ProjectArcturis

I wonder what was going on in her life that made her say, "I want to spend the next 43 days rowing alone across the ocean."

The timing doesn't matter because monopoly -> enshittification was always the plan. Hence FAANG were valued with the expectation that they could turn the profit knob at the right time.

I would have liked the essay more if PG had actually engaged with AOC's claims. He just does some math and shows that exponential growth is fast.

What did the founder have to do to keep growing at 93%? Good solid business fundamentals and identifying a new solution can get you some growth. But eventually you've done all that and the only way to continue growing is extraction -- buy out your competition and raise margins, outsource your workers, enshittify your user experience. THAT is why no one "earns" a billion. The last $900M pretty much always requires using your resources in clever but unethical ways to extract money from customers and financial markets.

You seem to be confusing "listing" - the stock exchange where a company chooses its stock to trade (i.e. NYSE, AmEx, Nasdaq) with "indexes" - a list of stocks that is often the basis for index funds.

The Nasdaq 100 is not the same as Nasdaq. A company can be in many indexes but only one listing. There may have been competition for the listing but there is not competition between indexes for inclusion.

FYI you can get Money Stuff delivered by email without a Bloomberg subscription.

I'm astounded that they've been able to keep that domain name.

Sure didn't seem like it.

It's not just Schwab, there aren't any options traded on BIRD. And shorting is not a guarantee. First you have to find a borrow, which if it's available probably costs >1000% annualized today. Then you have to be able to maintain that borrow, even if BIRD doubles from here.

Based on the price action today, this seems like a short squeeze.

Yes this would defeat it, but standard practice is that you can keep betting a couple rotations into the spin. The reason for that is that some people believe the croupier can target his shot to some extent. (I don't think it's farfetched that someone who spins a ball 8 hours a day could get above chance at targeting.)

You neglected to mention: - It was company policy to keep coffee excessively hot (180-190 degrees Fahrenheit, vs 140 or so for coffee brewed at home). This was to make customers drink it more slowly and request fewer refills

- Other customers had suffered similar burns, and McDonald's knew about it and did not change the policy

McDonald's, then, was willfully and inevitably causing injury to random customers in order to save themselves a few cents in coffee.

In light of those facts, I think a $2M verdict was too low, and the executives who decided to continue keeping the coffee that hot should have been criminally charged with reckless endangerment.

Not very smart itself. How sad to reduce the whole thing to ignorant stereotypes

It's hard to call it an ignorant stereotype when it is the explicit policy of some police departments not to hire smart people. And to go to court to defend that policy.

https://abcnews.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story...

There are easily hundreds of compounds that can reduce beta-amyloid in vitro. This is a decade-old nothingburger.

I don't think that's obvious at all. I think there are obviously a mix of wars where the outcome was inevitable, and where it was decided through a series of one or more battles.

In WWI, for example, if Germany had won the battle of the Marne, they would have captured Paris in 1914 and likely (eventually) have won the war.

Sovereign like Putin.

No, there'll always be a new trick.

Do you think their lives would be substantially better if they had been arrested and sentenced to lengthy prison terms?

Alcohol can have a well-documented destructive effect on people's lives. Should it also be made illegal?

It's weird that people argue it's better for you to consume extra burned plant material to get to the same level of high-ness. If it's stronger, people just use less.

Continuing the analogy, it does mean that they can blame the alcohol and not, say, rohypnol for their outcomes.

Low European salaries are other reason why brain drain fears are overblown.

Somehow, the "Everything is Corrupt" folks always end up supporting the most corrupt president in our history.

Horizon Europe funds everything — physics, engineering, social sciences, climate, agriculture, digital technology, space, and health. And its budget is still less than 1/3rd of the US NIH budget focused solely on health.

The real risk of drain is people leaving their fields of expertise to never return.

That is happening right now, all the time! Especially in the biomed field! Many, many PhDs spend 5-8 years getting their degree and receiving minimal pay, then 4+ years being nomadic postdocs, also making terrible money, only to eventually arrive at the end of the road and realize they have to do something completely different.

It is unsustainable for every professor to train 10 PhDs in their career, because there aren't going to be 10 professorships (or even 3) for those PhDs to fill. Funding has to grow at the same exponential rate as the number of researchers. It did, from roughly 1950s to 1980s, as the university system expanded to accommodate the Boomer generation. It has slowed since, and the PhD to professorship pipeline got longer and leakier. It's doing a tremendous disservice to the bright, well-intentioned young people who join PhD programs.

many countries are increasing funding substantially (e.g. [1]).

This illustrates exactly my point. Canada is planning on spending up to CAD$1.7B over 12 years. That is equivalent to USD$100M per year, or 0.3% of the NIH 2026 budget. Maybe if Europe does something similar they can get to 2%!

The US is also no longer safe

I agree that Trump's regime has made the US a less welcoming place for foreign scientists, and that budget cuts mean less research will be done. What I disagree with is the idea that "brain drain" is a significant threat to US science. We simply have such an incredible oversupply of biomed PhDs that we should welcome the prospect of other countries absorbing the supply.

Pretty good for the professor, not so good for the students.

No, the US still spends 5x what Europe does on biomedical research, measured as a percent of GDP.

Well, he might be planning to set up a lab. Probably wouldn't, though, statistically.

This kind of Level 1 analysis misses what is really going on. "Brain drain" is not really a concern.

There is a tremendous glut of talented biomedical researchers. We have been overproducing them for decades. Even before the cuts, it was incredibly hard to go from a PhD to a tenured professorship. 5-15% would achieve that, depending how you measured.

The cuts have made things worse, but European/RoW funding is even stingier. It's not like there's a firehose of funding drawing away researchers. There may be a few high-profile departures, but the US is still the least-bad place to find research money.

We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.

1. Sure they will! It's a prisoner's dilemma. Each individual company is incentivized to minimize labor costs. Who wants to be the company who pays extra for humans in junior roles and then gets that talent poached away?

2 Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, I think this is a good take. It was a combination of a very steep runup, and then the needle to the balloon was to take the possibility of a truly unhinged nominee off the table.

You would think, if banks did have a huge short position, they would have announced large losses in Q4 after metals mooned. They did not.