rchaud

Iran is already under decades-long sanctions and have shown that their ability to wait out the US+Israel was massively underestimated.

After Vietnam and Afghanistan, has the US not learned that countries at war are willing to incur costs well beyond what the State Department thinks they should?

Why would any country trust the current US regime to follow through on its commitments? They weren't even able to maintain a ceasefire during the agreed-upon ceasefire period?

Beyond that, what would prevent the next administration from unilaterally decreeing this current agreement null and void as was done with the JCPOA? They certainly aren't going to want to bear the brunt of political unpopularity of paying out billions in war reparations.

It says right there in the article that he donates to military veterans' charities and animal rescue charities. I don't see him as a big arts benefactor considering that the main motive the ultra-rich have for making lavish donations to fancy museums is to get invited to the right parties, Met Gala and the like.

He seems like a private person doesn't flaunt his wealth and has mostly avoided inserting himself into public discourse, unlike many of his tech-rich peers.

> to grow CL the way other unicorney companies grew

By hiring McKinsey to tell them they need to start selling and and acquire their competitors? That is the only way the unicorns established their position.

They're not using their money, they're borrowing it and using Special Purpose Vehicles to book the debt so it doesn't hit their own balance sheet.

Guess Musk figured out that paying all cash to acquire something was a bad idea.

The UK far right got what they wanted with Brexit, yet they are still complaining. There's no evidence indicating that capitulating to their extreme policies will somehow lead to them becoming friendlier to the political establishment.

School of Americas-trained death squads on one hand and hoity-toity arts and culture on the other. Soft power certainly casts a wide net.

Good. Indexes are supposed to be slow-moving, precisely due to their entry requirement of sustained profitability that skews towards mature companies.

All that an inclusion of these new companies would accomplish is a bailout of their stockholders by pension funds and ETFs where millions of regular people shoulder all the downside risk.

SpaceX and OAI stock will be available through Robinhood, Questrade and all the other retail investor markets. Individuals can make an informed choice to trade it there, rather than have it automatically added to their index fund without having any say.

I don't know about a population decline, but it's well known that its real estate is almost as expensive as it in major population centres. It's also very hard to find a family physician taking new patients.

Graham died back when stocks were traded by guys shouting orders from a pit. High frequency trading was decades away, as was Wall Street's push for:

- creative accounting (Enron, Worldcom)

- zero-interest rate policy

- SPAC IPOs

- exotic securitization (credit default swaps)

...that made valuation more opaque over time. The age of value investing is long gone.

Microsoft and Apple had decades of profitable years before hitting a trillion. AI companies are seeking trillion dollar IPOs without profits, selling a service well below its actual cost.

Hedge funds won't try to short the stock; the holders are almost all institutional investors and insiders who are long on the stock and have no reason to lend them to HFs betting on a price decline.

What they might do is trade bespoke instruments like a credit default swap on datacenter construction deals. Stays underneath the radar of politicians and tech insiders who are invested in a particular outcome.

There is no moral argument anymore. Every ad peddler online has broken every TOS imaginable to feed its AI training models, at a scale a human couldn't accomplish in a million years.

With this governance structure, you won't actually own anything. Ownership implies that you have a say as a shareholder.

It's not basic math when the numbers are this big. There's not going to be $50 billion coming in Year 3 if there's a market correction and lenders scale back financing. Borrowed money is how companies are paying for AI, and that's the first thing that disappears in a recession.

Waiving profitability requirements to join the S&P 500 and trigger auto-buys from index funds is DEI for corporations.

Directors talk to actors. There is no actor here. At best, this is the equivalent of sending multiple 3000 word emails to a casting agency and letting them figure out what to tell their actors.

Reminds me of a story a friend told me where she was on a date with a man who said he went to Harvard. After looking him up on LinkedIn she discovered he just took some courses at Harvard Extension school where there aren't any admission requirements besides a high school diploma and the ability to pay course fees.

Why is an AI movie startup trying to obtain social proof through the snooty film festival circuit anyway? If this is about "democratizing creation", why not just post the film on Youtube and let the public decide?

And the punishment for securities fraud is a slap on the wrist, as Tesla proved with its "going private at $420/share, funding secured" tweet. Who cares about a $40m fine from an increasingly toothless regulator when your investors have already fronted $1.5 billion to settle copyright infringement claims?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo

If the investors are VCs, they can sell their holdings to a syndicate of underwriter banks in advance of the IPO, and let the banks shoulder the risk of finding a bigger fool in the secondary markets.

I never saw the point of subscribing. The home page will show you videos from channels you've watched whether or not you've subscribed.

> intellectual freedom is a cornerstone of democracy and freedom.

Indeed. And what better way to prove it than by mandating six credit hours worth of tuition fees on the topic?

Yeah and private health insurance can be useful if it is designed to pool risk across a population, help make healthcare costs transparent and pay for treatments that people need. But that's not where the money is.

Plenty of iPhone users are on Brave Browser because it blocks ads on Youtube. When you type in a search query in the address bar, it defaults to Brave Search. Don't underestimate the power of defaults.

There is a boiling point for user tolerance when it comes to ads. Google has been pushing that needle deep into the red for years now.

The music industry got rid of all that years ago when the big labels swallowed the small indies and imposed their corporate culture everywhere. There are no A&R men skulking through dive bars using drugs and girls to sign bands. The bands are now supposed to approach the labels with their Spotify listen counts and social media follower numbers ready.

Rick Beato has a good video on why so many new generation superstars like Gracie Abrams are nepo babies who all the time and money in the world to chase music as a career.

Touring costs a fortune for bands. They don't even keep most of the money, the record label takes a big cut and there's Ticketmaster after that, and now Spotify I guess. Selling paper-thin T-shirts, vinyl and lapel pins for absurd markups at the merch booth is how they make money.

Less than 10 years ago I could stroll into a local record store in my city and buy paper tickets to concerts directly from them, zero markup, zero "processing fees". And the ticket itself would be a souvenir because it often had a unique design or typeface. Now it's just a hideous barcode.

it's in their interest for them to show you more things that they don't need to pay record labels royalties for.

xAI "acquired" Twitter, so rolling it into SpaceX is a way to hide a badly distressed asset inside a potential moneymaker and hope nobody notices. Like mortgage backed securities.