If by this you mean that standard supply-demand economics can't model price discrimination, which is what's going on here, that's not correct. See, for example, Chapter 10 of David Friedman's Price Theory, where he models price discrimination using supply and demand curves just fine. In terms of this kind of analysis, price discrimination is a way for sellers to try to transfer as much as possible of what would otherwise be consumer surplus, to themselves.
The buyer in a grocery store can't negotiate; the store just sets the price and the buyer's only choice is to take it or leave it. Under the conditions described, the product is still worth it to the buyer who the store is charging the higher price (the one the store knows has more income and so can afford to pay more), at the higher price--there's just less consumer surplus. So the buyer still buys the product. But there's no negotiation anywhere; there's no opportunity for it.
The store manager has a lot of flexibility, and some of the staff are also empowered to take care of things.
If you feel you are being overcharged, see the manager. If you're nice to them, you can negotiate. Remind him how many years you've been a loyal customer. Being polite and friendly works, being a jerk does not.
The ultimate negotiating tactic is to explain your position politely to the store manager, and walk out.
I remember buying a car from a dealer. The dealer wouldn't agree to my price. He was adamant about it. So I got up, left, got in my car, started the engine, and backed out. The dealer came running out of the showroom and said he'd match my price.
Businessmen will always tell you that prices aren't negotiable. That is a tactic for rubes.
All of this is very nice--and irrelevant to the point under discussion.
Under the scenario that the Maryland law is outlawing, the richer customer who is being charged the higher price by the grocery store still finds the product to be worth it to them at the higher price. And since their time has value, and they're just grocery shopping, and they're rich and not trying to pinch pennies, they'll just buy the thing at the price the store is asking. There will be less consumer surplus for them, as I said, than there would be if the store were charging them the same price as the average middle class person--but it's highly doubtful that it will be worth their time to try to extract that extra consumer surplus from the store. That's why stores want to price discriminate in the first place--because they know the richer customers won't bother trying to haggle over price.
From what the article says, it looks to be political pressure about protecting privacy and "consumer rights". Whether the law actually does what the politicians say it's for, is a different question.
This discussion is perverse. Negotiations require leverage, which the average grocery buyer in the USA does not have. As a society we don't benefit from min-maxing absolutely every opportunity.
The PX is subsidized by the taxpayers, and it's a benefit provided to members of the military and their families. A military base is a socialist paradise, which only works because taxpayers pay for it.
My dad grew up a socialist. He was cured of that affliction after living on military bases for years. For example, the economy on a base on the surface looks like a money based economy. But it isn't. The actual economy is based on rank and a currency of mutual favors. For example, the guy who allocates base housing to you obliges you to return a favor if you get better quarters.
Having a higher rank means you can grant more favors, and so get more favors in return.
The USSR economy ran like that, too, on a massive scale.
P.S. The USSR's actual prices on things included the time spent waiting in line. People would pay others to wait in line for them. Talk about inefficiency!
Personal favors do play a role in the private economy, but money is still the dominant currency. Under socialism, the dominant currency is favors. Favors are a form of barter, and barter economies are inefficient. I can explain why if you like.
Physics is so deep in epicycles now, and without observations to force people to sacrifice their numerically accurate dumpster fire on the altar of parsimony, we may never progress.
The problem is that we have a bunch of people trying to keep themselves relevant amid a great reshuffle, and there's so much noise that lovingly hand-crafted content gets ignored, so your only rational option if you don't already have an established audience is to slopspam.
The US committed massive treaty violations and genocide, on top of huge imperialist destabilization of many sovereign nations. Tianmen square and the Uyghers are bad, but we're straight up evil.
The Chinese government regularly kidnaps its own citizens, who have no due process rights, and is currently engaged in a mass genocide of a racial group they consider “inferior.”
Additionally, they have supported Russia consistently during their occupation of Ukraine, and just install leaders for life.
I’m confused how you think the US is worse. I say this as an Afroindigenous person who is very clear about the harms white supremacy has inflicted upon the cultures I am a part of.
Breaking shit is the path of most resistance. Do not do this unless you're young and poor.
The way to win is economic resistance. Stop spending and stop paying taxes. Crash the fucking economy so deep into the ground that the country self-immolates.
A bad economy is a noose around the neck of the people who own it, which in this case is the right wing authoritarians. The next people in line are the social democracy leftists. Look to Mamdani for where we're going when we hang the traitors.
Gemini had the best long context support for the longest time, and even now at >400k tokens it's still got the best long context recall.
Gemini is just not trained for autonomy/tool use/agentic behavior to the same degree as the other frontier models. Goog seems to emphasize video/images/scientific+world knowledge.
My experience is it advertises large context and then just becomes incoherent and confused as it climbs to fill that context.
e.g. it sucks at general tool use but sucks even more at it after a chunk of time in a session. One frustrating situation is to watch it go into a loop trying and failing to edit source files.
I often wonder how my old coworkers from Google get by, if this is the the agentic coding they have available to them for working on projects on Google3. But I suspect the models they work with have been fine tuned on Google's custom tooling and perform better?
The only AI use case that cares about latency is interactive voice agents, where you ideally want <200ms response time, and 100ms of network latency kills that. For coding and batch job agents anything under 1s isn't going to matter to the user.
tbh, that's a good point about the voice agents that I hadn't considered. I guess there are some latency-sensitive inference workloads. Thanks for pointing that out.
A customer service chatbot can require more than one LLM call per response to the point that latency anywhere in the system starts to show up as a degraded end-user experience.
I think the intent is that if you can cleanly encapsulate some complexity so that people working on stuff that uses it don't have to understand anything beyond a simple interface, that complexity "doesn't exist" for all intents and purposes. Obviously this isn't universal, but a fair percentage of programmers these days don't understand the hardware they're programming against due to the layers of abstractions over them, so it's not crazy either.
Theoretically yes. In practice even a few weeks before it ended, the actual rate limit was down to what it was before the promo. And now I'm getting roughly 0.25x of what I got before the promo.
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