Rationing is not a very fair way to distribute goods or services to people. Some people may value it just enough to pay the entry fee, while others might value it a lot more, but now they have the same chances of receiving it. If you prohibit people from on-selling their tickets, then you also causes losses when people change their minds but are already locked in by the lottery.
"Value" is an extremely overloaded word. Even within the narrow universe of money, economics, and finance, there are many different notions of value (e.g. market value, book value, replacement value). More broadly, what most people intuitively understand as value is independent of money and hard to quantify, but that doesn't make it less important.
I do appreciate that people want to make something as important as value quantifiable, but like all measurements there are pitfalls, and I merely pointed out a rather important pitfall when attempting to measure value using money.
> Rationing is not a very fair way to distribute goods or services to people.
So?
No one said life was fair. There is no human-right to vacation in a given destination. I have to apply for lottery hunts for various game animal in my state. It's just a means of controlling scarce resource.
> then you also causes losses when people change their minds but are already locked in by the lottery.
What does "democratic access to their country" even mean? The tourists visiting their country don't vote, so you don't mean literally. And any random rationing system you put in place will be inherently unfair in some dimension.
The work "democratic" does not always directly relate to governing a country, but also making something accessible to all without unnecessary limitations - similar to the right to vote.
Do I as non-citizen have a right to vote in whatever country I want, just because I have an opinion on the matter being voted? Access to citizenship is also limited by descent, wealth, or your conscientiousness. It is also ‘unfair’ if you interpret this word as ‘not instantly accessible to anyone who expresses interest’.
For this point:
"If you prohibit people from on-selling their tickets, then you also causes losses when people change their minds but are already locked in by the lottery."
You could just have a return program. 30 days out it is free, 10 days out and you pay a small percentage but get your money back. You don't need to rely on selling tickets to others to get your money back
Aside from the fairly large costs involved in running multiple large international lotteries, you'd have to build checkpoints around massive areas, stop people from buying tickets off of the winners somehow, deal with the corruption issues, and other exciting unintended side effects.
All because a tax on a luxury (which tourism certainly is), wasn't fair enough.
Actually, lottery is how they do it for various exclusive/special destinations & tours in Japan and it seem to be working in their case.
This is used for rides on the Yamanashi maglev test tracks, tours to the Kurobe gorge railway upper track and other places with inherently limtted capacity.
One trick I learned a while ago is that stepping back as far as possible and taking pictures of people taking pictures is far more interesting than yet another picture of the same thing.
There are only so many interesting photos of the Mona Lisa. But there are an infinite number of interesting photos of people maniacally taking photos of the Mona Lisa. If you're lucky, you might snap a pic of an instagrammer falling off a cliff, or getting hit by a truck.
I have a video of a woman holding a dog out over the edge of the Grand Canyon and having their friend take a photo, presumably trying to re-enact the Lion King scene. The level of absurdity on display is much more impressive than yet another picture of the Grand Canyon.
It's called a "meta". If you manage to take a picture of somebody taking a picture of somebody taking a picture - congratulation, you just earned yourself a "double-meta".
Exactly. Social skills can be learned, but often that requires a lot more effort and pain than learning a new programming language or framework. Listening with full attention is the most underrated "best practice" in tech.
The thing about (not) learning social skills is that there isn't instant feedback whether it's working or not. Can't write Selenium routines for people.
I'm adequate at this sometimes, but there are situations where I'm... pretty bad at it. They tend to be where:
(a) somebody is explaining something at either edge of my understanding -- either well-inside (and listening feels like a waste of time because I know this stuff) or well-outside (and listening feels like a waste of time because I don't know enough to get a solid purchase into the stream of communication).
(b) the primary purpose of the conversation is setting expectations or attempting to provide motivation, but it goes on for more than twice the minimum necessary communication
(c) I'm distracted by some unresolved issue I care about more.
(c) is clearly my issue. (a) & (b) are arguably failures of the other party as much as anything I'm doing, but I feel like I could probably get better at responses here.
If anybody has any hints, I might even try to listen. :)
They can be learned to some me extent, but they are harder for some people to learn than others, especially those far off to one side of the spectrum. Actually, it is really easy to tell naturals apart from those who have to consciously study social skills, the latter being much more stilted and systematic than the former. I admit I find it really off putting when interacting with someone with heavily trained social skills (and I’m definitely not a natural). I prefer people to be themselves rather than pretending to be something else.
If it is easy to see through communication that goes against feeling, the result can be unsettling to some listeners; eg what are they hiding? What do they really think?
There is nothing new in this article causing scientists to rethink Evolution. Sexual selection, on the basis of physical traits (weaponry or ornaments), has been known and observed since Darwin. Evolution doesn't produce the best adaptations to a given environment. Rather it produces the least worst. Reproduction of genes through generations is the name of the game.
Evolution produces random features, which remain as long as you survive and reproduce.
So you may get totally ornamental or vestigial or obsolete features simply because they were never enough hindrance to reproduction. "Enough" is a key word - even features which are hindrances but do not offset pro-survival/pro-reproduction features will remain.
One thing I don't understand is how one species can appreciate the ornamental features of another. Human aesthetic criteria may direct the development of human features, but why do our aesthetic criteria positively appraise the features of many animals that we did not influence? One example would be birds, which are very beautiful but aren't even mammals.
Ornamental features are not obsolete. Many animals are selected for their ornamental features, which may act as heuristics for fitness (both for the opposite sex in reproduction and for the same sex in combat/competitiveness). I know not all of the book is still considered wholly accurate, but Dawkins describes this at length in The Selfish Gene.
There are volumes and volumes on the changing nature of sexual selection over millennia by different species. It's striking that NYT would make this sound much larger than it is.
> Many of Darwin’s peers and successors ridiculed his proposal. To them, the idea that animals had such cognitive sophistication — and that the preferences of “capricious” females could shape entire species — was nonsense. Although never completely forgotten, Darwin’s theory of beauty was largely abandoned.
It's also so obvious as to not even require evidence, honestly. If evolution is the propagation of certain gene adaptations through reproduction, then it goes without saying that any discriminatory element resulting in successful or unsuccessful reproduction, wherein the gene expression has an impact on the outcome, is necessarily involved in the existence of that trait.
> The problem? Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round.
> The federal government controls the nation’s time zones, as well as the start and end dates of daylight saving time. States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time — Arizona and Hawaii do — but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time.
we're all familiar with the article in the constitution that gives the federal government the power to decide for states how to set their clocks, i assume.
i guess you can always count on the times to advocate for centralized power
The Commerce Clause:
>Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: [The Congress shall have power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Here's an example. Suppose I'm driving down the highways, and I arrive at some town and I decide to stop for lunch. I see a parking space, but it says I can't park there at certain times. But every city in the country sets its own clocks. How do I figure out what time it is? That's a pain, right?
That's quite a stretch. (Of course, the Commerce Clause has been stretched far beyond sanity before...)
And standard time was not instituted by the government, using the powers of the Commerce Clause. It was instituted by railroads, who found the exact issue you described to be a pain when trying to schedule trains.
The Constitution grants the federal government the power to pass laws, and "setting your own time" isn't explicitly enumerated as a right that is reserved to the states.
