Lavery

But what you're talking about isn't guaranteed. There's a lot of room between "stocks rip higher forever" and "societal collapse".

I'm not saying the right call is 100% t-bonds, but when you say things like "Over something like 30 years, the only question is whether your investment will outperform inflation or massively outperform it", you're making guarantees based on data from a narrow slice of history that is also the most economically favorable period just about ever.

Equities are the residual claim on assets, and their outperformance is predicated on growth. Economic growth comes from growing population and productivity. Neither of those is a given.

None of what you're saying is wrong, but remember the context here when using the historical performance of markets to talk about these kinds of hard-and-fast rules. The period for which we have market data also spans: the period with the fastest growth in global population, including population growth in developed markets; the outbreak of extended peace between world powers; and roughly tracks human exploitation of fossil fuels.

Which is not to say that this is for sure coming to an end (hopefully not peace!), but it's impossible to know that there will be similar growth going forward. Population may level off (in advanced economies, this appears to have happened), and while we may well find new energy sources and technologies, it's not likely any will offer the massive productivity gains seen in the advent of fossil fuel and the the internet.

Uber probably views it as important that they develop the self-driving tech because otherwise (if someone else develops it, licenses it to OEMs, and then Uber uses those cars), there's no lock-in to the Uber ecosystem. Either those OEMs will partner with Uber for a fee that will capture most of the profit Uber's valuation currently expects, the OEMs simply spin up their own Uber-style vehicle on demand program (far cheaper than Uber spinning up a car company), or people who can afford their own vehicles (likely a huge chunk of Uber's pool of users currently) just use their own now-autonomous vehicle a la carte, summoning it when they need a ride.

In a pretty ironic twist, Uber et al have already started rumblings about how the third option needs to be made illegal, because there's no regulatory oversight on vehicle maintenance and safety. Having spent most of their life ignoring existing regulations, they soon may need them to survive.

Of the names you call out for doing well though, it's worth pointing out that while Zoox may have so far avoided "wasting a lot of cash and resources on a gigantic clusterfuck", it's apparently their plan to explore said clusterfuck over the long-term. Zoox's stated goal, once/assuming they get the self-driving software right, is to redesign and then build a completely new concept of what a car is, from the wheels up, and then own those cars, operating an Uber-style self-driving cab service.

This is probably the most capital-intensive business model you could possibly come up with. [edit] Which isn't to say they'll fail! I know nothing about their progress on whatever internal research is going on. But in terms of including as many possible points of failure and guaranteeing that in the future you'll need an absolutely gargantuan funding round to succeed, this is tough to beat.

Just to address the "also just compensates for current emissions" point--the way this tends to be thought of in the research is that, if you assume a completed Step 1 of "develop perfect carbon capture technology", Step 2 is "apply that solution to power plant smokestacks and fuel those power plants by burning and replanting trees / crop waste (corn stalks etc)". So you're not carbon negative on the capture process itself, but can be on the broader system by converting to a fuel source that regenerates through carbon capturing via photosynthesis.

This poses it's own problems though, one of which being the enormous amount of land you would need to dedicate to this process to have a meaningful impact.

Your Enron example is worthwhile for the opposite reason you intended: there was a massive short position against Enron too, and corporate management accused the shorts of all manner of conspiracy, and the shorts were right.

"People invested deeply in something" describes the management of fraudulent companies far more than it does short sellers. There's a quote from David Einhorn's book (that I think he attributes to Warren Buffet) that is something to the effect of: "When you're short a fraudulent company, you'll be surprised at the ends they'll go to defend themselves. Because to you this is 5% or whatever of your portfolio, but to them it is everything."

People constantly cite self-driving cars as Uber's salvation, but never really seem to think through the implication. Hypothetically, let's say that self-driving cars are invented next year. Necessarily, these will start in high-end vehicles (as nearly all new car features do) before getting rolled out to the broader ecosystem. Now if you're Uber you face one of two choices:

1) You enter into perhaps the most capital-intensive business of all time and buy a fleet of these new self-driving cars. This would be a humongous cash raise; NYC alone would likely need $1B in vehicles to match current coverage levels. You'd also need service and maintenance facilities (or pay for someone else to handle it)

2) You wait for enough of these vehicles to be bought by consumers to create a ride share network akin to the current one, except without the drivers

Option 1 is likely a non-starter. Uber-style businesses are popular with investors precisely because they avoid this business model. Buying the vehicles and facilities to maintain current US coverage would probably run $100B or more. That's not really feasible.

Option 2 saves Uber from that awful capital raise, but means they're waiting for self-driving cars to reach high enough saturation within the broader vehicle fleet that they can use as rideshares during owners idle periods. Based on what Google suggests for a typical car upgrade cycle, this would be 5 years or more. It also probably doesn't improve their margins enormously, because they're still licensing the car from an owner who will demand a cut of fares (whether it be directly or as an hourly lease fee). The assumption is that fee is materially lower than what drivers want for their car and time, but there's no reason to believe that's true (especially given, as many studies have suggested, drivers in most markets currently lose money on a per-mile basis). During the initial period of self-driving adoption, owners fees will be higher, as there are fewer of these vehicles available and owners will have better bargaining power via their scarcity.

But while Uber waits for adoption in scenario 2, their first-mover advantage in rideshare erodes. If you're GM or Mercedes, this looks like a pretty high-margin business, and it looks really tempting to use the self-driving tech you're already putting into these vehicles to spin-up a competitor, and right now there's nothing on the books saying you can't simply lock Uber out of it.

Long-term, that's my expectation: that self-driving cars will exist and Uber will die to competition from OEMs (or some kind of alliance between OEMs and Waymo).

[e]fixed some formatting.

If you haven't already, check out the New Yorker. It's a weekly magazine, so obviously not quite the same, but what you're describing is their bread and butter.

A ticket allows admission while a passport certifies identity / credentials.

At least in so far as what the words signify, tickets are bought but passports are earned. I think it's a pretty good distinction in this context.

Hedge funds and PE firms aren't typically direct competitors. The goals and risk profiles of the funds don't typically align (and hedge funds aren't monolithic as a group, either), but beyond that, there are typically regulations governing which entities can invest in which type of funds. The LPs in big PE funds tend to be large institutional investors--pensions, endowments, and the like. Hedge funds tend to have mostly high-net-worth clients.

Without going into whether this belief is well founded (personally I don't think it is), its a combination of two factors: an assumption that there is a pool of potential business owners already in the state who are deterred by higher taxes, and a desire to be like Delaware (or internationally, Ireland), where low taxes and favorable regulatory structure are such that many large, inter-state or multinational corporations headquarter themselves there.

The first point, as you suggested, is pretty questionable. As you pointed out, it's worth noting that the current wave of entrepreneurship has headquartered itself in California, New York, and Massachusetts, some of the highest tax areas in the country.

I think to your first point, the assumption here is that the unborn don't have rhetorical standing. In this context I'm not sure I see a downside to that (at least in this context).

Since many of the other angles here have been covered already, I'll just point out that fair pay and benefits aren't the only thing absent when universities move towards a heavily adjuncted workforce. One additional vulnerability of adjuncts is that without the protection from being fired that's part of a tenured position, political (or whatever people have decided to make political these days) speech could be held hostage by threatening someone's job.

This sounds pretty outlandish, but just recently we saw an attempt at this very thing in Oklahoma[0]. While that didn't succeed, if a massive donation was tied to a professor's dismissal, would every university resist that? Florida officials are now banned from using the phrase "climate change"[1]; it's also not inconceivable that state schools could be subject to similar restriction.

[0]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-15/oil-tycoon...

[1]http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article1298372...

Drone use is prohibited in national parks.

Current large whales need enormous amounts of insulation (a big part of why they were hunted a hundred years ago) to maintain their body heat. While there is no doubt a point where heat becomes an issue for sea creatures, it's a ways away.

Given the degree of overfishing we've seen in much of the world and depletion of the fish stocks, I think a more realistic upper bound would be the ability to consume enough mass. Although on an evolutionary time scale maybe fishing policy isn't as much a problem.

Sure, and obviously it's not good to make people uncomfortable. But from his perspective he wouldn't care whether the numbers were fake.

While I'd tend to agree with your larger point, when looking at decades- or centuries-old wars it's worth keeping in perspective that the falling death rates have much more to do with improvements in evacuation time and trauma care. Even beyond the obvious improvements in things like antibiotics, soldiers are now living through wounds that would have been fatal to them as recently as twenty years ago.

The cynic in me says that the way that this continues to be reported--as military dead instead of military casualties--is meant to deliberately obscure this fact. How many people returning from these modern wars will need full-time medical care for the rest of their lives?

To be nit-picky for a moment, it's profoundly irritating when footnotes in an article are not presented as links.

I'm not saying there would be losers. But his scenario proposes, essentially, "I'll bet that if I take a random group of at-risk kids, move them to a system where they spend 100% of their time living, studying, and playing in a well-staffed, well-resourced, safe program, that those kids will perform better than their once-peers."

To which the answer is "Of course."

At the end of their 12 years of boarding school, is it still fair to say that these are kids from an inner city failed neighborhood? Much of the challenge with education in poor (inner city or rural) communities is that, at the end of the day, the kids still have to navigate the stresses and risks of home life. Eliminating that for all or most of the year (depending on your school calendar) would stack the deck hugely in your favor, and by the end of their high school abroad it would strike me as dishonest to refer to these kids as being "from Newark".

In my limited experience with kids from elite boarding schools (which tend to draw from already wealthy communities), graduates of these programs seem to tend more towards the culture of the school than that of their hometown. I think this effect would be even more pronounced in your proposed system.

The other miss with that same quote is the implication that average salary is the same as average comp. In addition to the base salary, junior bankers typically expect to take home large bonuses--in a good year, sometimes 100% or more of their base salary.

While I'm not as familiar with the tech sector, my understanding is that they don't have similarly structured bonuses.

Well, to a degree. It also depends on the extent to which the NSA believes they can trust their low/mid-level analysts: after the recent incident with Snowden, I'd argue "not much".

The more widely they allow such attacks to be used, the more people need know of its existence, and the greater their risk of exposure (even if the victims of these attacks are themselves oblivious).

Depending on who we're imagining as the victim, you also don't necessarily have to publish at all.

Encryption is worthwhile because even if the NSA has decryption capabilities that they have kept secret, the very secrecy of this ability is valuable enough to strongly discourage its use.

It is extremely unlikely that your email is important enough to the NSA for them to risk disclosing their ability and pushing everyone to different or stronger algorithms.

While calling these "basic concepts" is technically correct, I suppose, they're also among some of the most difficult aspects of game design. In a community as large and diverse (in terms of both ability level and time commitment) as WoW's, it's hardly surprising that Blizzard would err on the side of populism.

10.2 million may be a step down from the peak of popularity, but WoW is still wildly profitable and maintains a userbase larger than most of its competitors combined.