tiedieconderoga

If you remove the premium offered by people who just want to scrap the business for parts, and no prospective owners can afford it at your target price, is the business actually worth that much as a going concern?

It sounds to me like your hypothetical doctor might actually be upset that they can't get $2 on the dollar by selling to an unscrupulous party. You could view the PE premium as a way for the good doctor to benefit twice from all the tax benefits that they accrued over the years as incentives to keep their business around.

>But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos.

I dunno, look at private equity buyouts, which Twitter kind of resembles—Musk somehow convinced banks and Twitter itself to foot most of the bill for his purchase.

The whole point is to avoid putting money into the prey company by saddling it with debt, while you squeeze every last cent of value out of its living corpse. It can take a long time for companies to die when this happens: Sears is a solid case study from recent times.

https://ivyexec.com/career-advice/2018/sears-case-business-f...

Considering how little of his own money Musk spent on the deal, I wouldn't be surprised if he was just having fun lighting a huge pile of other peoples' money on fire. He's obviously gotten bored with his car and spaceship toys.

I would be okay with automated traffic law enforcement if police officers were forbidden from making traffic stops for the sort of violations that the cameras issue fines for.

It would turn the most common motoring offenses into predictable fines, rather than gambles where you can get away with it most of the time, but you might get arrested or shot if somebody is having a bad day.

It could also encourage voters to demand that speed limits and road construction reflect the real traffic conditions, ideally reducing the vast stretches of 40mph highways where you'll get tailgated by semi trucks if you're doing less than 70mph.

On the downside, it would make license plate scanning a permanent fixture of most roads, but that's already true in many places.

Maybe that particular proof wasn't in its training data, and presenting it in the input added it to the model's corpus for your session?

These models seem to work similarly with code. If you ask them to recreate something that appears in hundreds of GitHub repositories, no problem, a little bit of rubber-ducky debugging and you'll have a working solution. If you ask it for something novel, without many publicly-available implementations, the quality of its output appears to drop off a cliff.

He was probably in a rush. People use these tools to offload work they might otherwise have done if they had more time.

People who understand the systems limit their use to tasks where small occasional errors are acceptable. People who don't understand the systems are happy to accept any plausible-soundong results, especially if they don't have time to do the work themselves.

I would not be surprised if, sometime in the next year, we see a doctor or two being sued for malpractice after accepting an incorrect diagnosis from ChatGPT. When people are rushed and overworked, and the system is usually correct, these kinds of incidents are almost certain to happen at the scale of an entire society or profession.

According to that link, it sounds like they are:

>Title III prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by businesses open to the public (also referred to as “public accommodations” under the ADA). The ADA requires that businesses open to the public provide full and equal enjoyment of their goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations to people with disabilities. [...]

>A website with inaccessible features can limit the ability of people with disabilities to access a public accommodation’s goods, services, and privileges available through that website—for example, a veterans’ service organization event registration form.

>For these reasons, the Department has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.

The courts also found that Netflix was a public accomodation in 2015 as part of a lawsuit, and Netflix was forced to provide subtitles on 100% of their programming.

There might be precedent, if their site and app don't make reasonable accomodations.

https://casetext.com/analysis/national-association-of-the-de...

Buying an hour of fire feels quantitatively different from buying an hour of light.

When I go camping, my solar-fed LED lanterns are plenty bright, but I still need to cook and stay warm. I can do that using heat, which the efficient lights cannot produce in sufficient quantities.

HN runs ads to benefit YCombinator. Notice how you can't comment on the "<YC-funded startup> is hiring <roles>" posts.

Looking at how the banks who funded Elon's purchase are valuing their stakes, it looks like it would have gone to about $18.48/share by now. Fidelity is evaluating their shares on a $15B total value, so ($54.20 * ($15B/$44B))

Too late for anyone to actually see this, but am I the only one who is terribly amused that Apple's silicon lineup now consists of A-series, R-series, and M-series chips, with the R-series handling realtime workloads?

I feel like I've seen that naming convention somewhere before.

It does feel like they're well into the uncanny valley. We'll see how they fare against the ineffable "ick" factor.

Google Glass cost half as much and was in a much tighter form factor, but it failed because the general public perceived it as creepy and isolating.

If this product gets associated with people striving to wall themselves off from the world in their own personal dreamscape...well, I don't know. Maybe that sort of personality type will become a virtue in the zeitgeist. Maybe it already is.

Three big issues off the top of my head:

* Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/video hosting sites are cyclical: absent a benevolent billionaire, the costs will rise with popularity, and the site will eventually need a source of revenue, which will introduce friction and start its inevitable decline in popularity.

* Moderation. Always a highwire tightrope act. Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam.

* Network effects, which are basically a lottery. You can have a scalable service with great UI, and a solid moderation story, but you still need to get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle to take off. This is common knowledge, which makes it even harder to justify starting to develop or use a new social medium.

Personally, I like places like HN, which focus on good moderation without trying to scale up. We are blessed to have dang, but if the site were structured more like Reddit or a forum with different boards, I bet it would become unmanageable very quickly.

The way that it is handled today, "ADHD" seems to represent a spectrum of symptoms rather than a well-understood root cause.

I've seen people go through school and adulthood, with different doctors vacillating between "you definitely have ADHD" and, "there is no chance that you have ADHD". Clearly something is up, and their symptoms broadly fit the guidelines, but the typical medication (amphetamines) sometimes seems to do more harm than good. "It helps me focus, but gives me no control over what I focus on" is a common refrain, even in this thread.

I am sure that accurate diagnoses have helped a lot of people, and I don't want to belittle that. Based on my personal experience, though, I'm not sure that "prevalence of ADHD" is a particularly useful label for large-scale analyses.

Well, uranium could be an example. The US doesn't mine much of it anymore - instead, they buy most of what they need from Russia. There's still plenty of it out there, but if you ever stumble across an old mine out West, there'll (hopefully) be a lot of signs warning you not to drink the water or spend much time in the area.

There has been a lot of coal and oil extraction, clear-cutting, etc. all around the world. Sometimes because the materials weren't commodities yet, sometimes because it's cheaper to produce locally. But as land and labor get more expensive, so does local production.

The PNW has interesting geography: the Cascades run North/South right near the Western shore, and they catch most of the rain that the Pacific hurls at the area.

West of the mountains, it's temperate and damp. The Olympic peninsula is technically a rainforest, but the populous areas tend to get a lot of drizzle rather than heavy rain. Snow is rare at low elevations, even in winter.

East of the mountains, it's temperate and arid. Lots of power generation and agriculture on former tribal lands.

In the mountains, large national forests which allow dispersed camping.

It's not always "mild", but wherever you end up, it's usually not inhospitable. The summers have gotten much worse lately though, Seattle was a city where nobody felt the need for air conditioners as recently as 10-20 years ago. Now they sell out in the first heat wave of the summers, and new apartment buildings are starting to include them.

It seems like wealthy nations often leave resources in the ground until they really need them.

Mining, refining, logging, chemical processing...these are dirty businesses. Why muddy up your local communities and reduce your future reserves, if one of your trading partners is willing to do it on their turf?

It does mean short-term pain if capacity and expertise need to be built out quickly, but that's the price of admission.

"The Cloud" == "Somebody else's computers"

If your government passes a law saying that GPUs can only be purchased or rented with a license, as OP was suggesting, all of that capacity disappears with the snap of a finger.

Health insurance companies could buy the info, charge you more.

Same reason why, if you insist on installing an app from your auto insurance company, you should not let it access location data.

>Fourth, there's really no role for "brands" in the metaverse. Despite all the hype, no real world brand has had any significant success in the metaverse.

IMHO, this is a crucial and often overlooked point. In order to gain popularity, a metaverse platform needs the sort of offbeat creator trendsetters who tend to push boundaries. Without them, the platform feels sterile and business-y. With the sort of content they will produce, however, family-friendly advertisers will run for the hills.

As Neal Stephenson wrote in Snow Crash (1992):

>You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.

The funny thing is, World of Goo was already released this way on Android, and the old version still works fine offline.

Too bad it's no longer available on the Google Play store.

No, I explained how your earlier comment was facile to the point of being incorrect, like you asked. How you interpret that is up to you.

It's not a closed system, we import massive amounts of energy from the sun every day. Some of it escapes back into space, depending on the atmosphere/albedo/etc.

Anyways, how do you think radiators work on space stations?

But if I did more work and less ticket-punching, my bar would look worse than my colleagues' bars in the annual layoff decision-making chart.

Panel awnings seem like they would be a win-win for parking lots. The cars get shade, the local area gets energy, and the lot owners get a side source of income.

Is it not cost effective to raise the panels on stilts? Are there liability concerns? Is it too expensive to wire parking lots with beefy electric service?

Can "pip install" actually run code? My understanding was that it doesn't, and a package needs to be imported by a script before anything gets run.

What exactly are they supposed to be lying about? I do not understand what you are getting at.

Do you not believe that governments want to monitor financial transactions and flag suspicious ones for further investigation? Or do you believe they are not already doing this with other types of electronic financial transactions?

And where does cash come into the equation? Sure it's legal and "untraceable", but it's not like you can use a suitcase full of $X00,000 in unreported cash to buy a new house, car, business, etc without raising all kinds of questions from your local revenue agency.

It wasn't a revolt against taxation, the issue was that the colonies had no say in how their taxes were collected and spent.

The slogan was, "No taxation without representation."

One of the book's protagonists, Hiro Protagonist, lives in a converted storage unit with a roommate.

It is presented as a normal way of life for people who are struggling to make ends meet.

>The law specifies that no penalties apply to users of TikTok. But app store operators and TikTok itself could face fines of $10,000 per violation per day, with an individual violation defined as “each time that a user accesses TikTok, is offered the ability to access TikTok, or is offered the ability to download TikTok.”

Sounds like a money-printing machine.