2,415 karma · joined April 21, 2021
From a corporate financials perspective, Tesla is a very healthy company: low debt, high profit. Their stock does seem to be at risk of dramatic re-pricing, and that can have knock-on effects in the long run (harder to use stock as compensation, high performers with unvested grants may leave, etc). But certainly bankruptcy does not seem to be in the cards.
(That's not a beginner-level project, to be clear)
Is this a fun thought experiment, or are you immortal?
You may be shocked to learn that GDP growth can't continue perpetually either, under reasonable assumptions:
In any event there is more recent data (1992-4) that confirms that the differential is still present. This is maybe unpleasant to confront because it's self-congratulatory and has obvious class implications, but it's also pretty obviously true.
See page 89 / figure 12:
https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~hauser/merit_01_081502_complete....
Unrelated. Coding pays well because of the tight labor supply compared to the demand. Companies NEVER direct excess value to labor. Extracting surplus value from labor is sorta the whole deal with capitalism.
> I know plumbers who are technically brilliant
Also not relevant. The argument is that it isn't necessary to be brilliant in order to be a competent plumber, not that it would actually preclude you.
> I know very well paid coders who regularly say things that make me question their intelligence.
Do you think that's actually a good measure of intelligence? How are you normalizing it against the population, people you don't work with, and/or plumbers generally?
The question to ask is, "taking a random sample of persons having 80 IQ, half of whom intend to pursue a career in software and half who intend to pursue a career in plumbing, what is the relative success rate (for some reasonable measure of 'success')?"
This seems somewhat bad-faith: nuclear does supply the majority of France's power, and since nuclear is a "base load" part of the mix, it would be inefficient to get 100% of power from nuclear rather than a peaking-friendly mix that includes e.g. hydro and gas.
There are machines for this. Garda absolutely has them.
Take your first example: the music festival promoter shows up at his bank with a duffel bag of cash -- that's not unusual until suddenly every single missing serial number lights up the bank's cash handling systems.
Busted.
It's possible to launder marked cash, but it has to be in such small quantities that it's always plausible that it was simply spent in circulation, which in practice dramatically limits the speed with which it can be laundered.
Probably the single most straightforward approach to dispose of marked bills would be to swap for unmarked cash with someone who doesn't care, like an overseas drug lord. But man, good luck with that.
Hardly. Addictiveness does not exist in binary. There are many people who obsessively check their email or refresh news websites. There is no doubt that social media companies choose the algorithms that maximize engagement and so most probably they also maximize addiction, but _any_ algorithm will cause addiction to some extent. What's the limit? How do we even measure this?
Something that is maybe a little more interesting is banning the practice of recommending "negative content" because it produces more engagement than "positive content". How this is defined is also somewhat squishy, but we can at least try to define it -- content that is likely to provoke negative emotions, like anger, fear, aggression, etc.
I think there's a much clearer through-line to argue that recommending negative content on social media produces a substantial negative externality, and that moves this into the category of things like environmental regulations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Note that the age of reactors is calculated based on the date they were completed, not on the date that construction began.
I vehemently disagree. Another major disaster is all it will take to finish off nuclear for good.
- Personnel-level warning to immediately rerack servers, close racks, and get off ladders and away from fall hazards
- Proactively spin up generators to reduce failover in the more-likely event of a power disruption
- Potentially temporarily shut off very large circulation fans so that blades don't collide with the housings
- Potentially stop and carefully restart cooling water loops, in case there's a rupture in the system somewhere
These days I understand it is probably harder to hit those numbers. When I was doing it in earnest (2014-2016, roughly), it was already regarded as "late" in the sense that issuers had started to take notice and crack down. I'd read people reminisce about the "golden days" (pre-GFC, I guess) when you could get a card with something like a 5%-for-6-months signup perk and just absolutely go to town, we're talking literal millions in manufactured spend.
Even ports on the US Gulf Coast do not generally have the capability to dock VLCCs.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36232
If Baltimore had been anticipating VLCC traffic in the 70s, then presumably the bridge would have been built accordingly and this incident would not have led to a collapse.
In 1977 (and in 1972, when construction began), vessels of this size did not exist, and certainly were not allowed in the harbor[1]. But over time, they were given authorization, despite the fact that they could collapse the unprotected bridge like a load of toothpicks.
The real crime here is that there was no retrofit to protect the pylons. It was almost certainly considered and rejected due to cost.
[1]: https://logisticselearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Co...
The ship in question here was 10K TEU.
Bottom line, our taxes need to go up modestly in the coming decades... but only if these assumptions actually prove to be true:
> Inflation slows through 2026 to a rate that is consistent with the Federal Reserve’s long-term goal of 2 percent and then remains at rates that are consistent with that goal from 2026 to 2054.
> Interest rates generally rise over the next three decades, largely as a result of projected increases in federal borrowing and in capital income as a share of total income.
... I doubt it! Look what happens to interest rates in graying countries like Japan.
That said,
> It's been widely reported [1] that the US debt reached $32T in June 2023, $33T in Sept 2023, $34T January 2024, achieving those milestones roughly every 100 days. The projections indicate an exponential increase, which doesn't help the case for sustainability.
These figures aren't interesting because they include debt that the government owes to itself (intragovernmental debt). The debt held by the public is presently around $27T.
When actually considering long-run sustainability, you don't just consider the real GDP growth rate (as I did above). You really need to consider several factors:
1) Deficits
2) Nominal GDP (i.e., disregarding inflation)
3) Nominal interest rates
If you have a ton of inflation, you can effectively reduce the debt burden in terms of a % of GDP, since the GDP grows with inflation and the debt does not.
This is the data series that should interest you:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
You'll note an explosive increase due to the extreme pandemic deficit spending (and during the financial crisis), but lately it's actually not an "exponential increase".
The bottom line is it's not as though these are uncharted heights, or that we're presently on an uncontrolled exponential trajectory -- but, we have "run out of room", and if we have another crisis, we're going to be unable to engage in the kind of deficit spending that we have in the past without serious consequences.
How are you calculating this? The full-year deficit is running at less than $1T... You aren't counting it when Treasury rolls maturing bonds over into new debt, are you? That's normal and irrelevant.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
There's a few things worth mentioning, since after all that is still a big deficit.
1) Debt service costs are over $1T annually, as the end of many years of ZIRP finally starts to bite. There's no guarantee that we return to lower rates in the future, but it's likely, and that will reduce debt service burden over time.
2) Deficits are calculated inclusive of the costs of debt service, but do not include the impact of inflation on the public debt (which is substantial right now).
3) Deficits can absolutely be sustainable. The economy (i.e., GDP) grows over the long term, and the tax base grows with it. GDP is around $23.3T, and assuming long-run 3% growth, that would mean deficits of $700B are sustainable.
Overall the fiscal picture is not great, but anyone acting like there's an acute crisis is probably doing it for political reasons.
This $100B is a marginal cost on top of what has already been spent, and does not include the cost to operate the system. It seems unreasonable to imply that the cost of the highways which actually connect the entire state, somehow dwarfs the cost of this project -- that's just not true. It's even more unreasonable to to imply that the journalism is flawed because it does not make that argument.
You rotate XI 180 degrees.
It stands to reason that a smaller vessel like a Star Destroyer, it is not logistically challenging to move the trash to an airlock for ejection.
On something so enormous as the Death Star, however, it might be so difficult to move the trash around that it's significantly more efficient to compact it before transport to the surface.
That includes DMV and CHP as well as the city/county road funds, state highways, transit programs, bridge retrofitting, general maintenance, and existing rail programs.
I assume communities exist on the Internet for this kind of "drug piracy"?
What about vertically?
CMOS logic is still "mostly planar". With sufficiently low heat dissipation, you could make a cube and easily overcome the planar density problem.
The main challenge seems like it would be lithography cost for each of the many layers, but if the minimum feature size is 1.5um, there might be a clever way to make this work cheaply (DLP projection + gradual extrusion?)