Also, if I were going to put a UV lamp in an air duct, I wouldn’t make it 222nm. IIRC other wavelengths (e.g. 254nm) are more effectively germicidal and are mainly bottlenecked by safety issues, which don’t apply in this context.
willbradshaw
Karma: 758
I have a couple disagreements with this:
Regarding regulatory approval, 222nm far UV-C irradiation is already legal (in the US) to levels that probably significantly reduce transmission (8-hour limit of 479 mJ/cm2 for skin). Various people I know think that the limits should be much higher, but even irradiation at current US limits seems very valuable -- & very safe—to me.
While KrCl lamps are expensive, I think this post overstates how unviable they are. I think an interested organisation could afford to install & run a bunch of these in an office (within the legal limits) basically right now, and see benefits that are worth the cost. (Someone throwing cost numbers at me could ofc change my mind here.)
I agree that the LEDs seem pretty hard.
I use Complice, so this is exciting news for me!
Only admitting the mistake at comments and not in a more visible manner also doesn’t feel like you treat it seriously enough. It likely deserves the same treatment as the mistakes on https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes
For what it’s worth, I do think this is probably a serious enough mistake to go on this page.
I admit I’m pretty unsure how my beliefs change as the % of PS5s grabbed by scalpers changes.
Like, the more PS5s scalpers get, the higher the time cost for anyone trying to buy at RRP in the short term, but the faster the scalpers will run through the population of people willing to pay high markups?
This is where I realise that I don’t know how scalpers actually react to that situation – maybe for some reason they just drip-feed their PS5 hauls? Maybe (probably) they’re more patient than most of the people trying to win drops, so they sell off their PS5s more slowly (and so remove competitors from the pool at a lower rate than otherwise would be the case)?
I think there’s a pretty strong chance I’m just misunderstanding something here.
As I said in my reply to Dave Orr above, I now suspect that my opinion on the goodness or badness here is probably dominated by the net effect on the deadweight loss of time. (I’m not sure how much I think this should be weighted by the economic and/or social value of each person’s time.)
So my main questions now are (1) what is the net effect, and (2) what would the net effect be, if people were more rational about how much they value their time? (I’m also not sure how much the answer to (2) would change my view.)
It sounds like you think the answer to (1) is positive?
Sure, it might not be textbook rent-seeking, but it’s pretty close.
One important difference from classic pro-price-gouging arguments here, that I didn’t really crystallise until now, is that the scalpers aren’t really doing anything (AFAIK) to increase supply. So we lack the cutting-down-logs-with-chainsaws angle.
Just to check I understand this, this is roughly the same objection as my (b) above, right?
If so, I think this is plausible, though I’m not sure how bad it is. I think the overall badness would mainly depend on the total effect on the deadweight loss of wasted time.
(I also think that most people who can afford a PS5 should probably value their time much more than they do, but that’s a different story.)
There’s currently a global shortage in computer chips, which limits the amount of PS5s that can be manufactured. Presumably Sony is churning them out as fast as it can (see e.g. sxae’s comment elsewhere) but that is slower than everyone would like.
The recent extreme shortage was also caused in part by trade disruptions due to the Ever Given crisis, but I assume that’ll work its way out of the system fairly soon.
Thanks for this. I agree that it’s plausibly rational of Sony not to raise the RRP here.
Presumably the retailers would love to increase the price here, but they ain’t the ones setting the RRP...
it’s possible they’re enjoying a situation where demand is so high that there’s arbitrage to be done
Could you clarify what you mean by arbitrage here? What arbitrage is available to Sony in this situation?
Sure, I agree that reselling will become less and less important as supply increases – presumably the prices of PS5s on eBay will fall as supply increases, until it’s close enough to the RRP that reselling is no longer profitable.
In fact, my argument above depends, among other things, on demand increasing much more slowly than supply.
What I’m interested in here is whether, given the current (temporary) shortage, these kinds of reselling practices are actually (temporarily) harmful.
(Insofar as upgrading your gaming console later than you wanted is harmful.)
Are PS5 scalpers actually bad?
Yeah, it seems extremely easy to incorporate this into a pro-school model, and I’m confused as to why someone might think it isn’t.
Like, if you think school is actually good (on average), of course you think that finding a way to let kids not miss school is plausibly good.
Presumably the fact that kids miss out on the joy of snow is a cost, which is why I only said “plausibly good” above, but now we’re arguing about the optimal trade-off, at which point we’re firmly in Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided territory.
Yeah, I can imagine this being useful. One does sometimes encounter cases where unclear preferences lead to accidentally skipping endorsedly-best tasks.
Gifts as free exploration
I haven’t used it for that, but it sounds like a good application; and in this case, you only need to select one thing, so you can do it memorylessly (just keep your finger on the active dish).
Can you clarify your question? I started writing a response, but then realised I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting it correctly.
Right, for a single pass it’s a find-the-maximum-element algorithm in O(n).
I think if you eventually do every task on the list it’s equivalent to sorting the list? But this basically never happens to me.
Presumably intermediate states (doing e.g. half the items) is of intermediate efficiency? But my grasp of the underlying theory here is pretty weak.
It’s not often I see someone claim that the US medical regulation system is too lax.
The AstraZeneca vaccine was halted in the US for a month on the basis of a single, potential adverse event. Huge numbers of lives were on the line, and the US regulators were willing to hold up one of the frontrunner vaccine candidates for weeks on the basis of the faintest hint of unsafety.
There might be long-term adverse effects of the vaccine we don’t know about, though no-one I’ve heard speak about vaccines seems to think these are likely to be severe; most vaccines are very safe. But if the FDA gives approval we can confidently assume that, at least over the timescale of the trial, the vaccine is extremely safe. In fact, we can assume we have far too much evidence of safety, that it should have been approved on the basis of substantially less evidence than we have.
As far as efficacy is concerned, as I understand it the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have very simple designs (which were pre-approved by the – again, extremely over-conservative – FDA) and are overseen by an independent data-monitoring organisation. So while I agree their incentives are perverse, their ability to distort the data should be relatively limited.
(Here’s a piece claiming the same is not true of the AZ/Oxford vaccine; I’m not sure how to evaluate this, but it’s worth noting that the author is explicitly contrasting their data with the much more reliable Pfizer and Moderna data.)
I also think you’re excessively sceptical of the evidence of long-term risks from COVID in young people. But in my case, avoiding a significant risk of (a) a really unpleasant and really long (multi-week) illness, and (b) accidentally killing people is sufficient for me to want to take a vaccine as soon as possible, even without a (in my estimation quite small, but nontrivial) risk of long-term sequelae.
This sounds like it could work. I might well try this. Thanks!
That’s the old limit; it was changed last year. See e.g. this figure from Blatchley et al.