>Bezos, Musk and Richard Branson seem animated by a lofty goal: securing the future of humanity by going into space.
This seems like a very under-researched statement. Bezos and Musk clearly see huge profits to be made flying satellites for use on earth. Space is sexy - and that's why its used as the marketing gimmick by these companies. For an article so critical of them its odd they took the promotional material of these companies at face value.
The fact that Branson pretended to ride his bicycle to the launch pad, commented on his fictitious ride, and then subsequently admitted he made it all up, suggests a huge amount of this is for show. There is definitely a one-upmanship going on, and perhaps some really oddball humour that only the billionaire trio would understand.
All three of them are doing related but distinctly different things, so I think the competitiveness is mainly a gag. If the end result proves to be beneficial in the general sense, I'm happy to let them at it.
The funny thing about all this, is that back in college, the CS program included a semester on Ethics. Using computers to prevaricate or otherwise exaggerate one's accomplishments was one of the first trivial examples of maluse of computational resources.
Seems like that's one of the first uses a non-trivial demographic of users go for.
What they are all doing has real risks. There is a slight but still real chance they die explosively, and I'm sure they understand that. Particularly the proposed orbital flights. This is a potentially very expensive marketing gimmick.
You are right that it's sexy, though. I figure something deeper is driving them. Us. Probably the same basic mystical awe I get watching old film of Apollo missions. Some mix of ego and adventure and eccentric waste. The PR and marketing is just the cherry on top, surely.
I agree its risky. Perhaps I'm being pedantic but seems weird to do an entire article on Musk's vision for space and not once mention starlink or the satelite side of the business.
The not-up-to-date person reading this would truly think that the billions of dollars funding this by Musk are like a side project done simply because of his dreams of terraforming Mars. Maybe Musk is serious about that - but if described with starlink you realize its much less of a "billionaire hobby obsession" and more of a "potentially profitable business (with bragging rights too)"
I do wonder if this is proportional to your symptoms/proportional to other ailments.
For instance, is someone with Covid (who was on the verge of needing oxygen) more likely to have long term symptoms than someone the same age who got the flu/pneumonia (and was also on the verge of needing oxygen).
In other words - is there something unique about Covid? Or is that any disease that sets you back has serious long-term consequences, and Covid is just statistically much more likely to do that than the flu, for example.
For me varicella-zoster was the causative agent. I had a lot of trouble being taken seriously by friends/some medical staff after I said that I had serious issues after a bad infection with it, because of most people believe it to be a relatively benign disease. I think it's the case that most viruses will cause chronic disease in a small subset of people.
> “If Covid didn’t cause chronic symptoms to occur in some people,” PolyBio Research Foundation microbiologist Amy Proal told Vox, “it would be the only virus that didn’t do that.”
> Even with growing awareness about long Covid, patients with chronic “medically unexplained” symptoms — that don’t correspond to problematic blood tests or imaging — are still too often minimized and dismissed by health professionals. It’s a frustrating blind spot in health care, but one that can’t be as easily ignored with so many new patients entering this category, said Megan Hosey, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
It's frustrating but it's not a blind spot - we simply have no way to help these patients. You have brain fog and occasionally your heart feels like it's beating out of your chest for no discernable reason? Sorry, there's nothing we can do...try exercising and getting good sleep, we guess?
We (humanity) can still treat the symptoms - and the damage they cause. Eg the specific mechanism for covid-induced heart palpitations may not yet be understood, but a heart rate of 160 or even higher for prolonged periods will damage the heart. Beta blockers will manage that - but not all doctors have been willing to prescribe medication to people that clearly need it.
Rarely have I heard of sustained 160 BPM heart rate as a post-COVID symptom. Likely something else would be going on there. Mostly it's vague symptoms, maybe you have 90-120 BPM, but then it goes away by the time you see the doctor the next day. Beta blockers have their own problems and you don't want to just start prescribing them for these vague, transient symptoms.
It's frustrating that it took an an at-home heart rate monitor and a smartphone video of my heart rate for my cardiologist to do something about it (they sent me home w/ an ECG for a day or so), but I eventually managed to get a prescription for it. Doctor still can't explain the "something else going on there" but thankfully my heart rate no longer spikes for no apparent reason.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus binds to a specific receptor (ACE2) that is expressed in a multitude of different cells in our bodies, most curiously the endothelial cells that line up your vessels. Some hypothesis suggest that the disruption of the systems associated with ACE2 is what causes downstream effects that lead to symptoms of COVID. By virtue of infecting blood vessels, the virus can cause them to stop functioning properly, and thus impair the supply of oxygen to otherwise healthy tissue. These hypoxic microlesions, which have been found even in the brain of patient populations, could in turn be responsible for some of the sequelae that the infection leaves behind after the end of acute period of the disease.
The extent to which damage is caused, and the extent to which the body can recover will evidently dictate the period of convalescence. Because symptoms vary wildly from case to case, pinpointing general routes of treatment or estimating the duration of recovery is a highly complex problem.
I obviously realize that influenza does not attack the body in the same way with the same receptors - but it obviously attacks the body in its own unique way.
It rarely causes serious health consequences but for the people it does (I've known younger people sent hospital with it) are there long term consequences on the same order of magnitude? It doesn't seem like the data really exists for this.
I believe one difference with Covid is that people often have issues across multiple organs (I believe this is because the virus binds to ACE2 receptors which are present over the body, not an expert though) whereas with flu/pnemuonia I think it's more likely to be just generic fatigue and lung capacity as longer term effects.
I think the sheer range of long lasting symptoms is quite unique to Covid, although other diseases like Ebola or Smallpox would leave more severe damage.
Good question, and one that I would like to have the answer to too. I also wonder what the effects are on longer term immunity, apparently there is some evidence that if you had a more serious case that your immunity will be longer lasting but I have yet to find something that is conclusive.
I honestly am cool with NASA getting lots more money but also seems clear that the beurocrats have realized the best way to secure more funding now is no longer to make a national security argument - but one involving overhyping the evidence of aliens.
Would be more interesting/honest if they differentiated between companies that have declined versus just mergers.
The AEI is making the point there is more creative destruction than people think - which is fair.
But Mobil is counted as if it isn't in the top 500 companies now because it merged. But it wasn't just gobbled up - if it was independent it would clearly be top 500 still. If you were a shareholder in 1955 you'd be pleased.
I've used website blockers before on Twitter. I would still go incognito to find people for updates on things but the extra two clicks def nudged me from doing it as often.
Warren says he understands how much Microsoft is getting off of royalties for Windows but is unsure about his confidence in a 20 year bet compared to a company like Coke which sells Cola.
Warren turned out to be very wrong in investing in Coke over MSFT. However, his reasoning wasn't awful. The entire e-mail pleading the case to him is about how great of a business selling the OS is. However, if Microsoft had stuck to that the stock would not be doing so well now. Perhaps he and the person pleading MSFT's case were wrong to view Microsoft's business as operating system related instead of tech and computing more generally. I'd say both were about the same levels of wrong but one had a better outcome.
Buffet attributes his success into being able to stay within his circle of competence. He is perfectly aware that he is letting many golden opportunities pass, but he is not concerned about that. Unless it falls into his circle of competence, he is not touching it.
Today when Berkshire has two younger Vice Chairmans and Todd Combs and Ted Weschler are handling investments the portfolio is changing a little.
At that time software's AT&T style winner-take-all and network effect lock-in was still not that obvious. The PC was not yet the golden standard for desktop hardware and words like minicomputers and mainframes were not uncommon terms.
In 1997, what else was there for desktop hardware? Ok, I was an Amiga buff and waiting for Blizzard PPC to come out - but I was under no impression that mine was the golden standard for desktop hardware.
It was certainly dominant at the time, but not for that long, mostly early 90's. The decades before saw - by today's standards - rapid switching of dominant home, business and server hardware and corresponding OSses.
So it was not a safe bet in 1996 that Windows and Microsoft would still exist and be a big market player in 2020.
> So it was not a safe bet in 1996 that Windows and Microsoft would still exist and be a big market player in 2020.
There's an argument they're not. Now obviously windows still dominates the laptop (and desktop) OS market (and I'm not gonna claim Microsoft is doing badly or anything), but it isn't the dominant overall OS due to the rise of mobile and Android.
At wave of computing so far, from mainframes to minicomputers, from minicomputers to PCs and from PCs to mobile, the dominant market leader has been unseated. If viewed in this light, Warren's reticence is prescient.
For Windows you can, but Microsoft is diversifying risks and running their software on other OS and hardware, and Office is a major windows-independent revenue stream.
So I'd say 2020 -> 2040 Microsoft is a safer bet than 1996 -> 2016 Microsoft.
What was the alternative in 1997? None? Windows 95 was on every office desktop. It was the only desktop OS most companies bought. I can’t recall another desktop OS widely available. OS from Apple was a niche, mostly in education and desktop publishing, and on decline.
The point is that dominance was only a few years old, and it was not at all obvious it would last - the computer market had completely changed every few years prior to that, so assuming there was a risk it might again was not unreasonable.
In '96 people were still talking about how Microsoft had failed to understand the importance of the internet, and whether Windows '95 would fix that. The '95 DOJ consent decree also looked set to potentially severely reign them in. Apple still looked like a possible contender.
OS/2 still looked like a possible contender - I remember being at trade shows at the time and seeing how hard OS/2 was pushed, at a time where Microsoft was still a small upstart that had only bypassed Commodore in revenues a few years prior (and speaking of Commodore, even in 95-97, several years after their bankruptcy, people were still looking at whether Escom and then Gateway would manage to resurrect Amiga), and there were lots of people convinced IBM would swat Microsoft away like a fly.
In the corporate space, options like DEC, Sun and SGI were still pushing into the workstation space at high pace and making inroads downwards into more regular workstations - I saw this first-hand in computer labs filled with cost reduced SGI Indy's and a bunch of DEC workstations at work, and lots of SUN workstations at places I contracted in those years.
Non-Windows, non-DOS machines were still everywhere in those years. It was unusual to find an office without a non-MS OS, because if nothing else there'd by a Mac for Quark Express or the like. And the presence of beachheads of non-MS OS's like that meant that whether or not MS could maintain its position was still not obvious.
More importantly: Giants had stumbled many times before. Most notably IBM, but the years before were littered with computer companies that had either died entirely or were shells of their former selves.
Yet few predicted just how much the web would change things over the next 10 years, and then mobile computing over the 10 years after that.
If you'd have said in 1997 that the most valuable companies in the world would include Google, Facebook and Amazon you'd have been laughed out of the room, when you then said that failing toy company apple would top the list
Even outside the world of IT, if you'd have told people in 1997 that a new car company would emerge and become one of the most valuable car companies in the world, given it had been 30 years since the previous car company had gone public, you'd have been equally mad.
In 1997 the most valuable companies in the world included Shell, Exxon, Toyota and Coca-Cola.
Indeed, that's the point. You can't predict what's going to be the big winner of the next 20 years, but you can predict that some brands are going to be fairly safe and will at least not wipe you out without notice.
Sure you could have gone all-in on Amazon at IPO (ooh an online book cd sales company, with MP3s on the horizon), but you could easilly have gone all-in on Pets.com.
You could have invested in yahoo, after all that was the place that ran the web in the 90s - if you weren't on yahoo you didn't have a business. You could have piled into things like friends reunited, myspace, napster, all of which were just as likely to succeed as facebook, yahoo, or apple music.
Even dying companies like Blockbuster and Kodak took far longer to wipe out shareholder value than some new flash-in-the-pan companies.
He was wrong on MSFT. But at the time there were maybe 100 companies like MSFT, for example Worldcom, Enron, PET.COM etc. So if you average over those 100 companies that he didn't understand and didn't invest in, maybe he was right not getting into unfamiliar waters.
There were a lot of risks that he could not foresee - potential rise of a competing OS, the rise of mobile phones (which even BillG did not foresee), anti-monopoly lawsuits etc etc.
To add to your point, he didn't even say it wouldn't be a good investment; in fact he said if someone pointed a gun to his head he would choose to invest. His problem was he couldn't assess the exact likelihood of success (which he nevertheless reckoned was "high"), and he only goes for investments he considers 100% winners.
Very few cash-cows last forever which is why it is important to look at how a company is reinvesting in alternative streams of income when forecasting the long term
I'm gonna disagree with you. Very few companies manage to successfully pivot to a line of business that's substantially outside their original area of core competence.
The reality is that different organizations have ingrained cultural DNAs that's usually both optimized for their specific niche and painfully difficult to change. When an industry reaches its inextricable decline, most companies would do better to gracefully return money to shareholders (either in the form of dividends or buybacks).
9 times out of 10, that produces a better outcome for investors than a desperate attempt to reinvent themselves. We tend not to realize this because of survivor bias. But for every Apple, Western Union or AT&T, there's a dozen companies like Polaroid, Sears and DEC littered across history's dustbin.
It could be argued that every time a company comes out with a new product they are adding alternative revenue streams. By this definition it happens all the time.
Thing is. Whilst doing stock buybacks and dividends is best for the stockholders, it isn't best for the employees. Nor is it good for other stakeholders in the company.
In our modern state of stockholder supremacy, that doesn't tend to matter much. But I think it should matter more.
Well, one thing to note is that money returned in buybacks doesn't just get thrown in a big pit. It has to be reinvested somewhere else. So, while it may not help the employees of the company paying the dividends, it certainly helps the employees of the company receiving new investment.
I think you did adroitly mention down thread that there are labor market frictions to consider. And I definitely agree with that. Obviously stable employment is definitely one social consideration. And certainly long-lived companies make for more stable labor markets.
But all in all, I still think that overall most people would prefer faster rather than slower turnover among large firms. Younger companies (as in those founded more recently) tend to be more innovative, deliver better customer service, have more satisfied employees, engage in less lobbying, and have fewer environmental and safety issues.
Obviously it's better for you to take money from shareholders if you don't ever give it back. That's not a foundation for a long term stable ecosystem.
What about, if you keep the money from shareholders. And instead of burning the money, or letting the shareholders 'efficiently reallocate capital'. You try and redirect the company to stay relevant.
It might be a less efficient allocation of capital. But it could reduce a lot of friction in the labor economy, and incurs less overhead from building an organization from scratch.
Shareholder capitalism is an aspiration. We have never really tried it.
In practice, companies are run for the benefit of management and other insiders.
> Whilst doing stock buybacks and dividends is best for the stockholders, it isn't best for the employees. Nor is it good for other stakeholders in the company.
Stockholders can invest the money returned to them again in more profitable ventures.
Financial capitalism where everything needs to be consolidated, bundled and sold as an investment vehicle seems like a pretty modern invention.
To go to an extreme, look at It's a Wonderful Life. Something like a community bank in the early 20th century was not run aggressively for the sole benefit of shareholders, there was a notion of community involvement. If anything financialization since the 70s has created the fiction that corporations are soulless machines designed to optimize profits at the expense of all others.
I would be careful about citing a fictional example of an American bank.
I'm not even objecting to the fiction. But more that American unit banking was extremely weird. Basically, many states banned banks from having more than one branch. The result was the world's most fragile financial system.
I disagree. I feel like that's up for the patient to decide. If I am going to tell my deepest secrets to someone I'd rather there not even be the faintest idea that details would be written about, even in very general ways.
I specifically had to sign a consent form before starting therapy, with exactly how my data would be handled and what could or could not be done with it. I think that is SOP in the field.
In the US, afaik, there is no such requirement, and publishing anonymized stories in pyschiatric journals is common practice, without any sort of consent.
Surely there is a difference between a professional journal with standards and peer review, and a public blog with a comments section that frequently features Steven Pinker and discussions about racial effects on IQ.
Sorry, I got my online Steves confused and meant Steve Sailer, not Pinker. For one, there aren't any professional journals for which Steve Sailer's ideas about race, IQ or the Holocaust would meet their standards. Second, doctors often get consent for case studies on their patients, and only give pertinent details like sex, age, or complicating medical conditions if absolutely necessary. Case studies are meant for professionals to peruse in an effort to better advance the field they practice in.
A personal blog where a psychiatrist divulges his patients' sexualities and relationship issues to pontificate about polyamorism with his laymen blog readers, including Steve Sailer, is not the same thing as a case study in a professional journal.
I agree that they are not the same. But I don't really understand why it is different in a way that changes its moral character. Steve Sailer can read psychiatry journals if he wants to. As long as the stories are well anonymized, I don't really see much difference.
According to Snopes, the song "Sweet Home Alabama" was actually inspired by a radio commercial for "Sweet Homes" that had aired decades earlier. Full circle.
You fell for a Snopes TRoLL. They made that story up. Mobile homes are called that because they can move. There was never a mobile home company called "sweet homes", and the industry does not originate in Mobile.
> So how did this claim arise? In a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of “facts” that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous “facts,” among which was the statistic cited above about the average person’s swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst’s propagation of this false “fact” has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.
This is NOT in their "TroLL" section -- it is not clearly marked as being a fake fact.
This Snopes article cites a column reportedly called "Reading Is Believing" from a periodical called "PC Professional", page 71, date 7 January 1993. I was unable to find the existence of any such periodical although there is "PC professionnel", published in German, ISSN 0939-5822, whose archives seem to only be available in German libraries (and I have not reviewed those).
However, I was able to find in the Cornell University archives, a quarterly periodical called the Cornell Engineer, which carried a column by a student columnist dated April 1992 (Volume 56 number 2, page 24, column title "Stress and Strain", author Margot Anne-Stephanie Vigeant '94). That seems to predate the January 1993 citation given in the Snopes article, and the 1992 student-publication column text says in part
> My first topic for this issue is worries. I've decided that there are just too many well adjusted, un-paranoid people in this school (NOT), so I've decided to wreck their peace of mind by sharing a list of my favorite worries with them. These are the kind of things that just jump into your mind right before you're about to fall asleep - horrible little night gremlins whose goal it is to keep you up just a little bit longer. So here they are, hope you can sleep after this:
> The average person swallows eight spiders while sleeping, in their lifetime. What if all eight show up tonight?
Meanwhile the source that Snopes apparently made up, Lisa Birgit Holst, is an anagram for "This is a big troll".
It's just odd. Their debunking contains a pointless lie; there is a real citation available they chose not to use.
I am in favor of looser zoning laws and generally consider myself a YIMBY. However, I wouldn't say it is good politically to only support local low-income housing conditional on the fact that there is no negatives. I think that is the best policy but also acknowledge that there will be some tradeoffs.
As others have said I don't think looking at home values in major cities like Boston or Seattle is that interesting. Cities are used to having very rich areas next to poor ones. I grew up in a town of about 20,000 that had close to no housing that wasn't zoned as single family. As a result, the median income was very high, property taxes stayed extremely low as a percentage (since everyone was contributing a lot), and the schools were considered great despite people not having to pay a lot in taxes. The neighboring town had higher taxes (because the median property value was significantly lower) and the schools were known to be bad. I wish there was more state level funding at the time - but there wasn't and don't think there is now.
>However, I wouldn't say it is good politically to only support local low-income housing conditional on the fact that there is no negatives.
It obviously isn't but the history of progressive politics demonstrates that ideological purity is a great way of never getting anything real done.
E.g. planned Parenthood's murky beginnings, food stamps (buyer of last resort for leftover agricultural produce), schools (training kids to be obedient factory workers).
I doubt there are any progressive institutions which aren't partly borne out of an uneasy alliance with some powerful but unethical group whose interests either align or are at least aren't all that badly affected.
I've had some trouble understanding this claim though. From my understanding the bats that the virus most likely came from are thousands of miles away from Wuhan. This also is the area that the Wuhan researches went every year to collect samples.
My understanding of Chinese geography is a bit weak - but it is a bit like if a cow disease broke out in Boston near a BS4 lab. There are certainly some cows in Boston a few blocks from the BS4 lab there. Sure - there are cows in Massachusetts - but statistically it would be a bit surprising that a disease in cows would first show up there.
Yes, the institute of Virology in Wuhan did research on bats up to thousands of kilometers away. There are, after all, only two BSL-4 labs.
However, there is a large population of bats right outside Wuhan, and you can find research by the WIV cataloguing different viruses found in the same province. For example : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31009304/
The key here is that the bats the virus (likely) came from are not actually thousands of miles from Wuhan, but only a few dozen. It's just that since the WIV is a huge institute they sometimes also do research in bats in other regions too, because they don't have such facilities.
I'm a bit confused. That article doesn't mention viruses at all in its abstract, only bacterial studies.
My understanding is that the virus came from horseshoe bats. These largely live in Southern China. Wuhan is not Southern China. All studies of Corona viruses I can find deal with going to southern China (because that's where horseshoe bats live) to collect samples from horsehoe bats: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6563315/
Do you have a non-paywalled version to the link you provided? It says they looked at bacteria in bats in the abstract but didn't mention anything about which species of bats.
This seems like a very under-researched statement. Bezos and Musk clearly see huge profits to be made flying satellites for use on earth. Space is sexy - and that's why its used as the marketing gimmick by these companies. For an article so critical of them its odd they took the promotional material of these companies at face value.