zeke5123a
16hr ago
Fair enough. I do think most are jokes (but this one was snark—will try to raise the filter a little bit)
zeke5123a
16hr ago
We disagree. The point of the trolley example is that you must make a choice of killing more or less. What messes with our intuition is that there is an obvious right answer (make sure fewer die) but it feels morally wrong to take action to kill an innocent.
It seems less morally wrong to take action to kill someone that created the situation whereby you must choose to kill more or less.
zeke5123a
19hr ago
Coase made the point that any conflicts in rights are bilateral monopolies. That is, my factory is only a nuisance to your home because your home is there.
It is true that without the police Floyd may have lived that day (or may not have). But it’s also true that Floyd’s actions also caused his death. That is, there isn’t a single party responsible but multiple parties.
zeke5123a
19hr ago
The analogy doesn’t hold. In the trolley situation, the victim is exogenously tied to the tracks. In the criminal situation, the criminal tied himself to the tracks. It was in fact just desserts (ie do bad things and bad things are likely to happen to you)
zeke5123a
23hr ago
I was told by Scott Alexander that the mainstream media doesn’t lie so your post must be wrong.
zeke5123a
23hr ago
And well he should’ve been arrested. Don’t steal from stores; don’t get arrested.
zeke5123a
23hr ago
The biggest difference is that Floyd was human excrement. The world was better off with him not in it. Novak wasn’t committing a crime. Novak wasn’t tweeking from hard core drug use. Novak wasn’t acting fucking wild when the police showed up. Novak doesn’t have a history of home invasions where Novak held a gun to a pregnant woman.
The police’s job with Floyd was to restrain him because he was a criminal who was acting very wild. Notably the police did not start with kneeling on his back. That’s the first video that came out but if you watch the bodycam footage the police tried a lot before kneeling on him.
zeke5123a
23hr ago
Yes a jury with an activist who lied to get on and a jury who knew if they gave the “wrong” verdict their town would be destroyed and their lives at risk. After all Congresswomen showed up to make that point. It was for all intents and purposes a show trial.
zeke5123a
1d ago
Floyd was actually a druggie. So how was the police reaction to him worse?
zeke5123a
4d ago
Why would that generate seethe?
And Nixon famously took us off the gold standard. So the reason we need 250 bill is due to Nixon (ie it is mocking)
zeke5123a
5d ago
It’s prevalent for banks because the pref can be treated as equity for books purpose but debt for tax purposes (properly structured — see TRUPS). So it helps banks pass regulatory capitalization requirements (ie not overly levered) whilst maintaining (for the bank) tax efficiency (ie deductions).
zeke5123a
7d ago
Privatization isn’t merely about internalizing costs (ie avoiding the tragedy of the commons). It is also about spreading bets. Centralized decision leads to big bets; de centralized decisions leads to many bets that sometimes conflict and sometimes don’t. So when you get weird fat tail outcomes you aren’t fully wiped out because some bets were made on the weird fat tail.
But yes privatization is not a perfect system. But to paraphrase the great Half American Winston Churchill: privatization is the worst system except for all of the others.
zeke5123a
8d ago
First they became very valuable before the buybacks. Second some of them have not done buybacks!
zeke5123a
9d ago
It also matters what the stupid thing in fact is. Violent robbery is different from petty theft.
zeke5123a
10d ago
You must have missed the rise of the mag 7 who didn’t pay dividends of any sort for a very long time (some still don’t) and cash was reinvested. Just think of how much more valuable the company would be if they just had done more buybacks!!!!
The idea that “buybacks” is what drives stock prices is a meme created by Dems almost entirely out of whole cloth.
zeke5123a
10d ago
This just isn’t true. The market generally prefers buybacks to dividends due to EPS, etc. However, the theory behind distributions (including buybacks) is that a SH can generate more return with the cash compared to the company. If the company can generate a higher return with the cash, they would not distribute and the SH would enjoy value creation via higher stock price.
By forgoing buybacks and instead spending a bunch on capex, these companies are signaling they can make more on the cash compared to the general market conditions. This is certainly the story these companies are selling as well.
None of this means the companies are wrong. But right now they are being heavily rewarded for investing in AI. If they stopped and started doing buybacks, they’d almost certainly drop in value.
Finally established companies fail literally all of the time.
zeke5123a
11d ago
You do realize sometimes corporations make the wrong choice? Also corporations choose what the market rewards them for. If they cut capex because they didn’t think there would be major improvements, their stock would plummet because it would mean all of their prior capex spending will never make an ROI.
zeke5123a
11d ago
But you’d expect that regardless of the tech improvement. People were going to flood into the “low unemployment + high pay” job raising the unemployment rate of that industry.
zeke5123a
12d ago
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Anthropic isn’t yet public. You can’t easily directly bet against it.
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To short Nvidia would require the belief the hyperscaler will abandon the scaling. That’s really hard to time.
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Are you shorting a bunch of companies that would be killed by AI? P/E for many suggest they are highly overvalued if AI can displace in the next year or so.
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It isn’t obvious hyper scalers are making rational decisions. Apple isn’t hyper scaling (it is leasing). Doesn’t seem like a terrible idea…
No. I provided the support for way he was terrible. I spoke plainly.
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