Like the joke about the economists not picking up the $20 bill on the ground?

Faith in the perfect efficiency of the free market only works out over the long term. In the short term we have a lot of habits that serve as heuristics for doing a good job most of the time.

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uncircle 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Like the joke about the economists not picking up the $20 bill on the ground?

For those like me that don't know the joke:

Two economists are walking down the street. One of them says “Look, there’s a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk!” The other economist says “No there’s not. If there was, someone would have picked it up already.”

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shermantanktop 3 days ago | parent [-]

Presumably the non-economist following them picked up the twenty, unencumbered by theory.

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uncircle 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've never seen a $20 bill on the ground in my entire life, so I guess the economists are actually right.

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sgerenser 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I recently saw a $20 bill left in the bill dispenser of a gas station ATM. I didn’t take it because I assumed there was a chance that whoever left it would realize within a minute or two and run back for it. But most likely the next person to see it grabbed it.

	▲	uncircle 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Either you are a good, innocent soul or you’re an economist. Mind you, they are mutually exclusive.

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Symbiote 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I found 500 DKK on the ground outside once, which is about $77.

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3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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ThrowawayR2 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's been so much investigation into alternative architectures for datacenters and cloud providers, including FAANG resorting to designing their own ARM processors and accelerator chips (e.g. AWS Graviton, Google TPUs) and having them fabbed, that that comes off not as warranted cynicism but silly cynicism.

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infecto 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure but for commodities, like server hardware, we can say it’s usually directionally correct. If there are no pi cloud offerings, there is probably a good economic reason for it.

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themafia 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's quite the opposite when corruption becomes involved. There are definite financial incentives for middle men to deliver inefficient and wasteful experiences.

Competition is what creates efficiency. Without it you live in a lie.

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IAmBroom 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Faith in the perfect efficiency of the free market only works out over the long term

... and even then it doesn't always prove true.