rchaud

Good. Indexes are supposed to be slow-moving, precisely due to their entry requirement of sustained profitability that skews towards mature companies.

All that an inclusion of these new companies would accomplish is a bailout of their stockholders by pension funds and ETFs where millions of regular people shoulder all the downside risk.

SpaceX and OAI stock will be available through Robinhood, Questrade and all the other retail investor markets. Individuals can make an informed choice to trade it there, rather than have it automatically added to their index fund without having any say.

I don't know about a population decline, but it's well known that its real estate is almost as expensive as it in major population centres. It's also very hard to find a family physician taking new patients.

Graham died back when stocks were traded by guys shouting orders from a pit. High frequency trading was decades away, as was Wall Street's push for:

- creative accounting (Enron, Worldcom)

- zero-interest rate policy

- SPAC IPOs

- exotic securitization (credit default swaps)

...that made valuation more opaque over time. The age of value investing is long gone.

Microsoft and Apple had decades of profitable years before hitting a trillion. AI companies are seeking trillion dollar IPOs without profits, selling a service well below its actual cost.

Hedge funds won't try to short the stock; the holders are almost all institutional investors and insiders who are long on the stock and have no reason to lend them to HFs betting on a price decline.

What they might do is trade bespoke instruments like a credit default swap on datacenter construction deals. Stays underneath the radar of politicians and tech insiders who are invested in a particular outcome.

There is no moral argument anymore. Every ad peddler online has broken every TOS imaginable to feed its AI training models, at a scale a human couldn't accomplish in a million years.

With this governance structure, you won't actually own anything. Ownership implies that you have a say as a shareholder.

It's not basic math when the numbers are this big. There's not going to be $50 billion coming in Year 3 if there's a market correction and lenders scale back financing. Borrowed money is how companies are paying for AI, and that's the first thing that disappears in a recession.

Waiving profitability requirements to join the S&P 500 and trigger auto-buys from index funds is DEI for corporations.

Directors talk to actors. There is no actor here. At best, this is the equivalent of sending multiple 3000 word emails to a casting agency and letting them figure out what to tell their actors.

Reminds me of a story a friend told me where she was on a date with a man who said he went to Harvard. After looking him up on LinkedIn she discovered he just took some courses at Harvard Extension school where there aren't any admission requirements besides a high school diploma and the ability to pay course fees.

Why is an AI movie startup trying to obtain social proof through the snooty film festival circuit anyway? If this is about "democratizing creation", why not just post the film on Youtube and let the public decide?

And the punishment for securities fraud is a slap on the wrist, as Tesla proved with its "going private at $420/share, funding secured" tweet. Who cares about a $40m fine from an increasingly toothless regulator when your investors have already fronted $1.5 billion to settle copyright infringement claims?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo

If the investors are VCs, they can sell their holdings to a syndicate of underwriter banks in advance of the IPO, and let the banks shoulder the risk of finding a bigger fool in the secondary markets.

I never saw the point of subscribing. The home page will show you videos from channels you've watched whether or not you've subscribed.

> intellectual freedom is a cornerstone of democracy and freedom.

Indeed. And what better way to prove it than by mandating six credit hours worth of tuition fees on the topic?

Yeah and private health insurance can be useful if it is designed to pool risk across a population, help make healthcare costs transparent and pay for treatments that people need. But that's not where the money is.

Plenty of iPhone users are on Brave Browser because it blocks ads on Youtube. When you type in a search query in the address bar, it defaults to Brave Search. Don't underestimate the power of defaults.

There is a boiling point for user tolerance when it comes to ads. Google has been pushing that needle deep into the red for years now.

The music industry got rid of all that years ago when the big labels swallowed the small indies and imposed their corporate culture everywhere. There are no A&R men skulking through dive bars using drugs and girls to sign bands. The bands are now supposed to approach the labels with their Spotify listen counts and social media follower numbers ready.

Rick Beato has a good video on why so many new generation superstars like Gracie Abrams are nepo babies who all the time and money in the world to chase music as a career.

Touring costs a fortune for bands. They don't even keep most of the money, the record label takes a big cut and there's Ticketmaster after that, and now Spotify I guess. Selling paper-thin T-shirts, vinyl and lapel pins for absurd markups at the merch booth is how they make money.

Less than 10 years ago I could stroll into a local record store in my city and buy paper tickets to concerts directly from them, zero markup, zero "processing fees". And the ticket itself would be a souvenir because it often had a unique design or typeface. Now it's just a hideous barcode.

it's in their interest for them to show you more things that they don't need to pay record labels royalties for.

xAI "acquired" Twitter, so rolling it into SpaceX is a way to hide a badly distressed asset inside a potential moneymaker and hope nobody notices. Like mortgage backed securities.

The efficient market hypothesis has taken a real beating in the age of tech industry anti-gravity valuations.

This is a country where people are fine with more of their taxes going into police budgets every year.

Adding a line item to their property tax bill showing how much is paid into settling lawsuits will not make people think that they should demand more accountability. They will think that it should be harder to take legal action against the police.

Newsletters have a webview fallback with a public URL that makes them just as susceptible to scraping. If that ever gets fixed, Google will just scrape the full-text content in Gmail instead.

Newsletters have been around forever and never taken off like the open web and free blogging have. Slapping a Stripe integration on the backend hasn't led to Substack becoming a sustainable business not propped up by VC cash.

Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ads shown on Google itself are far more valuable than display ads that get shown on random websites. Google has been slashing payouts to those sites for over a decade. More recentlt, they've been slashing search impressions to those sites as well. With search engine ads + Youtube ads + Play Store ads, they can probably cut out the third - party site ads business altogether and not miss a beat.

And as time goes on, it becomes more and more like Ebay with a liberal returns policy.

Democracies aren't automatically immune to voting in illiberal leaders. Russia and the west have both been heavy handed in their efforts to swing Ukrainian elections in their favour.

Not trying to defend Russia in the least, but isn't their fear more about Ukrainian accession into NATO rather than the possibility of joining the EU?

EU membership isn't the golden ticket it used to be. Russia basically had an inside man in there for years with the Orban administration in Hungary. Member nations like Greece, Malta and Bulgaria also seem to have experienced more brain drain to the higher income countries in the bloc than they have in economic and industrial development.

I ran into this issue last week but it's gone back to letting me access the site normally on a mobile browser. This may have been an A/B test measuring app conversions pre and post mobile browser blocking.