thow-58d4e8b

Lost VAT revenue is not due to mom-and-pop shops offering a discount under the table. The vast majority of lost VAT revenue is due to organized VAT carousel frauds, also knows as missing trader fraud, where an organized groups of 10-20 people siphons tens of millions into their pockets through reimbursements of fictitious trades. It's one of the most lucrative fraud schemes there is, but if caught and convicted, the sentences are usually comparable to that of murderers. If not caught, the accomplices frequently try to assassinate each other in a sort of a sick tournament-style elimination

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_trader_fraud

Also, passports for a family of four don't come cheap. Around ~50-70e per person, in addition to taking significant time. For the same money, they can get two more nights at a holiday resort

Just because CATL can manufacture LFP cells at $80/kWh doesn't mean the end-to-end system is available at that price. Home battery storage is nowhere near $80 or even $100 per kWh. It's at $500-$1000/kWh. Tesla Powerwall 2 has the best price per kWh available on the market, at $560/kWh. Inverters able to handle the currents necessary for turning on an electric oven are in the thousands. Installation costs are in the thousands. And then, these batteries do not last forever - they're rated at 3000-5000 cycles

If we imagine a near-future scenario - a battery powered house heated with heat pumps, driving an electric car, during central European foggy winter, which tends to last for about a week at a time. Let's say they use 60kWh/day. We're looking at $100k just for the batteries and installation, even assuming electricity comes free. In ~15-20 years, the batteries reach their recommended cycle life, requiring a choice of another $100k or accepting that what used to be a 3-day storage becomes 2-day

This is not some "extreme situation". It's a completely predictable scenario that recurs with near 100% probability every single year. Then there are places like Ganges river, Bangladesh or Indonesia, home to hundreds of millions of people, where neither solar, nor wind is viable (and land is scarce)

I'm afraid it's not simply about political will. To have affordable and safe public transport, one would need to completely revamp the fabric of American society

Why is there no public transport? Because it's losing money due to low ridership. Why is the ridership low? Because people are afraid of dangerous neighborhoods, wackos, homeless and other people of lower castes. Why all of these factors? Because of massive inequalities, rugged individualism, broken healthcare, missing social nets,... Unless that is fixed, the public transport won't be a decent option. Driving everywhere allows people to form a bubble that shields them from daily witnessing the ills of the system

It creates captive audience, which is a gateway to further anti-competitive and abusive market practices

relocate - to where exactly?

There are two major manufacturing hubs in the world - east Asia and central Europe. Labor costs in manufacturing around the world have equalized to start at around $12/h. Slightly more in automotive. Average wage (whole economy) in Guangdong is ~$10/h. Labor cost in Poland is ~$13/h. The days of labor cost arbitrage are over

One can find cheaper labor, but it's always at the cost of worse infrastructure, missing supply chains or increased shipping costs. This is not pharma or silicon, where value per kilogram makes the cost of shipping is negligible. Manufacturing and assembly of heavy items like cars, trains or construction materials is nearly always near-shored

At least for the European Central Bank, housing is the single largest item in the inflation basket - entered as something called "imputed rent" - how much would it cost to rent an equivalent dwelling. This item alone accounts for 7.5% of the overall index.

Adding housing maintenance, heating, water supply, etc. - the entire housing category climbs up to 17.8%. Which sounds like a totally reasonable estimate to me - young people and urbanites pay more, older folks and people in rural or provincial towns pay much less. From my personal experience - housing and related expenses were ~50% of my income while paying down mortgage, down to ~7% after the loan was repaid

> Elizabeth Holmes made representations which she knew to be false to secure investments. That is explicitly fraud.

the problem - this became an institutionalized modus operandi of Silicon Valley, finance, higher education, IP law, crypto, even real estate - essentially the entire economy of intangible goods and services. As Jim Chanos put in ‘We are in the golden age of fraud’ - lying to investors, public or congress or courts became so normalized that people no longer see any problem with it

For the majority of app developers, but almost surely for a small minority of their app store revenue

If I remember the Kodak case well - their own research predicted that digital cameras will massively shrink the total addressable market. Which is exactly what happened. Outside of professionals or hobbyist, who even buys a camera nowadays?

No amount of innovation, pivoting or clever engineering could have saved Kodak. They were not flabbergasted at the technological change. The best course of action was to milk the existing market for as long as possible, which is exactly what they did

> hydrogen being much more efficient than believed

God/Allah/Nature obviously don't understand disruption, growth mindset and can-do-spirit. facepalm

There are hard physical limitations that no amount of human ingenuity can do anything about. 237kJ/mole is the theoretical minimum of energy required for water electrolysis. energy->electrolysis->energy round-trip efficiency won't exceed 45%, even if everything, from the energy source to the car wheel spinning, is perfectly frictionless and operating at peak theoretical efficiency. No, you cannot use existing gas pipelines for transporting hydrogen.

For passenger cars, EVs today are already better than what physics allow hydrogen cars to ever be.

Please, please - could people stop making this analogy?

Cars are not phones, and will never be. American lower class or Chinese middle class are not going to shell out $70k for a new toy every two years. Cars are not going to be made with 60% margins. You cannot wear a car in your pocket to show it off to your relatives or business partners.

Apple's business model, in short - is selling mediocre hardware for premium prices, and mask it with excellent software. Optimizing software to make it 10x better, faster, using less battery - fairly common. For any activity that interfaces with the physical world - forget it - we're tapped out, making 2-5% improvements per year. No amount of refinement will make a $20k econobox sellable for $60k

(also, ironically, LG dropped out of phone business)

For a typical car, only about 10-15% of the manufacturing cost is labor. And that's talking about Toyota Corollas and euro econobox hatchbacks. For a premium electric car, it's probably a single digit

Also, the whole claim would really need a citation, and careful parsing of the methodology. 3x difference in a mature industry like car assembly is very unlikely, and requires a very strong proof to back that statement up.

In other news that are never mentioned in western media - the top three countries based on long-term economic growth are Laos, Vietnam and China. The only three countries that are both enmeshed in global trade, while also being run by communists. Surely just a coincidence

Labor share of income in the developed countries is at the lowest it's been in decades (1). In the US, if all workers received a 13% pay hike, this would just bring the labor share to where it was in 1990. Profit margins are at record highs (2). It took me two minutes of googling, yet somehow people writing for one of the most prestigious econ-related magazine in the world are incapable or unwilling (more likely) to mention it.

In addition, this figure also includes the "labor share" of top-level management. People focus too much on CEO pay, and neglect the fact it's also C-suites, vice-presidents, board members, and most of the direct and indirect perks they receive. I wouldn't be surprised if the labor share of income to this new nobility increased from low single-digit to double-digit percentage

(1) - https://www.oecd.org/g20/topics/employment-and-social-policy...

(2) - https://www.axios.com/profit-margins-record-high-rising-infl...

Finland is ok. A square meter in the capital area goes for about 1.5 months of net average wage, and about a monthly income in other provincial towns. A decent house can be had for ~10 years of single income

The benefits of not being a tourist destination

It's a similar story with Nano, and it de-masks the true nature of this mania

On paper, it's a perfect crypto. Really fast and fee-less transactions, proof of stake avoids the environmental impacts, completely pre-mined, distributed as equitably as you reasonably can, and truly decentralized.

But it has one major flaw - no way to get rich quick. No celebrity hyping it up. Nobody is "in it for the tech", it's all a glorified game of chicken

rule of thumb - for the highest signal/noise ratio, look for reviews that give mediocre, but positive ratings - in the range of 6/10 to 8/10.

This filters out bots, fake reviews and low-effort negatives (product is ok, but shipping!)

What's left is man-made reviews that praise what is praiseworthy, and highlight the real drawbacks the products suffer from

Another giveaway is accounts posting multi-sentence comments or reviews within seconds of their previous submissions. How can this get past bot checks is beyond me

> Battery manufacturing life-cycle emissions debt is quickly paid off. An electric vehicle’s higher emissions during the manufacturing stage are paid off after only 2 years compared to driving an average conventional vehicle, a time frame that drops to about one and a half years if the car is charged using renewable energy. Approximately half of a battery’s emissions come from electricity used in the manufacturing process

From https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...

The important takeaway is that greener electricity grid will help both the emissions from manufacturing, as well as emissions from usage

Proposing nationalization is akin to blasphemy nowadays - way outside of Overton window. But I haven't really heard any good arguments or benefits of electricity production and distribution being private.

On the other hand, there are a lot of good arguments in favor of state ownership - matter of national security, need for redundancy instead of efficiency, it's a commodity and a basic necessity, low margins, large scale leads to financing issues for corporations, chicken-egg problems that state is better at dealing with, the domain is primarily about engineering challenges with branding and management having very limited impact, simple supply chains, cost-cutting may lead to disastrous consequences, etc...

> ICE engines were miniature engines that also ran off of a fuel source (eventually settling upon oil, but many different fuel sources were considered

Fun fact - Rudolf Diesel's first engines were running on cooking oil. In fact, many diesel engines can operate on vegetable oils without modifications (not long term though). That sounds odd, but from the perspective of "burn hydrocarbons to generate heat", petrol, diesel, oil, body fat, coal or kerosene are all very similar to each other.

State aid in EU is limited to 15% of the total value of the investment, but sometimes it is circumvented by offloading certain parts of the investment onto public budgets (e.g. infrastructure, or training programs)

Ethereum is mined with GPUs. The total mining rewards (block rewards + fees) are actually marginally higher for Ethereum than Bitcoin, with both around $51M per day

Mostly because what people refer to as "printing money" isn't really printing money, but more of a "reversible exchange of one class of assets for another class of assets of equal value". The central banks are not allowed to just create new money to give everyone working there a huge bonus, it always has to be swapped for a credible promise of future repayment. Banks take it up, since the rates are/were at near 0%, but people/businesses are not confident about their future money flows to take on new loans. Hence the new money just sits at banks and never reaches the real economy.

Helicopter money (1) does cause inflation, but the reason that the inflation has been stubbornly low for a decade is precisely because the central banks are forbidden from doing helicopter money

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money

To underline how preposterous the whole PoW is - BTC is mined by hardware that consumes 2000-3000W each, all the while vast majority of these machines never mine a single block

Small-scale ETH mining on gaming GPUs does take place. But nothing like dystopian warehouses stacked with racks of hardware until the ceiling

It's one thing to read about the click farms, but nothing can prepare one to actually see the videos of them in action - just visceral. It has an eerie Matrix-like feeling to it.

13 sec video of a Chinese click farm (quite loud):

https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1072114511212109824

10 sec - thousands of phones (not loud):

https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1148447866366464000

One aspect that shouldn't be lost - the implicit framing of the platforms being "under attack" by the bots is wrong - the bots are likely a net positive for the platforms - they're very much complicit with the fraud, or at least condone it. They sell views and clicks - if bots create more views and clicks, so be it. It's the advertisers who bear the cost.

Taking Facebook as an example:

Creating an account, linking Oculus Quest to it and leaving the account dormant - accounts locked en masse.

US account that logs in from Indonesian IPs, never posts anything, likes 5000 random things ranging from a shampoo to a cafe in a small Ohio town, to the new shirts of an Albanian soccer club - in Facebook's view that's a perfectly legitimate account.

This is the real question. From the outsider perspective, it looks like the navies and militaries of the western world are evolving towards extremely expensive, specialized high-tech "toys", produced in very low numbers, that require extensive year-long training just to get anything done. Most of which are useless against guerilla warfare insurgencies, and of doubtful utility against peer nation state competitors. Feels more like a job program than efficient armed forces.

As a deterrent against nation states, it's questionable how a billion dollar submarine would handle a swarm of thousands of suicidal drones, at a fraction of the cost of the submarine. The submarine takes years to build, a no-name Chinese factory can pump out thousands of drones in a day.

Imho, the approach of the PLA, betting more on unmanned drones backed by China's industrial capacity, is a more logical evolution of warfare.

Some links: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37062/china-conducts-t...

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/13284/americas-gaping-...