proteal

I did undergrad before chatGPT and now I’m back in school for an MBA at a school where the school pays for all students to have access to GPT4o. Maybe because we’re all older the tools are less of a problem, but I would say they have been a net positive. GPT3 was ass and students could easily tell when a classmate used it for their group contributions. Profs seems to be about 6-12 months behind the curve in terms of the tech. All profs are aware and thinking deeply about how AI is changing how they teach.

Group papers are usually made into an outline at first and then we divvy up the responsibilities. If you use AI, most kids only care if your work sucks. AI consistently scores like an 80-85% (profs sometimes submit and blindly grade the responses), but almost always misses the core teaching points of classwork.

In my program, grades don’t matter (so employers can’t stack rank us). People who make extensive use of AI are really only cheating themselves. If you’re a big AI user, other kids generally know and try to avoid forming groups with you if they know in advance. You learn better when learning alongside others and if all someone does is dump AI slop in the google doc, you’re wasting my time in addition to yours.

I use AI to flesh out points, especially on assignments I don’t care about. It can help for idea generation and “connecting the dots” between ideas, but I always edit the output because the AI makes stylistic choices I don’t like. It’s definitely an accelerator for me when writing papers. I stand behind all the papers I’ve submitted, though some have sucked (regardless of AI usage or not).

In undergrad, when my priorities were less about learning and more towards dating/partying, I definitely would have abused this tool. At the end of the day, using the tool mainly cheats your own learning. I hope they transition to talking about using LLMs like one uses gambling - a little is fine here and there but if it’s all you do that’s a problem.

I’m not sure what to do about elementary age kids, because the AI easily writes “better” essays. At least in college I could do better than an AI if I applied myself. But in sixth grade? Good luck me. Cats out of the bag now and we should be really empathetic to the younger generations. Imagine getting slammed with TikTok->Pandemic->ChatGPT in the span of like 6-7 formative years. They are growing up differently and I certainly have no clue what we need to do to help them be successful.

I think you’re right about the relative scale of the fine, but theres a part of me that believes the companies will try to comply with the law, similar to how pornhub is blocked in many US states. They could easily ignore the regulation but choose not to because thats ultimately what Australians want. Companies of this scale by and large try to follow the law, especially when the affected cohort is relatively small.

So let’s say we’ve got 28 possible characters (alphabet + period + space), you have a 1/28 chance of getting the first character right. So it follows that a string of length n is (1/28)^n because you have to hit each character correctly in a row. If we can do x guesses a second, and we know on average how many tries it takes on average to get our string right (28^n), we can divide and get an estimate of time. Though we could do it faster, or slower depending on our luck.

With multiple searchers it’s trickier, but we use the probability complement (probability of all possible events must add to 100%) to figure out the chances that our searchers all miss, and subtract that chance by 1. This gives the chance of at least one agent getting it right. Two searchers looks like 1-(27/28)^2 for the first char, and you can follow the same logic for any length string.

Your answer will heavily depend on your assumptions - how fast the computers guess, what they can guess, etc. But searching in parallel would speed things up dramatically. If you had like 100 computers searching simultaneously, 3 or 4 would likely get the first char right every time, giving you a big speed up on the problem.

idk man, you ask a good question. I think the idea has to do with the saddle you put on the invisible horse that is the game’s problem. Factorio has several complex saddles you must master to tame the beast. In factorio, you can get progressively better at using these saddles to tame even the most unwieldy scenario. Sudoku, at its heart, is not much different than factorio. However sudoku has one narrow problem with many different, increasingly nuanced ways of solving it. Factorio has many different “sudoku” style problems, but each problem needs to be handled differently, with each problem having increasing levels of sophistication. I think you might like factorio more because it’s just a bigger steak to chew on, and you’ve got the right appetite.

It makes sense to me. The number of people who actually create useful open source software is so vanishingly small compared to the number of people who use OSS, it seems obvious that we should optimize for their time, not the other way around. I agree with you that using mailing lists or GitHub issues or whatnot would be globally more efficient, but if I’m working on a product, I’m going to work in the way that is most efficient for my time. I owe my “customers” nothing because they are not paying for my work. We keep seeing discord as a means to communicate about products because devs see it as the best use of their time. The fact that so many people use it should be an indictment on the alternatives, not the devs who choose to use discord.

Beyond rude people making rude comments, I imagine the channel gets lots of bot spam, especially crypto scams, given the content’s proximity to the space.

You wouldn’t go wrong with electrical engineering if this is the stuff you like. However, I think most engineering and engineering-adjacent disciplines (basically STEM) will give you a similar set of tools to approach any problem. If what youre really after is the pioneering aspects of his work, consider a double degree in business/engineering. The problems businesses face are really just engineering problems in disguise. Since most people who have the desire and capability to be an engineer become engineers instead of businesspeople, there’s a dearth of engineering talent in most non-engineer roles. In my last role at a Fortune 500, my nickname was “The Wizard” because I was so good at translating business needs to computer workflows it seemed like magic to my coworkers. When I’d regale my successes to my engineer friends they’d just laugh. At my org, I was 1 of 1 who could solve these problems. At their firms, my friends were on teams of 20+ who could all do what I did in their sleep. They worked in a more competitive domain where magic was an every day occurrence, so their work product felt lackluster when compared to their peers.

This is one of those “left hand doesn’t talk to the right” situations. Delta has an arm of the company that only deals in disputes and has another arm that does check in and routine services. I think the manager did a good job here - I highly doubt there is a listed provision for allowances like this, but she paid anyways because she understood what the right thing to do was after confirming everything was legit. Unfortunately, companies have to play so defensively because they hold so much power, otherwise people will take advantage and bleed them dry. Note that this isn’t a political comment, I’m not interested in what should be, rather what is. If a company makes an honest mistake, courts will typically side with the less powerful party when possible. For example, JCPenney did a promotion with Firestone back in the day where you could get your car battery replaced for life. The intent of the promo was life of the car, ie 8-12 years, but the language really said “basically forever.” There are people to this day, decades later, still getting free battery replacements[1]. Hell, there are people who even hunt for the batteries and make good money when they find them in scrapyards. This promo turned into a perpetuity JCP did not want or intend to have on its books. That mistake went all the way to the top of the company and caused real change in how they did cross promos. I’m willing to bet this delta fiasco went to the CEO’s desk and the company addressed it, one way or another.

[1] https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/threads/jc-penney-lifet...

Most of weight loss actually happens in the kitchen, not the gym. A candy bar is roughly equivalent to a 20 minute run, in terms of Calories. Weight loss drugs surpress appetite urges. Even if you got super fit on the drug, without long term habit changes, most people are likely to put back on the weight quickly. Somewhat counter intuitively, fat people tend to have strong muscles to move all their mass around. My understanding with these drugs is that they artificially inhibit cravings, reducing the urge to eat, thus effectively stimulating weight loss. As soon as the drug stops being administered, the cravings return (and thus the weight) regardless of how fit you are.

Just as an anecdote, I used to not understand how people got so fat. Just eat less lol? I’ve been a little light for my size pretty much my whole life, so I didn’t quite understand. In fact, if it were up to me I probably wouldn’t eat at all. So the concept of being overweight was foreign to me and I assumed that fat people must be lazy/weak/whatever. As I got older and a little more in tune with my body, I noticed what sugar cravings are really like. And my god, when that part of the brain complains, it gets front and center stage. I specifically remember trying hard to resist reaching for a soda for like an hour. I conceded and drank one. I couldn’t focus otherwise. Then I realized that there are people (typically easily spotted) that live every day of their life like this. And I get that the brain is hardwired for gluttony- I will literally never eat enough food in my life- so it’s a rather natural thing to want Calories. I’m lucky that I’ve got a passable relationship with food. I feel for those who struggle with it. I’m also glad that there is a stop-gap in drugs like ozempic that help effectively curtail eating, today. I’m also hopeful that the drugs of tomorrow will be even safer and more effective than we have now and that the systemic sources of obesity in society erode away. I think the future is only getting brighter (and lighter) for the millions struggling with their weight.

I think cold calling works decently for a certain subset of business people. There are folks out there that have genuine needs that salespeople can meet. At my last job, I didn't have authority to buy nor any real interest in the risk that such an opportunity could mean for the business. My boss, on the other hand, had lots of authority and would occasionally listen to pitches because they could benefit both parties. 95% of the time things didn't go further than the first call, but every now and then it would be a good fit. Anyone more senior than him probably didn't have the time for cold calls, but there is a sweet spot in the org where they can be effective. Since my boss had the ear of the budget setters, he could pitch them the idea and reap the benefit. Like other commenters have pointed out, cold calling and spam aren't so different in the sense that if they never worked, nobody would do them.

For example, I worked with with the woman in charge of our modeling team. She had a big issue managing a growing, international workflow. They used spreadsheets when the team was smaller, but that solution didn't scale and was starting to show cracks. Her boss gave her significant budget to fix the problem, but she had no idea how to spend it. I told her that one call to a Jira sales rep (or equivalent) and all her problems would evaporate. One call could have potentially saved our firm tons of money and provided another firm with a very good, sticky customer. As far as I'm aware, she was so overworked as-is that she never reached out/researched it.

Scam is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, no? If by scam, you mean that a large volume of the “work” enabled by these tools is not productive to society, then fine, I think what you say follows. However, there’s a lot of good work that is done with email and other tools you mentioned. For every good email I send, there might be 100 spam emails, but the drag from the spam on society is surely much less than the value of my “real” email. Furthermore, the technology is an improvement over snail mail for many use cases. I agree that the jury is still out on whether or not AI is as good as imagined, but it seems overly pessimistic to entirely discount a new technology that has been at least personally useful to me. If we were to really run with this definition of scam, we’d soon realize that all technology is a scam. So why even get up in the morning? Might be a simpler life to mail bombs and rot in prison at that point…

Even if everything was released how you described, what good would that really do for an individual without access to heaps of compute? Functionally there seems to be no difference between open weights and open compute because nobody could train a facsimile model. Furthermore, all frontier models are inscrutable due to their construction. It’s wild to me seeing people complain semantics when meta dropped their model for cheap. Now I’m not saying we should suck the zuck for this act of charity, but you have to imagine that other frontier models are not thrilled that meta has invalidated their compute moats with the release of llama. Whether we like it or not, we’re on this AI rollercoaster and I’m glad that it’s not just oligopolists dictating the direction forward. I’m happy to see meta take this direction, knowing that the alternatives are much worse.

I'm not exactly sure how it all plays out, but if a company claims to not be able to pay, the lawyers will "pierce the corporate veil." Essentially they will ask for an ownership diagram and keep working their way up to the ultimate ownership entity. This trick doesn't work for real businesses, and only kinda works for fraudulent ones.

I would say yes, but realistically all large enough companies purchase adequate insurance for known categories like property and casualty. So this particular claim probably isn't making waves, but there have been claims in the past. For example, when that dude shot up the AMC theater during the Dark Knight, literally every other theater chain bought as much terrorism insurance as the market would sell them. Ironically, because the risk was elevated after the event, price went way up and coverage offered went way down because underwriters saw it as a losing bet.

You know, it's funny you mention Warren Buffet. I asked the Berkshire Hathaway guys the same thing when I first started as a broker! Turns out they can't go asking Mr. Buffet for money in case they run out. He expects them to run a tight business and hold the proper amount of money on hand to pay out any potential future claims. The natural followup was me asking if the underwriter had ever met the man himself. The closest he ever got was an unrelated picture at the shareholder conference in Omaha where Buffet was off in the background autographing something. Back on topic, you may be wondering how does an insurance company know how much cash reserves to have? The answer is to hire a bunch of wicked smart actuaries who go to school for 8 years that can calculate all this stuff for you. They tend to do a very good job and are paid handsomely for their efforts. As a fun perspective, let's take a look at AIG's balance sheet [1] (A balance sheet is like a database summary of all the stuff the company owns and to whom they owe money). I pick AIG because they only do insurance so it's easier to tease out the insights we want from the data as BHS is a subsidiary of BH and gets mixed in with other companies. AIG's market cap right now is $53B, but they've got $540B of stuff they own! That's 10x their market cap. Most of that will be paid out in claims (hence the balance sheet showing liabilities, aka what they owe), but what's leftover is the residual value of the company. It's a neat finance trick that you can buy $540B of assets for only $53B by buying AIG outright. Regulators know this trick so don't think you and your friends can pull a fast one. It just goes to show how capitalized insurance companies are. If you really want to dig deeper, there are many rating agencies (AM Best or S&P being the most popular) that assess the ability of insurance companies to pay claims. Brokers don't advise clients to buy insurance rated worse than A.

Regarding ultimate insurers, you're spot on that the answer is a big ol' "it depends." People buy insurance for three reasons, listed in order of how important I think they are. First is balance sheet protection (I worked hard for my stuff, I can't afford to lose it). Second is for contractual obligations (Nobody will do business with me if I don't promise to make them whole if things go wrong). Last is because the government says you have to. When you think of a claim happening where there is no insurance available, run through that checklist to see what what could potentially happen. Since you listed a few concrete examples, I'll go through them and opine how things may play out (remember we're in imaginary land and without policies I can't really say anything for certain).

Fire damages - I think of the Camp fire. In 2018 California was set on fire because of some transmission lines caused a spark. This is a big claim caused by an individual entity, so the normal rules don't necessarily apply here. But in general, the way it works is if my house caught fire because of this Camp fire, my insurance policy on my house WILL cover the claim. Whoever writes my policy will cut me a check and replace my home (subject to policy terms). What will then happen is my insurance company will the subrogate the claim to the entity that caused it. Meaning that they will knock on the electric utility's door and ask for reimbursement (this is essentially subrogation). When the utility goes bankrupt, they're saying we can't pay, so ultimately your insurance carrier pays out of pocket with no reimbursement. The head property underwriter of Everest insurance spoke to us about the fire claims and said they really hurt his book. If I recall, they paid like a billion in fire claims in 2018, but budgeted nowhere near enough. Those well paid actuaries couldn't predict a fire would raze California! Luckily they budget a rainy day fund, so the company was ok. Fire insurance prices did go up significantly the following year. This is because they didn't realize just how on the hook they could be for fire claims. The whole insurance market systematically underpriced fire insurance in fire prone areas.

Crane collapse is another good example. My old client had a particularly nasty crane collapse that is ongoing, so I will not share any details around any crane collapses, hypothetical or not. However, there is an analogous claim that I did not work on that I can use as an example: the MGM shooting in Vegas (2017) [2]. Basically, the concert venue didn't have enough insurance to foot the bill. In the process of discovery, the lawyers saw that MGM Casinos (where the shooter perched) had an extensive casualty insurance tower. MGM's insurance ended up having to pay out the claim. They used up the full limits of every policy they bought that year (and not a penny more). I think because they weren't negligent, the lawyers didn't seek damages beyond their policy limits. When there is a bad claim, lawyers will always find whoever has the deepest pockets and make them pay. If you don't have enough insurance, courts will force you to pay out of pocket. If you don't have enough money out of pocket, the wronged party will have to eat the loss. This is why point #2 is an important reason for buying insurance.

Also- if your question regarding crane collapses is more geared towards someone losing a lot of value quickly, that is easy. My old boss insured a factory in tornado alley. Couple hundred million dollar factory was insured pretty cheap because tornadoes don't cause much damage and are considered low risk. A few weeks after the plant was finished, a tornado came through and ripped the building clean in half. Insurance company paid the near total loss, no questions asked. Remember, they're in the business of insuring against these freak accidents. They are comfortable with taking a lopsided deal. They earn plenty of premiums each year on factories that aren't violently introduced to tornadoes.

I had a wealthy client who purposely didn't buy insurance on his buildings. He'd buy the first $75M or whatever of insurance and would guarantee the rest out of pocket (did I mention he was wealthy?). This is hard to do because of points #2 and #3, but it can be done. In the biz, we call this "self-insurance" and while it may sound like I'm being tongue-in-cheek, it is a very sophisticated risk management strategy that can accomplish a client's risk transfer needs. Typically companies self insure the small claims (via a deductible), not the top end of claims.

I guess to directly answer the lead question, the ultimate insurer without any insurance backing is you, the owner. It's your stuff after all. If your stuff is important to other people (ie the public, or other companies) other stakeholders are gonna make you have insurance, otherwise you won't be allowed to control those resources. That's why the boat, the bridge, and the port all had good insurance. The system was working as intended.

Thank you for your great questions! I've got a few other responses in the thread that detail other insurance questions that you may find interesting.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AIG/balance-sheet/

[2] It's a little fucked up that I have to put the year so we know which one I'm talking about. At least I didn't need to clarify the month...

An answer like this would need to refer to the policy provisions to really know, but I'm willing to bet the ship should is valued at Replacement Cost. Replacement Cost varies depending on the term of the policy, but the goal of the definition is to get the policyholder back to where they were before the accident (technical term is to indemnify the casualty). This definition typically looks like this: "We will pay the cost to replace a like kind and quality boat OR we will pay the cost to get your damaged boat back to operational state, whichever is cheaper for us." My guess is that the book value of the boat is $90M (what you would get if you sold the boat on the open market, representative of the present value of the asset's economic returns), but to actually build/repair that boat is cheaper. Insurance companies don't want to pay the book value because they aren't getting an economic return on the boat.

This is a great question with a lot of interesting nuance! I don't have deep expertise in maritime insurance but I do know enough to be dangerous.

Let's just look at the boat insurance, because the bridge and the cargo all probably have different policies covering them with vastly different terms. Marine insurance is odd because it actually just sucks as a business to be in. Boats aren't cheap and they sink too often for normal companies to realistically make any profit. But we still need insurance on our boats, so the industry basically has created a big mutual insurance pool. There are like 8 or 9 insurance companies that are owned by the businesses that purchase their policies (this is the definition of a mutual insurance company). So when a big claim is paid out like this, the entire shipping industry bears the cost because these same companies essentially share the risk on all shipowner's policy. Shipowners can't complain too much - there is literally no one else who will sell them insurance so they have to do it this way (Not having insurance is a bad idea 99.9% of the time). The deal is not all bad though, if there is a good year with fewer claims, the shipping companies get some money back. And because the risk is pooled via mutual insurance companies, they keep appropriate stashes of money in case there is a bad year. Actuaries are tasked with figuring out how much money to hold on to at any given time so hopefully there is never a capital crunch.

Will this cost be passed on to consumers? Tough to tell. I'm stepping a bit out of my expertise here, but my inclination is that there won't be outsize costs put on consumers. Roughly speaking, since the entire industry bears its fair share of marine insurance costs on a company by company basis, if one goes up, they all go up. So if that means shipping a crate from China to USA is more expensive because the space on that boat becomes more expensive, then consumers pay more. What's that saying again? A rising insurance premium lifts all shipping costs? However, I don't think that consumers will unfairly be paying additional costs to get their goods because of the mutual nature of boat insurance. Furthermore, the company you transact with (say Wal-mart) may just eat the additional cost of shipping in their margins or force shipping companies to eat the cost instead. This is all assuming the federal government doesn't pay for the rebuild. I don't think the government will pay any substantial amount on this claim given how well insured all parties seem to be.

What you are describing is true, but there is a lot of nuance to how reinsurance plays out in large insurance policy towers. If you build a stack of insurance policies that work together to create a large single policy limit, you typically won't see reinsurance directly in that tower. If "Westchester Insurance Company" is anywhere on that tower as a carrier (whether first line, known more commonly as a primary insurer, or above that as an excess carrier), they will cut your check in the event of a claim. The money will come from their bank account, as will all the other affected carriers in claim. They are what you would consider a traditional insurance company.

With that being said, Westchester may elect to purchase reinsurance to further reduce their risk. If they know the volatility of a policy is high or want to limit their potential losses, Westchester can buy a reinsurance policy to cover the long tail of their written policy. So if Westchester gets unlucky and has to pay into that long tail (ie an unforeseen mega catastrophe occurs and they are on the hook), they will then submit a claim to their reinsurance carrier who reimburses them on the backend. As a recipient of that policy payout, you will only ever see Westchester's names on the checks. Also, Westchester's parent company, Chubb, has a reinsurance treaty which basically helps protect them from any crazy one time loss. The reinsurance/retrocession market is fascinating! It truly is insurance policies all the way down.

Yes - this is great additional information. Here's some additional context around the article. Lloyd's of London is the original insurance company. They work in a syndicate structure, where the various other commercial insurance companies (think AIG, AXA XL, Starr, etc) all work together to share risks using their domestic balance sheets. I'm simplifying a lot here, but the insurance policies covering the various entities are stitched together like a quilt. No overlap and when assembled you're fully covered! For example, one insurance company may say they will cover the first $10M of a claim, another might share the next $10M of coverage with a few other companies, etc. They do this to limit their losses on a program. It's a lot more manageable to pay out only a small share of the claim than it is to pay the entire thing. By doing it like this, the brokers build out an insurance program for the covered entity that pulls in capital from across the globe in a very cost-effective way. It also has the added benefit of not stressing any one insurance company too badly.

What Neal (Lloyd's boss) is saying is "hey guys, we know we are all hosed here. It's gonna be an easy billion, probably more. Just because you're only expected to pay claims above $100M, you're certainly going to have to pay out. Let's not be knobs and pay this claim quickly to get the port back on their feet again"

As a former property insurance broker whose clients had big claims ($100Mish) and worked around people who handled the real big claims ($1B+), I can't really tell you with any specificity of how this will play out. All I know is that it will be a huge mess, and the lawyers will argue in court for several years.

Ultimately, someone will have to pay to rebuild the bridge. In the event of really big claims, it almost always end up being whoever has the deepest pockets. The process of discovery will list out who all the owners are and how much their policies cover this claim (whether intentionally or not!).

As counterintuitive as this may sound, the insurance and reinsurance companies are actually pretty well equipped to handle this type of event. The underwriter(s) on the other side of policy will have to report the claim to their boss and the report will show they followed company guidelines. The boss can only shrug her shoulders and say "welp, can't be too mad because this is the business we are in." No one is particularly thrilled about paying the claim, but these situations are exactly why insurance was created. (For context, the "small" claims of $1M -> $10M hurt the most because they are the ones that throw off underwriter's models the most and cause the most unprofitability)

Hi - I had similar experiences to you, but an old boss pulled me aside explained everything. For context, I was not doing great at work, I was missing deadlines, would get accounts confused, etc. While I was getting chewed out, he rattled off all the relevant numbers/structures/people for all the things I was missing. He told me he knew I didn’t care about my job because I couldn’t remember the details of my job. If I cared about it, I would know the details. Yet, when it came to the things I actually cared about (computers, video games, movies), I could list off of every minute detail. The framework of “you only remember the things you care about” helped me understand why I was dropping the ball in life and ultimately led to a happier life. I stopped doing some things I clearly didn’t care for and started doing more of the stuff I remembered more easily. The real kicker was that I also able to change the things I cared about. Work got much better a few weeks after that chat. I also got very good at remembering names because I started caring about others more deeply.

I hope you see parts of yourself in my story. You’re clearly a talented and smart individual - it’s never too late to turn things around.

I don’t work at Amazon nor am I an accountant, but likely your intuition is correct. There’s this managerial accounting strategy called activity based costing (ABC) where you can better map costs (ie real money spent on stuff) to the company outputs; in this case data egress, but it works for all activities (server maintenance, programmer time, etc). You basically take a weighted average of the time and money spent on activities to understand the cost of those activities. This is how Amazon knows the costs of all its services.

The second question is a bit trickier to answer. Amazon has a lot of fixed costs and ABC is one way to allocate those fixed costs (fixed costs = servers). You can also do something similar for the revenues of different AWS services. However, managers will tend to look at revenues and costs together because teasing apart the different revenue streams and their allocated cost structures doesn’t match reality. If you go too deep into that rabbit hole, you lose sight of the true nature of the business. Which is “we buy a shitload of servers up front and rent them to you virtually by the second.” To answer the question, the egress revenue likely dwarfs all the other revenue generating activities at AWS, making the other services look “bad” when comparing revenue to costs. On paper, egress makes up substantially all profit for the business. But this is by design- executives believe that this business model captures the most value so they’re not that interested in jacking up other service costs because overall profitability will be less. Is there subsidization? Yes, but Amazon believes they have the better business by charging users like this vs pricing everything “fairly.”

I haven’t followed it too closely, but he posted a video saying that previous iterations of the machine didn’t make good music. They were really loud (mechanical noise drowned out musical noise) and didn’t play music in time. In fact, the video from the submission has had its audio significantly edited to sound pleasing. I believe he posted the raw audio a few months ago in a video. His current design looks much more promising.

I highly doubt this is the case. The guy has plenty of money, power and clout. There’s really no more for him to gain in those departments. It’s more likely he fears AGI will put humanity into a truly dystopian future if monopolized by a corporation and he wants to ward against that future by ensuring the company is incorporated properly as a nonprofit.

I think that balance of power has shifted from the artists to consumers which is driving down direct artist pay. I’ve still got the same amount of time each day to listen to music before streaming services existed, but now I’m afforded so much choice in music that each song/artist must compete harder for my attention. There’s always been way more talented artists than I could possibly listen to, but with Spotify I can now actually get the music to my ears. Now the limit is my time. All of a sudden, each artist is now competing with every other artist (and not just the big ones, either!) because of the new streaming distribution model. It seems natural to me that the price is going down.

The new streaming model also isn’t going away because it’s changed the way consumers engage with music. Before I would have to gamble on CDs/records in a pretty high-friction process. You would pay for the big names because you knew they would put something quality out, so it wasn’t as risky to buy their stuff. Now the cost for me to switch to other songs is basically 0, so I’m much more easily able to find stuff I like.

I’d argue that this new streaming model is incredibly valuable and warrants Spotify’s high valuation. Though, I agree with your sentiment here. Artists and their music power Spotify, so it seems fair that they get the lions share of value. Right now, it doesn’t feel like that. However, I think in the long run artists will win because their music is truly inimitable. Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Tidal, etc. are all fiercely competing on this distribution model. I haven’t seen a single feature that can’t be copied on any of these platforms. On the other hand, it’s basically impossible to copy another artist’s music (and make real money). Over time, I think streaming services’ margins will slim down because they must compete on price if they can’t compete on unique features. This will ultimately allow more artists to earn more money which is something I think we both can agree is what we want out of the music industry.

To be fair, consumers mostly don’t want to pay artists much money either. The consumers who do want to pay have plenty of avenues to directly support their favorite artists. Spotify is a music distribution tool that modern artists use to leverage their popularity into fiscal gains. Paying per stream is an antiquated business model at this point.

Make sure to consult a doctor. I wouldn’t trust what random people on the internet say.

With that being said, the first thing the doc will ask is what you hope to gain from TRT. Often the answer to that question is a mix of diet/exercise/sleep which you should try to address first. And if you’ve truly got that sorted, then it’s time to loop in a professional.

I used to do workers comp insurance (which covers against the injuries in the article) and 600 injuries over almost 10 years sounds relatively in line with my expectations of a construction/prototyping firm. It sounds like the journalist got a leaked copy of the SpaceX loss runs. They tend to make the accidents sound more gruesome than they really are. If you get a papercut and report it, that shows up as a laceration on the sheet. Not saying there aren’t bad claims (amputation and death are never good!), but it’s very easy to make a company look bad even if they have good risk control.

I’m not denying that there probably were gaps in personal safety, but my guess is the risk manager has improved process. If this weren’t the case, no one would sell them workers comp insurance. I agree this looks like a hit piece.

One thing to keep in mind - if you accidentally run up a bill because of a mistake, there’s a good chance you can reach out to support and they will credit your account. $5k may be a lot to an individual, but the cloud provider’s costs for that service are significantly less and they shouldn’t mind forgiving the charge. Case in point, when the author deleted his account and switched providers, the old host didn’t chase him for the charges.

I built a similar system for one of my old insurance clients. Every 3 months we would send an updated list of what we wanted the insurance company to cover. This batching worked great because changes came in daily and without it we would have to amend the policy for each individual change. We tracked the date the client requested a change (posting date in the article) alongside an effective date (the date we would base cost calculations off of).

Often the client would forget to report changes to us, so the reporting delay worked in our favor. For example, we would find out out on Friday that a client needed coverage starting the previous Monday. We would make sure there were no known losses and backdate coverage in our database. The insurance carriers would receive the report in a few months and be none the wiser. Carriers will backdate coverage like this, but it can be messy with the paperwork. Tracking posting dates, effective dates, and reporting dates really cut down on the complexity of managing the day-to-day insurance needs of my client.