The clearest example I’ve seen of this effect is with dental hygienists in the U.S.. Big labor crunch as lots of industry veterans left the labor force during COVID, wage and career growth prospects are weak vs. alternative options for newcomers, very difficult to automate in practical terms, and the way they produce revenue is usually per-procedure, with a ceiling largely fixed by insurance reimbursement rates, so the offices that employ them see a profitability issue when contemplating a raise.
Sounds like some other places use capitation to break the tight coupling between hourly productivity and profitability. Sounds interesting but politically very challenging. Would be interested to hear some perspective from consumers in e.g. the Nordics with experience.
Fwiw sometimes I wear my APP2 inside my cheap passive 3M earmuffs haha. For an hour or two of use it’s been comfortable enough that I can listen and also attenuate loud tool noise e.g. a weed trimmer.
Of course you don’t get any speech boost to enable conversation with this setup. But no one else around me has passthrough either so I turn off my tools to talk the old fashioned way. :)
Not OP, but I would ban the tickets/prizes mechanism.
Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine.
If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward.
I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.
Chat thinks it’s a kana segmentation error in a list of possible hypothesized problems/causes that get mis-rendered as literal nouns, such as “XML風, 設定方法, 処理の流れ / 処理流” such that roughly
“XML style” -> “-style” -> “wind”,
“setting method” -> “-method” -> “pole”,
“processing flow” -> “-flow” -> “dragon”
(Note that XMl, setting, and processing are just examples to illustrate.)
The LLM assures me that “Japanese writers often end diagnostic questions with a compact list of possible causes (A、B、Cでしょうか？).”
Its final verdict:
“very likely the English “wind, pole, dragon” = MT literal translations of a compact Japanese list such as 〜風、〜法（方法）、〜流 (-style, -method, -flow). The pattern, repetition, and the fact they appear at question ends all support this strongly.”
My lingering question is how do you service a leaky pipe surrounded by dirt that’s 600C? Do you just have to forfeit a good chunk of your energy savings for the year?
Or is there like a practical maintenance window each year at the end of the winter when you’d do this?
That's not a lingering question. It's the question.
This is a steam boiler. Those are well understood. They have well understood problems. Leaky boiler tubes. Crud in the tubes. Cleaning. The problem here is that you can't easily turn the heat source off.
It's possible to build a long-life boiler for a heat source you can't fully turn off. Every nuclear reactor has one. Heavy stainless steel tubes, precision welding, distilled water.
Works fine, but not cheap.
This paper is very hand-wavey about the details of getting the energy out. They're all about the side that puts the energy in, which is the easy part.
Yes, the article addresses this explicitly. The key criterion to make it viabile is steady long-term energy consumption for the winter months. Otherwise the cost to rapidly extract the heat gets too high and wrecks the economics.
The application here is big, slow annual oscillations. Slow charge, slow discharge.
I wonder how they discovered that "clicking" works, seems so counterintuitive to discover. Though it's fair that I don't spend anywhere near that much time listening carefully and noticing how sharp sounds reflect.
> I wonder how they discovered that "clicking" works
I won't think it's they unexpected - have a walk a forest with loud insects. You'll hear a lot of interesting noises shaped a lot by what you stand near to. Large trees especially change how you hear things quite a lot.
Before practical applications, my first thought was a grade-school science fair entry. It’s novel enough for judges not to have seen it for a couple of years.
300k miles is only about 12 low earth orbits, so easily achievable by a second stage booster (though it’s going to be coasting for most of it). Not so easy for a booster though.
> Where are all these examples of products that have succeeded despite not valuing quality?
Windows products since the 2000s. They may have won on quality early on but today succeed mainly via compliance controls and switching costs IMO.
Also big legacy B2B digital systems of record. Pretty much any ERP. Can’t say firsthand but this is my impression of SAP products and Oracle products. Also Encompass, the system of record for a large majority of the U.S. mortgage market. Most medical software.
There are a lot of recordkeeping systems that have a massive moat from handling decades worth of nuance. Their “quality” by modern UX and performance standards is very poor but they handle all the nooks and crannies of their industry.
You're correct, so maybe there's a caveat. You need to have quality in the beginning during market capture mode. Once the customer is entrenched, you can then slack or even enshittify your product to some point. You're playing with friction that may lose the business, but comfortable customers can tolerate quite a bit for the familiar.
Sounds like some other places use capitation to break the tight coupling between hourly productivity and profitability. Sounds interesting but politically very challenging. Would be interested to hear some perspective from consumers in e.g. the Nordics with experience.
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