bluegatty
Nobody knows what demand is going to be for AI in a few years, and that's causing this wild volatility.
It doesn't matter how well you understand the supply chain - that helps.
In many cases, it's literally trying to predict a herd: if the herd steers away from AI based on bad news about it not creating ROI, if the media sours, CEO's pullback, that could cause a slowdown in growth and therefore a crash.
Everything is highly leveraged.
An opaque input on Verizon forecasting model would not result in such a wild variation, they have more predictable operations.
The bulk of the buying is done by people who use modelling to derive the valuation, not vibes.
Because Intel is a household names, it's subject to vibes, but it's mostly math.
Underlying swings is usually some kind of new data point that, because there is so much growth involved, implies greater swings in valuation. So the impact of the news is amplified.
Good gosh. Goldman probably has 50-100 people, inc. maybe 20 Engineers just on that alone, full time.
And yes, Intel can fail 100%. They can absolutely go into receivership and/or be broken up and bought for pennies by other entities.
It would be a strategic dismantling, obviously the government won't allow certain things to happen, but they could 100% allow investors to be wiped out.
Boeing is a bit different as there are no substitutes, but it could go into receivership. Some parts of Boeing will 'always exist' but the corporate entity can fail.
Stocks are valued as the sum total of all the money they ever make.
So $1/year - the are worth infinity.
But due to 'time value of money' (aka some risk free discount rate you can put your money elsewhere at get the same return for no risk, like your bank account), then the infinite sum of those $1 / year is some value.
The problem is when profits grow is perpetually higher than the cost of borrowing - the net present value goes to infinity.
So the P/E ratio is 1/(cost of capital - growth).
So an investor with 8% cost of capital, a company growing at 3% per year woudl have a P/E of 20.
At 7% growth the value is p/e 100x ...
Any growth over the 'cost of capital' and the P/E goes to infinity because the infinite sum of all future cash flows does not converge.
Basically - when there are gigantic swings of things like more than 30% growth for any extended period, it's extremely hard to value.
Verizon is valued as it is because they have an operational lock on a system, they will never grow that much but their returns are predictable.
All this AI stuff is 'inherently wild' - and yes, there is a lot of hyperbole and speculation.
This this is different than Space X which is 'Musk Meme' stuff.
They are full of koolaid but not dumb either.
They are aware of the opportunity cost of their tokens and the their staff are 'laying golden eggs' right now, if there is anyone making use of tokens, it's them.
Even tokens on the floor are probably well spent, given the economic leverage they have.
They are doing the calculation on if the $150K/person is worth it, and it probably is.
Their revenues have exploded, they are unit-profitable, they need to also invest in the future.
And after some time I could not figure out what this is?
Put this part: " building smart glasses that let you talk to your computer without talking out loud. You can mouth words silently and discreetly and the glasses decode them to text at the speed of speech."
right at the top and maybe show someone actually doing that instead of hiding behind cryptic marketing.
Also, the product looks great.
Get your words out of the way 'say what it is'.
Very amazing tech though
There are literally 0 confirmed deaths to due exposure at Fukishima. Zero.
Literally installing solar panels is more dangerous. Most of the are will be recoverable in a few decades.
The wars in Russia, Iran and frankly the entire Iraqi conflicts, and Yemen as well - are all 'Oil Wars'. Without high Oil prices and global dependency - none of that would exist.
If we had followed through with buidling out nuclear from the 1980s - and did it safely, we might have 1 more Fukishima, and also learned from it (there are htings about Fukishima that should have never happened) - and most of the West would have 50-65% base load from Nuclear.
We may very well have had all electric cars 20 years sooner and Oil would be used for jet fuel and a few other things. Maybe not even that, as we can synthesize fuel with electricity already.
Renewables are a long way off from covering the base load.
They are only now crossing the threshold into 'key supply factors'.
The cost of Nuclear has raised in the same way every other civil industrial project has risen.
A pipeline in Canada was supposed to be $8B it cost $30, subways and tunnels go 3-5x over budget because the actors can extract that wealth.
Think of the builders like Nvidia - they are not incented to build something for 'cost plus' - they want to make sure they suck all of the surpluses out they can. Why build for $10B when you can build for $35B?
Contractors are incented to price all the way to the point where it's 'not viable'.
Thats why with oligarchic vendors, you will never, ever have cheap energy. Never. Because the supply chain will take all the surplus. That's why we have competition. Groceries are not like that.
Insurance - this is a debilitating issues stopping nuclear because there's no way to know what the outcome would be. We don't know how the courts would rule on damages if there was a problem.
This is something that has to be socialized, at least on some level.
Farmers and property owners have to 'live with' the fact there are 300f monstrous windmills obstructing their view for the public good. It's minor but very real. In a more extreme case, we have to contend with the fact there are certain cases in which people may have to 'vacate their properties' in some cases. How do we compensate? It's hard to say, but that has to be worked out and made clear otherwise nothing will get built.
Regulations around storage are another problem - governments have not pushed hard enough for material solutions, kicking the can down the road because just leaving the problem sit in pools beside reactors was 'good enough'. Were we to have invested this for decades we would be much further along.
US, Canada and France etc. have pretty good records, though the US situation is too 'open' it could be tightened, and there's no reason we couldn't have already 35%-50% base nuclear energy all over North America.
Ontario does is quite well.
This should have happened decades ago.
The entire world works around the legitimacy of authority.
Yes - the quality varies, and pollsters don't have a high degree of institutional authority.
But some do.
If you want to learn about 'institutional legitimacy' - go visilt Pew.
Pew is an extremely well regarded institution. They are extremely good at polling. Go look at their methods.
They are a long running institution with serious professionals, big budgets, people who really know waht they are talkinga bout.
It's the difference between getting diagnosis from 'a neighbour' vs a 'doctor' but in this case there is no specific qualification.
Some 'respected pollsters' are basically insiders who have been doing it for a long time, with relationships and credibility - others, more institutional.
Check out Pew, they are probably he closest thing to institutional professional as possible.
Political polling is inherently hard - they will be the first to admit.
My point is --> this problem is the most basic and fundamental problem that is the focus of every pollsters existence <--
Asking questions is extremely easy.
Getting a 'truly random sample' is extremely hard.
Trying to factor in those things is 100% of the work, that's what they do, it's their job.
Some are better, some are lazier, some have better data, some are individuals, some are teams so it varies hugely.
When the conditions are controlled they'll have a better idea than otherwise.
Their job is not 'asking questions' it's 'figuring out how to get random samples'.
The entire objective of a polls is to get a probabilistic sample. That's the whole thing. Anything that deviates that ... creates problematic outcome.
Yes - they are aware of that.
- CNN doesn't do polling, they have firms do that
- All reputable firms try get valid results, they have professionals, they know who they are talking to and the limits. What we see in the last 2-3 weeks of the elections are the polls they want to release however, those that err in one direction or another.
- They definitely accommodate for misrepresentation samples - if more of their respondents indicate 'registered republicans' than in the general public they will adjust.
- It's very hard to measure 1) the people that are hard to reach and statistically more likely to not trust pollsters and 2) likelihood of actual voting aka enthusiasm.
- there are plenty of centrist institutions and pollsters
- It's fair to call out Elon because he's making the policies
Twitter is just a bad way to measure anything except for the Zeitgeist of Twitter readers.
The super farms are as important as ever.
Because farms are hyper competitive, it means that the surplus and efficiency gains are not kept by the farmers.
And it's not just 'super farms' - its' transportation that enabled 'regular labour farms' in low cost areas.
So the benefits go to distributors, packaged food makers, grocers and consumers.
In this case, mostly to consumers.
You can see the charts for the kinds of work people used to do vs, now aka we used to all live on farms, now we do all sorts of things.
This is why we're seeing an pushback on globalization, economic optimization doesn't always balance out with strategic considerations aka food supply security etc. and those are hard to put on the books because they feel like a 'non-market force'.
A 'subsidy' feels like welfare, it's really and adjust of the balance of power.
There is very little chance that Meta is doing algorithmic political adjustments at the behest of Zuck.
It's conspiracy theory without a shred of evidence.
As much as Zuck is a maligned actor, that's not how these things work thee.
X - yes, that could happen there, Meta and Google are different kinds of organizations.
Meta is feeding you click bait without bother.
YouTube is feeding you clickbait wit some concern, especially for advertisers.
X is almost entirely feeding you clickbait, and very aggressively amplifying clickbait voices, and heavily promoting those voices Elon wants promoted.
None of them are making up and promoting magical weird memes.
AfD is controversial - it's click bait - the algorithm is feeding 'action' - that's the problem.
Those places exist for billionaires to go to and not pay taxes or for corrupt regimes to park their money - where it will be protected by commercial law of Western nations - but no questions asked.
Switzerland hosts 1/3 of the world's offshore investment - when Nigerians pilfer their countries (billions go missing from the ministry of energy every year) - they end up in places like Switerland.
They exist with the bounty of the 'free money' of that dynamic.
Singapore is also an ant-democratic authoritarian state.
None of those places are 'self sustaining' they can only exist because of that special leverage they have of 'tax evasion'.
It's much the same in some carribean offshore places.
Trains can run on time if you don't have to worry that-that much about the money.
Dubai also provide many 'material advantages' to residents. Same thing.
It's a serious bit of hypocrisy posed by OpenAI here, and it's telling that the AI is much more limited that the narrative of 'AGI' would have us believe.
OAI and Anthropic have massive budgets they should be able to expand, were AGI actually AGI.