bransonf

Bingo

It’s increasingly difficult to find product reviews with search engines.

Massive auto generated content farms take a product name and add loads of AI-generated filler text. Pop in a bunch of banner ads and an affiliate link and they have huge economic incentive to scale these operations.

I’m very pessimistic about the direction the internet is going these days. The AI crisis isn’t going to be sentient AI trying to kill us, it’s going to be a flood of noise over knowledge.

This is great, but (obviously) not purely benevolent.

A vial of analog insulin costs something like $6-7 to produce, probably less at Walmart scale. The distribution costs probably make the net cost somewhere still in the $7-10 range.

That’s a $60-65 or ~90% margin per Vial.

5-10 million or so insulin users in the US, let’s assume Walmart captures 3 million, at 3 vials per month.

$180 * 12 * 3mil ~~ 6.5 Billion.

Current market cap 400B

Lots of assumptions, but Walmart may have just added 2% of market cap per annum by insulin sales?

While reading I really expected there to be some terrible conclusion, like “we accidentally ordered 100 burritos” but nope, just a fascinating burrito program.

Absolutely agree, thanks for this reply. I was cognizant of the foreign policy implications (how would this possibly get implemented globally) but I hadn’t heard or considered your points 2 and 3.

Given how much lobbying I suspect there is, 3 probably isn’t all that distant of a concern. Especially in older industries, say railroads or trucking, I understand there could be a lot of contention.

And as others mention, I think there needs to be a separation of taxation by segments of polluting activities. Would burning fuel in a combustion engine count as taxable energy production? Only power plants? What about agriculture, construction, material production?

> “In hindsight I wish we’d made these other measures of well-being the primary outcome measure,” he said. “However the world — the Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency — doesn’t recognize those measures as valid.”

Am I understanding this correctly? Other academics are critical of the outcome measured, but it was specifically chosen because of recognition by national authorities.

It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed.

No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production.

I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere.

Seriously, what are the current best arguments against levying such a disincentive?

Moreover, if energy were priced correctly (its toll on the climate priced in) would BTC become higher in value? That is, we have a supply, increasing at a rate fixed between the arbitrage of energy and mining efficiency. If energy were to become more expensive, the growth in supply would slow. Assuming demand remains constant or continues to grow as well, the only way for price to go is up.