kuiperblog

[kuiperblog]

Japanese vs American attitudes around removing shoes when entering

When I went to Haneda, I noticed that the Japanese people kept their shoes on when entering, but several Americans visitors removed their shoes out of habit.

This is because in American culture, it is considered customary and polite to remove your shoes before entering someone's airport departure concourse. (This is a unique quirk of American culture and not shared by Japan.)

[kuiperblog]

The tweet being quoted is of course obviously wrong: the fact that the current market price of gold is ~$3,000 per ounce is contingent on gold maintaining its current rarity, and the market price of gold would be considerably lower in a world where gold was more abundant.

But the person who has showed up to dunk on this tweet is wrong in a more subtle (and more annoying) way: gold being abundant would not make it "worthless."

We intuitively understand that many types of mineral are useful for things. For example, iron useful as a construction material (especially if you make steel out of it). And titanium offers a similar strength at less weight, making it useful if you're trying to build spaceships.

If the earth suddenly gained a huge amount of iron, this would not cause iron to become "worthless." Ditto for titanium.

If we had a magic machine that could instantly create more lithium and cobalt, that would not be a "worthless" invention: we would use the machine to create minerals that we could use to make batteries; we could make more of the grid solar, energy would be more abundant, and that would have the effect of making us all richer (in tangible ways, like cutting the price of your energy bill, and in other less-immediately-obvious but still tangible ways).

Adding more resources to the world would make the world richer, not poorer, because we could do things with them! This is true of iron, titanium, and cobalt. It is also true of gold.

Gold is useful! It has a bunch of unique properties that allow you to build useful things out of it!

If you've ever installed a CPU, you're probably familiar with this sight:

Intel did not put a gold top-coat on your CPU pins because they were expecting you to display them to ostentatiously broadcast your wealth. It used gold because that's the best material for the job!

Gold has low electrical resistance, and it doesn't tarnish, which means that properties like resistance won't change over the lifespan of the chip. Palladium-nickel is too porous and prone to cracking; silver tarnishes too easily, platinum is harder to solder.

The Intel chip in your PC has gold because in a counterfactual world where they instead had to use a different material, your CPU would be worse at doing the the things that it's supposed to do.

In fact, there are a lot of applications where gold is just straight-up better than copper, aluminum, tin, and nickel, but we end up using those (worse) materials anyway just because gold is too expensive. If price were no object, you'd really rather wire your house with gold than copper, but we use copper because it's less than 1% the cost. If gold were more abundant, we wouldn't have to settle for second-best!

But there is another way in which the annoying tweet is wrong that people would remain poor even if we accept the false premise that "gold would be worthless": those suffering under the resource curse of gold could be considerably better off!

A world where gold is valuable is a world where dictators who control a limited supply of gold have a major source of wealth that is mostly decoupled from human capital. A country whose main export is gold has considerably less incentive to do things like "build schools" and "ensure that children aren't malnourished" than they would in a world where their main export was microchips or movies or software, because in order to create chips/movies/apps, you need to have a bunch of skilled labor and you can only get that skilled labor by building schools and ensuring that your people's cognitive capacity isn't being diminished by childhood malnourishment. (In case it's not obvious, this point generalizes to many things beyond "just" building schools and getting nutrients into children.)

So, if "gold became worthless," it's quite conceivable that people could be better off: eliminating that specific source of wealth would mostly have the effect of reducing a particular kind of inequality that tends to make a tiny number of people rich at the expense of everyone else.

(That is, of course, accepting the premise that gold would become "worthless," which it wouldn't, because we can do useful things with gold: it can't be worthless because it literally has worth even absent any shared notion of it being a useful "store of value." Gold is like titanium; it's not like a piece of paper with Benjamin Franklin whose usefulness is entirely contingent on constructed factors. If humanity went extinct, aliens would struggle to find useful things to do with $100 bills, but they'd find plenty of useful things to do with all of the gold that they found on earth. This was even the premise of an extremely silly sci-fi movie starring Harrison Ford, Cowboys and Aliens.)

The only time when I really feel comfortable dunking is when it is a "counter-dunk," so I will float the possibility that perhaps this tweeter would benefit from taking his own advice to "take an economics class."

[kuiperblog]

Guards of Atlantis II is wonderful

Guards of Atlantis 2 is great, and it's great largely because of things I assumed couldn't be true based on how it is usually described, so I'll refrain from explaining what it's like, and instead try to explain what it is.

Guards of Atlantis 2 is a board game that I bought for €59 + shipping during a crowdfunding campaign. (This is supposedly a discount from its "retail" price of €75, though it is not and apparently never will be available at retail.)

It is a team game: there is a blue team, and an orange team. Each player controls one "hero" card on a hex grid, and you have cards that do things like "move 2" or "attack 4" or "defend 6," or fancier things like "swap places with a friendly unit" or "push an adjacent unit up to 2 spaces."

While the action cards follow a few basic templates, each playable character has a collection of action cards that are distinct enough to give each hero a unique identity, like "good at ranged attacks," or "slow tanky brawler," or "glass cannon."

The teach is short, the actions are simple, and the turns are quick. The first time we played a 4-player game, it took us around 2 hours. Our second game added a 5th player to the table and took around 90 minutes. (There's also rule variant that makes the game potentially longer for those who prefer more "epic" struggles.) This is a game that is totally reasonable to bring to a weekday "board game night" and honestly something that wouldn't feel too out of place on the shelf of a store like Target.

Here is the part where I feel like I start providing the sort of information that gave me an incorrect impression about what this game would be:

You can attack enemy heroes, but most of the time you are attacking enemy minions, which provide 2 gold when defeated. At the end of each round (which lasts 5 turns), players get to spend their gold to "level up" and upgrade their abilities. As you level up, it increases the "gold bounty" that the enemy team gets for killing you.

In addition to attacking enemy minions for gold to level up, you are trying to win the "minion battle." If all of the enemy minions in the current wave are eliminated, you execute a "wave push," and the fight moves closer to the enemy base. Fighting closer to the enemy base is harder, but if you push the minion wave all the way to the enemy base, you win. (Your other win condition is killing enough heroes on the enemy team.)

What I have just described sounds very much like a MOBA, and that is very much how Guards of Atlantis II is marketed. That is in fact the entire Unique Selling Point and Core Value Proposition of this product. And in many ways, this "MOBA board game" label is descriptively true. However, it is not MOBA-like in many ways, notably:

The minions do not move or perform actions. They sit on the battlefield, providing passive buffs to friendly heroes (and debuffs to opposing heroes), waiting to be harvested for a 2 gold bounty. There's no "maintenance phase" where you have to figure out what the minions do. This is great: the game is all about the heroes; the minions matter, but the minions are just there to make you stronger.

The default map does not have "lanes." When you play a 2v2 or 3v3 game on the base map, everyone is in one lane in the middle of the board.

Units do not have hit points. Every attack against a minion is lethal. Every attack against a hero is also lethal, unless the defending hero blocks it by discarding a card from their hand that has a defense value that matches the value of the attack. (In a sense, I suppose your hand of remaining cards could be seen as your "health pool.")

Notably, the lack health points means that there is no tracking of health points: there is never a point at which you have to look at an enemy and ask, "how much more damage to kill that thing?" This makes it a breeze to play compared to other hexgrid-based games like Gloomhaven.

Most saliently, I said it above, but I feel obliged to restate it: the teach is short. The actions are simple. The turns are quick and snappy. This is not what I expected when I heard that it was a "MOBA"-style game. This is not a game where you have to spend a bunch of time consulting the rulebook as you play to figure out how things work; you can completely learn the rules in <10 minutes, and then just go in and start doing stuff. You play a card, you do the actions printed on the card, the rules and phrasing are clear and unambiguous.

The other thing that gave me the (false) impression that Guards of Atlantis II was a certain type of game was the nature of the crowdfunding campaign.

I mentioned that I paid €59 for a SKU that is "the base game." The base game contains 7 heroes to choose from. However, you can also buy a €40 "hero pack" that is essentially an expansion that adds 5 heroes with interesting new abilities that are generally higher complexity. This also has the effect of raising the max player count from 3v3 to 5v5, as the back side of the board offers a larger map with multiple lanes.

Did I say that you can buy a €40 hero pack? I meant that you have your choice of up to five different hero packs for €40 each. Or, if you don't want to choose, you can buy all of them, if you are the sort of person who wants to expand the base roster from 7 playable characters to 32. For such people, they helpfully offer an "all-in" tier which gives you the base game for all the hero packs for €249.

That gave a certain impression when I walked into this game: in my mind, it was that sort of Kickstarter game, where you pay $250 for a giant box of nice-looking plastic miniatures that sits on your shelf for years unplayed because nobody you know wants to surmount the massive teaching burden that must accompany a $250 purchase.

But the reviewers at So Very Wrong About Games assured me this was worth the purchase, and so I bought it. And I was delighted to discover that the game that I bought for €59 shipped came in a reasonable-sized box that I can easily carry with me to board game night, and that people are happy to play with me because the teach is short, the actions are simple, and the turns are quick.

It's so easy to just start playing the simple action cards and executing what they tell you to do. Within several turns, everyone was able to begin talking strategy around the table. "He just played his highest defense card. That means we can probably get a hero kill if we go for a double attack." "Hey, can we win this minion push? I can kill these two over here if you get the last one on the other end of the map." "If you can prevent me from dying this round, I promise that I will be able to clear this wave by myself." It's a delight. It's the sort of game where you don't feel like you're playing with and against the ruleset; you're playing with and against your friends.

It's also a game that I feel a bit guilty about recommending, because it's not a game that you can easily obtain, as it was only available during a crowdfunding campaign. I was happy to pay €59 + shipping; I would have been considerably less happy to pay the $150+ that copies are now selling for on ebay.

But because it's a great game, and one that plays best with 6 players, people who own copies are often eager evangelists who are trying to find people who are willing to play with them, and if one of them ever extends an invitation your way, my recommendation would be to take them up on it and not to be intimidated by what the game appears to be, because it's really quite approachable and the sort of thing that won't ask for more than 1.5-2 hours of your time on a weekday board game night: the teach is short, the actions are simple, and the turns are quick.

[kuiperblog]

Nobody knows what will be popular in 2 years

I was recently giving advice to a younger writer asking for "business advice," and I gave a version of the advice that I usually give: "focus on improving your craft; the question of 'how to sell this book' is one that will be easier to answer once you've actually written the book and have a complete manuscript."

More specifically, if you estimate that your first book will be done in 2027, then you shouldn't be spending 2025 doing "research" to figure out things like "what's the best ad platform," or "what style of book cover works best?" because the knowledge that you gain in 2025 might be obsolete by the time it's time to publish in 2027. Just write the book and figure out the business side later.

Even your choice of what genre to write in shouldn't be informed by what you think is popular, because nobody knows what will be popular in 2 years.

After uttering that sentence, I wondered, "is it actually true?" So I went to Google trends, and typed in "Romantasy books," and lo and behold, ~nobody was searching for this term 2 years ago.

Here's a graph put together by Alex Newton from K-Lytics showing interest in "Romantasy books" compared to interest in "Paranormal romance books" over time:

It's currently among the hottest genres on the market (and probably an uncontested candidate for "fastest growing" over the past 2 years), but you probably wouldn't have seen it coming in April 2023 if you were researching "what are the hottest book genres right now?"

The popularity of "Romantasy" in the current market caught a lot of people by surprise. That being said, there are some things about the state of the book market in 2025 that are utterly unsurprising: the most popular genres on ebook platforms are romance, fantasy, and various blends of mystery, thrillers, and suspense. This was true of the market 2 years ago, 5 years ago, and 10 years ago. These genres are "Lindy."

It's really hard to predict short-term trends. If you saw in 2009 that "vampire romance novels are really popular right now," and then spent 2 years writing a vampire romance novel with the idea that this would be your ticket to success, your book would be hitting the market in 2011, at a point when vampire romance was already on the down-swing, and you might find yourself disappointed with the performance of your book as you entered a crowded market. The thing that's been surging in popularity for the past 2 years may no longer be resurgent if you travel 2 years into the future.

Breaking Dawn Part 1 was the first movie in the Twilight series to do worse than its predecessor at the box office, marking "the beginning of the end"

Again, see "the Lindy effect," or as mama used to say, "easy come, easy go."

Of course, even in 2011, when vampire romance novels had begun their descent in popularity, I still would have given the advice that "if you want to write a vampire romance novel, and the idea of writing vampire romance is what gets you excited to actually sit down and start typing, then you should write that, because the biggest thing you need to achieve to become an author is to get your reps in, and it still counts as 'writing' regardless of whether you're writing fanfic, forum roleplay, or a genre that is rapidly waning in popularity."

(Interestingly, "paranormal romance" has sort of become a Lindy genre: if you released a vampire novel in 2011 riding the coattails of Twilight hoping for commercial success, you would probably be disappointed. However, from the vantage point of 2025, could reasonably observe "despite the decline in the popularity of vampire romance, paranormal romance managed to remain a somewhat popular genre over the past 15 years," then that's a somewhat different proposition: a genre that has remained somewhat popular for over a decade has a good chance of still being somewhat popular a ~decade from now, and if you're lucky you might even catch it when it's on an upswing -- maybe in 2027, people will tire of romantasy and drift back to vampire romance.)

Spending several months of your life writing a "declining genre" is only a "waste of time" if you're doing it purely for cynical reasons and chasing book sales rather than developing your own craft. And empirically, the people who seem to achieve career success by "chasing trends" are the people whose turnaround time for a complete novel is closer to ~2 months rather than ~2 years, and they have the ability to do that because earlier in their career, they got their reps in, and now have no trouble cranking out ~3,000 words per day. And regardless of how cynical you intend to be, I think that's a valuable skill to have: the only piece of "career advice" I have for authors that really generalizes is "be prolific."

If you look at the release schedule for ACOTAR, you'll see that the first 3 books came out over a 3 year period from 2015-2017 -- and this overlapped with the 7-year period from 2012-2018 during which she released 8 Throne of Glass novels.

Sarah J. Maas did this well before "romantasy" was a part of the lexicon. TikTok did not exist yet. She did not achieve commercial success by "following trends," and if you wish to plan out a career that looks like Sarah J. Maas, it probably does not look like "look at what is popular in 2025 and then do exactly that."

[kuiperblog]

My parents and I just talk about movies we've seen

I have a ~weekly phone conversation with my parents, and we rarely make it past the ~1 hour mark before the conversation turns to the topic of movies and TV shows.

Whenever the conversation goes substantially over 2 hours, it just consists of us looking at Letterboxd and Rotten Tomatoes together.

Representative excerpt from our most recent conversation:

Me: Okay. I'm looking at the Rotten Tomatoes page for Facing the Giants. Guess the critics score and audience score.

Dad: 13% and 93%.

Me: Close! You're within striking distance of both. It's 17% and 85%.

(My parents then spent several listening to my review of Facing the Giants based on what I remember from seeing it at church when I was a teenager, and how even then, it was offensive to both my artistic and Christian sensibilities.)

Another representative "trivia question" from our most recent conversation: "Guess the top 3 most popular 70's movies on Letterboxd." After they get The Godfather and Star War with their first 2 guesses, I spend several minutes prompting them with hints like "Robert DeNiro" and "Martin Scorsese" and "I don't think Mom has seen this one, but I'm 100% sure you've heard of it" before revealing that the answer is Taxi Driver.

This is the kind of conversation that is utterly engaging for my family, and utterly dull to anyone not participating it, and I apologize for recounting it and putting it onto your tumblr dash. But I bring it up because I talk with my parents ~weekly, and sometimes we run out of things to talk about, and whenever we go down this rabbithole it almost always pushes our "lazy Sunday afternoon" conversation past the 2 hour mark, and what could be a better way to spend my Sunday than yapping with my parents about nothing? (Maybe the same is true of you and your loved ones!)

[kuiperblog]

Where do you find Jason Pargin's stuff these days? I haven't thought to look since Cracked went down the drain

For starters, Jason Pargin has a Substack, where he occasionally posts essays in a style that's reminiscent of his work at Cracked.

A lot of Jason Pargin's rants about pop culture are on podcasts hosted by the Cracked alumni, where he'll make a guest appearance whenever he has a new book to promote (which is all the time). From time to time, he'll do "roundup" posts on his Substack where he says "hey, if you want to hear all the podcasts I've been on recently, here are links to all/most of them," here's the most recent round-up post.

I particularly enjoy his guest appearances on the Gamefully Unemployed podcast, which is where you're most likely to find him talking about movies and TV. He also had a good appearance on the Flightless Bird podcast, where Jason Pargin and David Farrier got to participate in a bit of mutual admiration, with David being an enjoyer of Jason's latest book, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, and Jason being a fan of David's documentaries, like Tickled (2016).

Jason also has his own podcast (cohosted with Cracked alum Brockway and Seanbaby, also Cracked alum) called BigFeets, where they discuss the TV show Mountain Monsters, which is not a good TV show, but a fascinating one. It usually takes them 1-2 hours to recap a 45 minute episode of television. (Also worth listening to: all of Jason's guest appearances on Seanbaby and Brockway's other podcast, the Dogg Zzone 9000.)

HOWEVER! The thing that Jason is now famous for is his TikTok, where he has accumulated 58.5 million likes, which I'm led to believe makes him quite successful and by most definitions a "TikTok star." (Jason has often reflected on how weird it is that he, as a visually unremarkable 50-year-man, has gained so much popularity on the platform where "the cool kids" hang out.)

Jason originally got onto TikTok because he was told that "that's where the book people hang out," and it seems to have worked out for him: he credits his TikTok popularity with his latest book (I'm Starting To Worry About This Black Box of Doom) tripling the sales of his previous book.

Several times a week he will post short-form videos to TikTok. Some are nuggets of insight, some are shitposts, all are enjoyable. At this point I basically use the TikTok app exclusively for watching his videos. (Some of his TikTok videos are often duplicated across his accounts on YouTube/Twitter/Instagram/Threads, but I believe those other sites have duration limits that prevent him from posting his videos there; TikTok is probably the best place if you're trying to find "all his videos," even if a small number of his videos get taken down from TikTok for completely ineffable reasons.) His handle everywhere is jasonkpargin

[kuiperblog]

Where Star Wars went wrong

Quoting Jason Pargin, who articulates it better than I could:

"In any kind of a sane world, The Mandalorian should have run for 150 episodes at least. They had a formula here that could have worked forever.

"It's a formula that has always worked: a heroic stranger wanders into a strange new land and meets a bunch of colorful characters, usually under the thumb of a powerful threat. The threat is usually in the form of a villain who's played by a famous actor just chewing the scenery. He uses hits wits and his courage to get out of it and then he moves on.

"Have Gun, Will Travel" ran for 225 episodes from 1957-1963. It's where Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame got his start.

"The sci-fi space adventures we had years and years ago used to run forever. Star Trek TNG had about 180 episodes, Deep Space 9 had about the same number, even Voyager -- the show that we think of as being a "lesser series" -- had 172 episodes. And here's the thing: most of those episodes were really good!

"But because of the way the business works now, and because of 'corporate synergy,' by season 2 of the Mandalorian, they were brainstorming "how do we get this back to Luke Skywalker and the Death Star?"

"By season 3, fans were lost, because some huge plot events had occurred in a completely different series, because they needed it to connect to their Boba Fett show. And now, the Mandalorian is dead. They're gonna wrap up the story in a movie, and that's it.

And the crazy part is, this was always the perfect format for Star Wars: it always should have been a short form serial! That's what George Lucas was ripping off when he made the film back in 1977: serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

These were little 12-minute long episodes that played as one continuing story, but each one was its own little lighthearted adventure that usually ended on some kind of a cliffhanger.

"This is why so many of the most hardcore Star Wars fans who are old like me only like two of the movies, because by the third film they were already just repeating beats: they were attacking yet another Death Star.

They ran out of ideas so fast, because this is not the ideal format for this universe. The Mando and Baby Yoda Show is the ideal format! This should have run for the next 20 years! They even set it up so that the star wouldn't even need to be on set for most of it, because he wears a helmet!

"I think some fans object to this, because they think of it as making Star Wars smaller, that you're reducing it to 'just a TV show.' But it's the exact opposite: it lets you expand the universe, because you're forced to to keep coming up with new places for him to go, and new people for him to meet, new villains for him to face -- you're not forced to just keep coming back to the Death Star again and again, and the Sith, and the Jedi.

In Episode VII: The Force Awakens, the Starkiller Base destroys five planets. That's mathematically five times more tragic than the destruction of Alderaan.

"And if you want evidence, just look at Star Trek! It's the show that expanded the universe. The Star Trek films were just action movies that are very forgettable. But I guess the world has changed, because they don't even do Star Trek that way anymore.

Picard ended its run after 30 episodes. Discovery concluded after 65. Hopefully, Strange New Worlds marks a return to form for the franchise.

"I don't get it, because it seems like a version of this show that runs until the year 2040 would have just printed money. The merchandise sales alone would have covered the production costs. Instead, it's 24 episodes and a movie that I think everyone has already stopped caring about."

[kuiperblog]

Tidy your living space with Pimsleur language tapes

I believe that Pimsleur is the best way to start learning a new language if you care more about oral ability than literacy.

It's also a great way to tidy your apartment.

While learning a new language is something that's done just using your voice and headphones -- theoretically freeing up your hands for other activities, like video games -- I find that speaking in an unfamiliar language requires such intense concentration that I cannot do anything that involves using a screen while speaking or focusing on an unfamiliar language.

Anything that puts words on my screen and engages the language processing part of my brain is right out, and even tasks like steering my go-kart or moving my reticle to an automaton's head require too much focus for me to do them formulating a response to the woman asking me "koen wa doko desu ka?"

Thus, while listening to language tapes might seem superficially similar to listening to a podcast in my native language, I find that many things I typically regard as "podcast activities" are off the table when my brain is sending the signals to my mouth to form the words "koen wa asoko desu" or "iie, atode tabemasu."

My hands limbs should be free to do whatever they want while I'm learning (aside from the moments when I find it useful to "talk with my hands" and point to remind my brain that I'm saying "over there" or "no, no,"), but for the most part, all I can really do with my body as I listen to the language tape is pace around my home. And as I pace, I pick up the glass off the counter and put it into the dishwasher. And pick items out of my laundry basket and fold them. And take the folding chair propped against the wall and transfer it to the closet. And by the end of my 30 minute lesson, I find that I've added a few new phrases to my vocabulary, and that my apartment is a bit tidier than when I started, and at the end of a week my apartment has the appearance of a home that has been the beneficiary of several hours of tidying up.

[kuiperblog]

Two facts about Jamie Lee Curtis

Jamie Lee Curtis starred in movie where she trades places with her daughter (played by Lindsey Lohan)

Jamie Lee Curtis was in a movie titled Trading Places

These are two independent facts that have nothing to do with each other.

[kuiperblog]

A big one is that Costco stocks fewer unique items. A typical Costco location will have maybe ~4,000 SKUs, whereas a Target might have ~80,000 SKUs. This has several benefits:

Fewer SKUs means quicker inventory turnover

The higher the sales volume is for an item, the easier it is for sellers to move.

If a SKU is obscure or unpopular enough, it might never get bought, winding up as "dead inventory." (Maybe Target never manages to find a buyer for the last 2 bottles of sriracha-flavored mushroom ketchup.)

Costco only stocks the most popular ketchup SKUs that will move off the shelf quickly.

Think about what it actually means for a product to "move off the shelf quickly." That's not just a poetic way of saying "people are really eager to buy it," it means that Costco inventory literally spends less time on the shelf. When a huge part of the retail cost is the cost of keeping items on the shelf (and paying for the rent, utilities, security, etc), "less time on shelf" = "less inventory expenses".

And aside from the inventory costs of having a shelf on the item for longer, and just think about the time value of money: in a world where deflation means the dollar shrinks with every passing day, every extra day that an item sits on the shelf before being sold is a day that it is losing value.

Consider what it means for the cash flow of the business: suppliers typically get paid "Net 30" or "Net 60," which means that the retailer pays the supplier 30 to 60 days after receiving inventory. (The suppliers are essentially extending the retailer a line of credit -- this is something Dan Davies described in Lying for Money, and which I summarized in my book review.)

If the product sits on the shelf for longer than that, then the retailer has "cash flow problems," and they probably have to find a line of credit since they are now paying for inventory that they have yet to make a sale on.

When Costco products "move off the shelf quickly," they have the opposite of these types of cash flow problems: they make the sale, get the money, but still have another 20+ days to pay their supplier. This is called "negative working capital" and essentially amounts to getting an interest-free loan from your supplier.

Some inventory depreciates on the shelf

This is related to the above point about inventory turnover. I mentioned "the time value of money" which is real but sort of marginal; inflation doesn't reduce the value of a dollar that much over a 30 day period.

However, there are some items that decrease in value the longer that they sit on the shelf. Big examples of these are electronics like TVs. A TV that is $4,000 today probably won't be worth $4,000 in 12 months. It loses value for every day that it spends on the shelf. So once again, Costco's approach of "stock fewer SKUs -> get faster turnover" is preventing this kind of loss.

Fewer SKUS means higher sales volume per SKU

This is more marginal than the other factors, but bears mentioning: instead of having a little bit of many things, Costco has a lot of a few things. Just as you can save money by "buying items in bulk" from Costco, Costco can save money by "buying items in bulk" from its suppliers.

Costco has less shrinkage

Costco, which charges an annual membership, has a shrinkage rate that is around a tenth of a typical retailer. (Reportedly, Costco shrinkage is 0.1-0.2%, average is 1.6%.)

Shrinkage is a huge deal when you consider that net retail margins are pretty tiny (Walmart has a net profit margin of 2.5%, Costco's is 2.4%).

We can't really do math using the net margins since those already have shrinkage baked in to the calculation of costs, but consider a hypothetical example of a retailer that has 5% net margins if we consider everything except shrinkage (so we're factoring the wholesale price of the goods on the shelf, the wages of the employees that stock the shelf, the cost of literally keeping the lights on and paying for all other utilities, etc etc.)

For this hypothetical retailer with a 5% margin ("net except for shrinkage"), that means that when they sell a frozen pizza for $10, their total cost is $9.50, and they make a profit of 50 cents on the transaction. But if someone steals a frozen pizza off the shelf, they lose $9.50.

In other words, when one pizza is stolen, they need to sell 19 pizzas just to break even!

Fewer SKUs means lower operational/labor costs

A non-trivial amount of the labor cost of a Target location is the time that employees spend stocking the shelves. (I am reporting this based on my own experiences as a 23-year-old Target employee, rather than industry research, but my entire job was putting inventory on the shelf, sometimes just a few bottles at a time.)

Suppose Target sells 10 different kinds of ketchup and stocks 6 bottles of each SKU, while Costco sells 2 kinds of ketchup and stocks 30 of each SKU. Target will much more frequently encounter the situation where a single SKU runs out and they need to send an employee to restock the shelf, even if it's just to put 10 bottles on the shelf, whereas whenever a Costco resupplies the ketchup shelf, they'll be putting 40+ bottles there.

(The above is not a real example -- Target would have more bottles of the popular SKUs like Heinz classic and fewer bottles of the less-popular SKUs like "Hunts reduced sugar ketchup" but hopefully this imprecise model is still useful as an illustrative example.)

Also, this is once again just "reckoning from my perspective as an employee," but it just seems to me like Costco has fewer operational costs due to the way they move inventory around on the floor. I have been at Costco location where it seemed like "restocking" was just driving a forklift and placing a pallet at a designated spot, whereas as at Target the process more often involved a person physically going to the stockroom, finding a specific box, bringing out a relatively small quantity of product, carefully arranging them on the shelf, and breaking down the cardboard box.

I'm sure that Costco employees spend some of their working hours doing "small annoying things," but the modal Costco employee seems to be accomplishing more with an hour of their time than I did with one hour of my time as a Target employee. Also, Costco probably has higher employee morale than Target because Costco doesn't force its employees to bring their own boxcutters to work. (That observation about boxcutters is not really all that germane to the discussion of "how is Costco so successful," but it emerged from deep within my soul as a former Target employee.)

[kuiperblog]

Patrick McKenzie on "vaccine hesitancy"

From the latest episode of Patrick McKenzie's podcast Complex Systems:

One point about vaccine hesitancy that I think is broadly underappreciated: Consider the Pell Grant program in the United States. Pell Grants are essentially free money for college. Despite that, we never hear about “Pell Grant hesitancy,” yet every college knows it has to do a sales job to explain this to prospective students. For example, they’ll say: "There are various ways to fund college. A loan you have to pay back. A grant, like a Pell Grant, is free money you don’t pay back. Here’s an application you need to fill out, and then the money will arrive." Even though it’s free money, colleges still invest in explaining and promoting it because people don’t automatically understand the program. Now think about the COVID vaccine rollout. A lot of people, particularly in the professional-managerial class, assumed the vaccine was the most anticipated product release in human history. After a year of lockdowns and trauma, it seemed obvious that no one would need convincing to take it. But that assumption was wrong. Much of what was perceived as vaccine hesitancy wasn’t driven by anti-science or deep-seated opposition. It was more like, No one has sat me down and explained why this benefits me. Many people assumed, If the vaccine were truly important, someone—my doctor, a public health official—would have told me by now. This wasn’t well-calibrated to the reality of the U.S. healthcare system, which, for better or worse, didn’t believe it needed to sell the vaccine to individuals. Now, of course, there was a partisan and politicized element to vaccine hesitancy. And it wasn’t a straightforward left-versus-right issue—it had a bit of a horseshoe effect, pulling in groups from across the spectrum. But a significant portion of the hesitancy stemmed from a lack of direct, clear communication, not outright opposition.

I was in the group of people who were eagerly anticipating the rollout of the vaccines in 2021. Looking through my message history in several group chats, I can find that at the start of April 2021, I repeatedly broadcast a message to my local friends to the effect of:

The vaccine is available to everyone age 16 or higher on [date]

VACCINES ARE FREE FOR EVERYONE and YOU DO NOT NEED HEALTH INSURANCE to get injected FOR FREE.

Additionally, there are two earlier tiers of groups that are eligible to get their vaccine on [date -14 days] and [date -7 days]; here is a link to see if you're part of one of the eligible groups

I received numerous replies to the effect of, "thank you for sharing this information with me; I just booked an appointment to get vaccinated, which is something that I would not have done in the counterfactual world where I did not see your message." (I do not think the person who lives in that counterfactual world -- and did not schedule the vaccination appointment -- fits the typical profile of what people think of "vaccine hesitant.")

There is probably a world in which these people got this same information from a public health official or a doctor. (Perhaps that world has higher state capacity and more efficacious institutions.) Instead, these people live in a world where they got that message in the group chat that used to be used to organize board game meetups.

The point that "the general rollout in mid April 2021 is for everyone 16 and up" seemed to be a piece of information that people got from me that they didn't get from other messaging channels.

Another critical point that several people appreciated having explicitly spelling out for them was "everyone can get jabbed for free; yes, this includes the uninsured, or people who don't know if they're insured because they're 25 and maybe that means they're on their parents' insurance but they kinda neglected to figure out that whole thing but also embarrassed to ask about it."

This was a vital bit of signal that seemed to get dropped from some of the messaging that made it to their ears, and it rhymes a bit with a parenthetical remark Patrick made outside the podcast audio:

You can understand why people are skeptical [of Pell Grants], too! “As if the federal government would give me tens of thousands of dollars, for free, with basically no checking. That certainly hasn’t matched any other experience in my life!”

Patrick also has a parenthetical note about why the US healthcare system needs to play a marketing role in "selling" the vaccine to individuals, despite their belief that that this was not necessary:

Pharmacies were the primary site that the vaccine was physically delivered at, and pharmacies are not specialized in demand generation for drugs. The pharma industry expects physicians to do that; that is why the physicians get visits by attractive people explaining the benefits of the new things on offer.

Two practical implications:

Society benefits from having functional institutions that can do things at scale, like informing the public of information that they need to know as a matter of public safety

In the absence of institutions, one of the fallbacks for important information making its way to the people who need it is "group chat message from the person who organizes the board game meetup I attended a year ago." This might practically describe you, dear reader. You may not wish to be burdened with this responsibility, but this is one mechanism by which you can be part of the change which you wish to see in the world.

I participated in this (admittedly small-scale) messaging effort in part thanks to the example set by other participants in local group chats which I am a part of, which have historically been the way that I have learned information, like "There is currently a boil order for [neighborhood]; here is a webpage with a map to see if you are affected. (Also, in case 'boil order' is a new phrase to you: there are worries about water contamination due to [reasons] and as such the health department is recommending that you boil any water that comes out of your tap before drinking it, even if it 'looks normal.')"

I feel that parenthetical point bears repeating. One point of frustration I personally heard from multiple people in 2020 was the number of occasions when public officials issued an order like "shelter in place" without further elaboration for the benefit of people who weren't already familiar with that precise piece of jargon.

You might think that people, upon encountering that sort of jargon, would perform a Google search to discover what exactly it is they are being instructed to do. But as someone who has ever worked in marketing and looked at sales funnel dashboard can tell you, there is zero chance that the conversion rate for this is 100%. Whenever you add the step of "do a google search to figure out what the public order is actually notifying you about," you are adding another layer to the funnel. And with each layer you add, you are losing some people.

[kuiperblog]

An alternate solution to Daylight Saving Time

Twice a year, we have to adjust our clocks for Daylight Saving Time. This can be quite annoying, and there seems to be a pretty wide consensus that the current system is pretty dumb. However, there's considerly less consensus on what the new system should be: some people favor "abolish DST," others suggest "permanent DST." What should our new system be?

I see merits to both sides.

The biggest advantage of "permanent DST" is, of course, the extra hour that you have in the afternoon when you get off from work. This is great during the warm months of the year, when I like to spend more time outdoors with friends on weekday afternoons, and so I certainly see the appeal of "permanent DST."

That being said, I'm also sympathetic to the "abolish DST" crowd. The downside of DST is having to wake up an hour earlier, and you feel this most saliently during the cold months of the year when the sun rises later. I've had jobs where I had to get up early, and it was still dark at 6:20 AM, with full sunrise not coming until after 7 AM. If we had year-round DST, we'd have an hour less daylight in the morning, meaning that sunrise would happen after 8 AM, when most kids are already in school! The coffee-fueled, brain-barely-awake drive to work is already stressful enough -- now imagine having to do it an hour earlier.

The biggest benefits of DST are also absent in the winter: sunset happens at around 5 PM, meaning there isn't daylight for afternoon activities after you get off work. Even if perpetual DST made it so that sunset happened at 6 PM instead of 5 PM, it's not as if you'll have time to hit the golf course or tennis court. And you wouldn't want to plan outdoor activities anyway during those freezing winter months anyway.

So, after carefully weighing both the "permanent DST" side and the "abolish DST" side of the debate, I've come up with an elegant compromise that should placate both sides:

What if we used DST during the warmer months when we can actually enjoy that extra afternoon daylight, but switched back to standard time during the winter when morning light is more valuable?

[kuiperblog]

The World Is (Not) Your Oyster

Many are familiar with the phrase "the world is your oyster," an idiom describing a position where you have the means to go anywhere or do whatever you want.

The line originates in the Shakespeare play The Merry Wives of Windsor, where it seems to have a slightly different meaning:

FALSTAFF: I will not lend thee a penny. PISTOL: Why then, the world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

Already, the subtext here is a bit more violent: my read of this is that the roguish Pistol is telling Falstaff that he intends to take what he wants by force.

And Falstaff immediately recognizes this as bluster and shuts him down immediately afterward, repeating that Pistol will receive "not a penny," for Falstaff has already been far too generous in dealing with the oaf and his friends who would be in jail were it not for his undeserved generosity.

It seems odd to me, then, that "the world is your oyster" has taken on its modern use. For starters, nowadays, people use the word without the subtext of violence.

But for another, having an oyster and the means to shuck it doesn't exactly put you in a position of incredible material abundance. Even though these days we see oysters as "fancy food" today (like so many foods that require unreasonable amounts of labor to consume), in Shakespeare's time, oysters were undesirable: cheap, plentiful, and generally seen as food for members of the "lower classes" who wanted a protein for their soup but couldn't afford beef.

Of course, there's always the possibility that you will open the oyster and find a pearl...but finding a pearl in an oyster was like winning the lottery. We're only able to "farm pearls" nowadays because we found methods to artificially induce the conditions needed for oysters to produce a pearl, followed by years of monitoring the oysters.

In short, if you're in a position to reap whatever you want from the world with trivial effort, you could probably pick a better modern idiom than describing the world as your oyster. Fortunately, we have a much better idiom, coined by Weird Al in his 1999 song Albuquerque: "the world is your burrito."

On first blush, the burrito might seem like a rather declasse alternative to the oyster, but I think that as a metaphor, it does a much better job of expressing the sentiment that everything you could ever want is has been wrapped up and presented to you in a single neat convenient package.

This bundle of goodness was made to order, just for you, packed with all the flavors and textures you could think to ask for. No sword required here: you've got access to all of life's delicious possibilities without the struggle. Just pick it up, open your mouth, and take a bite. The world is your burrito.

[kuiperblog]

List of novels by Neil Stevenson

README: After neglecting to read the help file before installing a game, the niece of an eccentric tech mogul finds herself drawn into a world of crime.

SEVENELVES: After the moon is unexpectedly destroyed, the only survivors are seven elves who are left to rebuild civilization.

Crypto micron: World War II codebreakers embed hidden messages on micron film. Half a century later, tech geniuses try to decipher the clues to uncover a forgotten treasure cache.

Anthem: A group of cloistered intellectuals come up with a catchy chant.

Snow Clash: A hacker who wields a mythical ice blade must travel from Los Angeles to the summit of Mount Baldy to confront a deadly menace.

Quick Solver: 17th century Enlightenment thinkers invent an electronic calculation device that is capable of instantly answering basic math questions.

The Contusion: A man awakes on a pirate ship after suffering a minor injury.

System of a World: In 18th century London, an inventor creates an electric guitar which becomes the weapon of choice for anti-war protestors.

The Big You: Chaos erupts on a college campus when a secret weapons lab develops a new technology and a student is hit with an expansion ray that causes him to grow to to over 60 feet in height.

The Rise and Fall of Dudes: A Harvard linguistics professor investigates a fraternity house that has been engaging in time travel shenanigans

Inner face: A US presidential candidate faces an conflict between his two sides: the "public face" that he presents to the world, and his "inner face" which only emerges in private.

Polo Stan: A Soviet woman is a really big fan of polo.

[kuiperblog]

About those "work from home" scams

I often get spam messages promising me the opportunity to work from home and earn several hundred dollars a week for just a few hours of my time, with no skills or experience required. On occasion I've thought, "what is their end-game here?"

I have always assumed that 1) this was some kind of scam, and 2) anyone who responded to these messages would probably go through some sort of process where their prospective "employer" asked them for their SSN/bank account information in the name of background checks/payroll, and would promptly find their identity stolen or their bank account empty.

I was correct in my first assumption: these are not good-faith actors. However, it seems that I may have been wrong in my second assumption: their goals are often not to steal the identify or bank account of the person they are contacting!

If someone is guileless to respond to one of these messages, they may receive the following offer:

"Would you like to Work-From-Home doing Accounts Receivable Processing on behalf of an International Organization? If so, give us your address, and we will cause money, in the form of debit cards, to arrive at your door. You will go out and procure the money, keep 10% for yourself, and then wire us 90% through your personal bank account, or through Western Union, which you can do because you are an American with a valid form of ID."

So, those who respond to what appears to be an obvious scam may actually find themselves in the position of getting exactly what they were promised: for just several hours of relatively low-effort work, they can get paid several hundred dollars. This can even continue for several days or weeks, or however long it takes for them to receive a visit from US federal agents who are interested in the fact that they are engaging in money laundering on behalf of an international criminal organization.

This is one of just many things I learned from the latest episode of Patrick McKenzie's excellent podcast, "Complex Systems," available wherever you find podcasts.

[kuiperblog]

I've often found myself wondering about the extent to which anime hair colors are supposed to be diegetic.

For example, Kaname Chidori and Sousuke Sagara both have canonically black hair. Every written description of either character always tells us that they have black hair. But here's how they're depicted on the light novel cover:

Chidori's "blue" hair color is even more pronounced in the anime adaptation.

There's a separation between the characters' visual representation on screen, and their canonical hair color. The characters' colorful hair is non-diegetic: it's not actually part of the world, any more than the music that plays in the background, or the heart-shaped eyes that animators use to express characters' infatuation, or the anger marks that appear on their head to let us know how stinkin' mad they are:

Kaname Chidori also doesn't canonically have giant shark teeth that are half the length of her head.

So, does Madoka Kaname have canonically pink hair, or is that just something that we perceive as viewers, part of the visual toolbox that the artists use to communicate with the audience?

To the best of my knowledge, Madoka is never actually stated to have pink hair! Ditto goes for Sayaka's blue hair and Kyoko's red hair. Mami's hair isn't "blonde," it's yellow, and she doesn't spend two hours every morning applying maximum hold hairspray to give it that gravity-defying bounce.

I think there's something beautiful in this sort of hyperrealism. We get to see the world as better than it is, because these details don't exist for these characters; they exist only to be perceived by the audience of people who are outside this world.

When we watch anime like this, we aren't glimpsing into a terrarium that tries to render a slice of the the imaginary world as it is; we're looking at art that exists because it was made for an audience. It was made for us.

it’s funny how madoka thinks her pink ribbons are too flashy like girl your hair is fucking pink

[kuiperblog]

There's this oft-repeated cliche: "it's not about the ideas; it's about the execution." I wonder how often people actually think about what that means.

One of my favorite anecdotes is that Daniel Abraham (one half of SA Corey of The Expanse fame) is not really known for writing fantasy "by the numbers." If you've ever read The Long Price Quartet, you know what I'm talking about: it has this eastern-inflected setting where the conversations happen in tea houses instead of taverns, and only a few people on the continent can use magic at any given time, and the applications of those magic are usually things like "separate seeds from cotton" or "make stone softer," which go on to be world-shaping because they basically slingshot certain regions up the tech tree.

After writing the Long Price Quartet, Daniel Abraham wanted to do something different: he wanted to write epic fantasy as readers expected it to be.

He got a giant "epic fantasy symposium" together with a bunch of fellow authors who he respected, including George R.R. Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Ian Tregillis, Carrie Vaughn, and Melinda M. Snodgrass, who was kind enough to let him use her home to host the event. The group of them discussed at length what epic fantasy is, how it functions, and what reader expectations were.

And so, armed with this knowledge and insight from some of the great minds of fantasy, Daniel Abraham set out give the readers exactly what they expected from the fantasy genre: a bunch of fantasy races in a faux-European setting set some time in the medieval era, with a story that begins with a scholar inadvertently awaking an ancient evil, and a heroic mercenary captain who goes on a quest to obtain a magical sword and slay the ancient evil, and an abandoned orphan child who ascends from inauspicious origins to become a peer of monarchs. The first book in the series is called The Dragon's Path and it's got a picture of a giant sword on the cover.

It's easy to describe The Dagger and the Coin in ways that make it sound like everything you'd expect from a bog-standard epic fantasy story, and that was, in some sense, kind of the goal. Except, of course, that Daniel Abraham can't help but inject his favorite things into the genre. So, in his own words, "instead of having a farm boy chosen by prophecy, I’ve got an orphan girl who was raised by my version of the Medici bank," because Abraham is fascinated by the Medici bank, and so the orphan who ascends to power is a banker who never picks up a weapon, and by the way she's also kind of a functional and (mostly) prosocial sociopath.

The aforementioned mercenary captain who goes on a quest to obtain a magical sword and subsequently sets out to slay the source of the ancient evil is, well, not exactly the center of the story, because it's hard for "one guy with a sword" to accomplish much of anything on his own. After all, wars are won by armies, not individual soldiers. And as Napoleon once said, an army marches on its stomach, and so the ability to fund and procure supplies for an army is a great deal more important to running a war, and it quickly starts to become clear why a banker might be better qualified to save the world than a guy with a sword. That being said, the former mercenary captain can make a pretty good general if you give him the chance.

But, of course, paying armies is not the only way to get people to fight for you: those who don't fight for the highest bidder are often those who fight for ideology, and the conflict of "mercenaries vs missionaries" becomes very literal in this story. When one side of the conflict is driven by missionaries who are very good at spreading bad ideas, you have a conflict that is literally about how to defeat a totalizing ideology, which isn't exactly the kind of thing that you can reliably accomplish with a sword, and so this story becomes a story that is literally about the world-saving power of epistemic humility.

Running through all of this is the fact that, as Daniel Abraham does his best to write to genre expectations, one of the main viewpoint characters is sort of holding a mirror up to a certain kind of reader. After all, if you're a "typical fantasy fan," maybe you have certain aesthetic preferences and beliefs. Maybe you find yourself more comfortable with books than interacting with your fellow people. Maybe you believe that ancient prophecies are true, and find yourself easily persuaded by wise old bearded men who speak in aphorisms that resonate deeply. And most critically, maybe you believe that the world can be neatly divided into "good" and "evil," and that the appropriate response to the presence of evil is righteous violence. Daniel Abraham suggests to us that if you fit this profile, then perhaps you are not the "good guy," and that you could, with someone whispering the right things in your ear, very easily find yourself being the bad guy.

And Daniel Abraham does this while also delivering everything you'd expect from a traditional epic fantasy tale. This is not a story that is reliant on you buying into the idea of a "genre deconstruction;" Daniel Abraham just looks at the things he finds interesting, and says "okay, that's going into the book." Most of these things are not really that subversive: the guy who goes on a quest does indeed find an epic sword, and he gets to do some cool and heroic stuff with it, even if his sword skills alone do not suffice to conquer evil. You come to love the heroes, and hate the villains, and you sometimes even root for the antiheroes when they happen to find themselves on the right side of the conflict.

In a sense, he is not really "subverting expectations" so much as actually delivering on the expectations that readers did not know that they expected from the genre, because The Dagger and the Coin is one of the few epic fantasy series that actually grapples what it means to have a feudal society where people actually believe in the Divine Right of Kings, and why a constitutional monarchy would be total anathema to people who actually believed that members of the noble ruling class were inherently superior. He's not here to "subvert" or "deconstruct" the fantasy genre; he's here to deliver the series that epic fantasy readers have always wanted but didn't know they were allowed to ask for.

Some books I think it would be fun to take a crack at writing (which do not have anything like a planning doc or partial draft):

Choose-your-own-adventure

Shonen trading card game battler

Locked-room murder mystery

Scifi amnesiac protagonist

Little people book (like The Borrowers)

Very generic romance

Travelogue