Bubble_Pop_22

> Not having kids is the entire society's problem

So is tax evasion, CO2 emissions etc. What are the odds of being audited by the IRS ? What are the odds of being punished for illegally burning weeds? What are the odds of being punished for modifying your semi diesel engine so that you can do the "rolling coal" thing?

When you move from the level of the individual up to the level of society at large, solving problems (or in this case situations that certain people deem as problems) becomes harder not easier.

Good luck trying to force people to have kids and police people's penises and vaginas. Besides it's not even necessary...Nigeria and sub-saharan Africa will take care of that "problem" much like China takes care of the iPhone production problem now.

That's why categories exist. The first world can't do the job of the third world and vice versa, each should do their own job.

> I do not know a single person my age (30) who thinks of kids as retirement insurance.

Well of course, because they don't need it due to the fact that it's already there in the form of socialized retirement.

Remove socialized retirement , pension funds etc. and people will start having more kids as they'd start seeing them as a retirement insurance yet again. As they were seen for the whole history of mankind (and still are in high fertility countries).

It's time we face the fact that people don't make kids out of love but out of need. If you remove the need and you'd remove the kids, which is what is happening.

I don't think it's surprising. People do things for ROI and specifically quality of life ROI.

Once the retirement system is socialized or provided by insurance the role of kids for future retirement support immediately goes out of the window and so is the ROI. You privately spend 1 million dollars each to raise them, but society gets to reap the rewards collectively. It's a losing proposition and only a non-smart person would commit to such agreement.

If countries want to raise their birthrates they should immediately liquidate all their pension funds and insurance funds (both public and private) and transfer the stock/bonds owned by such entities to the holders of such rights.

Also countries should stop policing how people raise their kids. Many parents might want a slightly more ignorant kid in the realm of philosophy/English/math... but prioritizing values of family and most importantly the only value that matters to them: taking care of parents as they enter old age , when I say taking care I mean both financially and socially.

> functionality with phones, let alone be good enough to become dominant by “natural selection

Apple is at the very bottom of the list of companies that can claim to be where they are due to "natural selection".

Without the DOJ there is no Apple, they were essentially chapter 7 bankrupt and were saved by DOJ lawsuit against Microsoft.

Further what natural selection compelled Apple to kill the 3.5mm jack? As it stands a phone with a full listing price of 2000$ and you cannot listen to music while charging it. Absolute nonsense. Further nonsense is the elimination of the home button.

I don't want that kind of nonsense in my car. Maybe I'll look repetitive but BMW central wheel console is the kind of no-nonsense that is unbeaten. Physical buttons and toggles are also unbeaten.

Tesla is a projection of what an infotainment system built by Apple would look like, and it's a nightmare. There is a reason why some things are built in Detroit/Stuttgart while some things are built in California.

It's called delusion. Your survival and quality of life depends on others liking you so we were selected to optimize for being liked by others.

Case in point the Queen Elizabeth died at 96 but given her quality of life in terms of novelty and free luxury stuff of the highest kind (and in all realms ranging from mansions to yachts to castles to planes to jewelery) she lived like 2000 years of a regular person life. All that because she was liked by millions of people (or the institution of monarchy is)

Being liked by others is the only thing that matters for quality of life purposes, if you aren't then feeling shitty is a safety mechanism which promopts you to action and to pursue likeability to get some quality of life and not waste the precious little time that you have been given.

Every company is a house of cards. 1 dollar invested in a stock can pump the price 7-10 dollars.

Everybody is a boss with slick tyres, still they did not beat the record of the AMG GT at 6:48

> EVs have already passed the ICE in terms of performance and speed

EVs will always be inferior to ICE in corners which is basically all the fun driving.

See the ICEs vs EVs timing at Nurburgring, Spa, Suzuka, Laguna Seca etc.

Rockstar Games is coming for you in the sense that the even the map will be on DLCs

Oh snap...GTA 4 literally came and went without noticing. At least for me, I don't think I ever really played it.

I remember Los Santos in GTA San Andreas and Los Santos in V

And I want the car OS because it creates variability and a diverse landscape.

It’s how you end up with natural selection which produced the central wheel console pioneered by BMW in 2005 and has been the standard for 10 years.

There is a reason why BMW makes cars and Apple makes phones. Right out of the box you cant even charge that brick while listening to music because they killed the 3.5mm jack….at a 1500$ non subsidized price tag.

if you need a map that doesnt suck VW can pay apple or msft or google to build an app for their own proprietary car OS.

Kinda like Excel for Mac.

> But in the end it’s a monetary phenomenon

Its a psychological phenomenon. Lock people up for 2 years and they will want to go crazy when they get out.

Its the same reason why alcohol consumption is up and so is smoking for the first time in some years. Drug consumption is also up.

Appetite for debt is also up, anecdotally I have been thinking a lot recently on how being debt free causes me to leave lots of potential consumption, experiences and general quality of life on the table. All those things could be financed with debt. Never had such thoughts in the 2008-2019 decade

All sorts of violence is also having an uptick on a chart which is secularly going down.

I will go to my grave thinking that Putin would have never invaded Ukraine had he been able to host his monthly “kiss my ring” cerimonies/parties with his cronies. Instead he self isolated for 2+ years and he still mostly is.

Social isolation creates all sorts of pent up energy of all kinds

Again, its carplay or googlemaps or bingmaps, but there is no reason to connect the phone.

Google , Microsoft , Meta… they are software companies, thats what they do. If VW or Stellantis comes to them asking to do their satnav app they wont refuse.

Its easy to list all the bad UI but remember that BMW pioneered the central console wheel back in 2005. Car OEMs generally know better given that they build the actual car , especially the interior

When car OEMs try to copy phones you have disasters such as touchscreens and absence of physical buttons which is a trend that the maniacs over at tesla started and needs to be rolled back ASAP because it is dangerous and bad design

Your phone and your car have no reason , absolutely no reason to be connected to one amnother

You can just do a one time log in on all your accounts via the car OS and stay logged in on your phone at the same time.

The rest of the world doesnt have this dependency because they dont communicate via calls and iMessage but via Whatsapp/wechat calls and whatsapp/wechat texts

If anything the high reliance on a tyrannical ecosystem such as Apple underlines the high sensitivity of the public toward corporate cults and the power of advertising over masses. Ridiculing people who have android phones because of the “green text” is a national pastime which has by and large surpassed baseball

which in fairness was already evident in the era of Windows complete dominance over the desktop OS market …but at least the Microsoft ecosystem is free of charge (if you know where to look for it) given that from the early days the philosophy at Redmond is to turn a blind eye on piracy.

If that was really the case why don't say JPMorgan and Wells Fargo enter in a partnership to provide such service?

If it's really cheaper, faster more convenient then they'd be enthusiastic about doing it because it would look good for their bottom line.

Money at the end of the day represents trust.

If the Fed is the most trustworthy entity then JPM and Wells Fargo are at #2 and #3. Nobody would care if the #2 and #3 institution exchange money between each other instantaneously and 24/7/365 but only settle their accounts at the Fed weekly or bi-weekly.

This thing for everybody to have an account with the Fed in the form of tokens (digital dollars and digital euros) is something really strange and that nobody has asked for. It is the project of some beurocrat which has seen a topic of interest among the population (crypto) and wants to look good to his superior or wants to claim that "I was at the helm of the team which developed the Digital Dollar".

> Central bank digital currencies differ from existing digital money available to the general public, such as the balance in a bank account, because they would be a direct liability of the Federal Reserve, not a commercial bank.

Semantics. People want to know their savings are guaranteed and they can't possibly be lost. The FDIC does just that. The public doesn't care if the ultimate grantor is the Fed or the Congress or the Senate.

And I think rightfully so because in the end the ultimate grantors securing Americans savings are always and in any event 3 entities:

1) the U.S. Army

2) taxpayers alive now

3) future generations of taxpayers.

This digital dollar or digital euro is something that nobody asked for and nobody wants. At least with crypto you can argue that they fill the role of online casino in disguise. Which isn't really productive but at least there are people who actually flock to it.

So is it Miami or LA for the third time in a row?

You can't really see it from the leak.

Even if you don't have any sense of taste and beauty you can coldly analyze other people's opinions.

When a car turns heads you notice, like a beautiful fashion model.

The Polestar , the Taycan, the Audis and the Mercedes are the only EVs which turns heads if you exclude they supercars and hypercars. Lyriq will be one of them. Teslas and Prius do not.

How do you make cement and steel?

> A Prius looks the way it does because it's designed to be aerodynamic

Nobody cares, people want conventionally attractive such as the Lyriq or the Ferrari 458 or the Mercedes Gullwing or the Ferrari GTO or the new Corvette C8.

The Prius might be aerodynamic and save you 30% energy but still you have the huge inconvenience that once you are done driving you have to hop off and look at it. Same for Teslas. That deplates your mental energy way more than 30%, leaving aside the small detail that mental energy is much more precious than chemical energy.

We have not come this far to depress ourselves with ugliness in the name of functionality, that line of thinking should be applied at the oil well or the battery design process, that is as far removed as possible from the consumer experience.

China presence is significant in emerging markets

At least with Mercedes, Audi, Polestar , Porsche and the new Cadillac Lyriq there are some decent design languages.

Moving from design aborts such as Prius and Teslas to something conventionally attractive such as the Lyriq and the Taycan is bound to cost some extra money.

I beleive people will be knocking at Cadillac door for a gasoline Lyriq, and will do the same for all the Audi and Mercedes eSUVs.

As much as people try to resist and let themselves be brainwashed by the tree huggers in the end they want big and beautiful cars which are also affordable

They should have invited the DOJ attorneys too. They were more instrumental to Apple existence than Jobs, Cook or Ive

Same thing, you'd be looking at a zero-sum game.

The time to invest and also build is when new people and new money are coming into the game , not when everything is cooling down and the early winners enjoy their lead.

2014 was not the time to build a social media company, it was the time to build a social media presence.

Seems like a death cult more than a scientific mission.

"Follow us and you get to stay on Mars forever"

They are all priced for perfection. Meaning priced for complete replacement of the legacy financial system. If it happens you get to keep your money, if it doesn't you lose them all.

You can't make money by betting on something with a valuation of 800bn which is the cryptospace.

The cryptospace as a whole you cannot make money from anymore, the only thing you can make money from is betting that the marketcap of old coins such as BTC will flow into new coins such as ETH.

But that if you are gonna do that, then it's better to just do it on the stock market, by betting on new companies replacing old companies and taking their marketcap

> It’s the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the next decade or two and HN doesn’t get it at all.

It HAS been the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the LAST decade , along with Bitcoin.

They are now both priced for world changing paradigm shift and perfect execution doing so. Which means that there is no wealth producing opportunity at all considering that you need everything to pan out great just to mantain the current valuation.

Also everything is an S-curve and once you arrive to 750bn (or whatever they crypto-marketcap is) there is physically nowhere to go to from there.

> This was originally a forum for hackers, makers and entrepreneurs. It does not seem like that anymore.

There has to be a goal insight, otherwise it's just technical virtuosism for the sake of nothing. Nobody likes technical virtuosism for the sake of nothing otherwise guitar players who can play at 2000 bpm would dominate the billboard.

Blockchain is not a young technology it was conceived in 1996, almost 30 years later the usecase it's still obscure, except the only usecase has been to create a casino in disguise.

Making regular daily tasks less painful is a goal which if it was ever there has been abandoned post the first BTC run from 1$ to 127$

Megalopolis means an easy win for optical fiber for internet solutions

Satellite internet only makes sense if people are scattered around, but we are seeing the opposite phenomenon both in the developed world as well as the developing world.

Even hipsters are moving from LA to Portland not from LA to some small town with population of 500.