Especially since if you were driving in Sicily you must have your head on a swivel 100% of the time. There are probably multiple fiat pandas trying to drag race around you on the one lane road that somehow has traffic going both ways, lol.
I assume the tooling and process are such that it’s a one-time thing, as in, this is the most of these chips that we could ever possibly need for all time. They’re not going to be able to spin up the same fab and build the same chips the same way again in the future whether that’s 5 or 50 years in the future. Given the long lifespans of military systems, it’s maybe not so crazy.
Law firms are already limited by sales and marketing, and I believe the concept of ‘legal wizardry’ is misplaced. There’s almost nothing one law firm can do that another couldn’t do just as well. The only thing clients want are the ‘you don’t get fired for buying IBM’ factor and asking ‘how high’ when they say jump. The first is all based on cultivating an image and that’s just marketing and sales, and the second is just pure workaholic-fueled hustle.
Labor law will be hit more by widespread use of robotics, but I can envision a much larger market for contract disputes and transactional law. Having AI in both sides doesn’t mean people won’t disagree about stuff.
I recently tried to install Samsung magician on Windows 11. Tried. It flat out doesn’t work, tried some basic remediation and internet searching to figure it out, but could not get it to run at all. Completely nonfunctional. Seems to be an issue with some electron configuration or command line args. I gave up because it wasn’t worth more effort, but I believe it when I read that the software is a dumpster fire.
I’d argue that most if not all of the math that I learned in school could be distilled down to analyzing problems in the correct coordinate system or domain! The actual manipulation isn’t that esoteric once you get in the right paradigm. And those professors never explained things at that kind of higher theoretical level, all I remember was the nitty gritty of implementation. What a shame. I’m sure there’s higher levels of mathematics that go beyond my simplistic understanding, but I’d argue it’s enough to get one through the full sequence of undergraduate level (electrical) engineering, physics, and calculus.
Same with streaming services, ad-free services seem to be unusually higher priced than the ad-supported tiers. Netflix for example charges $10 for ad-free over the ad support tier ($18 vs. $8). I’ve seen estimates that ad revenue per subscriber is less than that, maybe $4-$8. And there’s a cost to that revenue as well, so their profit is even lower. Why go through all that trouble? Maybe the economics works out somehow, in that users willing to pay to get rid of ads are so price insensitive they may as well squeeze them for more money? Or the lower subscription cost opens up enough new subscribers to make it worthwhile to tolerate a much lower margin. I am very suspicious though and wonder if there is a more insidious or otherwise opaque motivation behind it. Is there some kind of ‘soft power’ benefit to being in the ad business?
I think there is value in having only one lossy encoding step on the way to my ears. And with all of the 4k video being streamed these days, lossless music bit rates are rather pedestrian, so I'm just not that concerned about the resources argument
lol, people don't remember all of the stern talking-to's zuck had to have from his investors in the beginning. The investors made him go to business classes to learn how to 'business' and talk to people. The one thing I could give him was to retain the ownership stake that he did, but that even could be said to be largely due to sean parker's influence and his experience with VCs.
Stole or just copied, the 'idea' of a social network wasn't novel by the time fb came around. Credit where it's due, it was executed well in the early stages and had the unique twist of being college-only at the beginning. People don't remember that when fb started gaining traction, friendster was already very much a thing but was stumbling hard on execution. I remember the friendster site being just dog slow. Myspace and Hi5 were also in the mix before or right at the same time as fb. Really just the PR/marketing angle and the not screwing up on execution are fb's claim to fame.
The innovation is the publicity and public image. I’ll get downvotes for it, but it’s the same innovation that Uber, Tesla, GoPro, Facebook, and countless others have rode to billions. Our economy is post-materialism and values public image and publicity greater than innovation and value. If you want to get rich, don’t do something innovative, focus on how you will make a good story to grab free publicity and cement an image as being ‘cool’ and ‘hip.’ Then you don’t ever have to make money or innovate anything. Investors will pour money on you because you’re cool and hip. I’m a little salty about it, but there’s something important there.
One more I just thought of, even if it’s not the same scale: Rap Genius. They took what’s pretty much a weekend project and turned it into a business and careers for themselves. The fawning press at their launch was overwhelming and impressive.
One small counter example: weebly. They made something actually innovative that provided real value to people. Grew quietly and made (by all outward appearances) a fantastic business. But since you didn’t/don’t see tons of gushing press about them, they (again, just by outward appearances) didn’t launch into the stratosphere like they absolutely could and maybe even should have.
I also wonder if they can borrow against it. It would seem a pretty low risk loan for a banker to make, and it would allow people to access the money arbitrarily, negating the one downside or limitation. So yet another way that the rich can basically avoid paying any taxes. Does anyone know of any limitations or rules restricting what you can invest the contents of an IRA in? Can you set up a business, sell your IRA shares of the business, then borrow against that value? Basically a foolproof way to avoid paying any taxes ever. The best part is the interest rate just has to be lower than the tax rate, not even the rate of return, right? Incredible. I think Romney was roasted for doing the same thing with his IRA. Seems like any wealthy person could and should be doing this.