vannevar

7 ms·

91.
by vannevar 4mo ago
They're an outlier in the industry in terms of profit per car. But they don't actually get revenue from selling cars, their revenue comes from selling car loans. So they're making the additional margin on the financing. They
92.
by vannevar 4mo ago
>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. Carvana is the poster child for this. It's
93.
by vannevar 4mo ago
>Can you explain what is wrong with people having different levels of wealth? There's nothing wrong with it, in moderation. Where it becomes a problem is when the distribution of wealth starts diverging widely from people's exp
94.
by vannevar 4mo ago
There is another possibility: "they" are interested parties working to keep futures down as long as possible. When the space shuttle Columbia re-entered with a massive hole in its wing, the control systems kept it stable for quite
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by vannevar 4mo ago
One can easily imagine pragmatic Tories saying the same thing about the American Revolution: "We should have done this 30 years ago, there's not point in trying now."
96.
by vannevar 4mo ago
The problem is that in an unregulated capital system, money naturally flows uphill. The industrial revolution made this clear to everyone early on, and so we got anti-trust laws and progressive taxation. But over the decades, anti-trust law
97.
by vannevar 4mo ago
>So at best we can have system where you can keep your data and pay more, or sell your data and pay less. And that would be fine, but without more rigorous controls on corporate behavior, you'll end up paying more and not keeping yo
98.
by vannevar 4mo ago
Every corporation is trying to spy on you. Why wouldn't they? There is no real punishment, and large reward. As long as that is true, superficial regulations around tracking will always be circumvented or hollowed out. We need fundamen
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by vannevar 4mo ago
A progressive property tax would actually lower housing costs, by reducing real estate prices. There would be a homestead exemption, so there would be no impact on taxes for individual homeowners. I think it would tend to stabilize rents,
100.
by vannevar 5mo ago
If you properly taxed real estate in a progressive way, you wouldn't have to bother with taxing paper wealth at all---the collective value of paper is already reflected in the price of land. People with large paper fortunes inevitably
101.
by vannevar 5mo ago
>It already exists in the form of property taxes, which are quite unpopular. For an unpopular tax, the property tax is remarkably ubiquitous. Are there really any popular taxes?
102.
by vannevar 5mo ago
Clamping down on immigration will go down as one of the greatest policy blunders in US history. The American people are about to find out the hard way that national economies are essentially pyramid schemes.
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by vannevar 5mo ago
I think this correlates roughly with the rate of stock ownership by income level. When the current equities bubble bursts, we will probably see more convergence between the income groups.
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by vannevar 5mo ago
>I see that folks could see this as evidence that I live in a bubble... Not all bubbles are created equal. In the US, Republicans tend to rely on a smaller pool of news sources ( https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism&#x2F
105.
by vannevar 6mo ago
>Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. Not according to this Redfin report (also linked by others in the thread): "Take 28-year-olds as an example: 38.3% of 28-year-old Gen Zers owned their home
106.
by vannevar 6mo ago
The boots theory is a concrete way of expressing the risk of ruin, which is the principle advantage of wealth (though our society has layered on many others): the rich can afford to take more risk, and consequently enjoy more reward. A poor
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by vannevar 6mo ago
Agreed. Color me skeptical. All of the interactions and decisions described are plausible, but in my experience with AI agents, they would require frequent human intervention.
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by vannevar 6mo ago
I don't know, "pleading for the computer to work" pretty much sums up my entire 40-year career in software. Only the level of abstraction has changed.
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by vannevar 6mo ago
> They haven't lost a crewed vehicle. Yes, that's my point. SpaceX understands they need to do many unmanned flights before trusting a launch system with a crew. NASA is trusting Artemis with only a single unmanned flight. Th
110.
by vannevar 6mo ago
They do not expect to lose a given vehicle. They are tolerant of losing some vehicles over time, because they understand that every flight may be affected by unknown unknowns. There is certainly no evidence that they expect to lose crewed
111.
by vannevar 6mo ago
>"Ads are the only way we've found that actually implements a form of microtransactions... paying a tenth of a penny for a sliver of attention." Ads were the path of least resistance, and once entrenched, they effectively
112.
by vannevar 6mo ago
Until Artemis actually flies a comparable number of missions, any advantage in reliability is pure speculation. Which is not a good way to approach crewed spaceflight. I don't think the two programs are as different as you think, prosp
113.
by vannevar 6mo ago
All of the controversy over the heat shield is obscuring the much bigger safety issue: Artemis has had only a single unmanned test flight. By contrast, the Saturn launch system had seven successful unmanned tests before being trusted with a
114.
by vannevar 7mo ago
Same here. Coupled with configuring the agent's email account at the provider to only be able to send and receive to my email address.
115.
by vannevar 7mo ago
>So your objection is the way in which they did the accounting? Yes, the accounting is the problem. As I said from the outset, if they actually just traded chips for stock, it would not be an issue.
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by vannevar 7mo ago
In a one-shot scenario, I agree. But LLMs make iteration much faster. So the comparison is not really between an AI and an experienced dev coding by hand, it's between the dev iterating with an LLM and the dev iterating by hand. And
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by vannevar 7mo ago
>If my company wanted to barter with another company to exchange equity for infrastructure how would you expect that to be reported? Did this situation differ from that expectation? As I mentioned, I would have no problem if that's
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by vannevar 7mo ago
>We just don't know and can't really imagine what it's like to live in a world where you are entitled to money for existing, no strings attached, pretty much from cradle to grave. Sure we can. As I noted, wealthy people li
119.
by vannevar 7mo ago
The article's central premise is based on a false assumption, which is that people taking UBI will be idle. There is no significant evidence to support that claim. The scant evidence we have so far on UBI is largely limited to relative
120.
by vannevar 7mo ago
Wall Street places a value on sales, on the assumption that the sale means a customer had the money and the desire to buy the company's goods. In this case, OpenAI had the desire but not the money---Nvidia basically gave them the money

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