Worst double major: Philosophy of Ethics/Railroad Engineering
My old roommate in Australia was literally this
He works at a startup in San Francisco and is big in the effective altruism scene now
"People talk about escapism as if it’s a bad thing… Once you’ve escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn’t have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality."
"When you say I don’t care about the right to privacy because I have nothing to hide, that is no different than saying I don’t care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say or freedom of the press because I have nothing to write."
Edward Snowden (via self-ownership)
“But people who self-harm and commit suicide are consenting to it! Obviously consent doesn’t matter and BDSM is abuse.”
Well, I think we should respect their wishes in those cases too. That’s allowing them basic autonomy as human beings who can decide what is best for themselves.
A dialogue
…
Because of the network effects, you expect a competitive market to provision too few taxis at too high of prices.I don’t understand. All of the taxis that exist are full, and people are paying really high prices for them. How does this not mean “someone invests in more taxis”?
Econ Jargon: For quantity-setting oligopoly, monopoly, and monopolistic competition models (the three BASIC!!! economic models one might be tempted to apply if taxi drivers aren’t independent), there will be an undersupply of taxis / price over the competitive equilibrium.
Translation out of econ jargon.
Premise: Running a taxi company has moderate fixed costs. You have to deal with lawyers and lobbying and industry groups and a bunch of other nonsense. Also, it’s a good thing to have a decent sized fleet of taxis, so that if one is taken out of commission for whatever reason, you can still serve the customer. Let’s say that this means, in our small city, that five taxi companies is the max your city can support before the inefficiencies are just too high. These are the network effects: the benefits of having taxis under group control.
Premise: more people are willing to call taxis when prices are lower. Every taxi charges the same price: if one charges slightly less, it eats your lunch until you charge less. This isn’t quite accurate, but it really simplifies the model and the argument holds with weaker forms.
Every taxi is the same price. If a marginal taxi is added, this lowers the price on all taxis. If I own a taxi, there is a cost to me of a marginal taxi being added, in that my other taxis earn less. If, say, I own a fifth of the taxis, I know that any marginal taxi will harm all those other taxis, because they will earn less money. As a result, I will have fewer taxis than 1/5 of the taxis that there would be in a world where every taxi supplier was independent and had only one taxi. If I’m supplying fewer taxis, that means that I can charge a higher price for them.