As long as you have an accurate sense of the intrinsic value of your shares at any given time; there is a price at which buybacks destroy more value for continuing shareholders than they would lose to taxes on dividends.
Nowadays the proof of resolution of singularities in characteristic zero is considered something you can teach in an intro algebraic geometry course, though. The concepts have been absorbed and are now much better understood. 4CT is very different because so much of it is exhaustive case analysis; you can understand the high-level ideas of the proof as a bright undergraduate, but you still can’t check the cases by hand
This isn’t true of the Medicare for All Act, for what it’s worth. That would ban private insurance altogether. Personally I think that’s a bug, not a feature, but if you’re very concerned with fairness then you probably think the opposite.
The people you’re talking to don’t understand why you would ever want to have the Wrong Kind of Person around an institution as sacred as the university
Having a prime factor greater than 2^32 accounts for about 80% of the 64-bit integers that can’t be expressed as a product of 32-bit integers. But it’s not the only way; you can also have three prime factors in the range (2^16, 2^32), for instance.
Do you have a reference here, or are you just going to continue to baldly state it as a fact? I’m looking at “Attention is All You Need” and don’t see any grant numbers or anything like that.
Worth also pointing out though that if you can sell new shares above intrinsic value that is accretive to existing shareholders. Dilution isn’t always a bad word. (It’s bad for the people buying new shares.)
ChatGPT isn’t literally or figuratively cutting off anybody’s limbs though. It’s more like, the guy on the assembly line had a mech suit, and now he doesn’t have a mech suit, and he’s sad. Skill atrophy is a real concern but unless you assume that nobody is working to maintain those skills it doesn’t change my analysis much.
I am not a Marxian economic expert but this doesn’t make sense to me. Modulo skill atrophy, the big AI model provider can’t capture that surplus value because its customers can just go back to bidding for human labor instead.
“There are three of these things made in a year, and I’ve got the juice to get one of them” is. Zuck doesn’t care about a million dollar price tag, any more than I would care about a couple bucks.
The price isn’t keeping anyone at that level of wealth from buying a Nautilus or a Lange 1 or a panda Daytona. But they can still flex with ultralimited pieces like Zuck’s Greubel Forsey.
For my money Rachel Aviv is the best and most interesting writer currently on the New Yorker staff (give or take a David Grann, who is pretty much just writing books these days it seems). I go out of my way to read whatever has her byline.
> Now the question I ask is: how was it distilled? what chemicals were used in the process? are those chemicals safe? and a million other related questions. With regular pot there's none of that.
You absolutely should be asking those questions about “regular pot” as well. AIUI concentrates are among the bestselling and most profitable products in legal states, and they use uncertain chemicals of questionable provenance even if the delta-9 THC is 100% natty. But even if you’re just buying flower you could reasonably be concerned about pesticides or mold [1].
I think there are some quite good reasons to oppose cannabis legalization (for example, it’s made the super-high-potency concentrates which are associated with bad outcomes much more widely available) and it’s possible your own culture war or other biases are getting in your way here. But there are also lots of good arguments in favor of course.
This might prove too much, particularly for the case of literature. There were people writing commercially successful and culturally relevant literary fiction in 1970; back then you already had Austen and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Cervantes, plus Joyce and Woolf and Hemingway and Faulkner. I think there’s books published in the last 50 years that deserves a place on a short list of Best Novels, but I don’t think it has much overlap with the best-selling literary fiction being published at that time.
The FT is well worth reading (regardless of anyone’s personal beliefs, it’s useful to get a sense of how the wealthy and powerful think by reading their papers) but note that the FT Alphaville blog, which published this piece, is free to read if you create an account (you don’t need to pay).
I dunno. Utilitarianism sounds nice on the surface—how can you be against the greatest good for the greatest number?—but it’s pretty under-specified (hedonic or preference? act or rule? do you discount future beings’ utils, and at what rate?) and if you take any particular specification seriously you get moral claims that are wildly counterintuitive, like “insect suffering is orders of magnitude more important than heart disease in humans” or “there may be quadrillions of sentient beings in the far future, and making their lives 1% better is a better use of resources than eradicating malaria now” or “it’s morally justified to steal billions of dollars of other people’s money to give to pandemic prevention and AI safety.” And maybe these are correct claims, but they definitely don’t align with many people’s moral intuitions, and it’d be a tall task to convince those people.
(To be clear, Berkshire could buy any of the bottom 476 companies in the index, not all of them. Also it’s probably closer to 400, because Berkshire has to keep some cash around to pay insurance claims and so on.)