gbacon

We will clean up in the coming labor shortage.

The law of leaky abstractions strikes again.

> All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

Name names; name and shame. Be specific about the charge you’re making. I’m not interested in the handwaving.

I assume that you understand that The Jungle was a work of fiction and that Ida Tarbell’s father was a failed oilman.

When asked for specifics about the evidently irresponsible charge that you made, you answered with conjectures.

You are one sick puppy. This is a brilliant idea.

The class NP-complete contains the hardest problems in NP. If you pick any problem in NP-complete, all problems in NP can be reduced to it (meaning that a solution to the problem you chose can be used to solve everything in the rest of NP) in polynomial time or “efficiently.” This applies to all of NP, including every other NP-complete problem, so in a sense, NP-complete problems are the same problem dressed in different clothing.

So the reduction to 3SAT could happen in principle, but it isn’t a necessary step.

> Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line.

Who? Name names. You are making a bold, broad claim. Who are these specific people against whom you have specific evidence of their willingness to “distribute contaminated food … quite readily in service to their bottom line”?

It is not profit motive but public choice economics, from which we see that state actors and agencies act in their own interest. The difference is a defenseless individual being bullied by an overly zealous official who thought she had something to gain by beating up a nerd versus an organization picking on someone their own size.

> I do have interest in their being at least some real negotiation between parties signing a contract. > > For pretty much all consumers - there is no negotiation. […]

How would this work for products with even a modest number of customers?

Today, Microsoft offers 365 Personal for $9.99 per month. Is it your assertion that Microsoft ought to staff people to field phone calls from prospective customers asking “Mmm iono, $9.99 is a bit much. What can I get for $8.99?”

Perhaps set prices are not the problem. You did specifically mention EULAs. How many attorneys — not just telephone jockeys — would you require Apple or Google to hire to analyze potential redlines and additions to their EULA from every Tom, Dick, and Harry around the world?

Do you limit your criticisms to Apple and Google and, I presume, Microsoft? Are open-source authors guilty of “tyranny of contract” by offering their software free of charge but with take-or-leave terms? What reëducation do these volunteer provocateurs require?

Based on your gripe about limited room for negotiation — and for which you assert, based on no moral framework or premises, that the rightful remedy forcible dismantling of at least certain unfavored vendors — you have tremendous interest in free things, namely other people’s time, attention, and expertise so that you may have someone with whom to haggle over terms or price, perhaps both.

Apple and Google are not the only providers of mobile phones. Microsoft is not the only provider of office software. Competitors with substitutes exist today. You may not like the features available at the price point that you would prefer, but that’s a separate matter. You get what you pay for. If you can deliver a better product that undercuts the existing giants and is profitable, then you have a great disruptor startup idea. Go put your money where your mouth is and await the arrival “certificates of appreciation” by the billion into your bank account.

If you cannot formulate a business plan for everything you’re demanding, then what you are engaging in is wishful thinking, not thoughtful analysis.

You obliquely raised Rockefeller. If Standard Oil commanded such fearsome “monopoly pricing power,” that does not at all square with the historical fact that between 1870 and 1900, the price of kerosene dropped from $0.45 to six cents a gallon. Rockefeller cut costs consistently, a great benefit to consumers. Muckraker Ida Tarbell was daughter to failed oilman Franklin Tarbell, which is to say he was not nearly as efficient at serving the consumer as Rockefeller. By the time the radical revolutionaries forced their breakup of Standard Oil, the company had some 150 competitors. It was the oddest sort of monopoly imaginable and does not at all match the bogeyman in what passes for economic analysis by so-called antitrust theorists.

No, I would not break up these private companies. Such an act would be monstrous. I don’t care that it happened in the past. We can both agree on many terrible historical events that should never be repeated. Apple and Google do have competitors in the mobile market. They are nothing like kings.

No, I would not nationalize them either. If you think they’re slow, arrogant, and expensive now, in no conceivable universe do they improve in any of those categories as federal agencies. In the reality that we inhabit, they become worse and impossible for private competitors to displace. It would be a terrible, terrible outcome.

Based on data from the BLS, labor union membership is not at all compelling. In 2025, only 11.2 percent of workers were represented by a union. Back out workers who are not union members but whose job is covered by a union contract, and the percentage drops to the single digits.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.htm

You don’t define what you mean by consumer rights. My conception is you get what you agree to or can bargain for and no one may point a gun at or otherwise mug another peaceful person. Rights are actions that other people and especially the state may not take against peaceful people. I suspect you’d lump in this right to negotiate with your category of consumer rights. Calls for so-called “positive rights” require other people to serve you and are really demands for special privilege. A right, properly conceived, requires others to do no more than to leave you alone.

> Historically speaking - we'll get there, but its going to get ugly first.

I realize I am far in the minority, but we are not the ones doing the ugly-making.

Reading big walls of monospaced text makes me sad.

Cassidy Williams has a brief YouTube video on using this method for passive learning.

https://youtu.be/cnuLX8BWYo0

They aren’t the “ONLY” service provider, and you know this. Competing and compatible products exist. No one is forcing, metaphorically or literally, you to do anything.

Sure, everyone would prefer to have all the stuff they want for low or zero cost. That’s Santa Claus economics.

> THC is capable of JIT- or AOT-compiling a number of Haskell programs, including pandoc, happy, alex, and, as of today, even GHC itself!

We’re too far apart on this. I reject “historical determinism” and “late-stage capitalism,” but in response you throw out Engels, Kreitner, and “tyranny of contract” as though they might be in any sense persuasive.

A contract formalizes the terms of an agreement: “I will provide X in exchange for you providing Y.” In the event of a dispute, the contract provides an objective record of what both sides committed to performing. This is how free people transact business. The people who want to sign their name to one agreement but then have a strong-arming outsider change the terms — allegedly in the name of “fairness,” “social welfare,” or some other aggressively undefined abstraction that may be manipulated “to mean anything or nothing at pleasure” — are expropriating parasites. They demand to replace clarity and order with “progress,” itself an undefined term with no end state and an infinite playground for radical revolutionaries. Throughout history, this has been a recipe for tyranny. Every accusation is a confession.

The state does not and cannot “provide competition.” The regulatory frameworks put up are inevitably captured because the witless regulators are intellectually undermatched. The allegedly independent but captured philosopher-kings now do the bidding of their corporate masters under color of law. Instead of realizing the gigantic systematic error, radical revolutionaries want to be even more destructive and bring out their sledge hammers to forcibly break up companies, even if doing so harms consumers.

This is not how free people deal with one another. Let peace and freedom cause a thousand flowers to bloom. Stop making it difficult for new competitors to enter the market. Get out of the way.

But we have to have common ground from which to start. If merely committing terms of an agreement to writing is alleged to be tyranny, so absurd that it’s hard to believe that anyone holds such a position in earnest — if the two camps cannot agree enough on the rules of the game to write them down, then they have no hope of uniting in a peaceful society.

ok

See also https://perl.plover.com/yak/lambda/ from 1999.

> Perl Contains the Lambda Calculus

> (How to write a 163 line program to compute 1+1)

> Length: 90 minutes

Prerequisites: None.

It happens all around us. The term from the literature is market segmentation. Exceedingly bright people make a lot of money identifying, analyzing, and adapting to the boundaries of market segments. Airline prices tend to be more expensive during the week because business travelers occupy more seats, want to get home sooner, and are less price-sensitive due to employers footing the bill. In the U.S., your choice of Publix, Kroger, Walmart, or Aldi for grocery shopping demonstrates your most comfortable segment. After passing through the doors of your favorite grocer, further opportunities for market segmentation are in your choice between name brands or store brands, which both may have originated from the same supplier.

Grocery store margins tend to be thin. Where they really want you going is to the pharmacy, and surprisingly, what they want you to buy is generic drugs — more market segmentation. The name brand drugs tend to be really expensive. The generics are much cheaper in direct comparison, and for the store, the margin on generics is higher because name-brand prices create headroom. Yes, these broad generalizations have lots of exceptions, e.g., some generics are not perfect substitutes for name brand drugs, but the general pattern is there.

Have the lockdowns and empty shelves that formerly held toilet paper really been that long ago? Artificially forcing sale prices to remain static when the underlying dynamic, which is to say the price, has changed creates economic dislocation and even suffering. Prices carry information and are not arbitrary.

Choose your emergency: paper products, bottled water after a hurricane, etc. Value is subjective; no item has an underlying True Intrinsic Price. When demand increases, the item becomes more valuable. The price should go up, at least in the short term. When held lower than the market price, runs occur and shelves empty. When allowed to rise, increased prices have a natural rationing effect to keep goods on the shelves for people who need them. Higher prices attract new providers, and the increased supply brings prices back down as circumstances return to normal.

Analyzed rationally, we see there’s no such thing as price gouging. The concept is an appeal to our base instincts.

When a potential employer demonstrates willingness to pay more with an offer that includes higher compensation, is the applicant a “price gouger” for charging a higher price than she would would have otherwise?

When someone is selling a house, is the seller a “price gouger” for accepting the higher of two competing offers for the same house?

I reject the eschatology that your comment assumes. I believe we agree, however, that the answer is more competition, not less.

But imposing heavier regulatory burdens has disproportionately adverse effects on smaller would-be competitors. The big, established players know this and actively engage in enlargement of regulatory scope and regulatory capture to widen their moats. Historical examples of this are Jeff Bezos encouraging states to be more aggressive in requiring sales tax levies on internet purchases and more recently the calls by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to “pace” AI through regulation. On the surface, they appear to be public-spirited moves but are deeply self-interested.

Prices carry information and are not arbitrary. Insurance is a paid transfer of risk. Policies that have greater risk of loss require higher premium charges or the insurer goes broke.

Actuarial science is its own field that prices uncertain future events. As you’re bringing out here, the insurer has additional uncertainty as to the actual driving habits of their policyholders, so some conservatism is likely priced in. Aggressive drivers would like to pay the premiums of careful drivers.

This is related to the origin of GEICO, Government Employees Insurance Company. Back in the day, you had to be a state or federal employee for them to bind coverage. The investment thesis was that civil servants’ caution in their choice of employment was an accurate indication of their overall risk appetite and risk-taking behavior. GEICO was able price policies lower without going broke because they by design insured a lower-risk population.

> Subagents are like trading derivatives. You can lose as much as you want.

Excellent pithy warning.

Thanks! It was a fun project.

In the early 2000s, I used the Tcl/Tk bindings to the VxWorks target management API. The application hotloaded and -unloaded test modules for a hardware in the loop lab. Tcl allowed the first working concept to come to life in a few days. I have no idea how long it would have taken with with C++ library.

Sorry to hear about the retinal tearing. I hope advancements come along that work in your favor.

Phil Greenspun is still active on X: https://x.com/PhilipGreenspun

Some throwbacks of his from 1999:

https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.ht...

https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.ht...

Perl/Tk is a lot of fun. I wrote a solitaire game called tktk — Tk Time Killer — that appeared in The Perl Journal.

https://blog.gbacon.com/publications/2000-perl-journal-tktk/

The little language that could.

“Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers.” (Larry Wall, October 1997)

Like so: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05341