kirse

I'm sure this will evolve soon enough and email delivery might increasingly become pay-to-play with all sort of backroom agreements, if it isn't already.

Comment · 2 years ago

H.Pylori is well known to impact iron absorption and serum iron/ferritin levels. Most of the world carries this unknowingly (esp. since childhood), and it has all sorts of silent consequences ranging from fatigue (due to iron impact, etc) to GI issues to stomach cancers.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8513126/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11218379/

Comment · 2 years ago

Cocaine has low calories, reduces appetite, and increases metabolic activity. That's a weight-loss supplement.

Comment · 2 years ago

Nah, I'm just arguing that it's both reasonable and fair to do unto others. Here's some more evidence:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/china-wants-to-ri...

I'm sure it's not "xenophobic moral panic" when China does it though, right?

Comment · 2 years ago

TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press.

No, TikTok is essentially digital opium. And China itself has confirmed that reality by 1) restricting their citizens' daily access and 2) significantly filtering the content they can see on it:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...

It would only be fair of the US to follow China's example of protecting its citizens from numbing out on TikTok digital garbage. We should most certainly should follow suit with an equivalently restrictive measure.

Comment · 2 years ago

What a throwback. Used to run cgi-proxy to tiptoe around ol' Bessie.

Comment · 2 years ago

This is great and really well organized, thanks for sharing!

Comment · 2 years ago

Aren't most insurance rates / rate ranges set by the states? And any further variance is down to the actuarial tables?

If that's true, I certainly couldn't find a table on allowable rate ranges when I did some basic research on pricing and what factors influence it. Certainly open to being schooled on how auto insurance works.

Comment · 2 years ago

After pricing auto insurance recently it's pretty obvious this is happening in that industry as well. While shopping around multiple quotes across 7-8 providers and calling at least 5 separate insurance agents to try to gather quotes, all of these companies are providing similar quotes within a few cents/dollars of each other.

I vent my frustration to a few agents about the yearly rate increase insanity and they all shrug, give their non-empathetic "I understand" telephone script and blame it on the "system" calculating the prices and make some useless excuse about inflation.

I've got a clean driving record, a fully paid-off cheap vehicle, in a reasonably responsible age bracket, and the cost of decent auto insurance these days is essentially another car payment. Within 5 years I'll have paid back the insurance company 60-70% the value of the vehicle. The Gov/FTC needs to take a look at these companies, especially if they're forcing us to hold the insurance to reasonably participate in society.

Comment · 2 years ago

The FTC, of which Khan is now chair, contends that Amazon has found a way to push up prices after all, without losing shoppers.

There's no doubt about this. I spent a few months of my life doing FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) before all the white-labeled Alibaba trash dominated the Amazon search results, and it was very easy to find things in the local Target, BigLots, etc. that could be sent into Amazon and sold at 30/50/100% markups, and it would still fly off the commingled shelves.

Amazon got everyone used to the assumption that Amazon prices were the lowest, then introduced the behavioral convenience of Prime, and then slowly allowed prices to float upwards once that Prime behavior was entrained.

The Prime membership has recently reached an inflection point where the value paid is not worth the value received, I just recently let my 15-yr Prime expire for that reason.

Comment · 2 years ago

Yea I've switched to calling them "CoinBS" for this reason, and I've been with them since the GDAX days.

Between the suspiciously inconvenient outages during market volatility and their forced switch-over to Plaid for bank account verification (during which they unlinked my previously verified accounts), I'm pretty much fed up with their absolute garbage customer experience over the past 3-4 years.

Problem is Binance is not any better either. If someone rolled out a boutique crypto exchange that offers a quality customer experience & phone support similar to TDA/ThinkOrSwim I would gladly sign up in a second.