913 karma · joined May 16, 2018
I know there was stuff like proposing to pay people to move away, but I don't know if that's a real thing?
With a lot of these things nowadays, I've been looking at my receipt data and rooting through FRED, and obv the absolute numbers are probably not going to be bang-on, but the percentages are definitely pretty similar.
So yeah, it's not fantastic, but FRED data for chicken, beef, sirloin is like 20%, 26%, 51% in two years, which agrees pretty well with what little data I personally have, or their estimate is a fair bit higher for the sirloin (also prob hard to estimate since I wouldn't treat it like as much a commodity as ground beef). Milk is a similar story, FRED has like 40% in two years, knock on wood I don't think I've observed that, but dairy might be a midwest speciality for these purposes.
whole chicken, beef, sirloin. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000706111 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703112 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0400703613
The reason the peaker plants aren't the first step is that they take up to ~30 mins-1 hour to spin up. They use hydro or imported power from France to cover until the plants can cover.
One example I can think of is LVMH made an offer for Tiffany in late 2019 for like $16.2B. It appeared to be unhappy about that price a few months later for some reason, people didn't want high end jewelry or something... They settled for like 3% less, but was that worth the bitterness? That's assuming that Arnault actually did want to go through with the deal, which, there I also believe genuinely was having second thoughts.
The reason I think Musk is trying to actually walk away is that I feel the pushing the bot thing is a pretty double-edged tactic. A lot of LVMH's arguments were that Tiffany was mismanaging the business above and beyond the covid environ i.e. not necessarily that the business is flawed, but the seller stopped caring once they sold it. The bot strat is kinda riskier because it's saying, the business is actually flawed, and the seller is misrepresenting it to me.
If it gets him out great, but if not it could potentially be like buying a house and throwing a lit molotov through the kitchen window on move-in day.
Prob not a weighty opinion, but I would probably look around Osaka, the idea of Nishinari mainly. But in general, the mercantile legacy of Osaka just feels more fitting to paint a "anything for a price" kind of dystopia.
And admittedly, I would say a big part of why I think that is that I think the real correct answer is just Ghost in the Shell's Niihama: Borrow heavily from Hong Kong, except it's in Osaka Bay or Tokushima (not sure exactly which, I always thought it was Osaka, but google has turned up both).
I guess the, pragmatist(?) in me thinks, "google kind of legitimately provides a solution to a problem that reddit has had like, forever. And reddit provides an organic source of knowledge that I feel google is at least trying to get back in the mix. Why should that combination not be allowed to exist?
Point is I agree it's not for sale, for the reason you describe, but also that one of the leviathans already has nearly the entire minority interest.
There's sort of the line of business. Just assuming from a black box, Apple wants to build devices in these low-cost countries. Is it a competitive advantage to do this themselves? Do they have the skillset and wherewithal to do it well? They design chips, but they have TSMC make them, because among other things, there's much more to being a fab that bluntly, I think apple is not equipped for. Similarly, I think, design the products, figure out processes, then get them from the companies that spend all their time coordinating and building the stuff at a global scale.
Not to exculpate Foxconn, this is not the first time there's been stories like this of Indian facilities of Taiwan ODMs. And usually the first thing that gets pointed out, is that the ODM is itself using local contractors. So the reality is, where does the buck actually stop? The big question I have, is how would apple do this themselves? Is it that Foxconn has not quite figured out how to operate in India effectively, or is there some implicit outsourcing of misery to the next sub-contractor?
I assume apple also works with everyone else who has the scale to build iPhones like Wistron and Flex, but apple already similarly put one of Wistron's Indian factories on probation after a riot due to unpaid wages(?). I want to say they were mainly doing macbooks and ipads?
My understanding was one of the things is that the ODM books all the components and sort of capital for building things, so there's some capital structure things that I probably don't fully appreciate. No guarantee that's correct though...
At first, I was going to state that it would be interesting to compare organized crime trafficking tobacco to other drugs where there is no long running commercial history. But then I saw the southern border states are theorized high in importing smuggled cigarettes. So either wyoming, idaho, and nevada are supporting the whole western US, or some of it's coming up from mexico.
2012 https://taxfoundation.org/cigarette-taxes-and-cigarette-smug...
2017 paper arguing tax increases do not exacerbate this https://tobacconomics.org/uploads/misc/2017/11/2017-generic-...
To me, the thing you are trying to curb is the short latency. You don't want, let's say...the head of the senate intelligence committee talking about how prepared america is for pandemics, and then turning around and selling a bunch equities. Or, calling his brother in law for less than a minute, directly after which he calls his broker.
Imo, it's the difference between, "disclose your plans, providing an opportunity for questions and looking for ethical red flags" and, "seeing the transactions after the fact, after which the people always say, 'nah, nah my guy, you got it all wrong, I already planned to make these trades, or it had nothing to do with the non-public information I had access to ;)"
And for that reason, the SEC has 10b-5 plans, which can certainly be critiqued, but at least removes the low-hanging fruit like "we are getting acquired so I'll buy as many shares and out of the money options as I can".
Iirc her husband was basically buying fairly far-out (~16-18 months) calls at the onset of the pandemic, and they were expiring around the time of, was it an antitrust hearing? The timing itself was poor, but the expiration didn't seem diabolical.
But it was just like, c'mon, I don't even like the anti-trust bent congress is on, but how are you thinking people are taking your goals in good faith when you have any explicit (and intrinsically timed) personal interest in not harming the businesses you are looking into anti-trust action against?
The Fed trading ethics thing with Kaplan and Rosengren was also pretty bad. But imo, they made real changes. They restricted a lot of individual trading, and anything they can still trade in, has to be requested 45 days in advance. I think they understood the gravity of what that said about them, and took real steps to remedy.
The STOCK Act otoh says Congress and employees have to report within 45 days...
I would have to look back through my order history, legit I thought prime was always fulfilled by amazon, and that was how they could guarantee the shipping process. But amazon's page even talks about why FBA might not be right for your products (too bulky large etc., i.e. whatever isn't efficient for amazon to store/distribute). But then amazon probably was not content to say "that entire class of products cannot be Prime".
So my view to this was, amazon is selling a product (FBA) and part of what you get is use of the Prime label. But, certainly willing to cede being mistaken if that is not the case.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210931
May be brash of me, I would assume all water resistant watches have water lock, but the speaker thing sounds so apple-y.
There is eFabless, among other efforts in the vein you describe, they do a multi project wafer shuttle thing that google sponsors using skywater. It's supposedly an open source PDK, I haven't used it.
That being said, there is a lot of stuff on amazon I'm honestly surprised is worth the space it takes up in their warehouses. And I have knowingly bought some low-quality stuff on amazon. But perhaps with the critical caveat of knowingly, I have yet to have a counterfeit foisted upon me.
But the first thought is always...just the track record. Rabbits, foxes, cats, cane toads, donkeys, camels, goats, pigs. But, like you say, they aren't going to be losing track of their rhinos.
But, arguing conservation as a practical application, has Australia ever intentionally introduced a species for a practical application and had it not go absolutely sideways (big caveat, usually once the animals escaped, or were just turned loose)?
To me the contention with any plan, conservation or otherwise, is "be ultra careful what you bring into Australia".
Certainly not an expert, I'm sure in any case they would be very careful doing any of this, tracking etc. And I don't feel rhino's are quite as aggressive as say, hippos (authorities did not think Escobar's hippos would survive in Colombia; that turned out to be dead wrong). But I would certainly be very curious to see how introducing such a large aggressive herbivore with no natural predators would affect the area, if only because it does seem like a doable task to control the population.
Looks like the pillars are 164nm tall, 610nm high, which is pretty big all things considered. So normal semiconductor cleaning methods are probably fine. But the ways you would clean a camera sensor for instance would be very not fine.
However, from what I understood, it only applies employers who have been designated H-1B dependent (something like 15% of their workforce is H-1B) or something like that, or were identified abusers of the program. And even then, there is a salary limit, i.e. if you are paying over $X (which I am assuming facebook is), even if you're workforce is a high enough proportion H-1B you would be dependent, you are still exempt.
"It's not about fairness, it's about theft"
Which was also applicable to that college admissions thing. The problem is not that people were buying their way into schools. It's that they were paying someone other than the school to do so. The situation as a whole feels a bit dodgy, but the core legal problem is the guy took something that really belonged to Netflix.
Is this the first macbook that's hit the 100WHr limit, or has this been a barrier previously? But I mean like, that's it? No doubt there are gains to be made with a better battery, charging, cycling, cost and so forth. But without changing the regulations, a better battery can only get you more space, not higher capacity. Wild to consider.
What do you mean the rubber feet don't stay on? They make millions of these, milled out of aluminum, they can't keep the feet on?
Personally, I would trade a lot of design elegance for some hardy laptop feet.
I don't know what scrutiny that brings, but Warren Buffett has been careful not to get Berkshire Hathaway designated it. I believe the limit is/was 10%, but then you could ask the Federal Reserve for a higher limit, which they did because of Bank of America or Wells Fargo I believe? I don't know a tremendous amount about it, but from what Buffett was describing, it wasn't the fed asking them about their bank holdings, they were asking the bank about them.
Always interested to understand why things are where they are (e.g. proximity to Korea/China, sheer expense of Tokyo or somewhere like Osaka for a large industrial operation).
And so you delve into a subjective area. Part of me feels that there is a literal 'passing of the buck' where the company sort of dilutes and distributes sort of, societal investment responsibility, which is where even my own philosophy solicits an internal eyeroll.
The problem I have with buybacks is that I agree it is frequently a signal that 'a company has no uses for a bunch of cash on hand'. But does society suffer when businesses are so wed to capital efficiency? Does society benefit from corporate investment, period? Are earnest investments beneficial to society even if they don't work out?
Basically, how does the money distributed from buybacks impact society, and could that be improved?
Like Melkman says, Broadcom is a good guess. Not only for past rumors, but iirc they also did work with google's TPU (could never figure out if that was actually confirmed?). Interconnect IP like that is definitely in their wheelhouse.
And I think because seeing that, my initial suspicion is they really know their target market, or something, and I'm not it. Because the whole "[bought a house on lake Tahoe]...inspired about making the dream of second home ownership possible for more people"
Makes me think "wow, really? that's the narrative pitch?" But tbf I don't know how you go about pitching a second home without sounding like Marie Antoinette.