Different regions have ended up with different equilibria in the rewards game. In the United States, card acceptance is expensive and the rewards economy is robust. In Japan, card acceptance is expensive and the rewards economy is fairly muted due to—ahem—effective collusion by issuers. In Europe, card acceptance is cheap by regulatory fiat and so rewards are far less common (or commonly lucrative) than in the U.S.

source: HN

People who end up in the emergency room complaining of chest pains a few weeks before their 40th birthday are very similar to people who end up in the emergency room with chest pains a few weeks after their 40th birthday. But on a chart, the former are 39 years old and the latter are 40.

The point of these studies isn’t to titter or sigh at the peculiarities of human reasoning but to use these natural experiments to estimate the effect of medical procedures. If the only reason that near-18 and 18-year-olds are prescribed opioids differently is the semantics of “child” and “adult,” then we can use the discontinuity in prescriptions as a natural experiment—it’s as if prescribing around the age of 18 were randomly assigned. The authors find, for example, that compared to the just-under-18s, the just-over-18s were 12.6% more likely to later be diagnosed for an opioid-related adverse event such as an overdose. The greater rate of overdose is valuable information—but imagine the difficulty of trying to convince an Institutional Review Board that it would be ethical to randomly prescribe opioids to young people.

source: MR

I really like the “tech debt” metaphor. A lot of people don’t, but I think that’s because they either don’t extend the metaphor far enough, or because they don’t properly understand financial debt.

Pretty good financial debt explainer, too.

source: trivium

Elevator control panels have long featured two buttons labeled “door open” and “door close.” One of these buttons does pretty much what it says on the label (although I understand that European elevators sometimes have a separate “door hold” button for the most common use of “door open“). The other usually doesn’t seem to, and that has lead to a minor internet phenomenon. Here’s the problem: the internet is wrong, and I am here to set it right.

source: HN

By the time I got to Folsom Prison in 2007, there were no longer any fruit trees on China Hill, and it was covered with the knee-high grass typical of the Sierra Nevada foothills. The stories as to why inmate agriculture on China Hill was shut down vary and they depend upon the people telling the story.

I’m a capitalist. A friend of mine is a devoted Marxist. I think we mutually agree that, considering any particular employee, it is in that employee’s personal interest to stop selling hours of labor and start renting access to his accumulated capital as soon as humanly possible.

A lot of day jobs structurally inhibit capital formation. If I were a Marxist I’d say “And this is an intended consequence of Capital’s desire to keep Labor subservient to it”, but I honestly think it’s true even without anybody needing to twirl their mustache.

source: HN

Tatís signed a contract with Big League Advance, an unusual investment fund that pays minor-league players money up front in exchange for a share of their future MLB earnings.

The Big League Advance payouts aren’t loans. If the player never reaches the majors, he doesn’t have to reimburse the money, and Big League Advance loses its stake. When a player turns into a MLB star like Tatís, Big League Advance receives a huge payout. In effect, Tatís is now funding a bunch of minor-leaguers who will never make it. It’s similar to a venture capital fund that backs lots of startups that fail, in return for a gigantic payday from getting in early on a company like Facebook or Uber.

Venture capital for all the things.

The air you breathe on airplanes comes directly from the jet engines. Known as bleed air, it is safe, unless there is a mechanical issue — a faulty seal, for instance. When that happens, heated jet engine oil can leak into the air supply, potentially releasing toxic gases into the plane.

For decades, the airline industry and its regulators have known about these incidents — called fume events — and have maintained that they are rare and that the toxic chemical levels are too low to pose serious health risks.

And yet there’s a lot of pushback to measuring just how bad the problem is.

Felicia Chiao’s illustrations depicting isolation, dissociation, and loneliness have taken on an added resonance during the pandemic.

https://www.instagram.com/feliciachiao/

source: K

It’s more than 120V. It’s even more than the other 120V! It is the sum of the two (and sometimes a different two!) that makes us who we are. Learn about the US electrical system in this not-at-all snarky video!

I’ve honestly never seen people more excited for walks. It’s the Great American Walk Renaissance. Even the dogs are like: OK, this is getting to be a bit much.

This is why the Big Walk is usually the highlight of the day, right up there with the 4:59 p.m. bourbon.

As for the runners…OK, let’s deal with the runners, because the runners are getting a lot of grief right now. Some folks are getting steamed at the runners—social media teems with accounts of runners barreling around sidewalks like getaway cars from a bank heist, weaving among pedestrians, not adhering to rules of safe distance and personal space. People are getting so mad at runners, they’re starting to call them “joggers,” which runners really hate, because a “runner” is someone committed to fitness, and a “jogger” is someone who waddles around in sweatpants while eating a turkey leg.

I’ve often complained that people think the most plentiful resource on the planet is your time. Not their time, your time. People are more than happy to spend your time on the strangest things. Take it from a guy who was once paid to scrape the breading off of the leftover fish filets at night, then re-bread the fish the next morning.

As cities become ever more packed with cameras that always see, public anonymity could disappear. Can stealth streetwear evade electronic eyes?

I liked this article because it at least acknowledged that these countermeasures are only a training data update away from becoming useless.

Hindsight bias suggests that one day you’ll look back on all of this and... lie

In a classic experiment in 1972, researchers asked people to estimate the likelihood that various positive and negative outcomes might result from President Richard Nixon’s upcoming trips to China and Russia that year. We now call those visits “historic” because they thawed decades of hostility between the U.S. and the communist powers. In advance, no one knew whether the trips would accomplish anything. About two weeks after Nixon’s visits, 71% of people recalled putting better odds on his success than they had at the time. Four months on, 81% remembered being more sure Nixon would succeed than they had said beforehand.

In short, learning what did happen impedes you from retrieving what you thought would happen.

Quite a few studies in this area, all with the same result.

In an effort to avoid the biannual clock switch in spring and fall, some well-intended critics of DST have made the mistake of suggesting that the abolition of DST—and a return to permanent standard time—would benefit society. In other words, the U.S. would never “spring forward” or “fall back.”

They are wrong. DST saves lives and energy and prevents crime. Not surprisingly, then, politicians in Washington and Florida have now passed laws aimed at moving their states to DST year-round.

This is interesting. There are definitely costs to shifting clocks, but that still leaves the question of what the ideal daylight hours are.

So if you can inject latency into sites artificially, you can reduce the actual impact of the addiction in a controllable way while not denying the enjoyment of the Internet to yourself.

Hacker News with 100ms latency feels like liquor: Hacker News with 9000ms latency feels like small beer.

source: HN

Reaching 95%-ile isn’t very impressive because it’s not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn’t help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it’s just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.

There are several sections here. Every time I thought I was nearing the end, more content showed up.

source: danluu

Nailed it: “There’s no I in team” says the guy saying someone needs to take one for the team.

The employee interface verified that my cart contained two (2) items. She scanned both. It verified that those two items were ones I had scanned. And then it told her that she needed to scan five more items to complete the audit, because the audit requires seven items to be scanned.

source: ars

There’s a box that moved with Sarah Loveless and her husband from San Diego to Charleston, S.C., from Charleston to Dallas and from Dallas to Richland, Wash. The box, never unpacked, went into a closet or the garage each time. Contents: 20 to 30 electronics cords.