gimmeThaBeet

that was definitely one of those "wait, what?" moments. i still love it when software feels like a magic trick

yeah i was like huh? you wanna bandy about on valuation etc. whatever. but part of why the whole circular financing is a thing is nvidia has so much cash flow, it is not trivial to allocate

It's sort a "broken clock right twice a day" thing, but I agree with not doing offshore wind in the US. The divergence immediately follows in that I wish they would just push onshore wind.

It's sort of a circular issue, it's madly expensive because we haven't built a lot and aren't super good at it, and we don't get much of it built because we aren't great at it and it always is ludicrously expensive.

The US has a uniquely underdeveloped maritime sector, we don't build a lot of the massive turbines you use offshore. You drive through central and west texas, it feels like there might be more wind turbines than people. We've kind of already made the decision based on what works.

I said accused mainly because the big 3 won their last antitrust suit in the US, sort of "what have you caught me for, lately?" approach.

For all I know, maybe they are dumb enough to try and actually coordinate again, my hunch would be no, or they've tried something new and inventive. Like Matt Levine talked about how so many landlords were using the same software to set prices, that one was pretty shady.

But it is interesting where it is popping up at the moment, like power transformers is another area. These companies have lived through these cycles before, and know there is no one to save them if they overleverage and get it wrong.

I struggle to think of a line of business as cyclical as DRAM, maybe like certain kinds of mining would be my only thought.

The DRAM fabs have been on a roundabout for 40 years going from getting accused of price fixing and cartel behavior, to struggling to keep the lights on.

And imo it's not really their fault, it's all the lead time of advanced semiconductors, combined with the commodity dynamics of oil. And the goal is to match that supply to the demand of everything from consumer electronics to more datacenters than you can shake a stick at.

It's maddening to try and solve that, so at this point I really don't fault them for prioritizing survival.

yeah this seems to be the catch 22 to me. the laws are out there to limit the e-bikes to speeds and power. i want an irresponsibly powered one because i have an endorsement and want a non-sketch electric motorcycle that isn't mad expensive compared to petrol bikes in north america.

but because that would indeed kill their market because most people don't have motorcycle licenses, no one gets them approved, or countries won't allow them.

I agree, or at least I would stress that people should be allowed to consent to that. I don't know what the prevailing medical ethics of doing that kind of thing in consenting patients in that state, but my uninformed intuition is I would disagree with it.

Though one thing that I might think researchers might not want is people may be too sick to recover even if their cancer disappeared tomorrow.

the aphorism that comes to mind with that prospect these days is: "populism is like cigarettes, it's not the first one that kills you, it's the last"

jeez 8-18 years, is that a record or is it one of those things they don't know enough about them to narrow down? that's another thing to think about when my ignorant self is eating my sushi. i used to assume that farmed salmon was marginally better than wild, but given how much wild fish gets fed to farmed fish, not sure that is even a plus on top of the ecological effects of fish farming.

Jeopardy style, Who is Lee Child?

Dang that 6k is pretty prohibitive not for the overall level, but because it's 4 hobs or nothing. Hardly a "give it a swag" kind of level. I assume they are probably somewhat comparable to the Breville Control Freak, so at a single hob you'd be competing against $1500.

But the battery is a nice philosophy, similar to hybrid/mild electric cars. You don't need all the power forever. You just need more than a 120V circuit can provide.

Not sure if any of my anecdata when I was a contractor are relevant anymore given current circumstances, but among all the NASA facilities I worked with, JPL really seemed to be doing its own thing, mostly for better. They were a bit quirky to work with though, because they did seem to do so much more in-house than elsewhere. So I don't know if it's that independence or their zip code that has made them such a target, but I wonder if it has been that they have less political capital from moneyed interests keeping them off the chopping block. But any gutting of JPL is probably irreplaceable damage.

I can add a minimal anecdote. I got some support from a couple engineers on a telecom project, and it wasn't even that big of a thing, but they were more than decent to work with. I did say to one guy, "you guys are a lot cooler to work with than some of the stuff you see in the news" and matter-of-fact he was just like "oh, yeah that's legal"

my vision of them is that the engineering side can be great to deal with when they want to be (and my personal experience is they want to be). but the other part of their business is like set the standard, and then enforce it.

This is what sticks with me the deepest.

With immigration are unquestionably tough decisions, tradeoffs, philosophies on the issue, and demographics in general. It gets heated, fast. I know I'm biased, but I wish trust had not degraded to such an extent you could believe people could deal with these topics in good faith.

But how can anyone support this kind of craven policymaking where uncertainty and cruelty are features and not bugs? Just shock and awe and deafening silence.

That's what's so dishearterning. Is that who we are now, or is this just a timely excuse to be who we always have?

I always wondered how to gauge how effective Apple's Dialog carveout was, in terms of was it just instant PMIC department or even effective at building a foundation for them? Given their long relationship, I would think it might be pretty seamless.

I assume Apple probably do that more than I know, it is just interesting that their vertical acquisition history feels the most boring and the most interesting.

At least looking from the outside, it feels like relatively small pieces develop into pretty big differentiators, like P.A. Semi, Intrinsity and Passif paving the way to their SoCs.

That's really at this point that's back to where I am with crypto. Through all the speculation and cruft, there is still a shot at owning our own payments, or rather no one owning them.

The payment networks have power, and if you can twist the arm of the gatekeepers, people subvert that power.

The only thing I don't know about these days is with the stablecoins, how do you avoid the government sinking their claws into you if you intrinsically (esp. if successful) have to hold that much in cash or short-term instruments? Or you have something like tether, which leaving aside anything else, you can definitely say is comically opaque for an entity that is nominally running $160B.

I remember running the class with the giant radar dish on top to keep the comms up, running skirmishes till the wee hours of the morning. Definitely biased but I agree it was such a cool game.

The three-sided conflicts and aesthetics of the civilizations also felt a bit ahead of their time, with the NATO-like, Eastern Bloc, and the Middle East civs.

Though to be fair, before Chromehounds was Armored Core, so it's not like FromSoft's mecha pedigree is that obscure.

Yeah really, Truss really is the most salient yardstick, with the complication that any analogous action in the mechanisms of american politics feels slightly unfathomable. And I was shocked enough at Truss' ouster.

It's all so divisive, but it frustrates me to no end that likely the biggest end that people trying to defend this, without any admission this is a crisis of confidence waiting to happen if it's not already there.

The amount of political capital immolated for the sake of this course of action is flatly embarrassing. It doesn't really matter what they want or how long they think it's going to take to get it, the damage is already done.

One thing I am mostly against is nationalized property/casualty insurance. California seems to have taken every opportunity to not properly price risk. My worry is that while extreme, their logic and priorities do not feel unique for government decision making. The last thing I'd want to do is expand it.

When you distort risk pricing, you distort the market, and if you do it hard enough for long enough, you are basically pulling back the slingshot.

While this also applies to mutual insurers, my philosophy is being serious about solvency is the best way to know if you are properly underwriting and pricing. I feel like the government operates too much knowing that they can backstop it either themselves or by imposing an assessment on the market.

You are right that the really big disasters are very correlated events. While not a silver bullet, reinsurance and other risk transfer stuff can help smooth those kind of events out. The good-ish thing with those risks is that while they are uncertain, they are sort of identifiable, known unknowns in Rumsfeld parlance.

I agree with that sentiment, the thing that always seems crazy to me is that California's housing pricing in the face of all these things, but perhaps it's sort of pick your poison. Like I don't want to harp on it, but the only implicit or explicit thing everyone appears to agree on given the decisions that have been made is protecting housing prices above all else. But don't expose people to the ramifications of the housing appreciation (Looking at you, Prop 13).

Matt Levine always has the good stuff, but he had commentary on a profile of Jim Chanos (the lesson not necessarily being specific to Chanos) that always sticks with me. The profile that discussed the idea that the real sort of 'secret sauce' was that the combination of Chanos' main funds were like 190% long, and then 90% the short stuff he wan known for.

On its surface, nothing crazy for long/short funds, the notable part was that basically all the effort was on the short side, and the long side was implied to be very humdrum. And the short book had like negative returns over a long period. It just struck me as a really elegant (if extreme) example of what uncorrelated returns can do if you do somehow have some edge over time.

And I'm not sure what Hindenburg's holistic picture is, but whether rightly or wrongly now I usually assume most of the kind of very public shorts operate similarly. I was never really on board with the "short sellers are evil" train of thought, but I did believe, "oh these very public short sellers only short things, they just go around all the time thinking everything is awful". And my assumption now is that they are like, kind of really theatric long/short funds.

Matt had some line like if you extremely good at something, you can get rich doing it, even if it loses money. As long as it's not correlated.

I don't want to generalize it but as soon as you said "if the culture here is different than the U.S" I thought "Okay yep that's why."

I don't even know if it counts as culture, but the US inevitably seems to have such a refined sense of litigation and, insurance mindset for lack of a better term?

Anecdotally, schools are indeed a prime example, we had cooking classes in high school that were stopped because of the costs to insure for it.

Yeah I mean there's a couple things to speculate.

It could be he thinks this is as good as it's going to get for a while, don't know.

At this point I usually look at the cash as being as much directly insurance related as it is business/investing related. They are a massive insurance and reinsurance writer.

I'm at least a little glad to see that, for me there's the weird kind of indexy thing where you want Berkshire to sort of be differentiated from the market. So much is indexed, you want the 'other stuff' to be not quite the index, which at their size is probably a tall order.

Obviously it's up to them. But to me there's a little temptation that if you're going to be this kind of 'pocket universe economy' for lack of a better term that it tries to be a little less straight beta.

I don't want to open it up and see "hey 20% of your maket cap is just apple? I already have a lot of that, can't you have something else?". Which firmly falls into the camp of not their problem.

So I guess now it's only 10% of its market cap, so progress :)

This has no weight to it but is just sort of my anecdotal perception, my feeling from googlers I know directly or indirectly feels like, I guess I would say a lot are really vigilant of career risk?

The vibe I always get is that they won't hesitate to abandon stuff that doesn't get huge fast, but a big part is that the manager or teams don't want to get stuck with something that isn't a juggernaut or obviously on its way.

And heck, maybe that is just everywhere, but anecdotally at google, from an outside observer, it looks like the culture dictates being on the 'Big Thing' is how you succeed there.

No it's actually 2-3k+ usd. I had done some cursory considering of it over the past few months because it seems like a potentially reasonable solution to a real problem I struggle with.

But yeah part of it is like, it's really weird. If you asked me how much consistently better sleep would be worth, the answer is how much do you want?

But phrase that as "Bed as a service" and my reflex is "you're kidding, righr?"

From the propublica about this last time, there was a lot of statements like this that stuck with me:

> “Initially, it was very hard for executives to accept that they could operate at 94% or 96% and achieve a higher NOI by increasing rents,”

Based on how multifamily operators refer to the software, it sounds like it was what they were doing before, just supercharged automation.

But this was part where it seemed like the algorithm made a leap, that the optimal trajectory wasn't max occupancy.

I’m gonna be blunt, that’s a strange position. I mean, even just math wise/FFT, you can break down a lot of stuff into a dc component plus your variable component.

But the other part is you can absolutely adjust the output of a nuclear reactor, we just don’t because the availability is there. Look up the largest power stations in the us/globally, and sort by capacity factor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_statio...

Yeah, that part kind of grinds my gears a little bit. Aside from the politics getting involved, the biggest agitator is the rival bidder.

But part of their revised bid before Nippon included a breakup fee in case their bid got blocked on anti-trust grounds. Which, on the one hand, while I will say I probably disagree with a lot of anti-trust policy enforcement currently, the implicit notion that the rival American acquisition is better is imo kinda laughable.

The things CC is mainly interested in are like entirely horizontal, ore production/pelletizing, and automotive steel.

Cliffs has already bought AK and Arcelor's US mills in the past 5 years, the fact that they would be allowed to consolidate the midwest further is like, what do you actually believe in?

Exactly, the tl;dr is energy storage, but I feel like it's sort of the Amazon approach. There was an interview where they asked Bezos why books as Amazon's first product, and his answer was basically:

"I read internet usage was going up by 2300 percent a year, so I decided to try and find a business that would make sense in that context."

"Cheap and ubiquitous solar power is coming, what products does the world need in that context to move away from extracting fossil fuels?"

Like a lot of things, current technology probably isn't there yet. But philosophically, if you wait for tech to catch up with your vision of the future, you might find yourself behind.

I think this is really cool, I think the economics of it are really tough, but there's a lot of ways natural gas is just a much easier thing to deal with, or at least a more approachable with our current infrastructure.

I think taking a step back though, the hydrogen itself is important in the first place.

I don't know if it is the largest use of hydrogen, but certainly the significant use is in steam reformation of natural gas to make ammonia.

It's not power generation, but it's keeping us alive and natural gas is a feedstock more than a fuel. You really are finding a way to replace it and its not fungible in the way electricity is.