Maybe also some prominent branding, so that it’s very clear that the strawberry isn’t coming from somewhere like, you know, Erewhon.

In most respects, most of us probably have a considerably higher standard of living than Marie Antoniette, simply because of what technological advancement has provided us with.

e.g.

https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/the-timaru-herald/20160530/281784218342032

Ver­sailles stank. Not just the bod­ily tang one might ex­pect 200 years be­fore the in­ven­tion of de­odor­ant (that was 1888: a paste ap­plied to the un­der­arms), but a rank stench that per­me­ated every room, every cor­ri­dor, and wafted over the gar­dens.

‘‘I shall never get over the dirt of this coun­try,’’ sniffed Ho­race Walpole on a visit to France.

Ver­sailles, the cen­tre of French po­lit­i­cal power from 1682, had more than 700 rooms but no func­tion­ing loos un­til 1768. By the time of the revo­lu­tion, there were still only nine bath­rooms, all in the pri­vate royal apart­ments. The con­tents of cham­ber pots were of­ten sim­ply flung out of the win­dows.

The royal dogs were not house­trained but nor were the courtiers and their ser­vants who crammed into the build­ing. The re­sult was a lava­to­rial free-for-all, from which no cor­ner of the palace was spared.

‘‘Ver­sailles was a vast cesspool,’’ wrote one his­to­rian. ‘‘The odour clung to clothes, wigs, even un­der­gar­ments. Beg­gars, ser­vants, and aris­to­cratic vis­i­tors alike used the stairs, the cor­ri­dors, any out-of-the-way place, to re­lieve them­selves.’’

For Louis XIV and his later im­i­ta­tors, ar­chi­tec­ture was pol­i­tics, a way to over­awe ri­vals for power - no­bil­ity, princes and lawyers - and fo­cus at­ten­tion ex­clu­sively on the ruler. But while Ver­sailles looked mag­nif­i­cent from the out­side, on the in­side it was over­crowded, smelly and in­fested with ver­min.

Most of us probably wouldn’t readily tolerate living like that.

French royalty could, no doubt, have live musicians or actors performing works that they want. But on the other hand, we have a vast digital library of video and audio of such scope and content…they could only comprehend them as dreams brought to life, created with resources well beyond what they could afford, because we have spread the costs over many and provided the output to many.

We can eat food from around the world in any season.

If I want the air in my living space to be chilly in summer, I can do so.

There are definitely some services that I’m sure that French royalty could avail themselves of that we cannot. But I think that it’s easy to lose perspective of how staggering the increases of standard-of-living have been over a couple of centuries.

$19

$18

Normally, in markets, you can sell below someone else’s price and customers will indeed come to you. Lower price means more demand. That is, this is a traditional demand curve.

However, there are some goods for which this does not hold. For such goods, increasing the price actually means that there is more demand. The thing becomes more-desirable the more expensive it is.

That’s frequently associated with luxury goods. There, the price itself can make something a status symbol, or perhaps people use price information to try to judge how desirable the thing is.

The economic term for such a thing is a Veblen good.

A Veblen good is a type of luxury good, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve.

The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.

My guess is that this strawberry isn’t actually all that amazing. What makes it notable is that it, well, costs $19. It may be a Veblen good, in which case you may have a hard time trying to sell similar strawberries while focusing on the value proposition.

Well, originally it was a novel, which is what I know the word for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon

…but apparently it’s also a luxury California grocery store.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon_Market

Erewhon Market (/ˈɛrɛhwɒn/ ERR-eh-hwon) is a California-based upscale grocery chain with ten locations, all in Los Angeles County, California, United States.[4][5][6]

In June 2021, Erewhon became a Certified B Corporation, recognizing its commitment to social and environmental responsibility.

Trump: EU was formed to screw USA – and they’ve done a good job of it

US president uses first cabinet meeting to double down on his plans to make Canada America’s 51st state

On an entirely unrelated note, in news that has been apparently rather drowned out by Trump just happening to concurrently be talking about annexing Canada and taking on the EU:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/21/upshot/house-gop-budget-blueprint.html?unlocked_article_code=1.z04.N3H8.hYR8aCuTbWYO

Energy and Commerce

Cut by at least $880 billion

Medicaid is likely to be the largest target for cuts to achieve the $880 billion in budget savings set out in the legislation. Medicaid, which provides health insurance mostly to poor Americans in a partnership with states, is the country’s largest insurance program, covering around half of all births and two-thirds of all nursing home bills. If all the cuts were applied to the program, it would represent an 11 percent reduction in spending, on average, over a decade.

https://www.kff.org/medicaid/report/the-debate-over-federal-medicaid-cuts-perspectives-of-medicaid-enrollees-who-voted-for-president-trump-and-vice-president-harris/

The Republican-led Congress is considering plans to cut Medicaid to help pay for tax cuts, with the House budget resolution targeting $880 billion or more in potential reductions to federal Medicaid spending. Medicaid is the primary program providing comprehensive health and long-term care to one in five people living in the U.S and accounts for nearly $1 out of every $5 spent on health care. Reductions in Medicaid could have implications for enrollees as well as plans, providers, and state budgets. While there are several policy options under consideration in Congress to achieve savings, it is not clear how much support there is from Republicans (including President Trump) about these specific policies. The discussions in Congress come at a time when support for the Medicaid program continues to be strong. According to KFF polling, Medicaid is viewed favorably by a large majority (77%) of the public and an even larger share of those on the program (84%). As Congress considers reducing Medicaid spending, nearly half (46%) of all people and nearly two-thirds (62%) of Medicaid enrollees believe the federal government is currently not spending enough on the program.

Most participants said they did not recall hearing either candidate mention changes to health care programs (including Medicaid) during the campaign. Because other issues, including immigration and the economy, dominated the campaign, most participants were unaware of either candidate’s health care priorities and any policy changes they planned to make.

“I didn’t hear a peep about healthcare. Nope. It’s immigration for me.”
56-year-old, White male
(Trump voter, Arizona)

Cuts to Medicaid would most-likely not be very popular with the voting public, were they to be a topic of discussion.

In 2010, I don’t think that the typical person used Web forums.

My guess is that if you want a slice of the general population, your best bet are going to be new, large social media websites, because, well, that’s where a lot of the population is, so to a certain degree it’s going to be representative. I just don’t think that a typical web forum in 2010 was representative.

So if what you want is “Facebook as it is in 2025, but without exposing as much identity information”, you’re probably looking at the major social media websites.

If you want something like a 2010 Web forum, well, a lot of those probably still exist. I don’t think that there are “general conversation” things, but lots of special interest stuff. I don’t think I was still using Slashdot much in 2010, but it’s still around, for example. You want that, you probably want to start with an interest and then go hunting.

At least for me, the Reddit-style model (a single software package that handled a “collection” of not-directly-related forums) pretty much was a better replacement for individual forums. There were too many forum software packages that all had some limited subset of features and a limited population. You had to juggle accounts on a ton of different sites.

The other tricky part is that something that old/used may have a worn out battery so any device with a built-in battery may not stay on for very long.

If you can solder, you might be able to replace old batteries.

Honestly, if you think about all the increasingly-aging hardware out there with built-in rechargeable batteries…given that some people would like to use them, the way there are people who like vintage hardware from earlier decades, there have to be some people out there who must specialize in replacing internal batteries.

I mean, it was going to happen at some point, just a matter of China scaling up.

It was a testing year for Airbus’ defense and space division. While its order intake was a record 16.7 billion euros, it reported a loss of 566 million euros — largely due to a 1.3 billion euro charge on its space programs.

looks blank

I didn’t even realize that Airbus did space.

I thought that the big domestic player in European space was Ariane.

goes hunting

Ahhh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArianeGroup

Owners

• Airbus (50%)
• Safran (50%)

Ariane is half-owned by Airbus.

Sounds like they’re going for taking a lighter hand on regulation.

Hmm. You know, I’ve never really thought much about antitrust law in the UK.

I normally think of antitrust in the context of the US. You have a big market there. While the US does have FTAs with some other countries, it doesn’t presently with anyone with a domestic market nearly as large as the US’s is.

But…that’s not the situation with the UK. Post-Brexit, the UK isn’t in the EU. It’s got a market linked to the EU’s, due to the TCA and geographic proximity, but it doesn’t have regulatory authority over what goes on in the EU the way it did when in the EU’s.

The UK’s domestic economy isn’t tiny, but it’s definitely smaller than the EU’s is; about a fifth the size.

My guess is that that means that UK antitrust regulators have less ability to influence what those companies that it interacts with do, because ultimately, being too-restrictive – which affects a company’s dealings in the EU, and could make it less-competitive in the EU, where the costs of any constraint imposed by regulation are most-likely higher due to greater scale – might mean that a company would just choose to do business in the EU but not the UK; they’d always have to weigh that with every antitrust restriction that the UK imposes. Like, say Company A and Company B both do business in the EU and UK and want to merge. EU antitrust regulators are okay with it, but UK antitrust regulators are not. The EU’s economy is about five times that of the UK’s, so the inability to merge is likely going to impact them something like to five times as much in the EU market to the degree that it would in the UK. If they think that the benefit that comes from merging is more than the loss of business in the UK, they might choose to exit the UK rather than comply with the UK antitrust regulation.

In turn, you would expect the UK’s antitrust regulators to aim not to place sufficiently-restrictive requirements such that that occurs, because that’d usually be counterproductive to obtaining a competitive market in the UK.

So I’d kind of think that the post-Brexit UK would be more-inclined to take a lighter hand on antitrust regulation than it did prior to Brexit.

I guess maybe things might work the same way in, say, Canada with the US. I don’t think I can recall Canadian antitrust regulators clamping down hard on a company doing business in both the US and Canada – it’s usually US antitrust regulators taking issue with something. I’ve certainly read more about EU antitrust activity affecting US companies I use than Canadian, though I’d guess that there are more multinationals that I run into that operate in the Canadian market than the EU market.

Hm.

I guess that’d apply to something like mergers. But I guess maybe there are other forms of antitrust regulation where that wouldn’t come up, like restrictions on how a company with a dominant market share might link products together, and there maybe it wouldn’t apply – you could independently and separately follow different regulatory systems in the UK and EU. A company wouldn’t be faced with a “follow UK regulation and be impacted in the EU market” choice then – it could follow EU rules in the EU and UK rules in the UK. So maybe Brexit will change the sort of antitrust regulation that happens in the UK, too – it might still do a lot of “Google is a dominant search provider, so it cannot also link search results to its own mapping services” or something, but not say “Company X cannot purchase Company Y”.

Well, presumably the draw would be pay. As you point out, depends on my financial situation relative to what it pays.

There’s a price point where I could put up with an awful lot for 2-3 months.

I’m not entirely enthusiastic about the fact that the maintaining GitHub account is using an avatar that appears to be a flaming Pepe.

MapQuest is from the 1990s.

Uh huh. So now that we’re not being terribly-exploited by Ukraine any more and Trump can announce that he has brilliantly cut a deal which will, no doubt, make America great again, are we ramping supply of military hardware back up?

It would make the most sense to move the body to a flight attendant seat and have an attendant sit with the passengers.

I think that the flight attendants have those dedicated seats at the ends of the cabin and facing it for a reason, so that they can see what’s going on in the cabin. Like, probably safety reasons for that.

Honestly, I’d just as soon not have a corpse next to me…but I’d also just as soon not have a living person next to me. I don’t see it as the world’s most traumatic experience. I mean, I don’t know whether it’s optimal or not, but it’s an airplane, sticking it there isn’t a wildly-unreasonable thing to do. I can’t see getting that worked up over it, as a passenger.

On the flip side, I also don’t think that it’s wildly-unreasonable for the airline to give them a voucher. I mean, it’s not like “dead body on an aircraft” is a common occurrence and it probably doesn’t cost very much to keep someone happy. I mean, I’ve gotten vouchers for being willing to take a later flight when I didn’t have any schedule to keep.

The whole thing just doesn’t seem like enough of an issue to get that worked up about or play hardball over.

I’d like to see an economist explain the rationale behind the first-sale doctrine applying to IP on physical media but not if it’s not tied to physical media in the US (note that the EU currently does approximate applying it to non-physical media). I have a really hard time seeing a reason for that.

I can believe that the doctrine of first sale shouldn’t be a thing. And I can believe that it should be a thing, and should apply to all forms of media. But applying to one but not the other seems like a pretty hard sell to me.

Physical copies degrade over time, whereas digital information may not. Works in digital format can be reproduced without any flaws and can be disseminated worldwide without much difficulty. Thus, applying the first sale doctrine to digital copies affects the market for the original to a greater degree than transfers of physical copies.

Okay. But…so what? Why do we care whether the market for the original is affected? If that were a factor, wouldn’t we object to the legality of making backups? Wouldn’t we treat more-durable forms of media differently than less-durable forms of media, or take into account the decay in value of the IP itself that lives on the media?

Like, I could understand maybe an argument that permitting a vendor to restrict physical media transfers of IP is economically desirable but simply isn’t enforceable, ergo we’re better off without a lot of halfway attempts to restrain it. But I’ve never seen it explained with that as a rationale.

In most cases, I’d guess that factories don’t need cameras or AI image analysis to track output, because workers aren’t simply putting their output into a single pool with the output of other workers. The factory already has an easy way to know how much output the worker is producing, and, no doubt, has a record of that.

There might be fields of work where that’s not the case, where it’s hard to know what any one worker is actually producing. But I’m dubious that it’s gonna be people doing assembly work in a factory.

There might be more-valuable uses to record and analyze workers in a factory. I remember that in Cheaper by the Dozen, the father works as a motion efficiency consultant — was in the heyday of US doing assembly-line factory work, and he’d go in with a video camera, record workers working, and then break down how workers were working and see if there were different motions that workers could be trained to use to increase output.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study

A time and motion study (or time–motion study) is a business efficiency technique combining the time study work of Frederick Winslow Taylor with the motion study work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (the same couple as is best known through the biographical 1950 film and book Cheaper by the Dozen). It is a major part of scientific management (Taylorism). After its first introduction, time study developed in the direction of establishing standard times, while motion study evolved into a technique for improving work methods. The two techniques became integrated and refined into a widely accepted method applicable to the improvement and upgrading of work systems. This integrated approach to work system improvement is known as methods engineering[1] and it is applied today to industrial as well as service organizations, including banks, schools and hospitals.[2]

But I’m skeptical that trying to find workers who aren’t producing output in a factory using AI vision stuff is going to be all that useful.

Intentional or not is irrelevant.

Unintentional damage still creates problems, sure. But there are ways to mitigate unintentional damage (e.g. trying to revise ship systems to better warn about a dropped anchor or rules on where to anchor), having it be protocol for shore stations to warn ships with AIS that they’re stopped near cable lines, or clustering cables tightly together and focusing on getting people to not anchor right there that don’t work for intentional damage. Maybe push for minimal international standards on crew training — you maybe can’t ban ships from sailing in international waters, but you can restrict who docks at your ports and can agree with other countries to impose similar requirements.

If your risks are intentional cuts, then you have to deal with a lot of other difficult issues, like “what happens if the state just falls back to using something like underwater drones instead of freighters”. And there are approaches that work for intentional cuts that don’t work for unintentional cuts, like deterring a country by threatening it with serious counteraction if it attacks submarine infrastructure.

So if you’re trying to deal with the problem, you are going to care whether you need to worry about peacetime intentional damage or just unintentional damage. Now, okay, you do still have to be aware that a country could go out and cut cables in a war. Intentional damage is always going to be something to keep in mind. But whether-or-not day-to-day intentional damage is occurring should impact how one responds to peacetime cuts.

You can drag an anchor when you’re trying to stay still and the anchor just isn’t, well, anchored; my understanding is that bad weather can cause that.

But some of the above incidents I listed are ships that have their anchor released and are just continuing to sail along while apparently unaware of the fact that they’re hauling an anchor right through the submarine cables that they cross. Like, they aren’t victims of bad weather+bad luck. They’re just screwing up.

At least some of these are accidental, because ships have damaged cables for a long time. Europe’s stopped several ships that have caused damage, had physical access to the ship, and I have yet to heard of one where law enforcement actually wound up saying “we conclude that this was an intentional cut”.

There have definitely been cases where important people have said that they believe that cuts are intentional, but those were not speaking of situations where their investigators had actually come to that conclusion after looking at the ship in a specific incident and asking questions of the crew:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/20/world/accident-or-sabotage-undersea-cables-intl/index.html

European leaders were quick to voice their suspicions. Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that “nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed.”

The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were “deeply concerned” about the incident and raised the possibility that it was part of a “hybrid warfare,” specifically mentioning Russia in their statement.

Their assessment was not plucked out of thin air. Russia has been accused of waging a hybrid war against Europe after a string of suspicious incidents, arson attacks, explosions and other acts of sabotage across multiple European countries were traced back to Moscow.

And the disruption to the cables came just weeks after the US warned that Moscow was likely to target critical undersea infrastructure. This followed months of suspicious movements of Russian vessels in European waters and the significant beefing up of a dedicated Russian secretive marine unit tasked with surveying the seabed.

But two US officials familiar with the initial assessment of the incident told CNN on Tuesday the damage was not believed to be deliberate activity by Russia or any other nation.

Instead, the two officials told CNN they believed it likely caused by an anchor drag from a passing vessel. Such accidents have happened in the past, although not in a quick succession like the two on Sunday and Monday.

The Kremlin on Wednesday rejected the “laughable” suggestions that it was involved, saying it was “absurd to keep blaming Russia for anything without any grounds.”

I can’t find much by way of a graph of submarine cable severing frequency by year, but this (which only shows older years) at least does illustrate that this isn’t a new phenomenon:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Summary-of-the-causes-of-submarine-cable-faults-attributed-to-external-aggression-as_fig1_224378640

https://iscpc.org/publications/icpc-viewpoints/damage-to-submarine-cables-from-dragged-anchors/

Damage to submarine cables from dragged anchors account for approximately 30% of incidents each year representing around 60 faults. Damage to these cables is costly, with telecommunication repairs averaging £500k-£1m per incident and power cable repair costs reported to be in the region of £10m-£100m per incident depending on many variables. Downtime from cable damage has the potential to cause disruption to global communications and energy transmission and distribution.

• One of the most significant anchor drag events in recent history occurred off Sicily in 2008, where a ship dragged its anchor for 300 km, damaging six submarine cables. Such incidents can disrupt multiple cables in proximity, magnifying the impact of an event2 [?].
• Another example is the incident between the Channel Islands and Cornwall, UK where a vessel deployed anchor in poor weather, causing damage to several telecommunications cables3 .
• There was another incident on 17 March 2016 where a vessel dragged its anchor causing damage to telecommunications cables and a power cable, which cut off the electricity supply to the Isles of Scilly4 for a significant period of time.
• The Chilean flag container ship Aconcagua cut three of the then 4 cables linking the United States to Europe in 2002 while sailing from Philadelphia to New York City. The captain erroneously attributed the reduction in the ship’s speed during a gale to the wind when in fact it was the ship’s anchor dragging. Investigation revealed that the anchor windlass had only been secured with the brake and the chain stopper had not been used.
• The Liberian flagged vessel Blue Princess damaged three submarine cables in the Red Sea in 2012. Over a period of 12 hours on 17th February 2012, SEA-ME-WE 3, EASSy, and EIG, causing multiple cable faults. The vessel could be tracked using AIS as crossing the cables at a similar time as faults were reported and appeared to become fastened to the cable with the speed reducing to zero at the time of the final fault during that period.

This is not in any way to discount the possibility that a state could intentionally attack submarine cable infrastructure, which is vulnerable. In the past, cutting cables has been a feature of wartime activity. We have linked Russian intelligence to a set of arson attacks in Europe, so it’s not as if there isn’t a willingness to cause damage. But (a) ships do regularly cause damage to submarine cables and (b) there hasn’t yet been a smoking gun indicating that an investigated cut that has occurred has been intentional.

I get an incredulous “how do you manage to haul your ship’s anchor for hundreds of kilometers and through a number of submarine cables without noticing? What kind of captain are you?” But…people have managed to do so in the past.

Pets will be told about foods, walks, and treats in a foreign language as to prevent them getting excited about things they love during normal conversations

And this was how TheAlbatross’s Labrador became fluent in Croatian.