throwaway-8c93

The real problem is that governments around the developed world gave up on building affordable social housing since the 70s.

AirBnB investors just highlight the symptoms.

I'm one of those that save/invest 70% of their take-home income. It's not about frugality at all - I would gladly pay for an increased quality of life - but it's simply not on offer. Past a certain threshold, a threshold well within the reach of western upper-middle-class households, the exchange rate between money and the quality of life becomes essentially zero. What's left are pointless status seeking games, scams and useless trinkets. The Bible's Book of Ecclesiastes describes it poignantly:

> I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure[...] Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun

A large reason is likely to double dip on the EV subsidies. Scoop 200,000 x $7,500 subsidies under the name 'Ford', then another fraction of 200,000 x $7,500 as partial owner and supplier under the name 'Rivian'

FSD occasionally requesting driver to take over in genuinely difficult situations would be completely fine.

The videos in the Twitter feed are nothing like that. The car makes potentially catastrophic blunders, like driving straight into a concrete pylon, with 100% confidence.

Propulsive landing has been achieved routinely and with perfect precision since the 60s - Apollo's lunar modules, Lunar surveyor, Lunokhod rovers.

The question has never been about the feasibility of landing the booster stages - what has been questioned is whether it's worth doing. The fuel used up during landing is fuel that cannot propel the payload. The landing might fail. The effects of thermal and material fatigue are not well understood. The transportation, refurbishing and QA are unlikely to be cheap anyway.

Battery manufacturing needs a lot of land, which is dirt cheap in Northern Sweden. Another activity that needs a lot of land is mining, which is one of the primary economic activities in the otherwise desolate region.

> Corporate tax rate 22%, Mineral Production tax rate 0.2%. (1)

Also, the location has to do with special, naturally occurring deposits of anode materials nearby. iirc, either silicon or graphite forms "clumps" of just the right size and shape in this region, enabling them to skip some steps of the manufacturing process.

(1) https://www.talgagroup.com/irm/content/why-sweden.aspx?RID=3...

There's a lot of corporate fraud like this, even in countries that have a reputation of being well governed.

I personally saw a respectable Finnish company leeching on government innovation funds, asking employees to log their working hours under a specific project. The kicker - nobody in Finland was working on that project, in reality it was developed in another country.

The article echoes what General Jim Mattis commented on the topic of leadership in one of his interviews - (paraphrasing) decisions take an hour to make, the rest of the day is spent crafting the message to ensure there's no room for ambiguity or misunderstanding.

Low fees - but only once you're in the crypto ecosystem.

If you're after dollars or euros, the on-ramp and off-ramp at exchanges adds a comparable, if not higher layer of fees than existing payment mechanisms, kind of defeating the whole purpose.

The trained model is a guarded treasure. There's a reason why very few ML papers publish their trained models; or Deepmind/OpenAI never releasing the resulting models - it's expensive to train the network, but cheap to use it afterwards. You don't want anyone unauthorized to get their hands on it.

There are several reasons it's mostly a China-operation. Interestingly, it's a textbook example of deficiencies being the competitive advantage.

#1 - China's electricity grid is not very efficient at distributing, which leads to some areas with constant surpluses, directly translating into extremely low electricity prices in those areas

#2 - almost all computer hardware is manufactured in East Asia. Chinese miners don't buy their hardware on the open market, they snatch underhanded special deals with the manufacturers who're then deeply sorry about their "unexpected manufacturing shortfalls"

#3 - Crypto is essentially banned in China for private citizens. Chinese Communist Party is actually quite happy about the mining though - when you zoom out a bit, it's just a money pipe from the rest of the world (mainly US) to China. It also funds bootstrapping of their silicon industry

#4 - crypto in general benefits from weak rule of law. Try running a crypto mining operation in France - the tax collectors will be knocking on your door after the first mined block. Corruption and nepotism is absolutely endemic in China - "sharing" a bit of the mining profits with the local officials has a high chance of skirting the rest of the tax burden

Expressing the energy consumption in electric vehicle mileage makes the numbers more tangible. 500kWh is ~3000 kilometers of range for a mid-sized EV, or enough to move a family across the whole continent. Just to shift BTC from one pocket to another.

In other words - different business environments create different equilibria.

In Chinese/Soviet/1920s America equilibrium, with an insatiable demand for construction work, the profit maximizing behavior is to be done quickly in decent quality, then hop on to another project.

In the modern western equilibrium, where projects are few and far between, the profit maximizing behavior is to extract as much revenue as possible from any single project, employ lawyers, ask for extensions, attempt regulatory capture, create an opaque chain of subcontractors, etc. - as it's not clear whether there will be any new opportunity to do so in the future.

The reality is even worse. The article depicts the operators as middle-men piggybacking on the tech expertise of vendors like Ericsson or Nokia. Unfortunately, the vendors are subject to exactly the same pressures.

The whole industry is in a deepening downward spiral. Outsourcing and subcontracting is rampant, layoffs left, right and center. The combination of non-functional requirements that would make even senior FAANG fellows dizzy - left to be done by stressed out graying veterans or naive greenhorns, who leave the industry after 2-3 years for 50-100% raises elsewhere for the same skillset. Due to the monopsony power of the large operators, the vendors barely break even on their deliveries. There's no institutional knowledge buildup, nobody to take up the baton after the veterans retire, the vendors gave up pretending they care about being a nice place to work. If you're a techie, stay away from the telecom industry.

Panama has full right to set its own tax rates. Developed countries have full right to deny Panama's corporations from entering their markets, and even forbid their own corporations from dealing with their Panama counterparts.

Or, more realistically, the developed countries will pull any of the dozens of levers to make non-cooperative countries' life miserable.

I do share your skepticism overall, 5G is being pushed more aggressively than its value would warrant. But there are parts of 5G suite that are indeed valuable and go beyond the mere "moar speed" mantra.

Network slicing is not consumer facing, but is a big deal in business-to-business connectivity, likely enabling business models that just aren't possible today. It's a bit like renting virtual machines in the cloud, but instead you're renting connectivity, tailored to your SLA needs.

Higher bandwidth, lower latency and lower power consumption are not exciting in isolation, but improving all of them at the same time does bring notably better user experience (see the raving reviews of M1 Mac for the same phenomenon).

Tesla's lineup is still great, but other automakers are closing the gap very quickly. And that's with the intentional market segmentation they have to do in order for EVs not to look too attractive compared to their ICE lineup.

Looking into the future, for example Hyundai Ioniq 5, it's not clear how will Tesla compete. Elon factor will only get them so far.

They're not islands in a strict geographical sense, but there are a dozen or so countries which are de-facto islands for any practical purposes - accessible only through large bodies of water, with land borders mostly impassable or crossed so infrequently that they don't matter.

South Korea, North Korea, Finland, Vietnam, several central American countries and others. Even China fits the bill. Not sure how frequent traffic across Thai borders are, but my impression is that SE Asian countries are not very well integrated.

Sorry, that's just not how it works.

What makes a card good at gaming (floating point operations per second) makes it good at mining, and vice versa. If the price/performance of the gaming variant is more favorable than the mining variant, why would any miner not buy the gaming one? They'll also have better resale value.

Real world equivalent: if Toyota made a special car for dog owners that costs 10% less but is useless for anything else, why would the dog owners bother with it?

Nvidia is trying to limit the hashing rate of the gaming variant, but it won't take long before someone figures out a way around it. There are billions at stake here. Also, the limitations only affect Ethereum hash rate, altcoin mining is untouched.

Had this been about diversifying their future income streams, the most efficient way would be the most boring one - buy yet another 1% of everything.

Pouring tens of billions into startups with questionable business models, in the world's most overpriced market, while conspicuously avoiding UK, EU, ANzAC and Japan - that's a clear sign they're not in this for money. They're trying to trade money for cultural influence.

As Solow put it - "once you have begun to think about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else".

After reading a lot of economic literature on this topic, my gut feeling is that endowments trump policy. Bad policy can ruin an economy, but good policy cannot make it boom. Factors like geography, historical path dependency, economies of scale, who your neighbors are, demography, cost of energy, technology or "brand recognition" - all matter far more than policies.

Finland may just as well have the best policies and the best educational system, it cannot outweigh the fact that it's a sparsely populated sub-arctic island in the corner of the world.

Economists are in the business of selling policy proposals. Clearly saying "policy actually doesn't matter all that much" isn't in their interest.

How much value can you get our of Reddit heavily depends on which subreddits you subscribe to. r/news or r/politics is a cesspool.

r/askhistorians is pure gold. Hobbyist subreddits are extremely valuable - discussions are polite, to the point, high-quality posts get consistently upvoted. r/coronavirus and r/COVID19 have been pivotal in making sense of the situation in early March (though r/coronavirus turned into a parody of the former self once Covid started spreading in the US). r/nottheonion or r/gaming are often hilarious.

There are three important steps to turn Reddit into a useful tool:

- Unsubscribe from the subreddits you find toxic

- Learn to use 'Sort by Top - this week/day'

- On PC, visit old.reddit.com instead of reddit.com. On mobile, use a third-party client like RedReader or Appolo

On Android, Reddit client RedReader is a great showcase of how pleasant and responsive modern applications could be, had they not been hobbled by tracking, ads, in-app purchase nudging, useless client-server roundtrips, etc.

Minimalistic, but clear UI. Subreddits open nearly instantly. Discussion threads open instantly. Comments arranged by upvotes, not by Reddit's opaque scoring algorithm. No visual clutter. Minimal battery usage.

A question out of genuine curiosity: Doesn't the nonce puzzle difficulty adjust to the amount of compute the network has, making it a zero sum game? If every mining pool buys 20% extra GPUs, isn't everyone soon back where they started, wasting hundreds of millions in the process?

> Is what RH doing legal for a brokerage?

At this point, nobody cares - Reddit found a repeatable distributed exploit that cannot be patched, and the financial system's self-preservation instinct kicked in.

> After performing over 100 interviews: interviewing is thoroughly broken. I also have no idea how to actually make it better.

My score is similar, and kind of agree. The eerie part is that the intuition can discern a good hire within 2 minutes with fairly high probability, and within 10 minutes with near certainty. The rest of the interview process is just padding to figure out whether the intuition is not wrong (it seldom is).

That intuition is some mashup of the candidate speaking on point, pragmatism, non-equivocation, admission of ignorance on some topics, English proficiency (1), etc. It's also impossible to codify or quantify, hard to convey and non-transferable.

(1) - here in Europe, English fluency, diction and (lack of) thick accent correlate highly with overall ability

It's not cheaper. However, employee compensation is a contractual obligation. Benefits and perks can be unilaterally revoked by employer at any point.

> banks loan out "your money" to companies

When the bank lends you money, it usually doesn't go from its deposits. Usually, there's an offsetting loan the bank takes from other banks, at the inter-bank lending rate (e.g. Euribor). Then the bank lends you the money at, say Euribor + 1%, pocketing the difference. The funds for inter-bank lending come either by offsetting loans from the central bank, or from consumer deposits, both of which can be re-lended many times due to fractional reserve banking.

I don't want to be the spoilsport, but yes, they very much can and it's not even that difficult.

Case in point: I moved to Finland as an immigrant 9 years ago, with nothing but a backpack, girlfriend and $12k in my bank account. Within 7 years, we paid down the mortgage for 100 m2 house in the capital area, while raising two children, with one above average and one below average income. And I don't feel like we were materially deprived in any way.

I think the main culprit is couples settling down way too late in their lives. Instead of settling down at the age of ~25 and combining two incomes to pay off the mortgage principle, we have two adults, each paying ~$700/month rents. When they finally move together at the age of ~30, that's almost $100k that went down the drain. The baby-boomer generation used to move together at even earlier ages, 19-22.

> with the ECB insisting there's no inflation

House prices are represented in the consumer price index as 'imputed rent', generally by far the highest weight item. Last time I checked, its weight was at 9%.