totalZero

Compare this with the $125B valuation for SpaceX from May of this year. Not bad.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-17/musk-may-...

I think multiplying by population serves as a way to normalize for link speed. Ten people who use a lot of spectrum are probably bigger customers than ten people who use a tiny sliver of spectrum, and thus constitute a bigger user base.

To be fair...

Apple's their largest customer by about a factor of 5, makes up about a quarter of TSMC's revenue, and probably bought more than half of TSMC's 5nm wafer production last year.

Knowing Qualcomm, there's probably a major royalty cost involved.

If Apple spends $450 million to enable the service [0], that's about $2 per phone sold in 2021 [1].

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/10/apple-spending-450-million-w...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-11/apple-exp...

> you can pretty much tell what an iphone will be able to do based on what qualcomm is currently able to do

Strictly speaking, if that were the case then the iPhone 13 would have been able to do it. [0]

The technology (Band 53/n53) and the timeline (end of 2022) are mentioned in the Sep 2022 SEC filing of the agreement between Globalsat and Apple. [1]

[0] https://www.semianalysis.com/p/no-the-iphone-13-does-not-hav...

[1] https://investors.globalstar.com/node/14431/html

I'm pretty sure it's Globalstar.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-picks-globalstar-sa...

In the US there are people who drive to the emergency room and wait outside in the parking lot to see if they get better or if they really need to go inside. Some of those people have insurance but would pay a deductible.

I don't have data to support this, but I guess that at least 40% of Americans would agree with the statement, "I take cost into consideration when I make a call to emergency services."

> regulatory darkness

Regulators barely understand equities let alone crypto, and they haven't taken the mantle of regulating crypto quite yet. People in regulated markets do a lot of malicious and illegal things. Imagine an unregulated one.

> capital assets

It's a lot easier to see what an aircraft manufacturer owns than to see what a crypto exchange owns. You might be able to run FTX from an armload of Raspberry Pis, but you can't run Boeing that way. Binance doesn't have inventory and real estate like a retailer. To compare a crypto exchange to a commodities exchange: it's easier to characterize the future value of aluminum or gold than the future value of a cryptocurrency -- not only because metals are more liquid, but also because they have been around far longer. Nobody knows the real value of crypto, so it's hard to know what assets a crypto-business is actually holding at any given time.

Why invest in a space where there are no rules and you can't see what everyone owns or how they use their resources?

Interesting. I found an old page with a photo and a newer one with more recent information. I knew that Iridium as a constellation is still operating, but I wasn't aware that they introduced a different satellite design that mitigates flares. The last Iridium satellite that produced flares was deorbited in 2019. (They folks who made the second page seem disappointed about the end of that era.)

http://www.satobs.org/iridium.html

https://catchtheiridium.com/mission/

I think you mean EUV in your second line. Deep UV is an older and more common technology than Extreme UV.

Buffett's average holding period for large holdings appears to be something like 7.5 years [0], and China won't be able to invade Taiwan in that timeframe because it will take time to build up their domestic semiconductor supply chain. It's hard to deny that TSM is trading at a cheap P/E these days. The stock has basically been cut in half this year.

[0] https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/11/05/3-stocks-buffett-h...

You managed to fit a pretty big sword of Damocles in the last four words there.

In the sense that you're talking about the math involved with the coins themselves, it's hard to disagree with you.

It does seem difficult to have a crypto ecosystem (based on those protocols/coins) that doesn't include the pitfalls of regulatory darkness and non-discoverability of capital assets. Investors seem to like having a cop on the beat. Even though the SEC doesn't really do anything, it carries a big stick and keeps market actors in line, more or less. Furthermore, it's a lot easier to verify that a factory actually has tools in it, than to verify that a crypto exchange is functioning properly.

Money inherently has a cop on the beat. When the cop is Venezuela or Argentina or Zimbabwe, its value gets dinged. And it's a lot easier to monitor things like GDP and taxation than to know how one of these acronymic crypto heroes is running his exchange.

It's unclear to me (no sarcasm) why tech debt is an issue. I would be grateful if someone could explain why they would need to cut down on tech debt in order to keep the product in a functional holding pattern. Obviously there are going to be things that break and new exploits that need to be taken into consideration, but when I think about tech debt I imagine kludge-ridden, inelegant/inefficient code that is poorly documented.

As with Meta and Alphabet, Twitter's major problem right now is ad revenue.

The final earnings report prior to the acquisition stated that uncertainty around Musk's then-incomplete acquisition of Twitter contributed to a dip in ad revenue. Perhaps it was counterproductive for Twitter to put that sentiment in writing as part of their note to shareholders, insofar as it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. They communicated to the public -- including advertisers -- that advertisers would hesitate to continue advertising on Twitter due to the pending deal (and, inductively, that they have good reason to do so).

As with Meta, Twitter's revenue derives almost entirely from its ad business. Other ad-funded tech firms have faced similar headwinds in 2022, so if Twitter is facing a one-two punch of deal uncertainty and secular headwinds, it seems wise to batten down the hatches by reducing operating expenses. The product is mature, user growth is not driven by sales staff, and advertisers are tightening their respective belts.

I'm not sure what the percent breakdown of terminated employees is by business area (looked for it and couldn't find it), but if you have staff dedicated to keeping Twitter clean and inoffensive in order to keep advertisers happy, but those same advertisers are already shying away and forecasts suggest they will continue to do so, then cutting staff in those areas is not entirely bonkers.

Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321411

Perhaps the engineers who dedicate their time and creativity to the expert manufacture of tools for destruction are not blameless.

Biden has control over them. They are a nontrivial aspect of his messaging, regardless of whether he or someone else taps out the words.

"Organization XYZ has godlike power thanks to Palantir, says Organization XYZ two years after investing half a billion in Palantir."

As far as I can tell, Sompo maintains a vested interest in hyping AI for business. Palantir has been on the rocks recently.

It's not every day that you see an insurance company violate several of the ten commandments in one fell swoop.

> Why does that work for him

It works for him the same way it works for Neil Gershenfeld. Be palatably erratic, assume the mad scientist role, make your credentials known, and people will eventually start to treat you as though you are brilliant.

That schtick hits more than one of Cialdini's six principles of persuasion.

(NB this is not a comparison of Gershenfeld and Bankman-Fried, just an observation of what seems like one shared attribute.)

Always gives me pause when I hear people say that someone graduated with honors at MIT, even when it's Tony Stark:

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/87387a75-dde7-44ec-bc87-66f4e20...

Or this guy from Why Him:

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/bbc047f6-7417-4eb3-b4fe-064f75d...

I thought the same but the article rounds to 1.

  That leaves SBF’s net worth at about $1 billion,
  down from $15.6 billion heading into Tuesday. The
  94% loss is the biggest one-day collapse ever
  among billionaires tracked by Bloomberg.

He did so on 60 Minutes about a month ago:

https://youtu.be/HfNnuQOHAaw?t=15

Seems fair game to compare Biden's White House tweets to the tweets from Trump's account while he was the sitting President.

The CHIPS and Science Act is nowhere near a qualitative shift away from the investor-centric mentality of managing a public company. Many investors are short-term greedy and don't learn much about the real goings-on of the company. It makes a few things cheaper, but if you compare to TSMC and Samsung it's quite clear that Intel doesn't get anywhere near the amount of government money or political power that its competitors at the leading edge happen to have in their respective localities.

I would consider taking a boxing class, running for local office, or going on a one-person vacation to the middle of nowhere.

Maybe all three.

I'm not sure that it's possible to lose skills in this way unless they completely fall out of practice. Seems like a situation where you learn that you won't grow in a particular way can only lead to a better understanding of the narrow path to fulfilling growth and development.

Just my viewpoint though.

There's an inverse relationship between wavelength and range, and the higher the frequency the better the resolution.

https://acousticstoday.org/wavelength

You're assuming the recipient has a bank account.

There are also rules that limit taxation on EBT.

I don't think Russia has the same cultural attitude toward casualties and attrition that the US has, and it seems to me that their objective is more than a pure grab of territory.

> Embarrassing military defeat? Check.

The war is ongoing. I have a couple of friends who share your mentality toward it, but perhaps it's better to be doubtful of the outcome and cautious about Russia's next steps.

> Leaving behind billions in hardware? Check.

The US did this in Afghanistan too. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/27/politics/afghan-weapons-l...

> Financially and militarily drained? Check.

Petroleum-based economies operate better in high-price environments. Sanctions can be painful but with oil above $80, there's no easy way to financially drain a petrostate. They keep pumping and selling. Russia's strategic position gives it unique power to manipulate the petroleum markets by affecting supply to key markets in ways that induce price volatility. Separately, the nuclear threat is real and it's hard to imagine that a country with so substantial a destructive capability is militarily drained. It's true that some young people fled Russia due to the mobilization; I met one such man earlier this month and talking to him gave me a greater understanding of Russian public sentiment toward the war. Still, it seems unreasonable to evaluate Russia's manpower without putting it in the context of the size of the substantially smaller Ukrainian military.

There's a political angle to a lot of the work around internet freedom, and a surprising number of people/lobbyists operate on the touch point between browsers and public policy. Faction-choosing is, I guess, a side effect of that dynamic.