>But Apple's position here is actually really wild: Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?
The DMA isn't a privacy law. In this case, the DMA would appear to require Apple to open up all user data to any AI agent. That removes the ability to provide privacy protections.
You can argue Apple should do that, but you can't in the same breathe argue for privacy.
I teach the LSAT and one of the passages is famously about this mania and contends that it was actually rational. You paid a high price for a tulip bulb, planted it, and then sold the descendants which paid off the original price.
The narrative from this article seems to be largely based on Thackeray's book from 1841. Wikipedia suggests the LSAT passage is modern scholarly received wisdom at least in some quarters, but does anyone have better knowledge of the state of our understanding of the history of tulip prices?
Edit: the top comment provided what I had been thinking of. My account above about profits wasn't right, because the trades were never fulfilled. When prices went too high, people didn't honour their contracts and that was that. No one went bankrupt. And as the bulb owners had bought at lower prices they also were fine.
That logic has a glaring flaw, that while tulips might be in short supply, the price is driven by everyone else doing that too, so there'll be a glut of new blubs in the future, so the future price shouldn't be assumed to be the current price.
Anything self-replicating can't hold to "current price best predicts future price".
what happened with the silver rule 7 is different from the tulip craze.
Hunt brothers buy a bunch of silver, lots on margin (bank borrowed), government saw what was happening and literally changed the rules of the market to force them to mass liquidate when they couldn't meet a margin call (all of the sudden). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
Having perhaps only a thin understanding of the Hunt births legacy, I was remembering that as silver was bought up, suddenly formerly unprofitable silver mines were reopened, people who had silver began to sell, etc. Suddenly we came to find there was a lot more silver than the Hunt brothers had cornered and the price crashed.
(But I'll (re)read the history in the Wikipedia link, thank. ;-))
While that was true, that was a negligible effect. Silver mining production stopped because ore purity became (and remains) low. Consider the now times of refiners no longer accepting less that pure silver, sterling, constitutional, 80%, 40% isn't getting refined currently due to a massive backlog (read: demand for silver). Reopening mines (and purifying ore to pure silver) remains unlikely in the near future because of this backlog. The core demand for all this silver currently is AI datacenters. There is also a weird acid shortage that's preventing refining from operating at full capacity too.
Lots of weird things happen with silver right now. Even weirder things when you go digging behind the curtain. Even a simple question about 'how much silver exists' is weirdly obscured (we've consumed {rendered into a state where it would be uneconomical to refine it back to pure silver} a substantial portion of the above ground supply). And with backroom whispers of silver confiscation (to fuel AI-datacenters)... lots of 'boating accidents' are being reported.
The history of silver, and pricing on the market gets muddy and grimy, with a lot of perverse incentives.
What's the pyramid scheme here? The Netherlands are the top producers of tulips today, seems like a sustainable business. A temporary inefficiency in markets does not make a pyramid scheme.
Pyramid schemes are defined by the price and structure. A business that sells knives is a fine business. A business that sells overpriced knives by promising that you can then find someone else to sell more knives for you at an even higher price is a pyramid scheme.
Selling tulips is a fine business. Selling tulips at an insanely high price by promising that the market for tulips will keep on expanding and increasing the price of tulips is a pyramid scheme. (Well, maybe not quite a pyramid scheme, the structure isn't right. But it certainly wasn't a sustainable business model.)
According to Copilot you can get one or two offspring per year from a tulip. So if you spent the price of a really nice house on one of those, it will take you quite some time to multiply the price down into reasonable territory. And even if you stay in unreasonable price territory, an average home, it is one thing to find a buyer for one tulip at that price, it is a very different thing to find a bunch of them. And you are still looking at three, four, five years of tulip growing to get the price down to a tenth of what you paid.
The article suggests people genuinely believed a tulip was, implicitly for the foreseeable future, worth more than e.g. a house. That suggests it was some sort of mania over rationality.
The NFT thing is comparable. I think most of everybody investing understood that they were worthless and that it was a bubble, but there was a remote chance that it wasn't a bubble and even if it was a bubble then you'd still a reasonable chance of making a profit, and even if you didn't make a profit then you'd stand an even more reasonable chance of getting out with fairly minimal losses. Nobody thought there was any remotely high chance of a poor quality rendering of an ape being worth more than a house for the indefinite future. It was just speculation, sometimes poorly and sometimes reasonably measured.
It is called the Greater Fool theory. I know that it is a foolish purchase, it true value is less than what I paid for. But there is a greater fool out there that will pay more.
People in the bubble typically know they are in the bubble. They do not know when to get out. The "even if you didn't make a profit then you'd stand an even more reasonable chance of getting out with fairly minimal losses" is the thing people are wrong about - once bubble is popping, only fastest few can react fast enough.
Is this true though? Take NFTs for again the latest contemporary example - that bubble has obviously long since popped, but those ape NFTs still trade for ~$20k with daily volume in the hundreds of thousands, and a lot of people made a lot of money off it all, some probably still are. At their peak they sold for millions of dollars, but that's on the extreme fringe end. Most traders literally can't afford the heights of bubbles, or anywhere near them, which largely limits the breadth of massive losses.
And we're speaking of modern times where there is this one grand unified global marketplace - the internet, that is most conducive to an inescapably rapid boom-bust. In tulip times there would have been a vast number of relatively decentralized marketplaces with varying supply and demand levels, for a good amount of time after the bubble popped.
That is what I took from economy history and from what economists wrote on the topic. That past bubbles we recognized as bubbles were known to contemporaries. They wrote articles about the situation being a bubble, they knew.
> Take NFTs for again the latest contemporary example - Most traders literally can't afford the heights of bubbles, or anywhere near them, which largely limits the breadth of massive losses.
I dont know whether you could have use your NFT "investment" as a collateral for mortgage or it shown up in company sheet etc. Honestly, I don't know who were traders of NFT in the first place. I think that all in all, NFT were kind of a fringe thing for super rich basically gamblers.
What you do actually get with crypto or stocks or in retail futures trading are people who have put all their money into that stuff. Or even took debt to put their money in. So, they are loosing all of that. Or, they invested into funds that buy that stuff - you invest whatever you have, those money join other peoples money and suddenly fund can buy it. And the last point is important, because some of those funds are things like pension funds who invest into certain stuff automatically.
There are so many of these breeding ponzi schemes every few years. Guinea pigs, "rare" snakes, long distance pigeons, you name it. They are all ponzis regardless of the animal reproducing, with the added benefit that instead of just being part of a financial scam you can also be part of animal abuse, because most people don't give two shits about the animal, mess it up, abandon them later, etc.
It's not clear to me from this announcement. The articles make it sound like all searches now go to ai mode and no more blue links.
But Google's description seems more minimal, like easier to get to ai mode, search box can expand intelligently based on input. Is there any clearer description of the magnitude of the change?
That doesn't change the fact that there isn't enough demand for canned peaches. If there were enough demand for peaches the farmers would sell the peaches, rather than destroy the peach trees.
>Another chilling aspect of drone warfare is that you don't get to surrender. No prisoners are taken.
This isn't true, you can surrender and there are videos of people doing so.
You've perhaps seen videos of drones loitering, waiting a bit, and then moving in when the soldier does nothing. This is often waiting for a surrender sign.
Normally the soldier in these videos is Russian. Why don't they surrender? First they may be shot by their own side if they try to follow the drone.
Second, Russian soldiers have generally been recruited with large bonuses and even larger bonuses paid out in the event of their death, paid to their families. However, if they try to surrender and are shot for desertion there is no payout. Whereas if they stay still and die the Russian government gives their family money.
Human labor is very expensive, and every time we make humans more productive, that makes human labor more expensive, because their time becomes more valuable. Technological growth does that.
The cost of nuclear is primarily in labor and long-term financing, due to the very long lifetime and upfront labor cost. Until somebody has some sort of technological breathrough to decrease the labor cost of nuclear, it's not going to be able to compete. Even decades ago it had trouble, and now it's far worse.
You are talking only about the operations of the nuclear, and ignoring all the high energy process required to mine and process uranium before it can be used as a fuel, and after as waste. But let’s pass this problem to the next generation, they will know what to do :)
You underetimate the energy density of nuclear power. Yes. Uranium needs to be mined - slightly more 3xpensive if you extract it from sea water or recycle the fuel - but you need just one bathtub of fuel pellets to power a plant for 2 years. Solar and wind require more mining. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Nuclear GHG are lowest per UNECE and NREL which do account a lot of factors. Nuclear requires least amount of mining vs any alternative so this argument makes little sense. Nuclear waste can be stored in facilities like onkalo or recycled like at la Hague(now) or Superphenix(in past)
The energy density of uranium is such that the amount of energy required to mine and process uranium is trivial relative to the amount of power produced. The carbon intensity of nuclear power is lower than solar: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/kountz1/
You're arguing that the action had some positive effects and therefore it was ROI positive. That doesn't remotely follow.
And most companies did NOT make the choice to be as accessible as Apple, which rebuts your theory that this was done only for the ROI.
Effectively you're so cynical that there's nothing Tim Cook could say or do that would convince you he was ever acting sincerely. It is comfortable to blame and rage but it is hardly good analysis.
The DMA isn't a privacy law. In this case, the DMA would appear to require Apple to open up all user data to any AI agent. That removes the ability to provide privacy protections.
You can argue Apple should do that, but you can't in the same breathe argue for privacy.
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