bitxbit

On HN and elsewhere, I had same reactions. There’s not a lot of rational debate. Stock is mainly driven by short-term OTM options.

Until financial institutions are regulated again, regulating big tech is a big joke.

It’s by design to extract fees and etc.

Here’s a thought: come up with an online payment platform with ZERO txn fees. You only pay 1% when you cash out. It can be done and it will be done.

That’s an interesting take. Does Apple really lag? I think quote-unquote AI in SV has pretty much stalled in the past 3-4 years. There’s been a lot of volume in ML but nothing groundbreaking.

Interestingly enough crude options went zero bound for nearly half a day before market makers started to realize their quotes were off. One of the most thrilling experiences trading in a very long time.

Microsoft is not a technology company at its core. You have to look at it as a conglomerate similar to Berkshire Hathaway except MSFT focuses on investing in technology companies. The reason why this works is because their cap cost is one of the lowest and they are able to use its shares to more or less retain talent at a steep discount as a result.

I actually wouldn’t mind the subscription model if they priced you for daily use. $0.99/day to use Adobe suite would be perfect.

Expected since the uptick in ad money came from all the smid companies going full e-commerce as well as new categories such as masks.

I don’t think it’s at a discount at all. They’re effectively selling it at the height of the market. Even if they cut valuation in half, it’d still be at a significant premium.

Go one step further and say all non-private knowledge should be free.

Aside from avoiding tax, that practically limitless cash holding gives them strategic leverage in supply chain.

This so much. Absorption rate could vary quite a bit and it’s nearly impossible to research and find a good source these days due to insane number of supplement manufacturers in the market (I partly blame Amazon for this).

I think it would make even more sense for such a consortium to buyout AMD at this point.

Anxiety induced shopping is a real thing. Leisure travel is another huge wallet share that’s been nonexistent for several months now.

I strongly believe the root of modern economic malaise and inequality is the fact that our antiquated system is purely production driven.

Highly recommend Poundstone’s Fortune’s Formula. Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp. This is the book (along with A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street by Lo and MacKinlay) that got me interested in finance.

A) When it’s significantly cheaper to produce vehicles outside of the US due to regulatory and labor costs, Tesla will do what’s economically rational. B) US auto manufacturing is subpar. A big reason why I liked Tesla in the beginning was the narrative of US manufacturing revival. Thought they were serious about producing quality vehicles here. Past two years showed that’s not the case.

Can we be realistic here? I am 100% behind zero emission electric vehicles. However, we are still 10-15 years out from even reaching the necessary infrastructure to support more than 10% market pen. Certain patents will have expired by then. I also despise the fact that Tesla was largely funded by US tax payers and they will likely shift majority of manufacturing abroad in the near future.

I don’t think patents encourage innovation at all in today’s world (and for that matter it’s questionable if they ever did). The main driver behind innovation is rarely monetary.

Off topic but what would be the downside of having no patents in today’s world? I actually think it would drastically accelerate the pace of innovations.

I am still pissed about their story on Elemental Technologies.

August will be brutal if unemployment stimulus ends. I don’t think Washington understands the dire nature of the situation.

Manufacturing quality is hard. Tesla, as a SV company, isn’t really interested in manufacturing it seems. Think they could really benefit from merging with Toyota especially at this valuation.

I agree with this 100%. US higher ed is largely funded by tax (direct and indirect). International students paying full tuition, even if true, is insignificant. I think there’s been a misguided focus on admitting international students over the past two decades. Some of the reasons behind it are valid such as diversity and globalization. However, it’s also contributed to skyrocketing tuition costs.

Alternatively it’s a signal that FB no longer holds most relevant data. They used to be able to market themselves as indispensable marketing tool (and they were) but that’s changed dramatically in the past couple of years. I imagine Apple played a bigger role than people realize.

This is something I’ve been working on the side for over a decade. A big part of the hurdle is in technologies. Just not there in terms of achieving this in a usable format.

Netlify + Stripe.

A bit off topic but what’s the status on any research toward leveraging audiobooks to produce text-to-speech? What are the hurdles in making it seamless and imperceptible? And what’s the “theoretical” number of recorded words/hour required to produce something reasonable?

This. I simply don’t get the hype behind Shopify. They’re not making money even this year. That’s saying a lot about the business model which is why they are forced to show “fluff” top line growth through these deals. The problem Shopify solves in the e-commerce space is really trivial. If anything, the real gem of this decade is Stripe.