Rury

There are more numerous cases where cities happen to be situated fairly close together in Europe, where trains actually are a more sensible travel option, hence the fixation there.

Planes instead make more sense the further you must travel.

I mean, depending on circumstances, it takes nearly the same amount of time to travel from Chicago to St. Louis by plane as it does by car. Something shorter than that and it can actually take longer to get there by plane than it does by car. I mean no one takes a plane to travel to a city that's only 30 minutes away by car - as it often takes longer to get through airport security and board a plane than that.

This mis-frames the actual issue. "Being there for the paycheck" isn't bad per se, it's the morality in the manner of doing such.

There's a marked difference in earning a paycheck via genuinely helping someone else out, as compared to... being apathetic to how that happens, or worse: earning a paycheck via deliberately sabotaging someone else's wellbeing.

Does it matter if they only own a small fraction of the homes? There's some studies that show that in markets where institutional investors do buy, prices typically noticeably increase for houses afterwards, even if they only own a tiny fraction of the housing units.

There's plausible argument as to network effects (e.g. my neighbor is charging that much, so why can't I?), as well as changing unit types to rentals, limiting owner-occupied supply and hence driving up prices.

I mean, I imagine it can be kind of similar in the stock market, where that you don't actually need to buy all a company's shares in existence to bid up a stock's price... you only need to buy enough of the available float to raise prices (sometimes which can be <0.5% of shares in existence).

Yes, I don't think this is a single faceted issue. I've yet to see anyone here mention animals yet... but numerous animals in captivity have also been shown to have far lower breeding/fertility rates. Factors like restricted space, lack of mate choice, and disrupted natural instincts can all influence animal behavior, and I see no reason why the same can't apply to us?

I know for me personally, it's not economic reasons as to why I have not had children, but more a problem of finding the right mate at the right time. Some people just aren't socially fit for each other...

That alone will probably do little, due to contagion effects. Simply finding an index which excludes it might not be enough if it still shares other similar underlying stocks with indexes that do include it.

It's as if the author doesn't understand why various forms of money came to exist, and why there are disagreements over monetary ideas/matters.

That makes sense, but something I've been wondering as of late... what if markets are just being... cornered? Surely, it can difficult to assess genuine market activity from not, no?

I mean I know it sounds absurd for something like the size of the stock market, but all you really need to do is have enough capital to consume floating demand, and you can control prices. Even easier with options, as they give leverage to do this. And arguably this essentially explains the behavior behind stocks like GME, AMC, AVIS, BIRD... heck even Tesla. If you look at Tesla, most of its stock price appreciation happened in 2020-2021, when SoftBank was allegedly controlling their options chain. And since its peak in 2021, when SoftBank stopped, Tesla has underperformed the S&P 500, and would probably would have fallen by now if it wasn't for all the passive inflows from being in the Mag 7. I mean, it could just be coincidence or genuine market activity, but how can we be certain that markets aren't just being cornered by coordinated groups?

Also, the oil market right now doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you compare futures and spot and what analyst estimates are giving even in the best case scenario. But Japan mentioned considering shorting over $1.4 trillion in oil futures, and if they actually are, then suddenly things make a bit more sense...

Which is a poor choice of words by the industry, as this is a semantically specious argument. You are still, in the strictest sense, relying on obscurity - the key being obscure from public knowledge.

The industry should instead say: relying on an obscure process is bad when it comes to security. Better to rely on obscured data. As this is what is meant.

But technically speaking, all of information security is done through obscurity. It is all done via hiding something from being known. To state otherwise, is a misuse of semantics.

Tough to limit to just 5, but I would consider something like the following:

1) Some measure of wealth (beyond GDP)

2) An equality quotient (considering both wealth and power)

3) Hours of work per capita

4) Reported happiness

5) Healthspan / Lifespan / Crime / Safety rates

the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers

This is an assumption that doesn't necessarily have to happen. Some markets remain uncompetitive, otherwise you would see every market collapse to 0 margins if this were always true.

I'm still waiting for people to understand the bias-variance tradeoff, and what it implies for the limitations of AI and terms such as "consciousness".

The game was always going to be systemically rigged, because the "riggedness" is borne from the very nature of how reality itself works. But it seems to me economics doesn't want to actually contend with nature or reality, just ideas which sound more or less true, even if they actually fall flat upon deeper analysis. It's essentially an ideology at this point... if it ever wasn't in the first place.

Odor was an example given by the researchers. And I too doubt it's due to odor, but we can't dismiss odor outright just because it seems reasonable. I mean humans for example are known to have an overall worse sense of smell than dogs, but can actually detect certain specific odors/chemicals at much lower thresholds than dogs (such as amyl acetate). Which is to say, birds may possess an acute sense of smell to certain things that we may not know of yet, even if they're bad in general when it comes to smells.

Another hypothesis given is sunscreen. If women wear sunscreen more often (such as on their face) and sunscreen reflects UV (and birds can see in the UV spectrum), then that could also explain it.

"Austerity" is a red herring. I mean let's be serious, every option is austerity for someone...

Cutting spending, means those who would have received that debt spending take a loss (perhaps their job). Raising taxes means taxpayers pay. Raising productivity or inflating the debt means the young and laborers shoulder most of the burden. Financial repression means capital owners pay. Defaulting means bond holders pay.

This is what people who argue the debt doesn't matter don't understand. Sure it doesn't matter in the sense that we could always just roll the debt forward, and continue to make future generations pay. Just as it's possible to choose over and over again to wine and dine at someone else's expense, against their will.

No the debt always matters, because, it's a matter over who gets to benefit and who has to pay.

They did control for obvious appearance differences (e.g. color & type of clothing, hair length) and morphology (e.g. height/body size), even people's approach. But not more subtle traits such as gait, waist-hip ratio, odor...

One hypothesis suggested that in early history, women may have more commonly caught smaller prey (birds) than men did, and this fear could be evolutionarily ingrained.

NVIDIA execs are now saying otherwise: https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/nvidia-executive-cost-of-ai-i...

Maybe Ed is right even if he's wrong on some things?

the initial investment will pay off once the technology matures

That's not guaranteed. Just look at the Metaverse. It did not pay off.

Yes about commodities, but what you said about surplus is actually wrong. Consumer surplus is at a maximum when there is no differentiation. That is because when producers struggle to differentiate amongst competition, they must compete fiercely on price, so customers often pay far less than their maximum willingness to pay.

And arguably your own statement here doesn't help the view that the industry is not a bubble, as one could argue most LLM models are not substantially different from each other, and most products integrating them are offering similar features. The industry may need to do better at differentiating if it wants to avoid being commodified.

Now do costs.

You're also ignoring the fact that these companies have been shifting things around to make their books look better than they actually are. Here's a good example explaining how META has been keeping debt and lease obligations off its books to fuel growth (and who's at risk if META doesn't pay up):

https://www.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1soent7/if_the_ai_...

People skills are primarily learned through observation, interaction, and modeling the behavior of others who have already have cultivated social skills. You know, from being around and interacting with people. It's not like studying a certain discipline, such a mathematics, forbids you from ever cultivating these abilities.

Mech E. on the other hand, is perhaps the broadest engineering discipline in terms of foundational principles, application variety, and transferable skills. So shouldn't be all that surprising when it comes to hardware engineering.

Does it really say something? If so what? I think the assumption that suppliers are always just catering to whatever the market demands is dubious at best. In uncompetitive markets with strong moats and price inelasticity, there's no need to cater the demands of market, the market must cater to the supplier's demands. And since markets tend to collapse into a few main stakeholders, markets eventually end up this way, rather than the assumed way.

I blame the four horsemen of project management: Brooke's Law, Metcalfe's law, the Ringelmann Effect, and Parkinson's law.

Honestly though, they're not all that prophetic. I mean, you can find widespread instances of each means used throughout human history. Although I would happen to agree that the methods that feed complacency and ignorance are the most effective.

Sort of, but not really. It's more that people get complacent/ignorant when it comes to matters of power (they shy away), so by choosing to let go (a selfish endeavor) - a power vacuum is created, which others seize the opportunity for their own interest. In other words, democracy is not self-sustaining, it requires constant participation by everyone in order to sustain. As soon as people opt out, you have a minority determining things for everyone, and so you're no longer truly a democracy.

new people slow you down, until they do not and become part of the well-oiled machine that is hopefully your team

This is true of training someone new to do a routine job. You spend some time teaching them, and they learning, and then that overhead of teaching/learning slowing you both down disappears.

But it's a little different with knowledge work, as the constant changes and creation of stuff means other team members have to constantly learn what you changed/created if they are to do anything with it. So you never reach this "well-oiled" state, unless you divy up the tasks so that the amount of information you need to deal amongst each other is minimal and unchanged. This principle even holds true in multithreaded programming as to performance, in that constant sharing and changing of data between threads can actually hurt performance in comparison to a single threaded process.

Isn't the need right now the need for more intelligent, context-aware software?

I mean, I feel like we've barely touched on what applications AI could be used in, that we have only just begun to start developing. It's tech that can be used in more advanced robotics, video games (adaptive NPCs, PCG, narratives), better data analysis, search, and more.

I understand the fears and dislikes around AI at the moment, but I think people need to understand that it can never fully replace human labor. At least, I am not concerned about that aspect in the slightest. To me, the real thing to fear isn't so much the tech itself, but our fellow man, and the ways they might possibly use it against others.

People are describing the results when they say models are non-deterministic. Give it the same exact input twice, and you'll get two different outputs. Deterministic would mean the same input always gives the same output.

Right, giving up is actually how these things end up becoming principles/laws. Power centralizes because people become complacent and ignorant on matters of power, so there ends up being a power vacuum, to which others seize the opportunity. But absolute power centralization almost never occurs, due to the delegation that is necessary to wield that power in practice, and so these two forces end up balancing each other. As such, the equilibrium point (or point of maximum entropy) ends up being some type of oligarchy. But anyone can take steps to address this and adjust this equilibrium point, but it takes active work.

You'd consider that a fair comparison? I mean, it's not like the lego inventor is trying to shove legos down kids' throats against their will. These AI promoters on the other hand... are absolutely trying to thrust things against others and their wills, even promoting loss to what some deem a source of their well being (ie jobs). And while I don't know if the lego inventor knowingly & willingly deals with bad actors, I'm not so sure we can say the same for the AI promoters.

It's even potentially worse than that. As a whole, it doesn't even require a majority, if a small amount are complacent or ignorant. And depending on competency, it might not matter if the majority protest anyhow.