lesuorac

> That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.

We did that though!

It's just so much more profitable to sell of the real estate and then let the government run the rails at a loss.

Ex. Penn Station's real estate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%...

I suspect this will only work in the US if the "rail company" is actually public.

- https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod

- https://www.wmata.com/business/real-estate-and-development.h...

> while keeping ownership of the asset at the end.

But they're not actually interest in owning 2 year old phones though right?

They're just interest in you / 2ndary market not owning any?

> There are a few countries that didn't do that (Sweden comes to mind) and they ended up not having a much worse outcome than anyone else.

I have no doubt Sweden did better than say sub-saharan africa. But it seems to me that only their neighbors are good comparison and they did worse than all of them.

Norway 1,050 deaths / million

Denmark 1,696 deaths / million

Finland 2,058 deaths / million

Sweden 2,812 deaths / million

> The government turned tyrannical re: vaccines and mandates, did the guns help?

I mean, the federal government had no mandate. So like were Floridians going to shoot up DeSantis because he didn't make a mandate? Or shoot up the other guy they elected, Trump (Biden not president until Jan 2021).

And then you don't really expect New Yorkers who elected Coumo to then shoot him up either?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

The lack of mark to market has always kinda confused me.

Like trivially if I go out and buy a plot of land for say $1M there's no way I can sell it tomorrow for $1M. So it's liquid value is really much less.

Like to use the example in the paper (page ~43) when the Insurance Company bought the $40 bond from the PE company there's no market to sell it back for at $40 so it should need to be marked down. Then it becomes obviously a problem that it's spending $40 for something worth less than $40.

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Although I guess your fraud comment is probably spot on.

> By comparing purchases of the same structured security on the same day, Huber, Huber, Shan, and Zhu show that PEowned insurers pay seven basis points more when buying from affiliates, and forty basis points more when the transaction involves privately-placed securities.

lying about the value of an asset for financial game is textbook fraud.

Sure. I also liked the idea that some of the rules are to promote tribalism by making clear defining lines.

A much weaker form compared to missions where people go out into the real world and get insulted and retreat back to the safety of their religion.

You can't leave anything on the ground for free either.

Like what is your argument? A new technology is expensive? That's why you invest into bringing the costs down.

Google invested into balloons to share internet (Loom). Which they eventually gave up on but the correct decision is to try new things and then evaluate their future success. Not just armchair decide that change is scary.

I'm not saying space data centers should happen tomorrow but just that ruling them out completely for YouTube is foolish. Like Sports often send the video feed through space back to earth to be processed. You can skip a step there by just sending it to space, processing it there, and then send it back down to subscribers.

Who do you pay rent to in space?

Space is free; you don't even pay property taxes.

Transportation costs are not but that's the whole reason you invest into (at the time) a space transportation company.

I guess I'm not sure on the purists take but to me I think they're going to eventually tank themselves over too many external hires into management that want to do things the same other other companies do instead of in-house solutions.

In-house is Google's moat. The big piece right now is LLMs where in-house TPUs allow cheaper internal costs. If Cloud customers want to rent Nvidia GPUs that's fine since they're paying. But Search and etc get an edge on competitors by not.

The bigger problem with in-house is the failure to out-house it. Kubernetes shouldn't been new. Things should be done like AWS where the internal APIs are the external APIs.

YouTube is probably one of the few companies that could benefit from data centers in space.

Rather than co-locating media servers into ISPs you can stick them into space so they're just closer.

Space in NYC isn't cheap. Space in space is free.

Eh meh.

If you're investing in an Elon company you better believe in the man because he's always ran them however he wants. Seems fine for the voting shares to reflect that since he's been running companies for decades; you had the opportunity to know what you're getting into.

If for some reason you're invested into some total market index or the like and you don't like the companies that it invests into then maybe you shouldn't invest according to those rules.

Idk it makes sense to me.

Like a lot of the rules are very fuzzy in their origin. The whole kosher business comes from a passage about "Not boiling a kid in it's mothers milk". I think most people would interpret that much more literally and you couldn't kill a child goat (kid) and boil it in it's mothers milk; and probably also extend it to other animals like cows. But I'd still think that killing a kid and putting a slice on cheese on the meat would be fine.

So if somebody is going to be obtuse with what you can do it seems like it'd be good fun to figure out all the ways around it.

You probably do have to make it plainer.

Afaik, Europe is not in solidarity on no long range weapons and it's mostly driven by the US who is trying to get out of helping Ukraine. So which countries are given the drones and which countries said no long range attacks?

Presumably they don't know where they are.

It's not like something being civilian infrastructure is a problem -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_strikes_against_Ukrain...

What's somebody going to do? Complain to the UN?

Worst for whom?

Lack of chargeback risk seems nice for businesses.

The 60 seats business needs to stop.

Fillibuster is a senate procedure rule. That's about the weakest a thing could be. At any point Democrats could have gotten rid of the filibuster with a 51 majority.

Democrats would much rather let congress do nothing than do something. It's hurt their reputation so much.

No?

Maybe you were busy being open minded and etc.

But uh rest of Silicon Valley was pretty openly rooting for Trump to win 2024.

The emperor having no clothes is actually really useful when you can interact with the emperor. You want them then to be mallable like Tim Cook giving Trump a golden statue so they're immune to tariffs that their competitors have to pay.

I mean why not?

It got him a presidency, twice. It's clearly an effective strategy in our capitalistic society and if you feel otherwise let me know how many 0 Billions you've grifted from your job over the past year.

In general terms you want the stock to pop.

Your bank will get a ton of orders from institutional investors of how many shares they want at a given price. You will have a preference as to which investors you want on your cap table. Almost all of those investors value your stock less than the "pop price" (which includes the investors you want on your cap table). So you'll need to target the IPO below the "pop price" so you get them on your cap table.

You're probably picking investors based on how likely they'll let you stay on the board / CEO and if you think they're just going to dump the stock during the IPO (which would be bad for it's price).

So (unlike the SpaceX IPO) you're going to sell relatively little shares to retail who will buy at any price which during the opening days will cause it to spike as the demand (in nominal dollars) per share is beyond the IPO price target.

> but is the share price returning to IPO opening not just a sign that the banks accurately estimated something?

Sure they estimated something. But there's a ton of different things that can be estimated.

Complex systems don't pop out of thin air.

The US form of government is highly based on the existing British one and the British King had the ability to pardon and so that was copied over.

I do think it makes a lot of sense to do things like mass-pardon people for things that are no longer crimes (i.e. weed legalization) but I really don't see how singling out cases is correct since the supreme court already can do that.

I guess it depends on what you see as waste.

As a programmer I see waste all the time where people are doing work that could be clearly computerized for better speed and accuracy.

Clinton benefited from an era where if a voter was going to hear how bad your idea was then he got a chance to defend it.

> This doesn’t prevent people from learning to paint or play the clarinet. It prevents students from taking out enormous loans for it.

The problem is going to that there's going to be a large shock to the system. As pointed out in the article, a lot of teachers make $55k. So basically no education degree should be awarded because the average worker is better than a teacher.

Eventually the supply of teachers will dry up so much that salaries will go up. But how many years do you think until that happens? And then add 4 to when the supply catches up. Although I would bet what happens is that states no longer require a degree.

> I do think colleges should be required to list the average salaries that people with those degrees have.

Idk, I think just making student loans dischargable in bankruptcy is enough. Make both sides have skin in the game and you'll find students not able to get loans in situations that they would never get a salary to afford it.

There's kinda a significant difference between bloodletting and blood donation.

For starters, you're not supposed to donate blood when you're sick.

The other being the quantity. A donation is 1-2 pints. Wikipedia lists bloodletting as easily 3 pints [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting#Use_in_the_1600s_...

Except leadership is largely not from employees moving up the rank

Sundar (CEO) is from Mcksinsley.

Ruth (President) is from Morgan Stanley.

TK (Cloud CEO) is from Oracle.

Mohan (YouTube CEO) is from DoubleClick which is Google at this point (~15 years).

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Largely the story of the past several decades is that "doing your time" is a bad strategy. Always move to another company to go upwards.

I didn't check, but I don't think the corporate charter for this companies allows for fraud.

Not sure what the penalty for doing things you weren't incorporated for but seems reasonable for me that the liability doesn't rest with the corporation.

What version of capitalism wouldn't have the problem of risky investments paying out more than safe ones?

The people with better ROI are just going to outbid the ones with a worse ROI for their retirement spending so if you just invest it into T-Bills you'll do worse than inflation.

They can't.

The subscriptions are for personal use not enterprise.

i.e. [1] "This article is about paid Max plans for individual consumers. If you're part of an organization looking to use Claude with your team, refer to Team and Enterprise Plans."

[1]: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11049741-what-is-the-...

I'm really unconvinced gerrymandering is the issue here.

It's not like Red cities have flock cameras and Blue cities don't.

It's really just that the Fairness Doctrine [1] needed to apply to more than radio. If you can constantly just repeat your point and then deny an opposition time then of course you'll get your point through.

Although maybe if super-pacs got outlawed then the Equal-time rule [2] would suffice.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule

Isn't Flock more like a house sitter in the analogy though?

"I gave the person keys to my house and then I trusted they wouldn't open bathroom doors while somebody was there".

Like law enforcement is being given access to the systems, the door isn't "left open", a key was given to them.