And from the study linked, that framing/suggestion would be incorrect (at least for the numbers given). "the 12% are not the same every day" is an accurate interpretation. They asked about what people ate _yesterday_...

Again, the whole premise of the article is that there really is such a thing as disproportionate beef eaters (DBE), and it spends time talking about this group explicitly. So the wording doesn't suggest otherwise, it explicitly suggests this is a real group.

Regarding the study this is a both can be true situation. There can be (1) a population who is disproportionate in their beef eating, and (2) a study about 12% doing the most on any given day can count in favor of that group being real and (3) not everyone from the daily 12% is part of the DBE group. It's more likely a venn diagram overlap, and where it doesn't overlap, people who aren't part of the DBE are incidentally in that 12% while being closer to average in the aggregate over the longer term. Those facts can all sit together comfortably without amounting to a contradiction.

They can both be true but 12% of people eat 50% of beef on any given day implies that way more than 12% of people eat 50% of beef on any given year.

Like, it’s probably something closer to 40% than 12%.

He’s right though - indifference to corruption or malfeasance begets corruption and malfeasance. Holding your government and companies to a higher standard of behavior is both possible and necessary for a functional, durable nation. Sure, you can enforce corporate morality via regulation or governmental morality via the courts or ethics committees, but that completely ignores the concept of soft power. Laws can be broken faster than they can be enforced.

The world must be so tidy for you. Who needs actual science when we have your facile hunches?

Well put. Whoever asked this question is undoubtedly a nightmare to work with. Your data is the engine that drives your business and its margin improvements, so why hamstring yourself with a 'clever' cost saving but ultimately unwieldy solution that makes it harder to draw insight (or build models/pipelines) from?

Penny wise and pound foolish, plus a dash of NIH syndrome. When you're the only company doing something a particular way (and you're not Amazon-scale), you're probably not as clever as you think.

I'd go further to say that rules without any verification aren't really rules. You don't make a rule without the suspicion that it'd be more efficient to break them, and if you're not verifying their adherence to those rules, your rule is meaningless.

This is the iterated game that morally bankrupt manufacturers (IE the vast majority) play to insulate themselves in these sort of scandals: - First, they get caught doing A,B,C, so they pass rules about A,B,C - Then they outsource to someone who is willing to do A,B,C, then they get caught outsourcing to violators - Then, they impose rules about A,B,C on these firms, but do no verification of the firms adherence to those rules. It insulates them of liability without ever increasing costs (because the firms still get to break the rules and the company gets to say "I'm Shocked! I told you not to do that!")

I'm more of the position of "trust but verify."

The verification process is exceptionally difficult. We're on HN and I think it should be rather common knowledge that attackers almost always beat defenders because the game is asymmetric. Attackers only need to find a single flaw while defenders need to find a large number of defenses. There is a huge difference in the resource expenditures between these two groups. This is related to the reasons why one single person can fuck shit up (e.g. a bad driver can impact tens of thousands of other drivers) but it is difficult for a single person to fix things. It is the nature of unstable equilibria.

A society, of any form, depends on trust. Like it or not, there are no trustless systems available to us. Certainly not at any meaningful scale.

This does not mean one should be negligent, but rather I'm saying that it isn't easy and the best intentioned can still be taken advantage of. We should recognize this and accommodate this fact when approaching solutions or we will end up with many undesired results.

I think it's worth distinguishing that 'most creators get paid a pittance' is only true on a per-view basis. The total outflows to creators is higher, but the total viewership is massively increased due to the leftward shift in where we live on the demand curve. There's no 'money for nothing' solution where everyone just accepts higher prices and continues consuming at the current rate.

> The total outflows to creators is higher

Is that actually true, though? I've lost count of the number of times I've heard that bands only really make money from touring these days and that streaming money is basically a rounding error.

The total pie has absolutely grown. There were a little under 1 billion US album sales in 2000 (the peak of CDs). Spotify alone paid around $3.5B in royalties in the US last year (with similar #s for apple music and a bit less for YT music).

I suspect the disconnect comes from a) a big increase in the # of artists b) artists trying to compare apples to oranges #s as though every stream would've been an album/MP3 sale c) the timeline of revenues: an album sale is a big cash flow shortly after the album release, but streaming revenue is a slow trickle as users gradually discover the album, listen, re-listen, etc

This data appears to disagree, with revenue peaking in 2000:

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Do you have a source for your numbers?

Well, we just saw Hollywood unions have a 4-month long strike over the portion of residuals they were receiving under streaming. I'm willing to bet that their complaints about not getting what they used to under prior contracts and models are entirely accurate.

We're also in a situation now where the media owners are building silos for their own content instead of licensing it and letting independent platforms compete on platform services and quality. That's not good for the people buying those services, either.

The pie might be bigger, but the same old middlemen are claiming the difference.

There's at least one bit that's missing here, even if the claim is entirely accurate:

Both the total pie and the total number of creators has increased. Hollywood feature film production is [estimated](hhttps://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-in-the-film-indus...) to be 3000-7000 people. There are [approximately 61.1 *million* YouTube creators](https://explodingtopics.com/blog/youtube-creator-stats), or approximately 10,000 times more. There could easily be 100x more money flowing to the total visual entertainment creator community and the old guard film creators could still get less than they used to.

I don't know exactly what to search for to get similar numbers for music production, but I suspect it is similar: There's a lot more creators and they get less each even though it's more in total, and this is especially hitting "old timers" that used to get the bulk of the old total and get less with the new setup.

The industry has shifted greatly for creatives. Musicians especially. In the 90s which was peak old industry music, the labels would take chances on various artists and those artists would have a shot at something big for little while. The label paid for the studio time.

These days with creative tools so accessible and widespread, and the ability to publish so cheap, artists need to produce their own music and find their own following before the label takes them on. Instead of the label paying for studio time the artist does. I think that's why these discussions concentrate on the whole "fewer artists making more of the share" part. It IS different, but its not the whole story.

And I'd probably argue in favor of making creative endeavors more widespread instead of being in the lap of a few label executive taste-makers, but you definitely have fewer artists who can just concentrate on making great music and getting nice royalties. Now you have to do everything for a smaller pay day.

>The label paid for the studio time.

I am sorry but this is completely false. All artist contracts in the 90s stated the label would pay upfront, but all costs would be recouped from future album sales and touring profits before the artist saw a dime. The labels didnt take a chance on anything, they heavily covered their asses by monumental contracts which were very famously difficult to get out of once signed.

If the label contracts were structured as loans that had to be repaid, I agree with "completely false".

But if, as I suspect, most contracts were structured as advances, then if the musician was successful, you could look at it as the musician just having gotten a loan.

But, famously, most musicians aren't very successful, and they aren't in general asked to pay back their studio time.

So I don't think "completely false" is a reasonable response to "the label paid for studio time".

I suspect it’s true, but that also a bigger share of that pie is going to fewer labels and artists. It works out to a net gain for a minority and a net loss for everyone one.

Do you have any sources I can use to dispel this myth the next time I see it?

I recently caught part of a radio interview where a musician bemoaned the fact that he used to be able to sell 10,000 copies of a CD and make a living, whereas now he can have millions of listeners online but still not cover the production costs.

How many times have you listened to your favorite album? Some of my CDs would have worn out in the 00’s if I hadn’t ripped them. In fact I had to use a disc doctor on a few to get a clean scan.

I think the broader point is that improving societal utility is rarely the north star of a startup, not that every business needs to last a century.

You get the climate apocalypse you deserve

When I worked at a certain three-letter-agency, much of the annual legal training amounted to "Here's our incredibly tortuous interpretation of every relevant term in the letter of the law. Don't like it? There's the door."

You don't want a whole bunch of analysts taking their own interpretation of FISA, either. There's the interpretation set by OGC. You're painting this as a bad thing, but it could easily go the other way: some analyst takes an overly broad or permissive personal interpretation of FISA, and ends up doing negative and abusive things. And not just abusive from the point of view of the privacy community, but abusive from the point of view of internal OGC and the law.

It would frankly be insane if your three-letter agency _didn't_ work this way. Everyone needs to understand what the interpretation of the law is, what the legal guardrails are. If you disagree with this, the answer is not just do what you want with FISA.

The point to my post was that there's no dissent allowed from the party line of 'this is definitely kosher'. If you thought the agency was overreaching in its interpretation, you better keep that to yourself, because it was a near-heretical opinion that would be eyed with suspicion, and it's not like you, a lowly rank-and-file employee, were ever going to sway things on that front.

I don't think they meant that interpretation was overly narrow. More like the interpretation was already stretching things well past the intended limit.

That is, the interpretation was meant to justify what people might be tempted to do.

When I was in interrogation school in the US Army, we were told we were only allowed to interrogate non-US citizens off US soil. However, even if a US citizen told us they were a US citizen off US soil, we were allowed to say they "were lying" (and any documents are counterfeit) and interrogate them anyway.

Isn't it ridiculous how they want top talent to find 'sploits or crack codes or whatever but "Sorry, pay is capped at G5, there's nothing we can do. Do it for your love of country", but when it comes to the Constitution? "Bah, don't worry about it!"

Cool, so what kinds of people typically leave and what kinds of people typically stay?

Well, I left for exactly that reason. I imagine those who stayed took an 'ends justify the means' stance that I couldn't abide. The organizations themselves are insatiable - there's no way that, left to their own devices, any three-letter-agency would ever say "Oh, this is beyond our scope, we shouldn't be allowed to access this.", and that combined with rubber stamp 'checks' allowed this surveillance creep.

I think this comment deserves to be read more widely. It always seems all around the world that the three letter agencies are trying very hard to convince people to spy more and I have often wondered where the justification comes from internally and if they have any debate inside.

Self selection would be one example. To be fair, when I once had a beer with someone who worked in that area before coming to academia she basically said you could work out how many intelligence officers a country had, and realise that given the amount of time effort and money it takes to properly surveil someone they were limited to a small multiple of that number of people to spy on "properly". I felt reassured by that. I can also see it being a justification for RoboCop.

if a phone is tied to a govt ID, and the phone is required for interaction with benefits or protections, then the phone is a place where the spy happens, including location basically all the time. "you can turn the phone off" or "you can not take it with you" sounds OK at first, but realize that the critical parts of your life, to sleep, purchase and go to places of social importance, will naturally be included in the location tracking.

"Why did you create the panopticon hive-mind when you could've stopped at any point?"

"Oh... I was going for promo."

What's your solution to stop runaway education costs in this 'voucher first' world? It's not exactly going well in secondary education.

Private schooling is already on average cheaper than public schools in primary education at the dollars spent per child level.

The reason education costs are screaming out of control in secondary education is because the government isn't responsible for student loans but students are and they have no opportunity to discharge to bankruptcy and there are no normal consumer debt protections for them. It's guaranteed free money for universities without any underwriting process and an albatross on the neck of the middle class.

Tuitions will remain high for as long as they have students desperate or ignorant enough to make poor financial choices.

The sad part is that this continues despite universities largely not meeting society's needs nor the needs of the students.

My point is that vouchers distort demand elasticity, just like unchecked student loans, employer-provided health insurance, low mortgage rates, etc distort their respective markets. The fact that costs (not even prices) may be low at present is not an indicator that prices will not balloon in the wake of a voucher system. The private education profiteers are counting on it.

Anecdotally, but the private schools in my large city are miles ahead of the public schools. The difference is so dramatic. I graduated from the same public school system. The children that went to private schools ended up in a far better place.

Do you have any evidence private schooling is bad? This is the first time I've heard it's worse than public school.

> The children that went to private schools ended up in a far better place.

Is this a result of the private schooling or does the socioeconomic status of their parents play a significant role?

I attended both and the people that were rich enough to attend private school but were sent to public school anyway still did very well for themselves, not obviously different from those that attended private school.

Could be parenting too, yeah. I don't think it can be discounted the level of violence in public school. Even when I was in school it was closer to a prison than a learning environment. Both in culture, and in construction. I'm sure this had an effect on kids.

The public schools in my city weren't even accredited when I graduated, as the students were not able to achieve the graduation rates and test scores required. This was despite the influx of billions of dollars to modernize the facilities, equipment, and lesson plans. Beyond that they were dangerous from middle school through the end of high school. Private school was really the only option for anybody who had the funds to escape the public school system.

Multiple decades of studies produced by the NAEP directly refute your argument.

I would reference the confirming NAIS studies as well but they've got some self-interest in those results.

I was curious and only found: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.a...

the data is very very old (20 years), but they did not find significant differences after adjusting for the schools / students characteristics. Unadjusted scores however do look better for private schools.

They release this very easy to find data every year (although items in the chart may be ~10 years old).

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa...

Private schools outperform in nearly all subjects.

thanks, but I think that comparison is not fair, if you're throwing all demographics in one bucket. E.g. I'd bet income explains most of those differences. I'm on the fence about public schools in the US as I'm originally from a different country where private schools are a rarity, but I've learned how bad schools can be here. Anecdotally here in NC public schools have a much better reputation than private.

> What's your solution to stop runaway education costs in this 'voucher first' world?

This assumes a lot of facts not in evidence. In general schools that accept vouchers generally operate on much smaller per-student budgets (especially if you include the capital budget -- buildings and facilities) than public schools do. In many voucher states, the public school gets some level of funding for a student even a parent gets a voucher and sends their child somewhere else.

There are no government backed & guaranteed non-defaultable loans in K-12, unlike secondary education.

Automate/centralize management staff