I've never felt keener to limit my explorations to the great indoors
8,682 karma · joined September 1, 2015
On the other hand, if I saw a product labelled "No AI bullshit" then I'd immediately be more interested.
But that's just me, the AI buzz among non-techies is enormous and net-positive.
- eating an shocking amount of spinach (works much better than a magnesium pill)
- some sort of light cardio of the affected muscles after lifting
The Venn diagram of people who have the diversity and depth of skills to pull off a major CEO role has a very small overlapped area.
If you choose your CEO well, you turn Apple in 1997 into Apple in 2010. If you choose poorly, your investment stagnates or evaporates.
So a couple of tens of millions in stock options are a bargain for investors. The value-add of any particular minimum wage employee, despite their equal human dignity and worth, is never going to even be in the same league.
From what I can glean from Google, the sun moves 1500 cubic kilometers of water from the ocean into the air every day, around 500,000 cubic kilometers a year (ie, a stupendous amount).
Apparently around 10% of that makes it up the various mountains and comes back down as rivers - that's 50,000 cubic kilometers.
And for scale, human "consumption" is 5000 cubic kilometers.
I agree we should be careful and intelligent about how we use water and where we get it from, but I fail to be alarmed.
Just charge people what the water is worth and they'll stop, or water companies will be able to afford much more treatment capacity.
You have a point about sequestering CO2 molecules, but:
a) I'm sure this will get cheaper over time, just like every other technology
b) we should be using solar and nuclear for everything
Too much over the market rate, and you're not maximally efficient at converting economic inputs into larger economic outputs.
Too much under the market rate, and you'll see increased employee churn, leading to all sorts of other problems.
If you want workers to be paid more, as we all do, even us greedy capitalists, their economic productivity has to go up (not the same as working harder).
The best way to do that - as far as I know - is improving technology and education.
We get blasted with an uncountable number of these joules from above (the sun) and below (nuclear). Our economy is generating an exponentially increasing number of dollars.
I understand wanting to be careful with resources, but not to the point where frugality becomes a goal in and of itself.
Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.
I mean unless you transport it off-planet.
You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that.
In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense to treat dirty water, or even seawater.
You see the same type of argument against oil or mineral use; the idea that we'll run out. But people who argue we'll run out almost always look at confirmed reserves that are economical to extract right now. When prices rise, this sends a signal to prospectors and miners to go look for more, and it also makes far more reserves economical.
For example, Alberta's oil sands were never counted as oil reserves in bygone decades, because mining it made no sense at the time. But the economy grew per capita and overall, prices rose, and suddenly Canada is an oil-rich nation.
A similar dynamic applies to water and everything else.
Of course there are finite amounts of oil and uranium and so on, but the amounts just on this one planet are absolutely mind-boggling. The Earth has a radius of 6400km, and our deepest mines are 3-4km. We may expect richer mineral deposits (not oil) as we go further down.
Keep following this price logic and at a certain point it'll make sense to mine the far side of the moon, the asteroid belt, and so on ad infinitum.
Same when I later moved to a transit-heavy big city (Toronto). I tried to tough it out for years, but buying a car completely transformed my experience of living there.
But if they have a great product and a high price, then maybe they're just using way too many resources as input. It's easy to see that happening with bloated org charts / massive cloud bills / lots of overhead of some sort.
They're going to feel all kinds of pressure to monetize users harder, and if they fail at that, they go bankrupt.
Index funds offer some defense against crazy PE's through diversification, but keep in mind that when an asset bubbles, it also takes up a greater percentage of the index fund. The big tech stocks make up a significant % of the SP500.
Banks, mines, energy, rail, telecoms - companies that are making big profits right now and will be with us for decades to come, all priced like they're going to evaporate in a matter of years.
Revenue and profit has gone absolutely nuts since subscriptions started and is clearly the way forward for them.
This model makes a lot of sense for software but none for hardware.
Adobe customers are indeed pissed off but they should fix that with lower prices and better terms, not going back to the old model that had them losing money.
It's a dry and boring book that latches onto the real frustrations of the working class to push an economic ideology that is so incompetent and disconnected from reality that it's completely indistinguishable from a genuine attempt to destroy society.
The fact that there's a 100m dead people and dozens of shattered cultures all around the world attests to the effectiveness of this attempt.
Then they can close out their positions at a profit regardless of whether the underlying business is any good. In fact, it's kind of better to pick a poor business for this since it's less likely the stock will spike organically for some reason.
I can securely complete transactions and subscriptions with ~anyone on the planet in mere seconds.
But holy cow do they have large margins. 40-50%!
The profit growth charts on these two are a sight to behold.
The situation is simply begging for disruption.
If you tax rich people even more than now, you risk simply slowing down the economy long-term and making the whole situation much worse.
The important thing is funding the state, not making a personal sacrifice. The economy is based on value, not pain.
This situation has persisted for as many decades as I've been able to find data for.
Here's a quote from my source: "The top 1 percent earned 22.4 percent of total AGI and paid 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes.
In all, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined."
And we haven't even talked about the avalanche of payroll and sales taxes generated by the businesses they run.