Based on this, you could reach both of these conclusions:
1. Most literary fiction is inaccessible to the average adult.
2. It's a big problem that even moderately complex novels are inaccessible to the average adult.
The first statement (which I think is where you're coming from) is absolutely true. If you want to write a very popular book, it should be easily readable at a 6th grade level.
The second statement is more a statement of values. Some people (such as myself) find it problematic that the average adult can't read/understand a book that is more complex than Harry Potter.
You don't have to agree with the second statement. A lot of people don't. But I think understanding why someone might find that problematic is important. Personally, I think there are a lot of things worth knowing that can't be written at a 6th grade level.
>Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn’t accessible is just not that enjoyable to anybody.
The PIAAC surveys, while imperfect, indirectly address what percentage of adults can read and appreciate "literary fiction."
The first part of the definition of level 3:
>Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing.
The first part for Level 4:
>At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents and sources across multiple processing cycles. Adults at this level can infer what the task is asking based on complex or implicit statements. Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences.
Based on that, what level of literacy do you think indicates someone capable of reading and enjoying literary fiction? I think the hypothetical cutoff is somewhere between Level 3 and 4.
Based on all of this, let's use Sally Rooney's book "Normal People" as an example. If we're being super charitable, at most 50% of people would be able to read and comprehend that book. If we're being less charitable with our definition of "comprehension," I think we're probably looking at closer to 30% of people really understanding it.
>Insurance gates these but could do so with their own tech rather than relying on the third party. Could help with keeping loss ratios at the minimum.
I work in insurance. In my experience, the fact that you have to go to the doctor for a referral discourages people from getting said referral.
So the tradeoff is that you would get fewer referral-specific visits (i.e. person going to their GP to get a specialist referral) at the likely expense of more specialist visits.
In the broad sense, people are in favor of automation. Most people aren't clamoring for the days before the stove, dishwasher, and car (all automated versions of past technologies).
That being said, I think a lot of people are against automation when it does something worse than the manual version. Think automated customer service over a human being.
Most people don't like change so are resistant to it. It's the same with electric cars a lot of people are resistant to it because of false range anxiety but when people actually use ev for extended period most of then stay with electric.
Robots are expensive, heavy, and require skilled workers to service. Even if they (for example) became competent electricians tomorrow, they wouldn't be cost competitive versus a human any time soon.
More generally, you don't have to replace "all of software engineering" to cause a lot of software engineers to lose their jobs. If you can make your top engineers twice as efficient, that replaces a lot of average engineers.
The "work" is actively trying to recall the information on the card. Spaced repetition is just a more efficient way of doing this than (for example) cycling through every single card, every single day.
When items like this go up for auction, sellers often set a "minimum" price. If that isn't met, the item isn't sold and remains the property of the original owner.
As you've highlighted, the reserve price doesn't have to be guaranteed by the auction house. So if this price isn't met, nobody gets the item (unlike the standard which is that the auction house will buy the item for the reserve price).
The 50% is probably the guy rounding the estimate to make a point.
As for why 64.25 wasn't enough but 70 would have been, I don't know. My understanding is that a lot of pieces sell for above their high estimate, so I'd guess that the seller was expecting/hoping for that? I do also think that 35% versus 40% matters a lot more when that difference is 6 million dollars in absolute terms.
Because as people start bidding they become invested in the outcome, and can often be convinced to go higher than they otherwise would. The trick is to set it under the minimum price the right amount that you can get multiple people bidding on the same item, each topping the other by smallish amounts. That way it doesn’t “feel” like you’re crossing the right price - “I’m already in for $60m, 1 more million is like 2% more, and then I beat this other person for something valuable”
Kickstarter works like this too. If you know anything about fixed manufacturing costs, when you see hardware projects with a 4-digit goal, you cringe. Some have other sources of funding, but the reason you set an artificially low goal is that it 1) gets people more excited when they see the % of goal go to 800% or 3000%, and 2) people are more inclined to back a project that's already hit its goal, regardless of how crowdfunding works.
>I didn't buy the premise of the movie that only that rich would be able to use them. Given they were robots, governments, hospitals, could and would make them readily available since ultimately it would massively lower their medical costs.
Given Big Pharma's current ability to get lots and lots of money for vital medicine, I'm not optimistic they'd price a theoretical medical machine low enough for a government to afford.
Plus, if overpopulation is a concern, a wealthy person wouldn't necessarily want the machine to get into the hands of everyone. Given that the creator of this machine would become very wealthy, the incentives would probably lean towards offering it to a select group.
>Pharma needs patent laws and a whole market economy to function.
I agree in general with this sentiment. However, I think that "medical robot that can cure anything" isn't something you'd patent (as you'd have to make some of the details public). I imagine you'd keep it as a trade secret and only license the machine for use by your own technicians or something along those lines.
I do think that the key assumptions for this scenario are that companies become as powerful (if not more powerful) than countries, and the incentives change such that withholding medical care is beneficial to the wealthy.
Do I think this is the most likely outcome? No. But I think that current countries with partially starving populations are a "worst-case" scenario for what a society dealing with scarcity looks like.
The orders in question here are 1 for Apple (the one that made circumventing Apple payments super difficult) and 1 for Meta (their ad-free subscription service). Meta and Apple have to comply with those within 2 months.
The preliminary finding on sideloading apps isn't subject to that 2 month compliance deadline from what I can tell.
A loan at an 11% interest rate pays for itself in around six and a half years. The general concept is that even if the PE firm runs the company into the ground, it only needs to exist (and make loan payments) for 6.5 years to get your money back.
For a company like Toys R Us, there is still value in that brand name. You can reduce the quality of the store and coast on that recognition for a little while before people change their shopping habits. Put another way, how many bad meals would you have to have at your favorite restaurant before you stopped going? I bet it's more than one or two, as long as the experience isn't super terrible.
So for a lender, the questions you ask yourself are:
1. With cost cutting and other measures, how long do I think this business can last?
2. Once this business reaches bankruptcy, how much am I likely to recover on my loan? This involves figuring out how much in assets the company has.
3. What are the chances this business is able to be turned around?
There are situations where even if the company goes bankrupt, the lenders still made money.
Lenders aren't dumb. They know the reputation of the PE performing the buyout. If that particular firm has a terrible track record money to lenders, the lender will want to be compensated for that risk.
Ultimately, the people that "pay" for this are shareholders (who get zeroed out in bankruptcy) and consumers (who get degraded product/service quality for the same price; that's how the company stays afloat in the short term).
In this case the PE firm would have been better off not getting a loan to begin with - it would have kept the interest payments to itself.
This looks a lot like selling some bad assets to some sucker investors. But the question a lot of people seem to ask in this thread is: when will the world run out of suckers? (Maybe this question shows how naive I am? Maybe some people know how to find these suckers one after the other?)
>In this case the PE firm would have been better off not getting a loan to begin with - it would have kept the interest payments to itself.
That assumes the PE company can predict exactly how long the expect the business to survive after takeover. They can't.
Both sides (the lender and the PE firm) are evaluating the company being purchased and the plan set out by the PE firm. The loan terms are set such that both sides feel they can make money on the deal.
The fact that PE doesn't make money on every deal indicates that they can be wrong.
>> Lenders aren't dumb. They know the reputation of the PE performing the buyout. If that particular firm has a terrible track record money to lenders, the lender will want to be compensated for that risk.
That's not a bust out then. If the lenders get compensated for their risk it's just a business decision.
The accusation was "The company has a bunch of loans it will never be able to pay off (sucks for the lenders)".
The accusation was that the lenders were in fact dumb.
I mean, the view I have is that at the time of the LBO nobody knows for sure what will happen.
The PE firm knows what they plan to do. The lenders know in a general sense what the PE firm plans to do, along with the track record of that firm's other LBO's and loans. Even if the outcome of bankruptcy is fairly certain, it's hard to predict how long it will take until that happens.
The point I'm making is that if you only look at the failures, LBO's look like a bust out. But I don't think the entire concept of an LBO is a bust out, which is why I don't think the lenders are dumb for underwriting these loans.
Based on this, you could reach both of these conclusions:
1. Most literary fiction is inaccessible to the average adult.
2. It's a big problem that even moderately complex novels are inaccessible to the average adult.
The first statement (which I think is where you're coming from) is absolutely true. If you want to write a very popular book, it should be easily readable at a 6th grade level.
The second statement is more a statement of values. Some people (such as myself) find it problematic that the average adult can't read/understand a book that is more complex than Harry Potter.
You don't have to agree with the second statement. A lot of people don't. But I think understanding why someone might find that problematic is important. Personally, I think there are a lot of things worth knowing that can't be written at a 6th grade level.