churchill

With $1.75t valuation & ~$16b in revenues, that's just over 100* revenues. SpaceX recently announced $8b in EBITDA, but I don't think it's a healthy metric for such a hardware-heavy business. Or, like Charlie Munger calls it, BS earnings.

Even if you give SpaceX the benefit of the doubt and assume they'll eventually settle at the profit rates Apple, Google, etc. have (~25%, check it), it'll be $4b in annual profits holding up $1.8t in market cap or roughly 450 PE ratio.

And that's if we give them the same great odds for profitability as America's most successful and profitable firms.

In summary, in the short-term the stock might very likely shoot up to $3t, but in the long-term, it doesn't look very healthy.

I'm happy with how the Overton Window on the US being completely subservient to Israel is shifting. A few years ago, this would have gotten you denounced as antisemitic, but now it's a common position even normies hold that no matter the issue, the US will take the position that favors Israel the most, no matter how it hurts American interests and endangers or outright kills their citizens.

Even if Iran gets 500 years to build out a proper technological economy, there's no universe where they're a threat to the US. All the players the US has invaded the Middle East to fight don't constitute a threat to Joe in Alabama. It's all about weakening potential threats to leave Israel as the only extant regional power, no matter the costs to American credibility, military stockpiles, finances ($10t so far, according to Brown University Costs of War).

The overton Window has shifted and this question will not go away.

Isn't mass murder of civilians the most Israeli thing ever? For those out of the loop, this isn't an anomaly.

It's a societal-level policy: 47% of Israeli Jews want all Palestinians killed; 82% want all Palestinians forcefully expelled (i.e., ethnically cleansed) [0] which would constitute genocide. 56% want the same for all Israeli Arabs.

So, it's pathetic when Westerners act surprised at Israel's antics: you can't support a genocidal state and then be shocked when it does genocidal stuff. This is just Tuesday for them.

Once you understand this, Israel's actions are not an anomaly. It's the natural expression of people who consider their neighbors beneath them, and barely even human.

[0] https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jew...

Off topic, but the reason Vietnam played out the way it did was because of China's implicit guarantee that they'd intervene in force if American troops came anywhere close to their borders like during the Korean War.

Fresh off WW2, with a titanic arsenal and industrial base, America and all of its allies couldn't end the war on their terms after China intervened.

That's why the US only did search-and-destroy missions, targeting Vietcong cells in the south and bombing supply lines in Laos. Which didn't matter much.

Once the Americans left, the North marched down a proper army and wrapped it up.

Pretty steep haircut from their $12b peak in 2022. And that's before you factor in their revenue that's grown 2.5* from ~$312M in 2022. If their figures are to be believed, Capital one is getting an asset growing 50% YoY, for just 7* revenues.

Maybe just pull a Bending Spoons after the acquisition, layoff most of the staff, and bring a lot of ops in-house and they'll be in profit ASAP.

First, I'll have to say that I noticed 15/19 of the submissions you've made to Hacker News have been on the topics of either the Gaza War or the recent protests in Iran. It's weird, just saying.

Secondly, having thousands of protesters chanting your name still doesn't confer state power. State power is in the ability to achieve and retain a monopoly of violence. Khamenei's forces can (and are doing so already) mow down the protesters with machine gunfire, just like the Egyptian Army mowed down the supporters of Morsi in Cairo.

If you can't achieve a monopoly of violence, an asymmetry works just as well since you can impose your wishes on the opposition with superior firepower. That is what will, and is happening in Iran right now.

The whole episode of foreign interests trying to astroturf Reza Pahlavi will ultimately go nowhere, because there are no significant numbers of young, able-bodied men willing to kill and be killed on his behalf.

Or, like Mao said, "the Army is the chief component of state power and whoever seeks to acquire and retain state power must have a strong army."

Now, you may point to other "popular revolutions" throughout modern history, but that only proves my point. After Khomeini went into exile in France, tens of thousands of his loyalists continued building their networks in Iran's universities, bazaars, mosques, offices, government agencies, etc. The revolution of 1979 was simply that underground network rising to topple the modernist Persian state once they'd reached critical mass.

Even during the Arab Spring, nothing really changed. For instance, in Egypt, the Army ousted Mubarak to simply install their own man who commanded a real army with guns (Sisi). When the protesters didn't get the memo, they were fired upon and thousands killed.

Across the Artesh (Army), IRGC, Basij militias, and other Shia paramilitary groups, Khamenei has over a million armed, trained young men who believe his words are God's words, and whose fortunes are tied to the regime's survival. No amount of airstrikes can meaningfully degrade those numbers to the point where Reza Pahlavi can be allowed to touch solid ground and be installed as king.

Reza Pahlavi has millions of bots on Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc. who astroturf him as a contender for state power.

It's not even a contest.

Mbah

Did you mean to say nah? Mba actually means just that in at least one language I know.

I mean, what other options does he have? FAIR was just gutted in favor of Meta Superintelligence, which is to be led by Alex Wang whose pedigree comes from founding a human-labor-API/ Amazon MTurk for AI.

All the veteran researchers still left have to be reading the room by now.

Clearly, Meta is signalling that they care less for foundational research and more for habit-forming products like Chatgpt/Sora that can give them another 10-15 years of runway like Instagram did.

Haha:)

Even if you want to give OpenAI the benefit of the doubt by comparing it to other software primos, they're doing terribly. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc. were profitable almost immediately after their founding. In the cases where they accumulated losses it was a deliberate effort to capture as much of the market as possible. They could simple hit the brakes and become profitable at will.

In OpenAI's case, every week yet another little-known lab in China releases a 99% competitive LLM at a fraction of their costs.

It's not looking good at all now or in the long-term.

Which is, tbh, a bad-faith tactic for wearing down the electorate. It’s similar to how Brexit advocates kept the issue alive until they gained enough momentum to push it through. Nearly a decade later, most of the promised benefits haven’t materialized, and the UK has borne significant self-inflicted economic costs.

Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.

Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.

You're trying to logically reason people out of a position they didn't reach logically. You'll fail because your target isn't truth-seeking.

I want to see theocracies gone.

How they choose to organize their society is none of your business. Whenever any Arab society becomes democratic, it's almost guaranteed they'll vote in Muslim Brotherhood types that'll be joined at the hip with Islamist movements. So, you don't want rapidly liberalizing benevolent monarchies, but rather democratic Islamists? Wasn't it the Americans who nudged the Egyptian military to topple Morsi after the Arab Spring brough an Islamist to power? Democracy until whoever we dislike is elected by the people.

It was the Western powers messing around with Mossadegh's democratically-elected regime in Iran that led to its fall and later down the line, the rise of the Shia-extremist Iran.

You westerners are so full of hubris. You don't know how to leave well-enough alone.

Solar energy is cheaper and it doesn't need to be trucked around on ships, threatening insanely expensive disasters.

That's none of your business either. No western country is accelerating the renewable transition. Stay out of the way of those doing it, and don't pontificate to those providing energy for civilization now.

... and instead funding them in Western countries, yeah. Saudi funded madrasa schools or imams funded by oilsheik countries are a massive problem, although I admit a part of that is our fault as well for not running theology studies in our universities for Islam (unlike for Christian denominations).

That's a YOU problem! Western governments hold a monopoly of violence within their own borders. You can simply shut down Islamist mosques. If you refuse, you implicitly permit their activities. There's a reason why extreme preachers are imprisoned/executed in the Arab Gulf, but they find an audience in the West. You allowed it; it's a you problem.

Well, Hamas is strongly supported by Qatar and Iran.

And Israel too, right? Are we going to gloss over that? That these fighters are mostly orphans, whose parents and grandparents where marched out of their homes at gunpoint and had their homes stolen?

Well, Hamas is strongly supported by Qatar and Iran.

You're still making these mistakes now, like the ongoing genocide in Gaza. You don't get to pontificate or preach. You don't have the moral capital. No one takes the West's moral posturing serious. The only people who do are developing countries paying lip service so they can get aid handouts. No one cares. Pack it up.

If I setup a $10b trust fund to buy up Texan land, I can't unilaterally invade Texas and build my ethnostate on it after I've purchased, say, 6-7% of it. That's the percentage of Palestine the Zionists bought before expelling the indigenous people in the Nakba genocide.

Likewise, if you legally purchase double-digit percentages of Indian, Chinese, Brit, Australian land, it doesn't give you the moral or legal precedent to expel the natives from the rest of their land and declare it your state.

Do you mean Elon Musk? Bryanston High School and Pretoria Boys High School were all-white, so any beating he received (I'm assuming you're referring to the same savage incident Kimball was) was at the hands of other white boys.

So, being attacked and nearly killed by other white boys does not validate his opinions on apartheid.

China says that, but they put countries into enormous debt and then control them. They also build naval bases in many of those countries.

All the third-world countries that have had their debts to China blow out of control have been able to renegotiate.

Countries near China's borders have turned strongly against their neighbor. The US has built a widespread network of alliances around that.

I'm not upholding China as a moral actor. They're as utilitarian as anyone else, but they're honest about it, that's all.

Here's why I don't apply the same metric/standard to China & Russia. They don't pontificate about their morals. They're mask-off about their Schmittian approach to power.

Western countries preach about morals, human rights, rules-based order, and all kinds of bullshit but always seem to violate their acclaimed principles every Wednesday.

China sells weapons to everyone who has money, works with all kinds of regimes, and generally have a non-interventionist policy. That's why smaller countries tend to prefer partnering with them. They're not your fairy godmother, but at least they're honest about what they want.

Thanks!

Stop the self-deception. America hates accountability so much that it has laws on the books guaranteeing that it'll invade the Hague (killing thousands of Dutch citizens, inevitably) if US servicemembers are ever detained there for crimes against humanity.

This is just a rogue state going mask-off.

Imagine if China or Russia even suggested the same willingness during a press conversation, let alone making a law to that effect.

That's a lot of fancy words to say, "America is a rogue regime that believes might makes right despite all the human rights, morals, and God bless America bullshit."

I actually don't mind tyranny on some level if I can't do anything against them. it just feels good having the mask of righteousness & honor fall off so that the world can see the ugly, unvarnished, hypocritical beast under the makeup.

I can denounce Nazis while admitting an objective point made by Schmitt. Churchill himself was a ghoul who considered Indians, Africans, etc. inferior and while he denounced the Nazis' tactics, he had no problem using similar ones to suppress colonized natives.

In other words, Churchill might have hated the Nazis (because they threatened his beloved England), but he believed in the state of exception they promoted. He believed he wasn't obligated to obey basic decency when dealing with non-European natives because, like Schmitt would say, "sovereign is he who determines the exception."

Schmitt is so quotable, haha.

But, on the flip side, coercive power cannot stand on its own without money too. The CCP's Politburo know beyond a doubt that they have coercive power over billionaires like Jack Ma, but they try to accommodate these entrepreneurs who help catalyze economic growth & bring the state more foreign revenue/wealth to fund its coercive machine.

America's elected leaders also have power to punish & bring oligarchs to book legally, but they mostly interact symbiotically, exchanging campaign contributions and board seats for preferential treatment, favorable policy, etc.

Putin can order any out-of-line oligarch to be disposed of, but the economic & coercive arms of the Russian State still see themselves as two sides of the same coin.

So, yes: coercive power can still make billionaires face the wall (Russian revolution, etc.) but they mostly prefer to work together. Money and power are a continuum like spacetime.

Targeting their legacy Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team, not the newly formed Meta Superintelligence lab.

That's basically the point the meme is making. It's not arguing that nothing literally happens in spacetime; it just asserts that we rarely, if ever, see events that fundamentally change the world from its slugging baseline.

Basically, the ultimate, "Nothing ever happens" scoreboard [0].

If any of your acquaintances are ever in doubt of anything ever happening, this will be a handy guide for them to consult.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-ever-happens

Since human history is by definition what has been recorded

Isn't that just dabbling into semantics? There are numerous societies & cultures we can definitely prove existed, without having further info on specifics such as their monarchs, etc. Your statement on human history sounds like, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

It's still an instance in spacetime and our detailed knowledge of it doesn't delegitimize it.

Can't say for all monarchs through human history (nor is it even possible to), but for the Roman emperors, 70% died violent deaths via assassination (actual and suspected), execution, suicide, or being KIA.

You had some particularly colorful episodes like the year of the four emperors where Nero's regional governors revolted and he committed suicide. Galba, a general, was declared imperator by his troops, only to be overthrown and killed by the Praetorians 6 months later.

Otho seized power, but died by suicide after he was defeated by Vitellius 3 months later.

Vitellius was declared emperor by his troops after defeating Otho at Bedriacum; held onto power for 7-8 months before being defeated & executed by Vespasian at the 2nd battle of Bedriacum.

Vespasian seized power and had himself proclaimed emperor by his legions, reigning for ~10 years.

Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth?

How could you not? At whatever point a crew member become disillusioned, it'll likely be too late to turnaround. There'll be a high incidences of interplanetary depression/psychosis as people struggle to deal with leaving the Blue Dot behind, esp. when they see footage from the earth, rainforests, etc. But, nothing counselling won't be able to take care of.

Right now, state propaganda is powerful enough to make young people line up to kill and be killed. So, a little interplanetary panic can be taken care of. In extreme cases, you can have protocols for any crew members who attempts to munity to euthanatized to guarantee the success of the mission.

My .02.

There's a reason Plato's Republic looks authoritarian to people, because it models a city in which justice is the highest good, and justice and freedom are ultimately opposed to each other.

So, Singapore?