Loved your description of the class system. There's a general theme of old money wealthy people not caring about vanity purchases because they don't know how much stuff costs nor if that is a too much money or not.
It's interesting to see how luxury brands have different segments of clothes that range from no logos at all to a huge alligator the size of your chest, depending on whether you need to announce to the world that you made it or if you just want to have access to good quality clothes.
Yes, the classic description for a member of the British Upper Class is someone who looks down on people who have to buy their own furniture.
(One classification of "upper class" is someone who has never had to buy their own furniture because they inherit it and pretty much everything else they need.)
With the 250M price tag I really keep thinking how we in the west just accepted such a massive cost for infrastructure development, especially considering the cost of living has gone down and the Victorians typically built this things by hand.
Most people who say these things frequently do want all the other functionality one buys with that money, though. As an example, in times with lower safety standards, many projects proceeded without incident. The point of modern safety standards is to guarantee to a greater likelihood that a project will proceed without incident. Would you be willing to give that up?
Another concern is the loss of a historically listed structure. Most people today prioritize historical structures over any modern structure. Would you be willing to demolish the bridge? You certainly can't rebuild an identical one because we don't have that many expert workers of wrought iron.
It will have been built to older standards. You'll have to convince a lot of people that the weight standards of then, the fire standards of then, and the disaster management standards of then should be exempted from modern controls and in order for them to be exempted you need to create a framework for exemption if it doesn't already exist. Coordination costs a lot of time and money. Even deciding that you don't need coordination for this project requires coordination because without a framework for exempting coordination you can't do it without allowing for always exempting coordination.
You will have seen this in any other realm. The more people have an opinion on something the harder it is to get done. The union of all requirements creates a project that is the intersection of all possibilities enabled, which combined with the classic aphorism about every additional percent taking as much effort as everything before, means that things cost more now.
We can build better and faster when we don't have to listen to anyone. This happens in emergencies. Take a look at the US MacArthur Maze tank truck fire and rebuild.
I don't see the value in preserving obsolete infrastructure for historical purposes. Photograph it, document it, open a museum to commemorate it if you want, but blow it up and build a modern bridge that doesn't have all these problems and benefits from an additional 100+ years of progress in engineering and materials science.
Well like the article points out - even that outrageous cost of 250M is nothing compared to the national budget. We as a country could easily afford it - but this is the second part of the whole problem, not just that things are expensive, but that no one is willing to actually sign off on any solution, so we just end up with the default of doing absolutely nothing. In a way it would have been better if the bridge actually collapsed(with no injuries to anyone, of course) because then it would have been much easier to replace it or repair it. Right now it's usable at least somewhat so there's all kinds of reasons why nothing should be done(money being just one of them).
Very few efficiency improvements have been made in bridge building over the past 150 years aside from prefabricating sections offsite and using hydraulic cranes. Inflation pushes wages higher, making it seem more expensive since there’s no efficiency gain, just higher wages for the workers. It’s good that the people that build bridges and roads and buildings can afford to live.
Preserving a 150 year old bridge gets complicated as it’s virtually bespoke work, problems are uncovered as the project continues, ballooning costs.
Like most UK rail, it’s anywhere between somewhat expensive and _outrageously_ expensive, depending on exactly when you buy the ticket and how. Looks like it cost me 9.50 last time I was there, which is not _horrific_ for an airport (airport transport generally being a bit of a ripoff), but the barely-faster Gatwick Express would have been far more.
(The UK rail system is a uniquely user-hostile one, in that it seems designed to fool you into paying more than you have to.)
This is what makes the innovator's dilemma repeat itself so many times in so many industries. It's not that the incumbent companies don't see the new technology; it's that they're so entrenched in what they know how to do that pivoting to the new technology is basically a Hail Mary no matter how you do it. Do it too early and your shareholders are going to think you're crazy. Do it too late, and you're risking entering a new market as the chaser with a bad hand of company, employees, and board that don't have any idea of what they're doing.
Exactly, usually the companies know what's coming up, like you said. But, properly shifting gears to play a new game requires that you act like a startup again. It likely requires foregoing the fat margins you were used to. And it likely requires going back to the drawing board and actually learning from the market.
And this is what companies find it hard to do. To be fair, I think that is not so bad a things. Companies should rise and die naturally. A few companies monopolizing markets forever does not seem good.
Kodak knew digital cameras were coming, my first digital camera was a Kodak from the late 90's. I guess it wasn't in their DNA to innovate and compete in this new medium.
I feel like being a publicly traded company prevents pivoting because of the focus on short term results.
Kodak didn't really have the option to compete. Their business was largely film, which just disappeared completely, and even digital cameras got replaced pretty quickly with phones. There was nothing to pivot too for Kodak.
and some simple math says that 10-15 minus 5-7 still leaves Kodak in the lurch. But it's now 2025, and Kodak the corporation is still around, so I don't know that my supposition: Kodak would be doing better today if they'd gone all in on digital camera sensor technology, is disproven by that fact.
I think it’s less “pivoting is hard” and more “we know what’s right and we’re not going to pivot”.
It’s not hard to have smaller R&D teams work on these problems to keep the innovation going, but most executives are out there prioritizing cost cuttings so that the shareholders get the quarterly dopamine boosts on the earnings calls.
car manufacturers can afford to experiment - it's not like they don't have room in the budget. and they did experiment.
if you don't know GM's history with electric cars: they were positioned to execute a successful transition about thirty years ago, but they simply chose not to.
As someone with a lot of family working in GM corporate, it seems like they were never really confident in it in the first place. So many of them scoffed at the entire idea of electric cars and most still do, even with their own lineup and having driven them themselves. They expected them to fail and never put in the actual effort to support it. It seemed like 80% of corporate were against it completely and without reason because they themselves were doing fine and could afford the gas on their free corporate car and massive discounted family purchased cars. And everyone below them fed their egos by spewing garbage about how well they are all doing with their high margin luxury trimmed cars without considering how they are pricing more and more people out of their entire brand each year.
Pollan touches on this in The Omnivore's Dilemma. The low price of a burger is an illusion because the real costs to the environment and public health are externalized, making fast food artificially cheap due to indirect subsidies on corn byproducts and other animal feed. Healthy food competes on a totally different cost base.
There's also the split between eating with agency and just consuming which requires a top down solution. Unless the government stops subsidizing meat and corn subproducts linked to health issues the majority of people will always gravitate towards the cheapest calories available.
Daycare quality is a spectrum, the same way as babysitting at home. My smaller one just started daycare, and we settled for one that actually does stuff with the kids (forest school style). But I can tell you, we've visited lots of places that are basically just making sure the kids are not dead by the time you pick them up. Same for babysitting with grandparents; there's the hyper-social grandpa style that's always doing something, and the couchpotato with +10k hours on Cocomelon.
Yes, I'll admit that my sample size for comparison is relatively small so I'm mostly offering anecdotal evidence. And I totally agree on the quality of daycares being a spectrum. Just like how one single, good teacher who actually cares can really change a student's school experience (even if the school itself is not that great).
Assuming this is irrational and must come back to reality at some point, I'm not convinced this is connected to the common man economy as other bubbles in the past were. This round of investment is mostly being funded by exuberant cash flow accumulated over the years that was otherwise used as stock buybacks by a small number of stocks and some private credit deals that are not that accessible to the general public. This is looking more like a crypto crash kind of effect rather than a 2008 one.
However 'normal people' buying into the stock market via 401ks or otherwise likely (and arguably sensibly) will be in index funds, that of course are exposed to the bubble via (grossly?) inflated tech stocks. Effectively their current pension/savings contributions are being clipped by whatever the delta is between now and post bubble. Time in the market and all that, but still it might be a hefty haircut.
It's interesting that you mentioned on a recent post that saturation on the pelican benchmark isn't a problem because it's easy to test for generalization. But now looking at your updated benchmark results, I'm not sure I agree. Have the main labs been climbing the Pelican on a bike hill in secret this whole time?
The problem in general is consistency. Bread is very forgiving on flavour profiles so what you're saying works fine within a good threshold. For breweries it's usually not worth it as there are lots of nuances on the mutations of the harvested yeast and their effects into the flavour profile of the final product. There are some exceptions like natural fermented beers or anything related to kveik yeast, but in general people don't reuse yeast past 1-2 brews.
It's interesting to see how luxury brands have different segments of clothes that range from no logos at all to a huge alligator the size of your chest, depending on whether you need to announce to the world that you made it or if you just want to have access to good quality clothes.