-13 karma · joined June 19, 2021
You have longer times of recharge (20-240 minutes) vs a 35 seconds gasoline splash and go
Unless the US goes full Norway and decides to ban Gas cars in city centres , then you'd be getting an inferior product at a higher price point
That's the hard truth
Back in the days banks would have meant they were in the cryptography sector or something.
Also why is this US business?
The US should be careful not to weaponize the USD, SWIFT DTCC or the correspondent banks network.
The world entrusted the US with said institutions (as well as the UN, World Bank, IMF) because the US never weaponized them, and never went after thought crimes.
The US can't stand Tether, more specifically it can't stand Crypto....so it is trying the same thing which pulled off with Microsoft in 2000 and with Standard Oil back in the days...only this time the population won't be onboard with it because there is no richer than god man in the high castle to point at .
Even 1-2% of failure or constant testicular pain is too much
Nothing fungible will come out of this Jupiter mission and you know it.
If this was education budget or brain research I'd totally be onboard with it.
Because quality of life gets everybody on board. This sort of expeditions are paid for with the money of people who don't agree with the spending.
These people are generally talked some sense into when they disagree with military spending, or infrastructure spending or entitlements spending. The theme is always "even if you don't benefit from it yourself, people around you do and so over time will you!"
A leftist version of trickle down, I call it trickle up or trickle laterally. I can see the point in having a discussion.
The talk doesn't even happen with space, it seems like if you are for containing space spending you hate America or something
And no, hope and hype about Europa being able to sustain life is not quality of life. It's a sugar high you get when you read the news or see the anchor losing it on tv.
The progress which matters always happens in some guy's brain. Imaginary journeys, not real ones.
Einstein didn't need to travel around massive objects to come up with relativity.
The cost of that theory was basically the rent, food and water for him.
This mission is a total financial loss until proved otherwise.
As of today the only people who managed to make money in space are the brokers and lawyers who negotiated private tourism trips to the ISS in the 90s and again this new wave of space tourism.
There's an irrational exhuberance about space in my opinion
Equity market price embeds every information about the company.
And thus it's a bad business by definition, which doesn't merit billions of capital investments.
Even if the investment thesis is that the whole world is rooting for them, and government will turn lots of blind eyes because of the "green mission", and they'd be first in line ESG funds allocation of capital...
Still all those elements don't propel you to SaaS type margins such as Google or Microsoft or Facebook.
Frothy valuations for companies which are building stuff in the real world are driven by the promotional power of said stuff and the CEO marketing ability, in fact people are fascinated by cars, it looks cool and it's out there in front of you.
Tesla is still a startup, so is Rivian
Google is not a startup, Bank of America back in 2009 wasn't a startup although risk of equity going to zero was huge, but it had a darn long spell in which the risk was nonexistent.
Relevant : http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
Quality of life of the population
If you leave quality of life on the table because of geopolitical games you are shooting yourselves in the foot.
Even during massive state sponsored hate campaigns (such as the one promoted by Hitler against the Jews) the population spends just a bunch of minutes per day actually fuming and hating...the rest of the 24 hrs they live their lives.
Quality of life is a much more potent motivator to support the leader/party than hatred.
That's why any sane country and leader would never attack an economically important country intentionally.
Violent wars are relegated to Africa and the economically unimportant areas of the Middle East such as Yemen. With some small outbreaks here and there in ethnically hot areas such as Ukraine
MAD is still going strong. It's not military based, but economical.
It's the reason why theories about intentional release of COVID-19 are bunk.
China is worse off than it would have been without the virus.
Same goes for nukes. If Xi or Putin decide to nuke the US , people will assault their palaces in 3-6 months for food and water. Even if the US somehow fails to respond.
The global economy is interconnected to a degree that makes it impossible for a leader to order a nuclear attack and not have his own people remove him violently
They are basically US territory if you are a criminal wanted enough.
English speaking people can also basically live everywhere in the world given how spoken the language is.
Bats and pagolins, now are public enemy #1. In general animal reservoirs for viruses and species jumps can't possibly happen on Mars because there are no animals and no other specie. So we have eliminated that risk right?
But....that also means no food, no ecosystem, no biosphere, basically absence of everything. So the benefits provided by bats , poultry, bovines etc. outweigh the negatives of a pandemic every 100 years or so
Even an Earth ruined by supervolcanoes, mega asteroid, nuclear war and climate change all at the same time..is better than Mars.
The only cases in which Mars comes out on top are a huge comet impact and a Gamma Ray burst which strikes the Earth but somehow misses Mars.
Bezos is right saying that we have to go to space to save the Earth, then we can talk sci-fi type things such as mind uploading ourselves in silica, and once that process is complete than Mars and the Earth will be equally valid to host us. But that ship won't set sail for a long while.
Winner of the race will be the dominant company in said community of 100,000 or the most socially influential person.
Bezos, Musk and Branson won't be alive to see that, so they are shooting for George Washington type influence, the one reserved for the founder, the guy who was at the beginning of it all and gets remembered .
It's not like we are talking Raffaello paintings vs. Bernini sculptures here
The UK has the best and cheapest process to incorporate a company (it takes literally 15 mins and 40£ to form an LTD)
And you can be CEO from everywhere in the world!
Granted the country you are living in might receive your UK LTD bank account informations pursuant the Common Reporting Standard/Global FATCA [0]
That opens a whole lot of considerations because odds are that your home country has a higher corporate and VAT tax rate than the UK or just wants to come after you for paying taxes there while using your native country roads , airports, IT infrastructure and hospitals.
I had to look into this case recently: Swedish entreprenur owning a UK LTD , working (and hiring) remotely within the UK but living in Sweden
Sweden says clearly that doesn't want any part of foreign companies incorporated outside its borders by its own citizens:
[1]"Entities formed/registered/incorporated outside of Sweden (foreign legal entities) are not considered resident in Sweden for income tax purposes, not even if their place of effective management is situated in Sweden"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Reporting_Standard
[1] https://www.oecd.org/tax/automatic-exchange/crs-implementati...
The audience of Di Caprio is emotionally deep, and loaded with money and relevancy , plus they are great storytellers themselves among their respective social groups. People of culture, people who have cumulatively billions of hours of interesting conversations to produce.
Johnson's audience is shallow, not loaded with anything except desire for the quickest dopamine hit they can get.
Di Caprio is sitting on a gold mine, it's the opposite for Johnson
There's a reason why Steve Jobs and Paul Allen loved The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix instead of Cardi B, Kanye West and One Direction.
Same goes for Di Caprio audience vs. Johnson's audience.
Also both "Fast 8" and "The Aviator" fall under the same umbrella of motion pictures, although honestly, it shouldn't be like that .
If you are not an entrepreneur money has diminishing returns. After 10M net worth and no debt...it's all the same.
What money can't buy is the knowledge that you can do this:
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUa7ikBHpaI
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hglyRJXCNCM
and that by now a cool billion people saw you doing it if you count: theatre releases + DVDs + cable + tv + legal streaming + illegal streaming
I think it's still true.
Leonardo Di Caprio is a surgeon picking his roles, he has had spells of 5+ years without a role. Doesn't interact or post on social media and he is seen as cooler than sellouts such as Dwayne Johnson who dilutes his brand on a daily basis acception roles in B movies and franchises, commercials and basically an all around dilution of his brand.
If you are a company looking for a face to the next marketing campaign you'll find yourself begging Di Caprio, not Johnson.
The problem with social media is that gives a raw number of followers, but it can't establish the "quality" of those followers.
If you have less followers than some other account it might be because your demographic maybe less impressionable, but for that exact reason they are bound to be more loaded then other demographics and if you try and sell them something the grand total in dollar terms will be higher even though the universe of followers is smaller.
I think this is true for entrepreneurs and businessmen as well...diluting the brand is something that affects everybody.
Musk tweeting daily and acting childish for example...compare him against a Jim Simons who keep his mouth shut, doesn't divulge his results and forces people to dig info on him and on the fact that his firm makes 10 M in profit for every employee
The smarter the human, the more conscious and aware they are about the surroundings, the higher their ability to create and understand abstract concepts etc.
Is this just the product of more numerous neurons? Better connected neurons? Higher density neurons in some areas of the brain? Is number of neurons correlated with IQ and in turn correlated to degree of consciousness and abstraction?
We don't know yet, but it seems better advised to start looking at the base biological components first vs "spooky stuff"
2) A few comments say that people have a true love for the craft
I think there is a third element missing:
3) People who want to be at the helm of a big, enormous organization but don't give a darn about money.
Kinda like building your own cruise ship and race to the North Pole against other people who built their own ships
Also kinda like a politician creating their own political party and gathering consensus bit by bit up until one day it has 3/4th of the seats and the founder is elected President/Prime Minister
Zuckerberg is exactly this profile, he turned down so much money for FB in the early days, and kept turning down money up until he turned down spectacularly 1 Billion in cash. There was no way Zuck was gonna hand the helm of the ship to somebody else and be helicoptered back to mainland. He was determined to remain at the helm and reach the North Pole, which in fact, he did.
Same for Bill Gates, he only gave up the helm when the US Govt. threatned to essentially bomb and blow up Microsoft's ship.
25 year old heart vs this machine is no match...but a 90 year old heart which could fail at any moment...maybe the swap is worth it.
It's not the same thing without top notch sports. Other countries don't have that. If you are a 'cryptobro' with a decent following that's not that different than being the QB of Michigan or Ohio State given the median age of people which are into BTC.
Okay there are very few girls and no cheerleading...that's a bummer, but it's still early , maybe they'll arrive now that Bitcoin Central has moved to Miami
There is the price argument which I think will remain , given how historically inflation scares people.
But it's just exciting as a social enviornment. All the young kids who are into crypto today...they might move on tomorrow, but the connections you can make while you are in this amazing melting pot will last forever.
And it's not like they are dumb connections either..
Crypto is a college experience 2.0 ,or... for those who are not American the chance to experience US College environment for the first time
This is why Musk jumped in it head first before doing a 180 after realizing the fact that this thing was in fact not built by him and thus had to be destroyed.
The various flavors of crypto can be compared with the different colleges.
Bitcoin...I imagine it as a weird mix of University of Miami, Stanford, MIT and George Mason
I keep thinking: "Those who are really great and relevant, they don't need to go talk to strangers, it is strangers who go and approach them"
This fuels negative thoughts about not being relevant enough so it's better to postpone any active social approach towards strangers up until I'll be relevant enough that they'd be approaching me instead.
I somehow feel that this is a consequence of teenager me being in awe of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Guns n Roses and Aerosmith. Getting the aforementioned attitude: "If you are good enough they'll come to you and you'd not have to do anything socially...just showing your talents"
Approaching strangers would be a defeat in a sense. Admitting that you are not good or rare or relevant enough to be approached by them instead.
Maybe that's why my favorite country is Brazil and the Amazonas region to be specific
And would the US be so magnanimous in victory had the toll been higher due to Axis victories on all major fronts (meaning that the human losses of the Axis were transfered to the Allies) up to the Atomic bombs use?