If the $100B+ was created through ownership of a company and is unrealized wealth, how would you have taxed it if not through a wealth tax? Nobody is getting to $100B by way of income.
From your comments and the way you describe yourself, you strike me as the stereotype of the sort of person you'd find at a DSA rally. Over-schooled (as opposed to over-educated), arrogant, and finding grievance in everything.
The author writes an article observing that people find more beauty in traditional architecture and you immediately slander him as a racist white guy who wants to go back to 1950s segregation? You think you're the reasonable one in this conversation?
You don't have to return to the 1950s to find racism and segregation in present day America. There's a lot of work yet to do. Get on it or get out of the way.
Sure, but it's a massive leap to go from "there's still some racism and segregation in America" to "traditional architecture perpetuates racism." The latter sounds like something from 2020 that's now being disavowed as "woke 1.0."
Nostalgia and white guys have a fraught relationship. The good old days weren't even that good for them, killing them off with cigarettes and booze in their replica colonial and Cape Cod homes.
There isn't just "some" racism and segregation, either. Check the text messages sent by cops in the Karen Reid case. What are the odds that the most racist cops in the state worked that case?
America doesn't want to pay the price of handling Iran. There's a difference. Clearly the US could conquer Iran but it requires a land war with mass casualties, not just sporadic bombing.
Obviously China is in an entirely different league.
That's cynical nonsense that executives don't look past the next quarter. There would be none of this AI investment if that were true. It's all a long-term play with huge investments and minimal revenue by comparison in the short run.
NVDA had the foresight two decades ago to invest in CUDA. That's not next quarter thinking.
Can you host the model for a lower cost per token than you'd pay Anthropic or OpenAI for a similar level of intelligence? I doubt you're beating their efficiencies of scale.
No, and the reason is simple: Usage is bursty and if you don't maximize usage of the hardware you're going to lose on price.
Ok you can host this model once. What if I want a dozen subagents? Ok you can host it 12 times at once. What if we go a whole week only using max 4 at a time? Etc etc. The limits imposed by self-hosting might be bearable for a variety of reasons, but it's going to be more expensive and less convenient/useful.
The flip side is if you already have the hardware and can utilize it. Also, if this is for security or IP concerns, you largely don't have a choice. The US players are out.
The marginal cost goes down significantly if you have datacenters. Baring in mind that US API pricing is kind of absurd. Even if you, say, only utilize your DC 1/10 of the time... you might still be ahead of API pricing by a wide margin.
I dont have estimates on the cost of running models, but I think openai and anthropic are running on subsidized prices. At actual prices it might be worth it in the future.
how is this idea still so persistent? The fact people are able to run open models with about the same performance at 1/10th the cost should make it glaringly obvious that Anthropic has massive inference margins at api pricing.
I think the idea conflates price discrimination -- where people on individual subscriptions pay a much lower price per token than corporate accounts pay -- with using venture capital funding for opex. Both are subsidies in some senses, but the former is sustainable indefinitely.
They made the worst laptop keyboard of the last 3 decades, and put it in their $1000 laptops, AND then refused to update it until 2019 when it could've been fixed a whole year earlier.
Straight junk, forced onto all of their laptop buyers for multiple model-year updates.
Sure, they have a reputation for quality today (in general), but that wasn't even a decade ago and you've already forgot. Classic apple discourse.
But they still make repairs very difficult in case of accidental damage, random failure, or inevitably battery wear.
Glued batteries, soldered storage, keyboards and screens that absolutely aren't designed to be swapped out in the event of damage. There's still an element of planned obsolescence even if reliability/quality generally seems better than the competition.
For an end user the “very difficult” repair process is to go to an Apple Store and either get it repaired under warranty or pay a parts and labor fee for it. It’s not actually planned obsolescence so much as tighter control over the supply chain of device parts.
> Apple's MO has never been to make junk that breaks.
Have you never used their cables? I don't think I've seen a single Apple cable lasting more than a few years if they're being used daily, the only ones that last are the ones that are kept static for the entire time.
Their computing hardware is great otherwise, no disagreement there. But their cables are the polar-opposite of whatever engineering methodologies they use for their computing hardware.
This is a pet hate of mine. My whole family has iPhones but only my wife and daughters cables break because they use the phones while they are plugged in. The cable gets bent sharply where it joins the connector causing it to break.
I'm not sure if the newer braided cables are better or not as they don't have them.
I have never needed to replace mine as when the phone is plugged in and charging I don't use it.
> cables break because they use the phones while they are plugged in.
Is that something Apple advise iPhone users not to do, or why would that be a problem? Other cables can handle being bent sharply, Apple's cables break way faster than other's.
So because their cables were subpar at one point (hint: they were bad because they got rid of insidious chemicals you don't want in your house), that means that's not their MO?
Failure at a mission statement does not mean you have a different mission statement.
> So because their cables were subpar at one point
What do you mean at one point? We bought a laptop for my wife a year ago, cable is almost broken already, behind the connector. They really don't seem to know how to make cables today or before.
> Failure at a mission statement does not mean you have a different mission statement.
Ok? MO or no MO, the cables have useless durability even compared to cheaper cables.
Anecdotal, but for what it's worth, only two of my Apple charging cables have broken since 2007. I always hear about people having issues with them, so maybe I've been lucky with all of mine, or maybe I just don't treat them like I expect them to be indestructible.
People beat the hell out of cables. People yank on cables to unplug instead of the connectors, wad them up in the bottom of a bag and drop books on them, etc.
I don’t think I’ve ever had an Apple cable fail, all the way back to the 30 pin.
My understanding is that the Inuit snow claim is a bit of a myth. Beyond English words like slush, sleet, powder, hardpack, flurry, blizzard, etc you can also say "fluffy snow", "wet snow", etc. The Inuit language is just smooshing the adjective so you get something like "wetsnow" as one word.
Dividends are also one way of income in retirement, much more predictably than selling stock. The yields are worse than bonds, but they can be considered to be mostly to rise with inflation, albeit on a year or two delay. Dividends also act as a discipline to keep management focused on the business, since you need to pay real money to shareholders, instead of just doing whatever good idea you have, regardless of whether it is a net benefit to the company.
I disagree with the last statement. The reason why most companies in the US have at least a nominal (one penny per share) dividend is that many pension funds have a requirement to only hold shares that issue dividends. Pension funds are all tax sheltered, so they don't need to worry about paying taxes on dividends. For retail investors, dividends are mostly worse that share buy backs. Why? Dividends are taxed, and the money needs to be reinvested.
> The only reason to do a dividend is because people like the feels of getting a cash payout.
Not really, when capital entities came up, the initial goal was to deliver return on invested capital,i.e. something "you get out of the business/back".
Or do you think back in 14th wenn Dutch East India Company was created, that you could by shares and sell them later to a higher bidder after the mission was accomplished? :-)
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