vannevar

6 ms·

61.
by vannevar 3mo ago
This is a specific example of a more general problem: the ability of capital to manufacture demand and not merely satisfy it. An implicit assumption about supply and demand is that they are largely independent market forces, that demand is
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by vannevar 3mo ago
From Article III: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." For example, if Russia met the definition of an enemy, and if the
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by vannevar 3mo ago
Given that the President is a convicted felon who maintains that what he did was fine, and that he has pardoned thousands of unrepentant criminals, and that the vast majority of his party enthusiastically endorsed all this, I would say &quo
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by vannevar 3mo ago
>ChatGPT 5.3 to 5.4 (and likely 5.5) was basically the same model, but probably trained a bit more, not a new model from scratch. Then those models have an eroding moat and will be quickly driven down to commodity pricing. The only thing
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by vannevar 3mo ago
>Similarly, it seems like open weights models and high-end models could co-exist? Low-end and premium smartphones are still overwhelmingly either Android or Apple. And I'm sure open weights and premium models will co-exist. But that
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by vannevar 3mo ago
>Commoditization means there's price competition. From a consumer perspective, that's good. You want it to be a low-margin, high volume, competitive business. You and I may want it to be a low-margin, high-volume business. But
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by vannevar 3mo ago
Two issues with this. One, it's profitable assuming you just keep serving the same model forever, which is not realistic in this market. A given model has a shelf-life, which these days is measured in months, not years. Which means tha
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by vannevar 3mo ago
You are making the common mistake of confusing two different things: the absolute capacity for an individual to improve their income over their lifetime, and the relative capacity to improve based on their current decile. If progress de
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by vannevar 3mo ago
>They didn't make the rising tide analogy, I read it as how much could be captured by labor if we increased leverage. Fair point, though it's not completely clear from the comment. >Wages have historically been a lagging ind
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by vannevar 3mo ago
>And employees are working at companies that provide robots, etc. Just as are the top executives. And the shareholders that have put money into companies that provide "robots, etc.". All these people, including labor, are stake
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by vannevar 3mo ago
This is consistent with the observation that the top 10% have captured a disproportionate share of GDP growth over the past few decades. https://equitablegrowth.org/new-data-reveal-how-u-s-economic... "The past three e
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by vannevar 3mo ago
If the program actually does create jobs, it doesn't much matter whether or not the politician benefits, because it still serves the public interest.
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by vannevar 3mo ago
Pretty easy to check on. And I'm not sure how the company would profit from giving away money to thousands of people who didn't work. And even if for some reason they did, we've seen that it actually stimulates the economy, w
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by vannevar 3mo ago
>There doesn’t seem to be any lesson-learning happening... Which would indicate that creating jobs was not the actual reason for the grants. Given how trivially easy it would be fix the problem (simply make the grant contingent on the cr
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by vannevar 4mo ago
The question raised by the article isn't why people don't pay their rent; it is why the number of people not paying their rent has increased. Occam's Razor suggests that the most likely reason is also the simplest one: that
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by vannevar 4mo ago
While that is certainly true, it's a very narrow view disconnected from the reasons for the policies. The most likely explanation for more people not paying their rent is that even fixed rents have become increasingly unaffordable be
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by vannevar 4mo ago
While it's tempting to just say we're going to cap wealth, it's not actually that easy to do. For one thing, most billionaires are not people, they are corporations. But the same concerns apply to concentration of wealth in c
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by vannevar 4mo ago
>1. Growing at a rapid rate over long periods of time is hard, doable and rewarding and depends on factors outside your control. This last is a critical caveat, and really the crux of the argument. It's not about cheating, but the
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by vannevar 4mo ago
The plot on page 39 certainly looks like the St Paul market turned somewhere around July of 2020, over a year before the rent control, and the downward trend accelerated over the next couple of years. I'm skeptical of the authors'
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by vannevar 4mo ago
>...which is measured in days and weeks, not months. There are multiple issues that will force a lag of at least a couple of months. First, the issue of the mines that have been reported. Second, the tanker owners will want to be quite s
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by vannevar 4mo ago
Another article from the other day contains this: And even more importantly, China has slashed its crude imports, turning instead to massive stockpiles. ( https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/09/business/oil-stra
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by vannevar 4mo ago
Once Iran closed the Strait, Trump's surrender became inevitable. The rest has been a combination of him slowly coming to terms with the inevitability of that outcome, and buying time to come up with a way to spin the catastrophe as a
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by vannevar 4mo ago
>If the conflict ends, or the U.S. stops exporting the oil, the tanks will fill up again... Not quite. Once the conflict ends, there will a lag of several months before the tanks will start filling up again. So even if it ends tomorrow,
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by vannevar 4mo ago
I haven't seen any articles saying "tomorrow" oil is going to $200/barrel. I have seen lots of articles predicting that once the stocks run out, the price will go to $200/barrel. The articles differ on exactly when
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by vannevar 4mo ago
I don't think that any study on the benefits of protein intake is meaingful if it does not also take into account exercise. The effect of a protein-only diet on a largely sedentary animal that lives in a small cage is likely to be very
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by vannevar 4mo ago
The second law of thermodynamics hasn't been proven either, but I'm fairly confident in it. ;-)
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by vannevar 4mo ago
>...if they indeed are running a ponzi it would be surprising it could last so long. There's a practice in the loan industry called "pretend and extend," which basically means endlessly extending credit to lendees who are
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by vannevar 4mo ago
My opinion, yes. But if someone said they had invented anit-gravity, then showed you a bowling ball "floating" but with a sheet covering any potential support, you'd be pretty suspicious. And if they refused to remove the she
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by vannevar 4mo ago
If "many businesses" operate this way, then "many businesses" are committing fraud. You can't publicly claim to be selling loans to an unrelated company when in fact you control that company.
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by vannevar 4mo ago
See my reply to @rtpg. The short answer is that it is believed they are selling high-risk loans to a company they control, making it look like the publicly traded Carvana is some kind of miracle in the car industry while offloading the risk

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