There is something that has fundamentally changed (or broken, depending on your perspective) with the valuation of American tech companies. They've always traded at a premium, but the pandemic and the encroachment of the monopolists has turned the earth sour.
Similarly, SpaceX has already brought the cost of getting things to space down by a couple of orders of magnitude, and Starship is rapidly progressing with the potential to bring them down a couple more. The aspirational goals there are being able to get things to space on the order of $10-$20/kg. That would dramatically reshape not only space but even transport as we know it, very likely in a way analogous to how the ability to quickly send a 0 or 1 signal long distances for cheap reshaped the world in ways that would be essentially impossible to predict prior to its happening.
I'm bearish on the LLM revolution and bullish on the space one, which generally seems to also be the market consensus.
.. who are they gonna sell to if people don't even have money to buy? We live in circular economy... everyone's dependent on someone or the other... you take one leg out of this, and the whole thing stops. UBI won't work either because it will lead to runaway inflation and extreme levels of invasive control over people's lives and what they can and cannot do.
I hope no one here is naive enough to believe that AI would actually be used for general welfare of people.
I've never heard this before. I thought UBI would be very freeing and without much control. If it is universal then there needs to be no control of who gets it or not. What am I missing?
Your fight against the data centers is misguided. All so they can be built somewhere else so what you have a few extra years of getting paid to fill out a spreadsheet or something? You're applying pressure on the wrong side of the equation.
Nothing, it is nonsense. UBI is just expanded social welfare in Europe. There are some checks that you are not abusing social welfare (i.e. living in a huge house while taking housing subsidies) but with UBI these checks are nonsensical from that first letter U = Universal. There are no checks by default.
And in cases where the strain on resources is significant, you could easily see things like efforts to restrict the fertility of the consumption class which would enter into the domain of defacto eugenics. And from all of these sort of issues you're going to see a conflict arise between the two classes, but one holds all the power. It's not going to be pretty. FWIW, a decade ago I was a huge advocate for UBI, but my outlook on the realities of political leadership, and it's probable inescapability, has changed my opinion over time.
It doesn't cover launch costs directly, but here's a bearish take on reusability of the second stage:
https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-...
[1] - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?board=72.0
[1] - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=63166.0
A typical American semi-truck (18-wheeler) can carry between 40,000 and 45,000 pounds (20 to 22.5 tons) can travel only 160k miles (2/3 distance to the Moon) on a budget of $400k (i.e. $20/kg).
Do you expect us to believe that rocket transportation would be in the ballpark of truck prices in the near future?
With rockets, the fundamental viability is there through full reuse, airplane style. The majority of the cost of a repeatedly reusable vessel ends up being fuel, which is around a million bucks for Starship. Add another million for refurbishing, amortizing costs, and so on and you get a baseline launch cost of around $2 million. With a payload of 100 tons, you're at $20/kg.
The major difficulty is creating a system that's fully reusable, and that's exactly what's being done with Starship. I don't know if they'll succeed to the point of $20/kg, but it's a viable possibility. And if they do succeed then everything is going to get very weird, because the economics of transport become absurd, to say nothing of the entire frontier of space suddenly becoming 100% accessible at a reasonable cost for development.
At least that's what I remember from the 00s.
You can debate the assumptions, but it isn't witchcraft. The math is simple.
How many serious, large AI players are there? Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and who else exactly?
At least one of them will probably win. And winning here means billing almost all companies for AI and automation, consumers, perhaps robotics and research.. and that potential earning is massive.
So yes, I will pay 10 times the worth for the stock now, but paying 1000 per stock for a chance of owning all that future profit is not that outrageous.
That should make it hard to bank in on future growth with any single AI company: what I believe is happening is investors jumping in on the short term gains train.
If you limit yourself to simple math, than you get this result.
Assuming linear growth into a market with competition and an unclear ability to absorb that growth is a gamble.