hhs

If interested, Charlie Munger had a special take on the failure of old GM and several other things, including what was said about unions:

"General Motors, out of the profits of their good years, they could have bought, every year, for many years, a big company. They could have bought Eli Lilly one year and Merck the next, and United Technologies. General Motors could own the world. Instead, what they declared to their shareholders was a goose egg. They took the common equity to zero. And they would say it was all somebody else’s fault. The climate was bad, the unions got powerful. Those damn Asians and Europeans were too competitive.

The truth of the matter is, their very prosperity made them weak. The dealerships got in the hands of inheritors, and the executives on the sales field go around and drink martinis with inheritors, and didn’t pay enough attention to defects in their vehicles. And one thing led to another, and when they were all done the shareholders’ equity went to zero.

And that was in a company that at its peak was one of the most admirable companies in the world. Take the stuff that Boss Kettering (Charles Kettering – head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947) had invented in the early days. Kettering was one of the most useful citizens that ever lived in America.

A self starter on a car is a wonderful thing. Under the old system, you frequently broke your arm. You would give it a crank and it would answer back by spinning backwards and breaking your arm. I would much rather push a button than have my arm broken. Nor do I have the opportunity to go and crank in the sleet and snow." [0]

[0]: https://fs.blog/worldly-wisdom-from-charlie-munger/

> denial of the implications of the steam engine.

If interested, there has been a lot of research done on the implications of the steam engine and other general-purpose technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_technology

If interested, this page has context: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/pop...

The article seems pretty clear; it talks mainly about the two business owners, one is Aaron Rice and the other is Dana Spears, as well as the relationship with private equity over time.

Indeed, "data cartels"; if interested, there is a book that talks about this in detail: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33205

Indeed, they cover full tuition. And with respect to what may not be covered, the page "Cost of Attendance" with the bottom table, "Estimated Tuition, Fees, and Expenses", may help: https://med.nyu.edu/education/md-degree/affordability-financ...

If interested, another medical school in NY that offers free tuition is NYU. They write, "1st medical school to offer Full-Tuition Scholarships for all students" [0].

[0]: https://med.nyu.edu/education/md-degree/md-admissions

If interested, this is the silicon-photonic (SiPh) chip's source post [0] and Nature paper [1].

[0]: https://blog.seas.upenn.edu/new-chip-opens-door-to-ai-comput...

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-024-01394-2

More broadly, as tools advance and catch signals to notify of certain irregularities, this may be of interest:

"Jan Egger and Jens Kleesiek, medical researchers at Essen University Hospital in Germany, are looking at ways in which the headset might be useful for health care2. They say that the Vision Pro’s advanced eye-tracking technology might be capable of picking up conditions such as vertigo, or even early signs of a stroke or dementia. The pair plan to study this when they get one of the headsets. “You have different eye movements and these can be detected using such a device,” says Kleesiek. “The quality of the sensor readings is so high that you can actually utilize it for such medical tasks.""

"2. Egger, J. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2308.04313 (2023)."

To be fair, the author does link to that study in the first paragraph of this piece, and then adds some context about languages near the end:

“But while the English-language web is experiencing a steady — if palpable — AI creep, this new study suggests that the issue is far more pressing for many non-English speakers.

What's worse, the prevalence of AI-spun gibberish might make effectively training AI models in lower-resource languages nearly impossible in the long run. To train an advanced LLM, AI scientists need large amounts of high-quality data, which they generally get by scraping the web. If a given area of the internet is already overrun by nonsensical AI translations, the possibility of training advanced models in rarer languages could be stunted before it even starts.”

> By historical standards, 2008 to 2022 really was an anomalous bull run.

And interestingly, the rise of intangible assets over time: https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/boom-of-intangible-assets-f...

If anyone is interested, this is over a period of 15 years: https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/research-insights/spiva/

Please note this is the paper's link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31984

If interested, News Corp. is discussing this more broadly, too: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/new...

Interestingly, the whaling industry had been similar to the way venture capital works today. Tom Nicholas talks about this in his book, "VC: An American History" [0].

[0]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2019/10/01/today-ventur...

Regarding the future, Martin Cooper says:

“We still have a way to go. I think phones are too complicated now. The way we use them is not very natural. Holding a phone up to your ear with your elbow opening is not what you’d call a very natural way of talking. We have a way to go. I think that the cell phone is still in its infancy. I think that the children of today’s cell phone, if I could use that analogy, are going to be used for things like connecting to your body, measuring things on your body, understanding when you’re starting to get sick. But talking to a computer somewhere that does a physical examination of you — not every year — but every 30 seconds. I believe that the cell phone is going to be an important part of eliminating disease. And I really mean that.”

> This book is not really addressing the more common "is math real" question of it being empirical or invented.

Please note, this is mentioned at the beginning of the review:

"I settled in to read the book “Is Math Real?” expecting to become embroiled in the age-old controversary of whether math is invented or math is discovered. Instead, I found myself confronted with two viewpoints of mathematics: one view is that mathematics is a stiff and fixed set of rules and algorithms while the other view is that mathematics is flexible and our understanding of math comes from questioning of why mathematics functions so effectively.

The premise of “Is Math Real?” is that people have different emotions about math. Some love the math and have little difficulty determining the correct answer to a problem while others loathe and dislike the math and have a difficult time ascertaining the correct response. Many times, a student is humbled or chastised for asking ‘a stupid question’. Author Cheng states that there are no stupid questions. In fact, the most profound concepts in mathematics are learned from asking the simplest of questions.”

> Voyager Labs, a surveillance company that has been sued by Meta for using nearly 40,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect data on an estimated 600,000 users.

If interested, this is Meta’s newsroom piece of legal action against Voyager Labs for scraping user data:

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/01/leading-the-fight-against-...

Please note, at the end of this piece, it says: "The researchers caution that the correlations they found were fairly modest and should not be overstated or misused to promote an agenda (Horwitz points out that assortative mating research was, tragically, co-opted by the eugenics movement).

They do hope the study will spark more research across disciplines, from economics to sociology to anthropology and psychology."

Yes, it’s good to know about the background and context of institutes.

This is the title of that piece: "U.S. Cold War Policy Was Designed by a Bigot"

Hm, the book, "Kennan: A life between worlds", though, is an interesting read.

> The issue is simply that the Carbon Capture schemes seem to be hot air.

If interested, this is how the University of Cambridge named the url of this story: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/carbon-credits-hot-air

> But on the flip side, nobody has ever really demonstrated strong negative effects from HFT and many studies show positive effects

If interested, this is a paper published in January 2023 called "Does high-frequency trading actually improve market liquidity? A comparative study for selected models and measures" [0].

And the abstract notes: "By comparing a variety of regression models that associate various measures of market liquidity with measures of high-frequency activity on the same dataset, we find that for some models the increase in high-frequency activity improves market liquidity, but for others, we get the opposite effect. We indicate that this ambiguity does not depend only on the stock market or the data period, but also on the used HFT measure: the increase of high-frequency orders leads to lower market liquidity whereas the increase in high-frequency trades improves liquidity. We hypothesize that the observed decrease in market liquidity associated with an increasing level of high-frequency orders is caused by a rise in quote volatility." [0]

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027553192...

In the paper, the authors address issues related to the definition of "misinformation".

If interested, this piece offers context with the docket and complaint documents: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/elon...

> AI generated text.

> It reads like it.

One could make this argument about any text.

And please note this is a blog piece, and there is no disclosure that notes it is sponsored by anyone.

Time management is important. Patrick Collison, one of the co-founders of Stripe, addresses this with a wallpaper [0]:

“Patrick’s desk is covered in books […] The wallpaper on his computer displays a countdown clock for his life: He has 52 years and a few days left. “This is a very coarse estimate, but it’s a reminder that you get old quickly,” he says, a touch of gray now in his red hair. “When you talk to people who are old, some wish they had enjoyed themselves more, but not many wish they had wasted more time.””

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-01/how-two-b...

Indeed, these are important questions. Adding to this, in the last paragraph, the piece states, “Current knowledge of how genomes work is primitive. There is also a lot of so-called dark genetic matter in them, which does things currently unknown.”

> In many cases the uncertainty of the predictions is very high to the point where it’s useless.

The article does address this, and points to the complexity with an example:

“One of the trickiest questions of all concerns Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a degenerative illness that starts in childhood. Screening for this would find it in six of every 100,000 children tested. But only a small number of these have forms of the disease that can currently be treated, and the drugs needed are not widely available. However, learning that one’s child has this disease could also allow children to join trials of new drugs.”