I'm thinking on this topic a lot lately - how do we change the system so that the bigger the company, the harder it becomes ? It's more of a political / societal issue.
Similarly to housing - I believe it should be cheap to buy your first home, more expensive to buy a second one, and very expensive afterwards.
We can definitively punish bigger companies. The issue is the geopolitical positioning, and basically agreeing that we accept smaller companies in our country / society while another country might develop bigger companies, and in theory have more power. Maybe more actual military power.
So unless it's a worldwide agreement, really hard to make this happen.
Interesting. And quite sad - we definitely should invest in things that make people lives better all around.
There are countries were public bathrooms are everywhere - New Zealand is a good example. As a tourist, you're never too far from one. Which is good, since quite often that may be the only human made thing, surrounded by beautiful nature.
I visited Hollywood Boulevard once. That was nuts. No public toilets anywhere, in one of the most famous tourist attractions in the country. Worse, food establishments won't let you use the restroom, claiming they have none or that it was out of order.
Not just in remote locations. We just got a new public toilet in my suburb's town center. But the lack of public facilities is certainly noticeable when traveling.
If you have kids and you prioritize your career to the point you never see your kids, and you will have huge and legitimate regrets later in life. Especially if you don't achieve Jobs / Musk level of financial success. That's pretty common knowledge.
But the opposite is also true. As parents, we're always examples for our kids, for better or worse. Do we want our kids to see us abandon our dreams 'because of them' or do we want them to see their parents showing them how to go after their dreams, because that's what life is about ?
The middle way, perhaps? What "dreams" are more important than having a strong connection with your kids? Not only are the regrets that will come later in life huge and legitimate, they would also be irreversible. But, assuming you're in relatively good health midlife, you can always attempt to build the 5 startups that will almost definitely fail. Just my opinion of course.
Ah, I may have misunderstood your comment. I thought you were leaning more towards the "dream" part. But so my comment also meant to say that the definition of ambition and success changed after becoming a parent. I know I won't be curing cancer in my lifetime and so what thing is really important that I have to sacrifice time with my children for? To me, being the founder of the next failed facebook for cats is just not it.
Note that I am not talking about earning a living and thus necessarily sacrificing time doing that and showing your kids that sometimes you have to work hard to survive in a decent way. I am talking about the parents who outsource their children to childcare to work to pay off the loan on their third car and newest iphone and tell you that they have no choice.
Really curious if it's related somehow to the Venezuela one.
Interestingly, New Zealand also experienced a well above average frequency of shakes recently, although the scientist don't see any relation yet.
That explains the Spurs situation very poorly actually. They are in very unusual situation, similar to OKC when they had young Durant / Westbrook / Harden, in that they have Victor, but also Dylan Harper and Stephon Castle who are also young and on a very clear path to becoming all-stars quite soon. De'Aaron Fox is quite irrelevant for their future. Their real question is how to hold the trio of Victor, Stephon and Dylan together. If they manage to do that, and barring serious injuries, they will have the best team in the NBA for the foreseeable future.
Hilariously, the quote that comes to my mind when reading about this monstrosity, is one from Steve Jobs "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you".
Ferrari sells dreams. That's not a car anybody will dream about.
I really like how you put it down! This is how I'd have imaged to be the Apple car, not a Ferrari. The "irony" of people defending this monstrosity are saying thing like "this is the type of comments of someone who cannot afford this", but they are completely missing the point. If it doesn't making people dream about it, then it's not worth of being a real Ferrari product.
What would be interesting to know how much did it cost xAI to build it ? Ai says between $18-$40 billion to just build, without running cost, but no idea how close to reality this is.
Yes and no. They paid what everyone else pays for those gpus. NVIDIA make the profit and leaves crumbs for the rest. For other components they paid less, but since the gpus are the majority of the cost…
Anthropic is getting capacity from Colossus 1 not Colossus 2 it sounded like. The initial colossus capex was under $5B, making that an even more astounding payoff.
Edit: S1 states both are being leased so the 20-25B initial investment probably more relevant
The debt is on the balance sheet and even the VC investments are listed so you can figure out how much they have to make to be on the whole profitable (as opposed to operationally)
So be it. What's the alternative ? Continue a bubble ? Ride on the 'FSD by the end of the year' or 'thousands of Optimus next year' for the next 10 years ?
The guys is openly lying and clearly a drug addict at this point and people think he's not cooking the books ?
Musk empire will end up being a much bigger scandal than Enron ever was. It's just a matter of time until it unfolds.
Tesla is mentionned 87 times. And even they explicitly state that they have strategic collaboration. They supposedly biggest projects are developped together (Macrohard, Terafab - all fugazzi, but still).
Related party transactions are close to a $1 Billion in 2025.
The idea that 100s of global pension funds don't do their due diligence when investing 100s of millions or billions of their members' future retirement funds is extremely naive. With sincerity, I hope you can find a way not to be so emotional about what Musk says and be more grounded in what his companies and their employees are doing.
Investing in SpaceX is one thing. Investing in SpaceX that is now merged with several other failed companies that each incur massive yearly additional losses.... let's see how long those funds still hold SpaceX.
Yes but only if its added before the index funds. Let's just hope that the nasdaq and the other markets just don't take spacex (Nasdaq is literally bending its rules to accodomate SpaceX)
The worst thing is that we don't even have a say in all of this and chances are most likely that its gonna IPO and get listed on the index funds soon and once it gets into Index funds, a lot of collateral damage might happen.
I must say that I am not quite optimistic about there not existing collateral damage, there is happening a lot of corruption within financial markets in general with bending laws. The worst part is that we all would/might be the most impacted by it all
Total market cap of NASDAQ 100 (QQQ) is $40 trillion, SpaceX joining that and immediately going to zero would be a 5% drop, big but not the worst we've seen.
If SpaceX joins and goes to zero, that is firstly a 2 Trillion dollar wipeout and the whole market would absolutely go completely crazy and the market would be so spooked as @etempleton suggests that instead of it being a 5% drop, it would be more like 50% (don't quote me on it) but still, the markets would absolutely drop substantially more than 5% & it might erode the trust within financial markets altogether for many people too because of such massive wipeouts of funds.
Arguably Ukraine is still alive because of StarLink.
Granted, Russia is trying hard to make every mistake in the book, but StarLink’s benefits for UA and cutting off RU units from StarLink was very advantageous this year.
For those who don’t know, for a ~$400 terminal, UA can C&C a medium-long range drone/ plane or cruise missile which has low latency, massive global coverage, and which is resilient against EM jamming (apparently the terminal handoffs from one satellite to another make it ideal for resisting an enemy’s jamming efforts). Also the obvious: it maintains MUCH better resilient comms between front lines and HQ (RU depended on this, but they were cut off a few months ago, causing coordination chaos).
There is discussion that if Taiwan gets a similar deal to Ukraine for StarLink access, it makes the porcupine strategy much more viable.
Conversely, any country which can’t get access to it loses a massive tool in the tool chest.
And sadly, it means that if the US continues to be fickle with allies, those allies may not be able to rely on such a valuable tool.
It seems to me that it feels that the world, or at least the US, decided that far far worse things are acceptable too.
Not easy to be a parent and explain to kids that no, this is not how the world should be run. How do we expect them to have any confidence in the institutions and the rule of law ?
> How do we expect them to have any confidence in the institutions and the rule of law ?
They shouldn't. The reality is that the rich and powerful have never been particularly beholden to the law.
For a while, there was a lot of energy spent maintaining the illusion that we had rule of law, and I don't doubt there are some who believed it was an ideal to strive for that we'd get closer and closer to over time, but Trump and his administration stopped pretending.
I taught my kids the rule of law and what's right and wrong or desirable are totally separate concepts. The law itself only tells you what's proscribed and potential penalties, all of which have to be analyzed in the light of how or who will actually bother to enforce it and the incentives of the various parties enforcing it.
Unfortunately the police come to public schools and try to do their brainwashing very early before you have the opportunity to even address it. So unless you address this issue at a very young age they likely won't question it again until near college age.
> I taught my kids the rule of law and what's right and wrong or desirable are totally separate concepts.
You should be careful to distinguish "rule of law" from the law itself.
Rule of law is merely the principle that laws should be applied equally to all. It shouldn't matter if you're rich or poor, man or woman, a member of the majority or minority race, famous or obscure, politically well-connected or not, etc. This is an inherently just principle, but it's also extremely difficult (impossible?) to live up to 100%.
On the other hand, you're correct that individual laws can be just or unjust, moral or immoral. We have plenty of historical examples of unjust laws (e.g., a recent and hopefully unquestionable example in living memory is segregation), and it's our duty to oppose them through voting, contacting representatives, protests, and perhaps even civil disobedience.
> Rule of law is merely the principle that laws should be applied equally to all.
Which sounds good at first, but...
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
― Anatole France
"To my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law" -- Oscar Benavides
You have to both apply the law equally to all and apply equitable criminal penalties for breaking the law, but the latter is pretty useless without the former. In that way, you could say that honoring the rule of law is necessary but not sufficient for truly equal treatment under the law.
> it's our duty to oppose them through voting, contacting representatives, protests, and perhaps even civil disobedience
If none of those work, there can come a time when it will be appropriate to take similar actions to those taken to secure US independence from Britain.
Why not ? Why do we allow global tech businesses and leaders to somehow be able to make billions in profits in countries, but don't pay any taxes or have close to 0 responsibility ?
I'm thinking on this topic a lot lately - how do we change the system so that the bigger the company, the harder it becomes ? It's more of a political / societal issue. Similarly to housing - I believe it should be cheap to buy your first home, more expensive to buy a second one, and very expensive afterwards.
reply