BahRamYou
3d ago
Diversification seems like a really good idea here, in that it seems to bring the nature of the disagreement into focus. Almost all the replies I'm seeing are related to SpaceX, but Musk has multiple businesses. Is the general consensus that those other businesses are write-offs, and thus SpaceX has all the value? Does anyone actually expect him to crack auto-driving or tunnel boring or robots or making twitter profitable? Is it just the rockets? Maybe the rockets are enough, maybe not, but is any of the rest plausible enough to bet on, or is it essentially fog?
SpaceX is so far the only really "cool" company that Musk has. Maybe Tesla used to be cool, when EVs were new and they could shatter acceleration records while talking big about "saving the earth." Now they just seem normal- lots of other companies make EVs now too, and we've all had a chance to ride in them and see "OK yeah it's pretty just another car." It's decent but no where near enough to justify it being one of the most valuable companies on earth, ahead of other companies that produce way more money.
SpaceX can still trade on that "we're going to mars!!!!" sci fi aspect. But I think their real value is launching spy sats for the military, and maybe eventually ABM missiles like Brilliant Pebbls, or straight up weapons like "Rods from God." For that, they can pretty much name their price to the military and the US taxpayer.
BahRamYou
4d ago
I've always thought of Elon Musk as being essentially the world's greatest tech recruiter. Maybe for a while he was also great at sales at marketing, but like you said, the reception to him has really turned a corner recently- people have started to notice that he never delivers anything like his promises and are openly mocking him. Plus it doesn't help that half of silicon valley now hates him for ideology reasons.
But the one thing he does still have in spades is to attract talented young engineers in spades who will work overtime for sub-market rates. Even at the boring company, which is literally boring and is out in the Nevada desert, they seem to be flooded with talent. Even if most of his ideas fail, it seems like all the talent he has working there should be able to make something worthwhile. It turns out that young engineers really want to work on sci-fi hardware, not manipulating data to sell ads.
SpaceX specifically might pay off if it can land a big military contract. Get the government to pay him an oversized for providing a service that no one else can do.
But yes I've been thinking for a while that Tesla is in trouble... vaguely considering buying some puts there. They've been in this game a long time now, still selling very few cars, and are now getting tons of competition from foreign car makers selling good EVs for cheaper prices.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Well it's always opportunity cost. "I can't afford to give away my house for nothing." Why not? It costs nothing, right? "Because it has a huge mortgage attached, and also it would be insane to give away something worth that much for nothing." "Oh, so you could give it away, you just don't want to?" "yes."
I think the finances of plantation slavery were also a bit weird to modern eyes. when cash was low they borrowed money, since selling slaves was tough. When cash was high they bought more slaves, since it paid better than paying off debt. I don't pretend to understand the business decisions of the time. Anyway I think we agree- this was a business decision, they weren't just giving up on something worth nothing.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Yeah but... that's with all sorts of legal and ethical rules.
Ask yourself. If there were no rules. You could own a slave. Human chattel. Do whatever you want. Do you really not think you could make money from that?
BahRamYou
7d ago
Thanks for linking the anecdote, I hadn't heard that before.
Presumably that debt was being serviced by the income of the land and slaves, no? In modern terms, it's possible to own a business (with income) that also has a debt. If you inherit that business, you also inherit the debt. It doesn't mean the business was worth nothing, even if you don't have the cash to pay off the debt instantly.
I agree that Jefferson's situation was wierd and maybe a bad example for the economics of slavery, since it seems like he was more concerned with other things like art, politics, etc and didn't really care about money. On the other hand... maybe that's the point? The guy was so rich, and from such easy money, that he never had to care about money at all. He could afford to throw away money on things like turning Monticello into his own personal architectural vanity project, while also being president, and it just didn't matter. Slavery was profitable.
BahRamYou
7d ago
like you said, Haiti was hell on earth. It didn't have to be that bad. I really think the US could have done it better, even under the rule of the old south. certainly the modern US could handle it better. But instead we just... let it rot because it's not our country and we have no responsibility.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Jefferson is admittedly a complicated case. The man spoke grandly about human liberty, but also spent money like water and needed slaves to pay his bills. I can't say for sure that he wanted to free all of them. He freed a few, while the others were sold to pay his debts. You can't say it's "straightforward" when we're talking about human slavery here, plus a very large amount of money for the time.
Regardless I think it goes to my original point- slavery was not on its way out economicacally, since those slaves were worth such a large amount of money. If you really want I'll link some books on "yes slaves were worth a large amount of money."
BahRamYou
7d ago
LOL i love the way you phrased this. As an Expat American it's incredibly annoying that my home country is still stuck on SMS messaging, and they just take that as a default ("texting") to where it's hard to even describe anything else to my friends back home.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Oh ok cool. Thanks for clearing that up. I mean, you didn't really make any logical argument or cite any sources but you're here on the internet so I'm sure you're a trusted authority figure. I trust you. All those southerners selling slaves at high prices were just idiots I guess. There's just no use for a free labor source, might as well just kill them all.
On another note, do you have any advice on where I can hire a good gardener? I've been paying a Mexican guy, but I feel weird paying a guy who's obviously here illegally. I'd like to hire an American, but the going rate is way too high and there's just no way I can afford that.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Weird how sweatshops, prison labor, and human trafficking are still things then.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Maybe it's to filter out guys with low social skills who don't know how to read non-verbal social cues?
Also: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y6NWDBFo0gQ filters out guys like that
BahRamYou
7d ago
The long-term picture isn't much better. Since the end of the gold standard in 1971, gold has outperformed U.S. treasuries. Simply buying and holding a lump of rock is better than holding the debt of the U.S. government. And the government was actually in good financial health for most of those years, unlike now.
Gold Bugs love to talk about the price of gold since 1971. But the performance really depends on what year you start in. Turns out 1971 was an exceptionally good time to purchase gold, as it had just been deregulated and could be bought for like $50 an ounce because no one was paying attention. By the end of the decade it had already boomed to a price similar to what it is now, like $2000 an ounce. And there have been several boom and bust cycles since then. It's (ironically) not really a long-term, buy-and-hold investment, but something that can maybe save you during a big market crash but can just easily tank. Treasuries have outperformed over almost any period other than starting in 1971.
Incidentally- treasuries right now have a great interest rate and are still rock-solid safe. This might be the time to just park your money in bonds.
BahRamYou
7d ago
When America was founded, slavery was on the way out: turns out it wasn’t that profitable of a system for tobacco farming, and sugar couldn’t be grown in the continental US. Many northern states abolished slavery and then the south followed suit. If there was a time for the peaceful national abolition of slavery it was then.
I've always heard that as the conventional wisdom, but I wonder if it's really true? If you put aside all morality and politics, it seems odd that they couldn't find some profitable use for literally free labor. Especially in the rural south, where a natural resistance to both the sun and malaria would have been huge. Maybe tobacco farming would have gone out, but they could have grown something else, with black slaves working on peanut farms or whatever. And of course house slaves would have been useful anywhere.
More empirically: Jefferson famously tried to free his slaves on his death, but he couldn't afford it. The cost was too high. If slavery was really "on its way out" it seems odd that the price of slaves was still so high.
It seems more like this is a "just so story" that we tell to simplify things. But it didn't have to be. Slavery was always a choice. They did it because it was profitable, but only for a select few, and they were mostly growing things like tobacco and sugar that did nothing of any economic use. But there was also no particular reason it had to end, except that people started to feel bad about it. It had endured for hundreds of years, and could have gone right on into the present day if people hadn't developed a conscounce about it.
This is the first time I've ever heard about that "Knights of the Golden Circle" thing. Kind of a big hole in the American education system I guess. But I can see why they leave it out... it brings up too many awkward questions. Why didn't the US take over the caribbean? It would have made sense. Both for money/realpolitik (those caribbean islands were producing crazy amounts of cash, much more then the US did for a long time) and arguably would have been better off ruled by the US instead of distant European monarchies or "Ok you're free now" suddenly putting slaves in charge of everything, like Haiti. But instead we just took Puerto Rico and nothing else because... that's just the way it is, I guess.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Why do we even need to build AI if the market is this 500IQ superhuman that knows everything instantly and can never be beaten? ... putting aside all those people who do beat it...
BahRamYou
10d ago
I swear to god e-girls are the real mind killer, not politics.
This for real. You know how there are some men with extremely skewed brains where they're brilliant at logical reasoning but terrible at dealing with people? E-girls are like that but in reverse, and they've weaponized it to take people's money like a modern day highwayman.
BahRamYou
13d ago
hmm yeah currency trading there would probably the most direct bet. I'd expect Russian gas sanctions to continue even after the war ends though, and also there's all sorts of other factors that impact gas prices.
BahRamYou
13d ago
when you own your premises, you’re a real estate company in addition to doing whatever else you do.
You say that like it's a bad thing! Real estate in major American cities has been one of the most profitable investments of the last 50 years!
A big business like Red Lobster could even do some weird things to manipulate the market. Like
- open a business that attracts a lot of loud, low-class customers to lower the value of nearby real estate
- buy up all that real estate
- close the red lobster and start a fancy coffee shop or art gallery instead
- profit!
BahRamYou
13d ago
Not any one particular event, but a lot of little things add up. And I think a lot of people still think of this as being a linear conflict defined by territory like a football game, instead of an attritional conflict that will be decided when one side suddenly breaks down like the end of WW1.
Anyway, most internet people seem to just want to talk and not actually do anything, and I don't think the average EG grain commodities trader really pays attention to Ukrainian recruitment numbers.
BahRamYou
13d ago
Is there any way to "short Ukraine?" I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Ukraine is doomed, or at least they'll be forced to sign a peace deal that gives up some territory. Is there a way to bet on that for significant money (more than just play money on prediction sites)? Apparently Ukraine does have a stock market index, https://tradingeconomics.com/ukraine/stock-market but it seems uh... sketchy. Maybe buy into the Russian stocks, if that's even allowed?
BahRamYou
14d ago
I think it says something about us that everyone is so interested in aliens, to the point where any kind of speculative "maybe it's aliens" generates insane media hype. And people are willing to support millions of government research funds for this stuff, even though it's unlikely to ever pay off and has no practical purpose, and most people don't generally support that sort of impractical academic research.
This is not an original idea but- are "aliens" taking the place of religion in our society? It feels more "scientific" even though it's still mostly just faith, and you can choose whatever sort of alien-belief suits you best, and hang out with other believers to create art about it.
BahRamYou
14d ago
I've read some of Saberhagen's books. And yeah, before it was "The Dark Forest Hypothesis" it was "The Berzerker Hypothesis" so he should get some credit for coming up with it first. But they're very silly space opera books, lots of action with basically no deep thinking. They're not meant to be taken too seriously, so I can see how people slept on the idea.
Still, as crazy as it sounds, there is a certain elegance to the idea- it solves the "it only takes one" problem. Like, maybe most aliens just don't want to expand, or don't want to build megastructures, or are using tech that is somehow hidden from us. That's all fine, but you'd think there'd be at least one similar to us so that we could detect it easily. But in the same light, maybe 99.99% of aliens are peaceful, but there's just that one group of assholes who built berzerker probes and wiped out everyone else (maybe including themselves).
BahRamYou
15d ago
good advice, although to be fair i wasn't that serious about working there. It was a spur of the moment thought while I was hanging out at the bar.
BahRamYou
15d ago
But I want to talk about jobs. It's time for a nice change of pace. Back in the day, to get a blue collar job you walked in, physically, to a blue collar workplace and asked for one. It's true; ask the old men and they will tell you. And you can in fact still do this; I reckon any one of you can find a job within biking distance of your house if not walking distance by asking around enough, in maybe an afternoon's effort- granted, probably a job as, like, a dishwasher, but the boomers don't regale you with stories of walking into a job as CEO of the company
I actually did literally get a job as a dishwasher that way as a teenager. But it helped that, (a), someone else I knew worked there, so he had already vouched for me and told me how to ask and (b) the place itself was such a shitty job that no sane adult would want the job. They relied on teenagers to young to have any other options and, uh, recent ex-cons.
More recently I tried to get a bartending job this way. The bar was crazy busy, the staff was all obviously overworked and exhausted. I asked them if I could apply. They seemed open to the idea, but they were just shift workers, the actual manager and owner were nowhere on site. They took down my name and info, but never called me back. I have no idea what happened to my "application," it seemed just the same as an online app where you throw your app into the ether and it disappears without a trace.
I actually think people have plenty of grit. See: all the people hitting the gym every day, or training for marathons, or grinding out thousands online of hours to try and launch their streaming career. It's just that "grit" sucks, and the modern world makes everything so unpleasant and unnatural that it leaves people feeling confused and isolated. Most of us aren't cut out to be pushy telemarketers who will ignore all social cues and relentlessly press for what we want.
Their brand is nowhere near as strong as it was 10 years ago. Rivian is the new "cool" EV company, while Kia, Hyundai, Ford, and GM offer perfectly good normie alternatives. They had the dream of being apple, selling for twice the price of anyone else, but I don't see that happening.
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