Learning new languages in-depth is an incredibly taxing thing, because there are whole jigsaw pieces of syntax you have to learn at once. But worth doing the right way if you have time.
It's worth reading the Ray Dalio debt crisis book to see how this might end - the most likely scenario is the US, Japan, and EU all encountering cash flow problems in the next recession that they resolve by devaluing their currency. In that sense people have less money today than they believe. If all the major currencies and stock markets crash at the same time, there's no safe place for everyone to keep their money.
A fixed or limited supply asset will hold its value against fiat currencies devaluing to some extent. Although it's likely that a scarce asset like gold/bitcoin is already artificially inflated by people who currently hold this belief.
If those people then liquidate their scarce asset in order to acquire more fiat currency after a devaluation then the market glut will devalue that scarce asset too to some extent.
I think the decline of Silicon Valley will have much more to do with the end of Moore's Law than any kind of social or political trend. The name is very predictive - if there will be nothing left to do with Silicon, maybe there will be nothing left to do in Silicon Valley, and the computer industry generally.
I have been using Dropbox Paper for about two years now. I highly recommend it for cloud note taking app, because:
(1) Can easily collaborate and share
(2) Markdown syntax with LaTeX support
(3) Embed images, youtube, PDF and lots of other stuff straight into the note.
(4) Visually clean and elegant
The downsides are:
(a) No offline editing (only limited support on mobile)
(b) Dependent on Dropbox Inc
+1 for Paper, but how are you embedding PDF? I can only add it if it's already in my Dropbox, and it is not editable (notes, highlighting, etc..) Only thing missing for me to make it go from good to great.
PDF has to in the dropbox folder somewhere before you can add it. Then it appears as a single page preview. Clicking on it allows to view the full doc within Paper, but there is no annotation feature as of now. Example:
Financial projections will undervalue Tesla because they are very different from other car companies - they are a monopoly with gigantic barriers to entry on many fronts. Other carmakers could copy some features of Tesla's cars, but they can't easily copy the multi-billion-dollar factories that make other features possible. They have better engineers than other car companies and a culture that works them harder. They avoided the dealership system and built their own stores. Elon Musk's PR stunts and Twitter feed are a much more effective method of advertising than the TV and Internet ads other car companies use.
What are those? I'm fond of Tesla, but they don't have an insurmountable moat around their technology. There's nothing intrinsically novel about their approach (especially outside the US where direct to consumer is a common model), they just had the benefit of a clean slate to build it out, rather than incrementally changing systems, platforms and procedures like other car manufacturers.
The halo of an eccentric billionaire genius wears off pretty quickly if they can't continue to compete on price, design, safety, and other areas of public perception.
It remains to be seen if Tesla engineers are objectively "better" than those at other car manufacturers, because very few directly compete at present. The number of "ground up" electric cars is quite small, compared with ones hamstrung by retrofitting electric powertrains into existing platforms.
> Elon Musk's PR stunts and Twitter feed are a much more effective method of advertising than the TV and Internet ads other car companies use.
Elon Musk's PR stunts and Twitter feed are a much more effective method of advertising to the ahead-of-the-curve, switched on audience who're interested in Tesla's current offering than the TV and Internet ads other car companies use. Again, there's nothing yet showing you can extrapolate this out once other manufacturers are truly competing in the same space.
I think they're great, and I want one - but we do need to be a little pragmatic about their position in the industry.
All launches of a completely new automobile by any automaker will tend to have quality problems. It’s unclear whether Tesla’s quality issues are significantly different from those experienced by more established automakers.
Peruse Tesla owner forums and reddit. The model 3 in particular has quality issues on brand new cars. Compare it to buying a Honda or Toyota - you're not going to have the kinds of problems described.
Well of course you're going to see people post about issues they're having if you look on forums. Nobody goes out of their way to look on forums and make posts sharing their frustration over the lack of problems they have with their car.
Come on, I'm trying to be scientific about this and you're just going to swing in with a rude, ad hominem argument about "Tesla fanboys"? Claiming that Tesla having bad QC is "common knowledge" doesn't somehow insulate you and your friends from stuff like confirmation bias.
And to address your other point, if you search the web for panel alignment issues on Honda or Toyota cars there seem to be plenty of those out there as well.
Fair enough! My main point was it's not clear that engineers at Tesla are better than those elsewhere. Even if all car companies are terrible. The other biases are my own, and are purely anecdotal based on my own experience and what others tell me. I'll leave it to other people with more time to do a scientific comparison.
Googling "toyota quality control issues" returns news about a recall of 1.75 million cars. So it seems the "reliable" brands have the same problems. Unless we can quantify it better, it's hard to compare.
Except when Toyota does a recall, its just a note in the mail and a little extra work at your next service appointment.
When Tesla does a recall, its a major headline news story and fodder for many forum trolls to use in their rants against the company. (plus, a notice and a little extra work at your next service appointment)
> Elon Musk's PR stunts and Twitter feed are a much more effective method of advertising than the TV and Internet ads other car companies use.
I think there's a bias here. This kind of PR resonates more with "techie" people (as found on HN) than with the rest. For some groups of people, TV ads are probably much more effective.
I would also point out that short sellers and "activist investors" are a significant downside to being public. Essentially you give investors focused on these strategies a financial incentive to destroy the company's long-term value. Activism has been a big problem for drug companies where investors will try to fire all the scientists so that profits will go up for a few years.
> Activism has been a big problem for drug companies
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't it kinda up to the shareholders?
If shareholders value something other than the "long term value" you speak of (I guess share price and dividends) then that's their prerogative surely? If I want to buy a controlling stake in a company but my idea of value is, say, sacrificing profit at the expense of employee perks and charitable efforts, then this is my "shareholder value" and isn't it then the responsibility of the company to provide that?
Likewise, if I buy shares in a company and then want that company fire all the highly paid people so profits go up to enable me to flip my shares for more money, that's my value and isn't it therefore up to the company to do that?
In summary, if the value of a company is measured by what the shareholders want, then it can't be a problem if the company does the thing that the shareholders want, even if that's destroying what you see as the "long term value" of the company.
It might not be what you want as a founder or CEO when you IPO, but those are the rules, those are the risks and you have to take them if you want to play the system?
I think your points highlights the contrast between how the US thinks of corporate stewardship (shareholders get complete discretion) with how many German companies do (stakeholders all contribute to board-level decision-making).
In the US it seems entirely reasonable that an owner should be able to undermine the long-term viability of something they own, but in Germany other stakeholders - the larger community the company exists in, the employees of the company -- get a seat at the table to determine the company's course.
I'm not advocating for either, just an interesting distinction.
For what it's worth this is my limited understanding of the way the US stock market works from my observations over 17 years in the UK :)
Personally I'm a big fan of the "middle ground" European model that seems to be, "capitalism with boundaries", as far as I can tell unfettered capitalism is incredibly destructive and unfair.
This is correct. Shareholders may increase the voting power of their shares up to 10x over 10 years by registering their shares on the company’s books.
You mean people that point out shady shit a company is doing? Short sellers serve a very important role in the market and help prevent things like Theranos.
True, but it can be a significant problem for legitimate companies. After going public Tesla had the highest short interest of any major stock at 72%. The other companies that were in the top 5 at the time are all bankrupt or close to it now. Short sellers perceived it as an unrealistic joke, and tried to convince everyone else of that, which could easily have become self-fulfilling.
But they didn't, did they. So what's the problem here? There is no problem with a big chunk of people holding a short position in a stock. Tesla has some big problems that traditional business people get concerned about (e.g. making money).
Activist investor is minority investor who puts pressure on management and generally campaigns to change something about a company - for their own goals.
> There are two quite separate kinds of "activist":
> One kind wants companies to make more money by being meaner: They call for efficiencies, stock buybacks, mergers, less spending on perks, etc. This stuff is often stereotyped as enriching shareholders at the expense of workers and other stakeholders, and as harming long-term value by focusing on short-term stock-price results.
> The other kind wants companies to make less money but be nicer: They call for more social responsibility or environmental studies or other things that might reduce returns on investment (at least in the short term) but achieve broader social goals.
> They are not so much opposed as they are unrelated.
I don't see how they are a downside. I am sure that VCs and PEs are at least as tough as activist investors in making sure to keep management on its toes. Notions like MVP and ramen profitability were not invented by activist investors, after all.
Healthcare is a much bigger problem for the government than student loans. The federal government spends about 1 trillion per year on healthcare, while the total of all student debt in the U.S. is around 1 trillion. This is true on a societal level too. U.S. healthcare spending is 17% of GDP, up from 5% in the 1960s. The problem with student loans is that the burden falls mostly on the least financially secure people. This is as opposed to Medicare/Medicaid where the government tries to foot the bill rather than allow people to get in massive debt.
I predict that BMIs are going to suffer from the same problem as AI, where the applications that are working in the short-term get very overestimated because they are confused with the long-term where you create a singularity. If you had a BMI that could read/write the entire brain on neuron-level resolution, you could create computer back-ups of people, and if hardware were fast enough you could create superhuman intelligence. If you just have cochlear implants and prosthetics, the best case is a world where nobody is impaired, which is good, but still very far from a singularity. The Neuralink version is that if you can do telepathy, that might be valuable in some situations, but it will probably just be like faster email until the computers become smarter than us.
I think it's unclear how much progress has been made on the superhuman AI problem. We haven't pinned down a good definition of intelligence, or figured out what it is that makes monkeys smarter than mice and us smarter than monkeys. We do have a lot of progress in specific domains, like image/speech recognition, but it's hard to tell whether they're on the critical path to superhuman AI because we don't know what the critical path is yet. That makes the timeline unpredictable, but biased a priori towards "far away". It's possible that better hardware will accelerate progress, but with CPU clock speeds flattening out, significantly better hardware is not guaranteed in the future.
$200M usually isn't enough for even one drug - $500M is on the low end, and not all drug development works out. So it's plausible that the money is better allocated here than in treatments.
But also, from the article: "Based on some of 23andMe’s newer hires, we wouldn’t be shocked to see the company dive into drug development, either."
