BayesWatch
11mo ago
walking back and forth yelling at nobody in particular that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn't care if he went to prison and he was ready to die. He then aggressively threw his jacket onto the floor.
What, do you think, would have happened next. This seems to be leading up to a certain kind of action, no?
BayesWatch
9mo ago
Did the FBI itself actually lie, or was it people associated with the FBI?
BayesWatch
5mo ago
"mowing the grass"
When they go in every couple of years and collapse tunnels, destroy weapons depots, and take out terrorists? What follows from that? Should they not do that?
BayesWatch
6mo ago
Why?
BayesWatch
1yr ago
that there is a case to be made that they are comparable to libel.
Have a disclaimer saying "everything you are about to see is fake". Libel problem solved.
BayesWatch
5mo ago
Well, there is always the verboten topic of the "meme sex". Probably going to get modded again for even uttering the words.
Meme sex? What does that mean? That one sex is more susceptible to cultural programming?
BayesWatch
1yr ago
pattern seems to be that they have an ego problem and lash out in frustration burning all their social credibility
What does this mean?
BayesWatch
1yr ago
Putin can lose the war regardless of his domestic interests, because Putin's domestic political needs aren't what determines military success. No one 'chooses' to win a conflict in order to win election.
That is unless ones survival is contingent upon winning AND there is no question that you do in actuality have the ability to win the war. What determines the military success is Russia's risk aversion towards escalation, and if put in a situation, where Putin thinks that it is worth it for HIMSELF that Russia should risk escalation by making the choice to win (which they obviously can), the the entire world is at risk.
This rush to adjustment is absurd.
(1)
"But it looks like Musk is doing a bad job at Twitter." This is usually a reasonable predictor of failure. However, everything Musk succeeds at looks like an absolutely terrible idea until all of the sudden, it's not. So hold your horses.
In the case of Musk, the claim "it looks like he's running company x like a total clown" isn't good evidence that he doesn't actually know how to run company x. It is likely that he would look like in idiot even in the case that Twitter eventually becomes a trillion dollar company. Everything we are seeing is weak evidence of what the future outcome will be. The nature of market inefficiencies is that they are not obvious, else someone would have already exploited it. Finding major market inefficiencies almost requires you to see things in a way that would seem absurd to everyone else.
This is just the beginning. There are so many things that Twitter can become. I don't understand how people are writing him off so easily. How would you expect a world where Twitter is a huge success to look different than it does right now.
Did you think that Musk was going to do things that everyone thinks are totally reasonable, just as everyone expected based on his clear operational excellence a couple of weeks after buying it, it does really well? That was never going to happen.
I would expect a success to look something like "Musk is a total idiot" to "see I told you he was a total idiot" to "OK, it looks good now but it's just a blip on the radar" and eventually "Ya Musk was successful but it's because of his workers not him. Any rich guy could do this" and "did you hear about his fathers emerald mines?".
I don't understand how you are distinguishing a world where Twitter goes bankrupt from a world that it's absurdly successful. The expectation is that everyone would say that he was an idiot. Everyone would say that he has no idea what he's doing, and eventually people would say how it was obvious in retrospect (and had nothing to do with Musk). I don't understand why you would expect Musk to run his business in a way that doesn't seem stupid. Everything he's done for the last 20 years has seemed stupid. Until it wasn't. And people still think that every new thing he does, at those same businesses, is stupid.
Surprise, when people exploit market inefficiencies it looks stupid. If it was obvious sthen omeone would have done it already. Musk has a long history of doing stupid things that are totally reasonable in retrospect.
I don't know if Twitter will succeed or fail. I do think that if Musk does spend a lot of time at Twitter (at the expense of Tesla and SpaceX) he will make a tremendous return. I do think that there is a very large chance that Twitter will eventually make an absurd amount of money and that when it does so it will look nothing like it does today; I think that Twitter the micro blog platform will serve as a launching point for other more profitable businesses.
Things currently look exactly like we would expect a Musk success to look; they also look exactly like we would expect a Musk failure to look. As of yet we don't have sufficient information to determine whether this is a winner or a total flop.
(2)
Twitter is a far more plausible business than either SpaceX and Tesla. Tesla and SpaceX were terrible businesses, the idea of them succeeding is absurd, but we are so used to their success it seems like Twitter is uniquely terrible; the reality is that Twitter operates on far more fertile soil than Tesla/SpaceX. Tesla/SpaceX were pie in the sky companies that were going to fail with near certainty. Conversely, Twitter is a company that should be worth more, it was expected to be worth more, but has failed to live up to its potential. In a vacuum, Twitter is a far more plausible than SpaceX/Tesla.
(3)
There are a lot of claims that Musk is just some luck business guy. This is absurd. The odds that someone would hit gold so often, on companies that seemed certain to fail is incredibly unlikely. His first 2 businesses Zip2 and X.com (X.com acquired paypal and later rebranded as Paypal) might have been luck. He was a smart guy, but there were lots of smart guys making lots of money like that before the dotcom bubble. So it's impressive, sure, but that's it.
However, Musk then picks two companies that were near certain to fail, just terrible ideas, even if they had adequate funding, which they didn't, and turns them into no only functioning businesses, but implausibly large successes. I don't think you appreciate how absurd this is, and how this, in combination with his two software startups, suggests that there is property of Elon Musk that makes a company likely to succeed. It would be improbable that he was so consistently lucky in not only business, but in what were the WORST businesses; these businesses were terrible ideas. You would have to be looking to loose money to touch them. The nearest competitors to both businesses have some of the largest revenues in the world and don't touch either of those markets. The improbability of succeeding at all these things is implausibly improbable.
He had 180 million before tax, and wanted to start a rocket ship company and a car company, despite not having nearly enough capital to make a weak attempt at either.
There hadn't been a mass manufacturing automotive company since the early 1900's. Starting one should have required a ton of capital and time. You might not know this but Tesla has the highest automotive gross margins of any car company not named Ferrari, despite Musk's silly automation and manufacturing ideas being mocked as the whimsical overconfidence of a fool. He was a complete idiot until maybe 2 or 3 years ago, and turns out all those stupid ideas created the highest automotive gross margins and companies are tripping over themselves to incorporate them into their assembly lines. Tesla has higher gross margins than Toyota (the king of not only auto manufacturing* but of all manufacturing*), Mercedes, and BMW, despite the current standard cost of manufacturing electrics cars currently being $10,000 higher than that of ICE vehicles. This is absurdity upon absurdity.
SpaceX is just an exercise in implausibility and improbability. The odds of its failure were a near certainty. It's rivals were rich governments, and defense contractors that make bids on Trillion dollar government projects. It would have been a near certain failure with adequate capital, which it didn't have, not anything close to it. The majority of satellites in space were launched by SpaceX. The overwhelming majority
If he would have gone out and looked for business that were most likely to fail a rocket ship manufacturer and mass production automotive company would have been pretty good attempts. You need to go back in time 20 years and consider how absurd these companies were. They were terrible ideas. Certain failures. They both succeeded beyond any imaginable best case scenario.
I don't care that Musk makes cool rocket ships and cars. I don't care that he's "disruptive". That means nothing. What matters is that he picks businesses with the most infinitesimal improbability of succeeding. It wouldn't matter if he had founded a company that makes industrial solvents conditional on its success being so incredibly improbable. T
he salient feature of Musk isn't the cool stuff he makes, it's this strange property that lets him take businesses that are certain failures, and to not only make them profitable, which would be absurd, but absolute giants, that dominate the spaceflight industry (civilian and private) and produce significantly higher gross automotive margins than those of not only BMW and Mercedes, but Toyota as well; all this despite the industry standard that it is $10,000 more expensive to make an electric car. FYI up until the recent supply chain woes, Tesla was increasing gross automotive margins each quarter by a couple of percentage points, despite cutting the prices of the cars by an even larger percentage (that's wild).
Musk is simultaneously the most overrated and underrated person alive. He's overrated because people think he's amazing because he makes cool cars and rockets ships, and because he's super "disruptive". Meh. He's underrated because people don't appreciate the degree to which he puts himself into situations with the most overwhelmingly certain probability of total failure and turns them into implausibly massive successes.
There is some special quality that allows Musk to totally defy probabilities, to an insane degree. At a certain point it's not luck. There is no reason to expect that this weird ability would not extend to Twitter. Everything he does is outside his domain of expertise. Twitter is the closest thing to his first businesses were he wrote all the code, so prima facie, if he has any "area of expertise" Twitter would be his only business that is plausibly related to that area of expertise.
I think that he is very very smart. I think that people dismiss this because fanboys on Reddit praise him for silly superficial things like disruption and making cool stuff. What you should care about, what matters for this conversation, and what is actually impressive about Musk is his ability to give the middle finger to the Gods of plausible outcomes. You hear so much fanboys praising him for silly reasons that one would dismiss the whole thing. He deserves that praise and more, but not for the reason that he gets it.
The whole idea that he's a genius because "cars, rocket ships, and disruption" is silly; it is Musk's absurd ability to shift probability's that stands out. By analogy it's like saying that Tom Brady is the best football player of all time because he's good looking. It totally misses the boat.
Everyone needs to take a step back and wait.
BayesWatch
3mo ago
Darwin. You're back! Good to have you!
BayesWatch
5mo ago
But that has nothing to do with Turkey bacon, which is fine.
BayesWatch
5mo ago
The point being argued is whether or not Israel has been seeking a ceasefire - the "mowing the grass" term refers to them accepting a policy that requires going in and doing that every few years.
In response to new escalations. They they make a new ceasefire. Hamas defects. Defection escalates until they mow the grass again. Repeat the cycle. Which is the point. This cease fire, like all cease fires, would be followed by Hamas defection and escalation until they have to go in again.
BayesWatch
6mo ago
Can you explain? Why couldn't a conventionally armed F-16, F-35, or missile without a nuclear warhead reach Iran?
BayesWatch
1yr ago
Then he never really was a billionaire. Theoretical future money you may or may not get from a business deal doesn't actually count.
Well, then most billionaires aren't actual billionaires. The value of of Kanye's stake in Yeezy plummeted absent without his partnership with Adidas (and the fact that no one else would want to fill Adidas's role in the partnership given the stigma around him) . If equity in a company (Kanye's clothing company) doesn't count as wealth then what does? I'm not sure how you would measure wealth, but I that certainly isn't how wealth is normally measured. By your reasoning, there was probably a brief point where Elon Musk was both the richest person in the world and not a billionaire as you define it, given that he didn't, for a decent period of time, have a billion dollars in money outside his stakes in his personal companies.
It seems counterintuitive that a guy who was then richest person ever should yet, according to your unique definition, not be a billionaire. I mean more power to you, but you are using the word in a very strange way.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
More than that, you just cast an invisibility charm, apparate next to world leaders, Imperio them, repeat for people at every locus of control, and wizards control the muggle world.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
severely hampered by a bad but IP mandated ruleset and meaningful lack of content compared to the book/movie story games
How so?
BayesWatch
1yr ago
That makes sense, but then you can't use existing notions of libel to justify your intuitions.
BayesWatch
1yr ago
Not to mention taxing consumption instead of income incentivizes people not to buy a ton of random shit which a lot of our economy is based on.
Why do you think buying random things is a bad thing for an economy?
BayesWatch
5mo ago
Bezos, Musk, etc. have fortunes but that money is not making its way to me.
To the degree that they have cash it is making it's way to you about as much as any other cash, as for their wealth, that they created, they did so by creating lots of utility. I can order something online and have it the very same day. That's awesome. Thanks Jeff. You deserve all that money for doing something so awesome. You earned it! Thanks Elon for the cool cars and internet!
These are things people want (we know this because people pay them for these things).
BayesWatch
5mo ago
That's the first coherent 5D chess explanation for what's going on at Twitter.
BayesWatch
5mo ago
Is your model that Israel is trying to kill as many people as possible? The world would look different if that were the case. There would be a lot more dead people.
BayesWatch
5mo ago
After Israel's war with Hamas is over are they going to deliver a bunch of resources to Gaza and the West Bank to help the development of a peaceful Palestinian state? I am skeptical!
If they thought that this was a viable possibility? Maybe. I think that the hatred is a bit more entrenched than it was in Japan/Germany.
I mean, it's hard to imagine that they won't use resources to try to destroy Israel. When given a choice they have show that that is exactly what they will do.
BayesWatch
5mo ago
ex-Presidents are not held to the same standards as the common man
Of course they aren't, this is priced in, it's standard wisdom. We try not to prosecute the previous president so as not to become a banana republic.
BayesWatch
5mo ago
I think that the prediction markets might be pricing in things like 3rd parties, which a Trump vs Biden poll doesn't account for.
Trump AG prosecute Obama, Biden,Hilary, Fauci etc.. Also people who criticize him. People get violent. Atmosphere of fear, people are afraid that one wrong move will fracture the republic (or try to make that move because it feels virtuous given that your side is right).
Replace generals with Trump loyalists? That doesn't get you all the way there, but it helps. Then you have a choice between an internal military coup to get rid of the Trump loyalists at the top, and maybe they say that it's better to have another term of Trump than to destroy the Republic; they might be right.
You could see how they would think it's reasonable. The first term didn't count because the deep state interfered, and this makes some kind of internal sense, so this would be his first real full term, or maybe the next one, because he will need to use this one to eradicate the deep state.
Ya, I have a hard time seeing any of this happening.
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