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bedhead

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Ubiquiti SFP Wizard 9 months ago

Most innovative and disruptive (and generally just profoundly interesting) company that hardly anyone knows about in the grand scheme of things.

One framework I like to use is, “If this thing didn’t exist today, and someone proposed it, how would people react to it?”

I think it’s fair to say that if none of this existed today, and someone proposed that the federal government simply give universities like Harvard seemingly endless billions, it would be laughed out of existence by republicans and democrats alike. All of this is the product of inertia at best, corruption at worst. It’s a different world today and we don’t need our tax dollars going to these places.

The author wrongly implies that if Center Parcs was just owned by a public company or an individual, that those controlling entities would simply not care about making a profit and wouldn’t charge the prices they do. Author also ignores inconvenient facts such as how the private equity firms actually spent a lot of money upgrading parks in order to make them the desirable locations they are today. I suppose author would’ve preferred they be kept in disarray but cheap?? I could go on but no point. This kind of left wing economic ignorance (redundant?) is tiring but sadly expected. Private equity isn’t perfect but it’s been made out to be some sort of bogeyman it’s demonstrably not.

Sarepta. Why? 2 years ago

I bet the treatment costs somewhere around $350,000.

These should be approved on the condition that the patients pay into escrow and get refunded one day if the drug fails trials.

[dead] 2 years ago

I have no idea whether Katherine Maher is currently or was some sort of intelligence agent or not, though having seen the fact pattern the theory is far from crazy. What I do know is that she is a stereotypical insane phony wokie (I don't think she genuinely believes any of this stuff, it's just good for business and her bank account and status) and that alone disqualifies her from running anything other than a soup kitchen in my book. NPR makes the ACLU look like it's staying true to its mission.

Raise prices on what? There are barely any revenue generating AI products with a line of paying customers. I look around an I still don’t see anything. At the end of the day there have to be viable business models at the end of the line in order to support all this otherwise this too is just a house of cards.

The ripple effect from our unhinged covid response continues to be felt in countless places, from school absenteeism to downtown office space values to public transportation and on and on. We created new habits that are hard to break and naturally none of the hysterics who tried to unwind society gave any thought to anything besides trying to temporarily feel “safe.” There’s always a tradeoff…

Pumping Nvidia by something like $1 trillion on “not publicly visible” business models of any kind anywhere sounds a hell of a lot like “wild speculation run amok” to me. It’s not that I don’t get your argument, but seriously, where is a company that’s making money from charging customers for AI services, let alone enough that there’s a trillion dollar ecosystem here? It just doesn’t exist. Ultimately to support this kind of valuation there have to be paying customers and real business models and real value add at the end of the line otherwise it’s just a bubble like all the ones before.

23andMe's Fall 2 years ago

The last 5-8 years in tech were like the steroid era in baseball. We thought all these people were geniuses but virtually none of them can make their business models work without free money and investors looking the other way on profitability. 23 and Me being worth billions is like Brady Anderson hitting 50 home runs.

I feel like this became much more acute when Starbucks jumped on the bandwagon and forced every customer to opt in/out of tipping on the POS terminal. Obviously, Starbucks is ubiquitous and a frequent purchase and for decades tens of millions of customers who were accustomed to getting coffee without tipping…and everyone was fine. Then they changed things up and shoved these tips in customers’ faces when the notion of tipping for coffee was/is strange. To this day I find it really off-putting and that annoyance has bled into pretty much every other interaction involving tipping.