bartart

Do they have any specific reasons? Haven't heard that sentiment before so curious to learn something new

That’s very interesting, so thank you — how do you handle if the eigenvectors change over time?

I don't know that these are very good examples. The box office and newspapers have been declining for years. Companies like Apple of course have a higher revenue relative to US gdp because they can sell their products with ease to rich people all over the world, not just in the US.

It is also completely unsurprising that the internet's most viewed websites is unchanging as the industry has matured, following the pattern of every industry since the industrial revolution.

And the structure of US elections completely discourages third parties, and this is not a new thing. In Europe things are much more dynamic -- France's current president founded his own party and then won the presidency and legislature like a year later. It's also probably good that people are living closer together, ideally as densely as possible, from an environmental perspective.

I am curious, is putting up with the occasional self-obsessed ceo not worth it?

For example Tesla has a market value greater than every European carmaker combined, having gone from approximately 0 annual car deliveries to over a million in just a few years while revolutionizing electric travel. Or with space x developing reusable rockets that have utterly transformed the industry. These companies will contribute to economic dynamism and wealth creation for years and decades.

Macron said of American space companies, “Unfortunately they’re not European, but they took a bet”. Perhaps at a certain level you need people with lots of money who are willing to risk it

The big read is definitely very good https://www.ft.com/the-big-read. You can read the articles by googling any article title in a private window.

Just to give some examples, in the last week they published lengthy articles all with charts on topics as varied as a European private equity company's IPO, Ben & Jerry's activism, and tech companies shredding old memory disks.

Here is an interesting article outlining some specific Clinton-era laws that were an enormous help to private equity: https://prospect.org/economy/cut-off-private-equitys-money-s...

There used to be strict leverage restrictions on funds that raised money from investors, as well as limits on who/what entities could invest in the funds. The article really goes into more detail but lawmakers and the Clinton administration eliminated these laws and birthed the modern private equity industry which is pretty much the definition of short term focus.

Aren't products like smartphones, laptops, desktops, etc all low-margin businesses though? At least for every other company in the market. Apple just sticks to the high end?

Porsche sells hundreds of thousands of vehicles per year with something like $20k profit per car on a $90k average selling price. There could be big demand for an innovative Tesla equivalent that didn't have so many build quality issues.

And Foxconn is desperate to get an Apple car contract. Car companies really screwed themselves by outsourcing everything to suppliers (who have much higher profit margins than the car manufacturers at this point) except the internal combustion engine which is losing importance fast. What I am seeing here for Apple is big demand, low barrier to entry, and high profits.

The low-income threshold in sf for a family of four is about $120,000. And $150,000 is not far off from that. And even more important, the extraordinary rents in sf more than outpace the higher incomes:

For example, a fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the San Francisco area is considered to be $3,121 (£2,340) per month - nearly twice the 2008 figure of $1,592 (£1,190). In Cincinnati, Ohio, the figure is $845 (£632). This difference (270%) is much larger than the difference in median family incomes (50%).

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44725026

Yeah, the actual pew summary for that question was "Germans more likely than those in other publics to say they are satisfied while offering few specifics".

It seems like the takeaway is only two percent of Americans say vague positive things when talking about what gives them life satisfaction, with many more saying specific positive things

It seems like this inflation is not broad-based:

“In the quarter to August used cars, hotel rooms and airfares made up less than 5% of America’s consumer-price index, but together accounted for the majority of overall inflation”

If we’re having inflation due to a tiny number of goods having large price spikes, it might be too early to predict disaster

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/11/06/a-handfu...

I know what you mean but I think think this specific article makes a good case. For example the financial industry concentration in New York and retiree mass emigration really do distort things.

I think the picture is more complex than donor states and receiver states. As the article below argues, the Rockefeller study that the data comes from has flawed methodology.

New York for example benefits tremendously from its large financial industry that pays a lot in taxes. But arguably the industry is so concentrated in New York today because of federal laws that force the federal reserve to conduct its financial activities only in New York, among other hard coded advantages that the state has lobbied for. In addition, retirees who receive billions in benefits each year from the federal government commonly leave the state in favor of places like Florida, further distorting the picture. Unlike more fiscally prudent states, New York also has billions in tax exempt bonds outstanding that deprive the federal government of revenue but are not counted by the Rockefeller study.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/new-york-is-no-donor-state-...

Plus it appears that the lab was poorly run: She noted that a September 2019 paper in an academic journal by the director of the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory, Yuan Zhiming, had outlined safety deficiencies in China’s labs. “Maintenance cost is generally neglected,” he had written. “Some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”

I would agree that it doesn't seem like much. But the article says that the director of the wuhan institute's BSL-4 laboratory wrote in 2019 that “Maintenance cost is generally neglected ... Some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”

Most importantly, "the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."

"Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research—some involving live SARS-like viruses—had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories."

There is apparently a history of SARS escaping from Chinese labs on multiple occasions, and the bat coronavirus from the mine that was human transmissible was the "only one whose genome closely resembled SARS". And according to the Wuhan lab itself, the coronavirus is "96.2%" similar to this sample, though they tried to hide this.

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible.

One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."

Plus there's all the stuff about the miners shoveling bat poop for weeks and then dying of coronaviruses, and the Wuhan institute collecting and doing gain of function research on these similar-to-SARS samples. And then several of the lab's gain of function researchers became ill in late 2019. And there's the weird renaming of samples to hide the unmatched closeness of the mine samples and covid. This is just the absolute surface of the article. There's too much to list here

Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."

Yes, but unfortunately no rich person actually paid those rates: "despite these high marginal rates, the top 1 percent of taxpayers in the 1950s only paid about 42 percent of their income in taxes. As a result, the tax burden on high-income households today is only slightly lower than what these households faced in the 1950s."

https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/

It's also worth noting that the top 1% pay about 40% of all income taxes at the federal level, and they earn about 20% of annual income from all sources (http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/186106). So classifying 88% of federal revenue as paid by regular workers might be a bit misleading

I think in this case it’s worth pointing out that monthly unemployment numbers are historically very uncertain and the subsequent revisions to the initial number are often pretty substantial.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/jobs-report-growth-unem...

I wonder how many of his original blog's visitors were just bots. Also social networks have really lowered the barrier to entry for posting your thoughts online. The marketplace of ideas is much more crowded.

In a different article it says "Based on figures revealed on Monday, he has been able to turn a 14 per cent stake in his old PC company, worth $3.5bn, into a 72 per cent interest worth $35bn in his enlarged tech conglomerate."

How did he do that?

Homes are a bad investment except that we all need somewhere to live. Even if you're renting many of the costs and risks the article mentions are borne by the landlord and then passed on to you.

Yeah it is pretty bad. For a long time they were even projecting an 8.25% return according to the LA Times article I linked above. They used this number to justify the large benefit increases enacted when the stock market was doing well in the late 90s.

They made nowhere close to that and now state and local governments in California contribute over $50bn annually to CalPERS alone.

Calstrs, which is only for teachers, has over 900,000 members, with a bit less than half currently working. The average pension payout is $50,000 and the average retired person under Calstrs worked for under 25 years. And this is only for teachers. https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/...

The many tens of billions of dollars spent on pensions annually in California alone dwarf any tax breaks given to companies. And California is very stingy with those anyway. For comparison California's annual budget is just about $270bn according to Ballotpedia.

In California "More than 200,000 civil servants became eligible to retire at 55 — and in many cases collect more than half their highest salary for life. California Highway Patrol officers could retire at 50 and receive as much as 90% of their peak pay for as long as they lived." http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pension-crisis-davis-d...

This seems like a pretty big budget item, especially since most CA government pension funds haven't achieved their expected 7.5% return consistently for years if not decades. Eventually the money to pay for these large pensions comes from money that would have been spent on other things.

Pensions are going to become a hot political issue as they become more and more unsustainable. Even Illinois, one of the most liberal states in the US, elected a republican governor four years ago in large part because he promised to tackle the state's pension crisis.

It was actually an issue after the breakup because the successor companies started making much more money as a group than they did when they were together.

They did all sorts of creative accounting to make it look like the breakup was a big success that led to lower profits, when in reality cutting bloated bureaucracy and the R&D budget led to really bumper profits.

A self-centered desire to preserve an environmentally unfriendly suburbia at the expense of others who wanted to share in the region's prosperity contributed the shortage.

In the article the polls cited say that people think it was profit seeking developers and "technology companies who add jobs". Clearly instead of accommodating these desirable jobs we should give ample incentive for them to go elsewhere.

The main problem with these newsgroups is that they have _so_many_ competitors. Most people don't want to and don't have to pay to get around a paywall because chances are someone else offers a similar article for free. Even for local news you have tv stations, print outlets, and npr. It is a tough business.

I hope this will matter less (if it even matters now) once automatic translation of web pages gets good enough and those google auto translate earbuds actually start to work

At least the chairman is on trial. Not that the trial would be fair or is for the right reasons.