lenerdenator

> It's a very typical failure mode for publicly-traded companies. For a CEO to have the incentive to do something that will kill their company, in a few quarters' time—in exchange for a one-off windfall that will boost the stock price, CEO compensation, &c. Short-termism at the "eating the golden goose" level.

If it makes the major shareholders money, then in our system, it is, by default, not a failure mode, but a feature.

The C-suite has a contract that guarantees them generational wealth under most circumstances. They're incentivized by stock options granted to them by the board, which is elected by shareholders. Most shareholders in major companies are institutional investors who are paid to do nothing but make sure that a company going out-of-business is a non-issue (if not even a boon) for their returns. It makes no real difference to the institutional investor if Reddit goes down in price; the people who were gaining in their holdings from Reddit are diversified. The people actively drawing off of their holdings are doing so from asset classes less volatile than equities.

In other words, there's no incentive to keep companies running as a going concern.

The problem is, ultimately, most companies have this mindset. Certainly the ones you've heard of do.

Charlie Munger once said, "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes." There are very, very, very few actual incentives to operate a real infosec effort at most companies. Think about it: how many companies have you heard of going out-of-business because of breaches? If you're like most Americans, you've probably received at least one letter from some company you did business with telling you that their systems were compromised and your data may or may not have been stolen as a result. They'll usually close out the letter with an offer of free credit monitoring for some finite length of time. Since that's useless and a lawsuit is a pain in the ass with no guarantee of benefit, the vast majority of people simply sigh and toss the letter in the trash.

There's no real way to pin identity theft or other consequences on a given data breach, so it's hard to make any sort of claim that way.

At the end of the day, the company has saved money by not instituting best InfoSec practices and red-teaming their software on a routine basis. There are no civil or criminal penalties for them not doing so.

So they don't.

Aviation is a perfect industry to learn from if you are willing to hold IT to the same standard of regulatory scrutiny. You can bet your entire net worth that anyone running anything in the industry would fight tooth and nail to prevent that sort of regime from coming into force.

Medicare could be paying younger people to do the things necessary to prevent them from encountering the healthcare system later on in life. Really, if you're only going to cover part of the population based on age, you should want to cover the part of the population that 1) still produces economic output and 2) has fewer and less-expensive medical needs.

Kind of like how the free models from China were supposed to have utterly collapsed the value propositions of all American frontier labs by now because only a fool would pay those sorts of token prices.

I suspect some of these sentiments are real, but also suspect there's a not-insignificant amount of astroturfing going on.

At least in my personal use - which is admittedly far smaller - I just see the battery as the main source. Solar exists to charge it.

Is the point of the battery not to add 9s with solar?

And therein lies the problem. We need to break the industry of this mindset.

A Nobel Prize is an amazing accomplishment.

It is not a profitable quarter.

That's my bet as well, but not because Anthropic couldn't become Eli Lilly on intellectual/intelligence grounds.

The regulations, liability, and stringency of procedure in pharmaceuticals and healthcare in general simply won't gel with the SV mindset of "move fast and break things"/"forgiveness is easier to get than permission". A University of Missouri pathologist working with Jon Carreyrou put a SV biotech darling in literal prison despite a huge valuation. That sort of accountability is the exact thing founders seek to avoid, not court.

> Data centers cannot just use any kind of water either; it has to be clean enough to ensure the equipment and pipes are not damaged. Tapping into public drinking water is both easier and cheaper than paying the cost of treatment themselves. That means data centers end up competing with communities over their potable water supply.

Makes sense.

I think that tech companies are often insanely greedy when it comes to building these data centers. They're asking for tax breaks they don't need and putting strain on local electrical grids that they expect other people to pay for, all while bringing little in the way of permanent employment increases to the areas where they're built. It's wrong.

That being said, water isn't like electricity, land, or a given year's tax revenues. It exists in a cycle and can be reused. It can be piped in from a potable water source, and you could probably develop a cooling loop that would return it back to the civic supply in potable form.

Other than somebody not wanting to because "b-b-b-b-but what about the shareholders!?", why not build that loop, put its components into mass production, and let economies of scale start cutting the cost while having less impact upon local water districts?

Plenty of those people around here.

This is HN. Asking people here to consider any long-term geopolitical ramifications associated with their economic activity is futile.