237 karma · joined May 12, 2022
This is your typical fraud startup by someone who doesn't even know what they don't know!
Hate these kinds of people!
So if you want a Nikon film camera - for reasons - better buy one now.
Guess what celery is natural high in? Nitrites.
Especially not electronics. And certainly not more advanced semiconductors.
The rule-of-thumb is the lifespan of planar CMOS processes in years is proportional to the "node size" in nanometers. So we are right now at 2-10 years. Some specific ICs or specific applications or specific designs can be bigger or smaller than this but it's the average.
If you've ever worked on "antique" electronics, this is no surprise.
Elon is claiming this. Twitter is denying it. It will be decided by a judge in a few years.
Given Twitter's ethics I already have a prediction for the outcome but ultimately it's for the judge in the end.
This is NOT realistic or available in many cases. I live among farms and I have to drive 10 miles to get cellular or internet. I'm pretty typical for the majority of America. And given the evil of social media this is probably a good thing - we do other things instead.
The "Apple Car" is 100% a non-innovative, uncreative me-too product.
I don't see anything relevant announced that suggests innovation. Certainly the last 3 WWDC have be super disappointing and increasingly fluffy irrelevance.
Now imagine some key technology that appears to be "less important" and with "smaller budget". It will never come back; it will be lost foever.
Modern technological society is always less than a generation away from "losing the recipe" for any given critical but ignored technology. I saw this at HP and it can be as quick as 2-5 years in some cases.
And this applies to outsourced technology infrastructure - once outsourced, you can NOT just flip a switch to bring it back - it will take 20-50 years to bring it back and only if you fund continuously (not continually).
Because the intent was to allow heavy use of glyphosate to wipe out weeds under the assumption that glyphosate is 100% harmless to humans so eating such a crop plant with so much glyphosate wouldn't matter.
That happens to be wrong but that was the assumption of many GMO plants. And why glyphosate is showing up in urine!
"We don't want people from Richmond and Oakland being able to come into Marin!"
Well back then just like today, there is a distinct ethnic group this obviously refers to.
That was the primary argument against it - we don't want blacks in Marin (unless they are "house blacks" living in Marin City which used to 99% black in the 1970s - it's been gentrified a lot since then).
Even as a teen I knew exactly what they were really saying and I found it disgusting but it also made me aware of the fact that the most racist people are not Klansmen in white robes - it's progressive liberals and this was only my first experience with that. I've had plenty more since then over the decades.
Marin county is full of racists. It's a large part of why I'd never live there despite how I will partially inherit my mother's house there (it will be sold off instead). You can talk to black folks driving through Marin about how they get followed by the police and often get warned to get out of the county ASAP if they want to avoid trouble.
It's a large part of why I always lived on the east side of Silicon Valley (East SJ, Milpitas, Fremont, etc. where being "white" made me a minority) instead of the whiter west cities like PA, MV, SV, Cupertino, etc. You still hear to this day comments like I heard in Marin from people in these cities! We don't want "those people" from "over there" around here!
It's a large part of why I no longer live in California and have no intention of returning despite being a native born California with all my remaining family still in California.
When I was getting my MBA at SCU, one of the assignments was to estimate the correct "fundamentals price" of various company stocks and what cash flow would be required to sustain that stock price.
The technique is simply: the current stock price is the NPV (net present value) of future revenue cash flows. Because of the effects of discounting, you only really need to go 10-20 years into the future (the present value of future money approaches zero as time goes to infinity but it's already effectively zero at 10-20 years).
The simplest solution is to assume constant revenue into the future so each each for 10-20 years is, say, $1M and that gives you a NPV that depends on an effective interest rate.
But a start up starts at zero revenue at day zero and must increase that revenue and generally markets require exponential growth (which is what "X% growth" announced each year actually means mathematically - non-exponential growth would be 0% growth per year by mathematical necessity). So you have to give an "interest rate" of growth as another parameter in your estimate.
How big is that? Well isn't NOT 5%, 10% or even 15% or 20%. Because if you wanted modest ROI like that, you'd NEVER invest in startups at all. You could invest in consumer credit card companies instead.
No. You need 30%-100% growth per year of ACTUAL money revenue. Which is what makes startups so great for founders if they do well. The ROI is enough for everyone involved but more so for founders. In Silicon Valley's past, this was possible even with hardware. But in the 90s it became passe to require or expect that apparently.
So what about Dot Com and later internet startups? Well, we did the analysis on Amazon back in the day and to justify their THEN stock price, you could set revenues growing at 100%-200% per year for the entire 20-30 year event horizon of the analysis AND STILL NOT COME CLOSE to justifying the stock price at the time.
Fast forward to 2022, and note that companies like Twitter are still not profitable or having revenue growth levels to sustain its even now depressed stock price. The wrong lesson is to say that "Obviously fundamentals pricing doesn't matter" - instead it means they current wishful thinking of "animal spirit" pricing is dangerous.
The main reason for the discrepancy is these irrational exuberance pricing driving the price: these are "value stocks" (as long as a bigger sucker, I mean buyer, can be found) BUT they are NOT investing in ANYTHING that can build greater revenues in any effective way. The problem is that the South Sea Corporations and Tulip markets were exactly that as well.
The poster child for this lack of fundamentals is WeWork, which was NOT EVEN a growth tech play (with Moore's Law based value multiplication) but simply a real estate business no different from any REIT or property management business (fixed size pie) AND had anti-fundamentals (risk creation and wealth destruction at its core) baked into them financially in their core business model. But if you say "Moore's Law" enough times.... you get a Cargo Cult of delusion.
Twitter and most other internet players are effectively similar in that it has no real value creation but plenty of risk-creating features to its business model with a high operating cost. And now even Amazon is floundering in many ways with it only sustained by its prior destruction of competitors.
The Achilles heal of destroying your competitors is there are circumstances when customers will simply say no to buying what you are selling _without direct product substitution_ or by having them completely changing their economic allocations and choices entirely outside the market. That's already happening thanks to economic destruction and inflation - when people cancel Netflix accounts, often they are NOT substituting another streaming vendor - often they are changing what they do with their time!
If these companies ACTUALLY provided value, they'd have some immunity to economic downturns if they were truly essential. But they are weak financially and they are far from essential so the result becomes dire. AND DESERVED if you haven't been focused on the fundamentals due to unethical get-rich-quick schemes and political distractions. Having "good times" for too long has also made them "fat, dumb and happy" and destroys the instincts and even core knowledge to insulate themselves to the current reality.
That was the VALUE of cyclic economies pre-1980 - bad times forced to you remember and learn how to prepare for that reality. Just one of the many reasons why eliminating business cycles causes more harm than good.
A lot of this due to the hardware architecture itself. The software abstractions dictated/limited by the HW itself causes many of the risks!
If you designed BOTH HW and SW up to and including the OS, you _might_ have a chance to control the risks better. But by the very separation of duties and roles, papered over by abstraction itself, you create problems. ALL abstractions throw away information and eventually those abstractions bite you in the ass.
This was the case with digital logic once HW speeds rose to a critical level - suddenly the reality that digital is merely an abstraction upon analog and the very abstraction of lumped-model analog started failing which caused digital fail as well.
We definitely can have and have had the same failure occurring with von Neumann architecture - there's NOTHING magical about it that immunizing against model abstraction failure and it can creation "intrinsic failures" that can never be fixed thanks to Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Because this is literally about the time-domain solution to heat conduction and fluid dynamics (convention) with different initial conditions and boundary conditions (shape of vessel, temperatures at boundaries, etc.).
For example if there isn't uniformity of initial temperature, if there isn't uniformed of the applied cold sink, if there isn't uniformity of heat flux capacity due to conductivity of the interfacing boundary conditions, etc. There's even questions about the water purity or contaminants which definitely would change the answer.
These are not and often can not be controlled. And in practice at home, you will never duplicate even what the answer is in a control lab experiment.
It is the norm to have a range solutions that entirely depend upon initial conditions and boundary conditions. And there's also uncertainty of even knowing the values of these conditions.
Expecting a simplistic yes/no answer to many problems ESPECIALLY those involving heat transfer and fluid dynamics is like asking for a specific date for your date from your date of birth or your childhood medical history.
See also climate change - we DO NOT KNOW there is a specific date when things "tip" and ANYONE claiming there is a date let alone timeframe is a liar or so ignorant they can't possibly be right! The error of any model is larger than the estimate value itself.
You'd think people would have learned something from the 20th century about the FACT that we do not live in a 19th clock-work universe with complete predictability. We know how it can never be predictable especially if fluid dynamics is involved - you know, mathematical chaos and all.
The other aspect: when you resonant between Earth and ionosphere, you do NOT get 1/r^2 losses because you are effectively inside a parallel plate capacitor that nearly is uniform and no r dependence other than the surface area average of the Earth's surface - the power put in is uniformly distributed across the area of the Earth.
The other part: Tesla's system is exactly the same as hydrogen - it's NOT an energy source but a distribution medium of CONVENTIONALLY GENERATED electrical power. So you still need fossil, nuclear, etc. power to source the power and then you pump it into it. It's NOT FREE ENERGY as many claim. Not remotely.
The average lifespan of an established corporation is only about 20 years. The average lifespan of a new company is only 10 years. So anything that lasts longer is living on borrowed time.
It's like reaching your 50s-60s which when the 2nd derivative of death goes into overdrive. Only by surviving that period is there evidence as proof of life that you are doing something right or had good genes. The same for corporations and then 10-20 year period.
So Google in exactly in this cusp. They may not survive it but "that will be that" without moral or ego judgement. If they die now, it's simply that they didn't not find the magic elixir of life or purpose or business model. I think the handwriting about that is already on the wall - they did NOT and we are merely watching its decline. It just happens.
The best way to avoid the problems of dependency on an entity is to not become dependent in the first place.
Just like allowing one to be coddled and never growing up is a bad long-term strategy because that person's parents won't live forever and they will survive parents alone. They will be ill-prepared to do without but nothing in this universe can undo that reality once it happens. The answer is always for a parent to make sure your children are independent and well-prepared enough to live without you. Not doing that is misparenting.
In the economic sphere, blindly becoming dependent on only one technology or vendor is similarly an error on your part. Either create alternatives or find ways to live differently that do not require it in the first place.
Note that as an America these UK rules make no sense to me (especially the solicitor/barrister thing - talk about assuring justice can't be served without money or power).
It could be that you have the wrong politics, or wrong anything else that is arbitrary and capricious. We've see exactly this occur in the last decade so NO ONE can be trusted to have centralized control like this.
It does make me glad I never jumped onto the Minecraft bandwagon - I have no investment of time or passion to lose from this.
I recently deleted 100% of my Reddit and Quora posts (10-15 years worth) - didn't even bother to save anything. Just better to pull the bandaid off fast. Such an improvement.
If I get bored and feel the urge to go online, I take a walk outside.
I'm seriously thinking about getting a dumb phone and tossing my iPhone entirely. I don't actually use it for more than literal phone and text. I disconnected e-mail on it a year ago. Of course, never had social media.
Note: I've been on the internet since it was called Arpanet and I was heavily involved in the 1G web. No stranger to being online but my views have its utility and value have changed - I now believe it's nearly the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity.