throwaway-8c93

The real problem is that governments around the developed world gave up on building affordable social housing since the 70s.

AirBnB investors just highlight the symptoms.

I'm one of those that save/invest 70% of their take-home income. It's not about frugality at all - I would gladly pay for an increased quality of life - but it's simply not on offer. Past a certain threshold, a threshold well within the reach of western upper-middle-class households, the exchange rate between money and the quality of life becomes essentially zero. What's left are pointless status seeking games, scams and useless trinkets. The Bible's Book of Ecclesiastes describes it poignantly:

> I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure[...] Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun

A large reason is likely to double dip on the EV subsidies. Scoop 200,000 x $7,500 subsidies under the name 'Ford', then another fraction of 200,000 x $7,500 as partial owner and supplier under the name 'Rivian'

FSD occasionally requesting driver to take over in genuinely difficult situations would be completely fine.

The videos in the Twitter feed are nothing like that. The car makes potentially catastrophic blunders, like driving straight into a concrete pylon, with 100% confidence.

Propulsive landing has been achieved routinely and with perfect precision since the 60s - Apollo's lunar modules, Lunar surveyor, Lunokhod rovers.

The question has never been about the feasibility of landing the booster stages - what has been questioned is whether it's worth doing. The fuel used up during landing is fuel that cannot propel the payload. The landing might fail. The effects of thermal and material fatigue are not well understood. The transportation, refurbishing and QA are unlikely to be cheap anyway.

There's a lot of corporate fraud like this, even in countries that have a reputation of being well governed.

I personally saw a respectable Finnish company leeching on government innovation funds, asking employees to log their working hours under a specific project. The kicker - nobody in Finland was working on that project, in reality it was developed in another country.

The article echoes what General Jim Mattis commented on the topic of leadership in one of his interviews - (paraphrasing) decisions take an hour to make, the rest of the day is spent crafting the message to ensure there's no room for ambiguity or misunderstanding.

Low fees - but only once you're in the crypto ecosystem.

If you're after dollars or euros, the on-ramp and off-ramp at exchanges adds a comparable, if not higher layer of fees than existing payment mechanisms, kind of defeating the whole purpose.

The trained model is a guarded treasure. There's a reason why very few ML papers publish their trained models; or Deepmind/OpenAI never releasing the resulting models - it's expensive to train the network, but cheap to use it afterwards. You don't want anyone unauthorized to get their hands on it.

There are several reasons it's mostly a China-operation. Interestingly, it's a textbook example of deficiencies being the competitive advantage.

#1 - China's electricity grid is not very efficient at distributing, which leads to some areas with constant surpluses, directly translating into extremely low electricity prices in those areas

#2 - almost all computer hardware is manufactured in East Asia. Chinese miners don't buy their hardware on the open market, they snatch underhanded special deals with the manufacturers who're then deeply sorry about their "unexpected manufacturing shortfalls"

#3 - Crypto is essentially banned in China for private citizens. Chinese Communist Party is actually quite happy about the mining though - when you zoom out a bit, it's just a money pipe from the rest of the world (mainly US) to China. It also funds bootstrapping of their silicon industry

#4 - crypto in general benefits from weak rule of law. Try running a crypto mining operation in France - the tax collectors will be knocking on your door after the first mined block. Corruption and nepotism is absolutely endemic in China - "sharing" a bit of the mining profits with the local officials has a high chance of skirting the rest of the tax burden

Expressing the energy consumption in electric vehicle mileage makes the numbers more tangible. 500kWh is ~3000 kilometers of range for a mid-sized EV, or enough to move a family across the whole continent. Just to shift BTC from one pocket to another.

In other words - different business environments create different equilibria.

In Chinese/Soviet/1920s America equilibrium, with an insatiable demand for construction work, the profit maximizing behavior is to be done quickly in decent quality, then hop on to another project.

In the modern western equilibrium, where projects are few and far between, the profit maximizing behavior is to extract as much revenue as possible from any single project, employ lawyers, ask for extensions, attempt regulatory capture, create an opaque chain of subcontractors, etc. - as it's not clear whether there will be any new opportunity to do so in the future.

The reality is even worse. The article depicts the operators as middle-men piggybacking on the tech expertise of vendors like Ericsson or Nokia. Unfortunately, the vendors are subject to exactly the same pressures.

The whole industry is in a deepening downward spiral. Outsourcing and subcontracting is rampant, layoffs left, right and center. The combination of non-functional requirements that would make even senior FAANG fellows dizzy - left to be done by stressed out graying veterans or naive greenhorns, who leave the industry after 2-3 years for 50-100% raises elsewhere for the same skillset. Due to the monopsony power of the large operators, the vendors barely break even on their deliveries. There's no institutional knowledge buildup, nobody to take up the baton after the veterans retire, the vendors gave up pretending they care about being a nice place to work. If you're a techie, stay away from the telecom industry.

Panama has full right to set its own tax rates. Developed countries have full right to deny Panama's corporations from entering their markets, and even forbid their own corporations from dealing with their Panama counterparts.

Or, more realistically, the developed countries will pull any of the dozens of levers to make non-cooperative countries' life miserable.