Now that you edited your post to correct your spelling, people probably have no idea what I'm talking about.

Laundry detergent is usually priced as cents per load by savvy shoppers. That would factor out smaller doses.

The amount of detergent per load is set by the manufacturer, who can injection mold that measuring cup in whatever size they want. FTA:

> The amount of liquid had shrunk to 92 ounces from 100 ounces before the pandemic, and the price had risen by a dollar. After that, the cost stayed the same, but the contents shrank to 84 ounces in 2024 and then to 80 ounces in December.

> The label continuously promised enough detergent for 64 loads of laundry.

> ...Tide specifically got the "most significant upgrade to its liquid formula in over 20 years," according to the company, with a "boosted" level of active cleaning ingredients and updated dosage instructions.

> "The result is superior cleaning performance in a smaller dose," a Procter & Gamble representative said.

Do you take them at their word for that? I'm specifically wondering whether the 84 ounce, 64-load bottle with a cap that measures out 1.3125 ounces per load contains the exact same liquid as the 80 ounce, 64-load bottle with a cap that measures out 1.25 ounces per load. I prefer powder detergent with a prewash dose, I know my clothes get clean, but I don't know that anyone outside a lab would be able to inspect clothes post-wash and notice the difference in cleanliness caused by the removal of 0.0625 ounces of detergent.

They have three ways to protect or boost profits: Raise prices, decrease quantities, or decrease quality. NPR and the

Credit card companies have all of this data. They could track classes of spending and regress out rising incomes, age, etc.

I’m just how exactly does my credit card company know how much I paid for shampoo?

Your retailer knows exactly how much you paid for shampoo. In most cases, they know it was exactly you who bought it. Data sharing agreements through direct or third parties complete the picture for both sides, retailer and card issuer.

"Back in my day, we had a cardboard box and a stick and didn't complain ..."

Now you'd get CPS called for the stick.

Mostly sarcastic, but I don't think it's a hot take to realize that the curtain has shifted substantially over the decades in terms of how to raise a child.

There is no a priori reason why a bunch of meatbags would have the ability to test all laws of physics of this universe. I think we may have gotten lucky for a while there. String theory is so far out there that a new methodology has been developed, namely using beauty or symmetry or Occam's Razor to choose between competing theories. None of these have the pedigree of empiricism, but they may also not be wrong. I hope some aesthetic could be applied to the laws of the universe, but that is also not at all guaranteed.

Occam's razor is perfectly empirical: "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity". It's what people repeatedly accuse string theory of violating in low-rent popsci criticism.

The other things you refer to are still Occam's razor: symmetry is handy because it eliminates symmetry-breaking entities even though we know they can happen in the standard model (Higgs) and "beauty" is really just another way of saying Occam's razor - you'd prefer your theory to not be full of dozens of free parameters because it starts to fit any possible outputs and be less predictive.

At all points the issue is that unless you've fully explored a simpler space with less entities, don't start adding them because you can always keep adding them to solve any problem but predict nothing (ala epicycles keeping geocentric solar models alive. You could probably run a space program assuming the Earth is the center of the universe, but it would be fiendishly difficult to model).

You seem to be intuiting some kind of chi squared minimization. It is true that fewer free parameters constrain models, but there is nothing in nature that prefers simplicity. That is probably the most annoying thing to us physicists. Even thermodynamics is always shoving us toward disorder. Just look at plasma physics some time for deterministically intractable problems stemming from four little equations (one if you like tensors).

I think it's better to think of most real world models as being low dimensional-ish, where there is a decaying power law of eigenvalues, and most are quite small, though not zero. You can get quite far by looking at the largest modes and ignoring small ones, but you're not exact, so you're not seeing The Truth, or whatever. Forcing your self to use fewer parameters is a way of denoising, however, that is quite effective.

> I hope some aesthetic

Certainly internal self-consistency will take you a long way if you don't have experiments. Some people find beauty in this :-)

This is good and all but then it is not really physics as it is generally intended

Lumpy Quantum Gravy is real. I've seen it at Thanksgiving.

What an abysmally cynical take. More good stuff is good. Be happy about it.

Malcolm Longair's books are really what most people who want to read the Feynman lectures should read.

I'm with you. As a physicist, I never found his lectures easy to learn from. They do have interesting explanations, though.