Arn_Thor

Also, the indoor park "tour" voiceover refers to "Thinking Machine supercomputers", which I never figured were a brand name until today!

Look, we are shareholders, but I showed how so much of the value generated by increased productivity never reaches listed companies, let alone their dividends. THAT is the key argument

In the US, public and private pension funds directly hold about US$9.9trn of corporate equities, out of US$83trn of the publicly traded market (ignoring non-public wealth extraction which I also mentioned). That is about 12%. After allowing for pension exposure through mutual funds, we might be nearer to 20%. The Fed’s corporate-equity category also already includes ETF shares, so you can’t simply add “ETFs” on top without double-counting.

You've ignored the broader point about distribution. The Fed show that the top 1% own about half of corporate equities and mutual fund shares. So saying that shares are held by “billions of ordinary people” is quite wildly misleading.

My point wasn’t that ordinary workers own no shares through pensions or retirement accounts. But it is a limited and very unequally distributed channel for returning productivity gains to labor. It doesn’t make “shareholder profits” equivalent to “workers’ pensions.”

The key is that the wealth generated by workers makes its way into private pockets at many stages along the chain. Much of it never even makes its way to shareholders, neither through stock value increases nor dividends.

The problem is, if you deviate too far from the index, your head is on the chopping block. There is no incentive to outperform the index, and every incentive to not meaningfully underperform it. Anyone bought into an index fund expects exact index performance (whether or not the prospectus technically allows for deviation).

So any manager who values his pay check will say "the index may go up, may go down. The investor's paper wealth may increase or decrease. That's not my problem! And in a market like this, I risk underperforming if I don't own this asset. So of course I'm going to buy it!"

fine, strip out the words "surplus value" and "reasonable" if they truly blind you to the point.

Let's say, "If we had a tax system that captured a greater share of the increase in profits resulting from higher productivity (which mostly goes offshore and does not in fact "generate more jobs"), then we'd have no problem at all funding the pension systems, and much more."

I'd be in line to buy today!

I was going to be glib and say "a thimbleful" but let's really look at it.

Firstly, pension funds hold some share of stocks, but far from all. Second, pension funds hold a share of a pie that's not all that came out of the bakery. The bakery made a lot more dough, but much pie was spent (horribly mixing metaphors) to buy assets like property and private investments. So in reality pension funds hold a fraction of a fraction. Third, pension funds invested in equity is a replacement for the old pension systems of yore where companies were forced to set aside money and invest smartly to fund guaranteed income pension plans. They don't have to do that anymore. Instead they contribute to a 401(K) or similar in other countries, which lowered their costs and reduced company risk. For listed companies, those savings went to the shareholders, of which pension funds were just a fraction of a fraction.

I hope this illustrates that we, the salaried workers, see only a small fraction of the value created by increased productivity.

You've been told a lie. Productivity has increased every step of the way even as populations shrink and the elderly cohort grows. Most of those productivity gains, i.e. the added value produced by each worker, has gone to shareholders' profits. If we had a reasonable tax system that captured more of that surplus value (which mostly goes offshore and does not in fact "generate more jobs"), then we'd have no problem at all funding the pension systems, and much more.

7. Index fund managers are not incentivized to exclude a SpaceX from their indexes. (?)

Correction: index funds don't have a choice. They must follow the index, and so must buy the stock.

side effect: they'll have to sell other stocks, pushing their prices and weighting in market cap weighted indexes down.

Passive investors are unable to rapidly respond to these types of changes because liquidating portfolios will incur capital gains taxes. (?)

For some active investors, yes. For passive investors (say you through your employer's pension fund), the tax isn't the problem. It's that the market has such a short time to adjust the price of these companies before indexes are forced to include them--and so might buy them at wildly inflated prices. Then, not too long after, the early investors can sell at still-high prices as soon as their lockup periods end. It's a massive transfer of wealth from pension funds and index investors to the early investors in those companies.

If they (and the rest of us for that matter) weren't burning so much of it, there'd be more left over for other uses.

(with the obvious caveat that less demand means less production, which would mean there wouldn't be a lot of surplus. But in a world where we don't burn so much oil, it probably wouldn't be worth either party closing the Strait anyway...)

I was a dedicated Claude user but in March/April I started using GPT5.5 on a new project that Claude had tried and failed to execute successfully. GPT knocked it out of the park, and was able to do it within my subscription allocation of tokens. I'd recommend giving it a go at least. Something like OpenClaude can let you use the Claude tools you're used to

The only way that'll happen is if deep-pocketed corporate buyers exit the market almost entirely, and therefore stop being the highest-available bidder. Even in a scenario where it's obvious to everyone that consumer-side hardware is a viable option, it's still not in the big AI providers' interest to abandon the effort to push/pull everyone to their cloud. They'll keep buying as long as there's liquidity to fund them and the will to do so, and we're a ways off that collapsing. I'm quite pessimistic. Prices will probably come down in the next 12-18 months, but not to where they were before this

Maybe it's bad to let people bet on anything, huh

This was news to me. Very sad news indeed. I see now they were bought by Canva. That explains it...

Yes, looking at things from the same angle every time and not really representing the alternative view is indeed a crusade

_Something_ motivates them, though. They have been on a wild anti-solar bend the last year or more. Dozens of articles, all with the same anti-solar NIMBY bent

The Guardian continues its anti-solar crusade. For some inexplicable reason

Roboto Mono, apparently

I'm using the drives, not hoarding them, so normal wear and tear is likely to be a problem before helium depletion enters the picture

Considering my helium-filled hard drives a strategic reserve now

For this particular person, the inordinate factor is not the frequency of flights, but the distance: 40 flights in 2019, mostly from the US to Austria via Frankfurt. Now, there are some jobs that really do require such travel (though the business should probably consider hiring locally even though it might be more expensive?), but probably fairly few. The individual doesn't show flying stats after 2021, but presumably the work did get done even in the pandemic years when they couldn't fly as often.

Understand this is both an individual and systemic critique. We have the internet. Much of the travel you describe can and should be done remotely. The top 1% of flyers account for 50% of emissions. I would argue most of that probably is unnecessary technically, but there is both a push and pull factor from people expecting some things to take place face to face.

We're adults, we can keep many things in our minds at one time: We should all reduce flying. Regular working people should not be shamed for taking a holiday and flying there. The most frequent fliers for work should make a personal effort to reduce their flying. And companies, conferences, etc. should work much harder to facilitate remote participation and reduce stigma around it, as well as encouraging other modes of travel. Governments should improve alternative solutions such as rail and high-speed rail.

Couple of things: 1) NO ONE is suggesting any one forego flying altogether, or skipping their once-a-year overseas vacation or periodic family visit. 2) THIS level of flying is not normal and is exactly the kind of harmful behavior people have in mind when they complain about frequent flyers. 3) Whinging about summits and Taylor Swift is just a bad faith red herring argument. Obviously less flying is better, no matter by who. To the extent it's related to the topic at all, it bolsters the case for less air travel.

"Do 99% of city-builder players care what shape the corner radius of the intersection has? Most likely, no."

Finally, I am part of the 1%!

Danish and Norwegian are not linguistically Germanic

Where do you get that notion? My education (and some googling to refresh my memory) has Norwegian, Swedish and Danish classed as "North Germanic" according to comparative linguistics. That is one subset of the West Germanic languages which most of northern Europe speaks.

It’s funny but it’s still AI slop. It also loves to add electrical boxes everywhere

Second the Cambridge Centre for Computing History

Well, you CAN, yes, but then nobody knows what the hell you're talking about and at that point why should we even care

This doesn't refer to the double-paned outer window, the pressure window. It refers to the innermost protective pane, the "scratch pane" that keeps greasy fingers and portruding camera lenses from reaching the two "real" windows. It's the hole in the scratch pane people are asking about

Yes, I'm not including deaths in the colonial periphery. That's a rather different dynamic to the domestic question. Your criticism of this simplified view is a valid and welcome addition to the conversation, though.

The West's post-colonial exploitation and suppression of the global south does strike me as a feature of unfettered capitalism more than the political systems "back home".