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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’m sure it varies a bit by region, but that wouldn’t be a crazy price for the NE. HVAC is just expensive these days.

    I’d recommend getting at least three quotes. If different companies propose different setups (e.g., all heads vs ducted vs mixed), try to get at least two quotes for each. I ended up getting six quotes due to how much they varied in both price and design. My highest and lowest quotes were more than 20k apart for a <1500 sqft space.

    If you have access to a 0% financing program, don’t wait too long. Those run out quick because it’s such an amazing deal.








  • I forget the specifics and who came up with it, but: pick an amount you haven’t written before. Then, write that much without looking back. If you can set your word processor to only keep your current line visible, even better. Once you’ve written that many paragraphs or pages, do a fast edit. Use a timer so you can’t linger. Then write that much again with the same strategy. After 3-5 times, do a more thorough edit of the whole thing.

    It’s not necessarily how you always want to write, but it can help getting over that initial confidence block as an exercise.




  • Great, and where local is the best choice they should do that. But nobody can seriously argue that reducing the ability of government to shop around for the best cost/quality balance is a good thing. It’s not like the only options are buy everything American or everything from China. I’d like qualified experts making that decision, not legislators.

    You create bad incentives if you artificially reduce competition like this. Not every good or service will have tons of American choices, so you end up with a handful of companies who know the government has no other choice.



  • This is a notoriously difficult thing to prove out either way in data, and I’m sure it varies situationally.

    The Mariel Boatlift natural experiment did not demonstrate a decrease in wages or increase in unemployment. It makes sense: immigrants both work and consume (i.e., create demand). Unless every immigrant happens to work in the same industry/union, the sum total of immigrants may create demand for labor equal to or greater than they fill.

    It also may have the impact you’re suggesting. But it doesn’t have to be zero sum. And, understandably, people only remember when they lost a job potentially tied to immigrant labor. Nobody asks if the job they’re applying to was created due to demand immigrants added to the economy (and how could a company know that?).




  • Two points about R&D costs:

    First, they aren’t just trying to make up what they spent on this treatment, but others that failed during research/trials. There’s a lot of them the general public will never hear about, and pharmas generally don’t like to bring attention to their failures. Part of that is many shareholders are morons who don’t understand how science works.

    Second, the costs can get fuzzier for larger companies who in-house much of the R&D process, since the costs get shared among many programs. Properly attributing spend in that case can be a serious challenge.

    All that said, they’ve clearly seen an opportunity to rake it in with this trendy drug and are charging way more than they need to.