mattmaroon

I don’t think earnings have much to do with any of Elon’s projects’ market caps.

No.

Yeah I wouldn’t argue that it’s a good valuation but it may achieve it.

Oh I was wrong, they were forced to go public. At the time any company with $10 million in assets and 500 investors had to go public. Perhaps I misremember them trying to stay private and failing.

But the point remains, it would have been unheard of for a company 1/10 the market valuation of these companies to be private, so the public market is missing a lot of the growth phase now.

The index fund thing seems to me to be an overhyped nothingburger. The seasoning period would just delay the inevitable when a company is launching with a trillion dollar valuation.

The big story is that that is happening at all. It wasn’t that long ago when Facebook had to get special permission from the government to stay private until they got to $100 billion.

The issue here is that public investors are missing out on so much upside.

It’s a footnote because SpaceX is going to be worth trillions. If Twitter were fully written down right after IPO SpaceX’s shares might not even have a bad day.

I just don’t understand why a company with $95m in sales would steal $200k. That’s a fraction of a percent of sales for the year.

There’s now a boycott against them that will easily cost them more than that.

If the case is as this blog says, it cannot be hard to find a lawyer to do this one pro bono. Breach of contract is one of the few things in America where you can sue for your legal fees. If you take over a business you assume it’s contracts even though your name wasn’t on them. You gain anything the business owns but a consignment shop doesn’t own the inventory.

BAM is going to lose millions and for what? Is this article just wrong on substantial facts? Simple greed wouldn’t explain this as it will almost certainly lead to far less money, even in a short period, than returning it.

Something must be missing.

Well, fraud prevention requires them to block some transactions that are ostensibly legal right? To the extent that they can’t always tell if a transaction is fraudulent, any effort to fight fraud will block some number of legal transactions. And if it’s something they object to on moral grounds, they can probably always make a case (usually accurately) that the fraud rates are high.

Fair point. I think we’ve all tried that and it isn’t working, and pointing out to people they’re being annoying could help.

But probably won’t, so you’re probably right.

Do you imagine someone got a stolen credit card, made a linkedin with that name, used the card to attend a live class under the fake ID, or are you just doing the classic hacker news aaaaactually?

Comments like this have ruined this site. We all know that’s never happened once in history.

Who do you recommend as an alternative?

For the first time in their history Google was finding themselves losing market share to ChatGPT. It wasn't a huge amount yet but it was clearly going to become one. That's what this is. The idea that the end user doesn't want this is preposterous. Those of us who make money off the web don't want this but the end user absolutely does.

This is going to happen whether Google does it or not. The toothpaste is out of the tube.

I looked it up, MSFT’s market cap in 2005 was $278 billion and would be like $450 billion in today’s dollars.

OpenAI will IPO soon AI probably more like a trillion.

Crazy.

Most nonprofits don’t have a mission that would benefit from a transition or a trillion dollar product to sell. There would be no real way to profit they wanted to.

They want both.

Oman is not helping them, they are merely being granted tolls by Iran because the strait is shared. Iran has launched several attacks on Oman.

Geography prevents most people from exerting the form of control Iran has. It would be much more difficult for, say, Canada to control it. The Iranian coastline is pretty favorable.

Also, most governments are more susceptible to being bombed than Iran. They’ve been preparing for it for decades. If nearly any country (except for maybe a couple of Irans neighbors) tried, they’d be easily routed.

Crypto but not Bitcoin.

Apple might not specify a time upfront but they do consistently support hardware for a good length of time. IPhones generally get OS updates for 5-6 years and security for at least a couple more.

I’ve never used anything they made long enough to get there.

We were specifically discussing privacy from government as that’s what the original post is about. The FCC making cell providers check IDs like a bank will have no privacy ramifications in any other regard. My provider knows who I am, gives my government any info they want (probably all of it without even having to be asked, possibly without their knowledge), and sells it “anonymized” to all sorts of people. Graphene won’t help with any of that. I’m sure it is wonderful in other ways, but they’re just not ones that rank on my list of concerns.

And you’re right I should.

Oh no, random people on the internet who don’t understand simple logic and can somehow take “we need a constitutional right to privacy” as not caring about privacy are judging me. Whatever shall I do?

If you’re worrying about a light rain while you’re drowning in the flood, that was the end goal and you fell for it. My life is materially impacted by spam calls, as a small business owner, it is far beyond an annoyance, so I’m going to enjoy the rainbow until I figure out what to do about the flood

The 4th amendment has been interpreted by the courts to not be a broad right to privacy, and the overturning of Roe specifically stated this. Even if you think it should be interpreted as a broad right to privacy, it is clearly capable of being interpreted otherwise and is in no way adequate in today’s world.

You can only have SOME privacy on a phone with Graphene if you don’t really use the phone the way people use theirs most of the time. You’ve still got a SIM card talking to cell towers owned by a company who sells your information. You’re still presumably using apps and websites that require authentication. The government can still find where you were and what you were searching for unless you take extraordinary measures. That’s not privacy.

So basically, ReCaptcha should be spun off into a not-for-profit.

Yeah I strongly suspect this will allow them to use it in court considerably more frequently.

But still, I know they know who I am. Anyone with a cell phone in their pocket has no privacy. It’s the best tracking device ever.

Anyone who thinks anything at all can make that problem worse simply doesn’t understand that they have none.

I’d rather have zero privacy and zero spam calls than zero privacy and lots of spam calls. Obviously I’d prefer privacy and I think we need a constitutional amendment to that effect, but as far as showing our ID to eliminate spam in a world where zero privacy exists, sign me up.

Does anyone imagine the government doesn’t already know who owns every phone number?

Also, couldn’t this system be optional, numbers that are ID-verified are somehow flagged so (assuming I choose) when one calls my phone knows to let it through and when an unverified number calls it doesn’t ring?

Oh! I thought it was Jim Obama, the owner of Obama Chevrolet of Sheboygan!

Oh sure but I meant in their case they might be their own biggest customer. Companies shuffle money from one pocket to another often for tax/financial reasons.

Yeah I don’t blame them. They didn’t create the meme but once it happened, any responsible leader would start doing secondary offerings to raise money. I sure would. If morons want to keep investing in the stock of a company that has no other chance of survival, great. Now they’ve got $9 billion on hand and they’ve had time to find a niche, right-size, and the interest on the cash pile is great too.

Unfortunately that support doesn’t seem to extend to making the process take less than decades and cost less than gazillions due to overregulation so there’s no incentive to build.

I think they make most of their money off searches with intent (“vehicle detailing near me”) and things for which they still send you somewhere. The kind of searches that an LLM can just answer probably largely just sent you to Wikipedia or somewhere nobody was paying much for anyway.

It’s possible AI will do a better job of capturing ad dollars by better serving intentional searchers.