".
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