rchaud

"Explain like I'm pitching to TechCrunch Disrupt".

That's what the entire apparatus of sanctions and blockades are for - to make sure they don't make the wrong choice.

not to mention hiding all the Twitter losses inside of xAI because AI in general loses lots of money.

Burton Malkiel's "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" was published in 1973, well before significant changes to financial markets that affect its theoretical randomness.

1. 401Ks were introduced in 1978, making mainstream the concept of automatic payroll deductions that funded an investment account. Trillions more dollars moved into pension funds that might otherwise have been spent elsewhere.

2. Bloomberg Terminals went online in 1982, kicking off an ever-growing information assymetry between investment professionals and retail investors.

3. Electronic trading didn't take off until 1992 with Globex, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's platform

4. High-frequency trading didn't take off until 2005 or so

5. Finally, the Nasdaq changed its rules in 2026 in a way that directly benefited new IPOs like SpaceX, triggering automated purchases from investment funds, propping up its price beyond what its business fundamentals might have justified.

They were always the regional hegemon next to Israel. US leaders just happen to love the canard of "they'll welcome us as liberators" because it's the only thing they can attempt to sell to the electorate.

Gubernatorial run in California.

All of these examples are Cold War era or before, when defense and aerospace was a much more collectivist venture with far less private sector involvement.

After the Cold War, McKinsey and big 4 consultancies are working in every part of government, ostensibly to make government as efficient as the private sector. The NSA's surveillance program wouldn't have seen the light of day had Booz Allen not had a contract with them.

A 5% stake in an overvalued private company without public financials and with an indeterminate timeline to profitability is a bailout. Shareholders cash out while the taxpayer is stuck with the bill.

95% of countries weren't formed by settling on somebody else's land and excluding the original inhabitants from citizenship for several hundred years. The American project is what it is because of millions of migrants who settled there for the perverse incentives of free land via the Homestead Act.

Even if you don't use FB, pictures of you tagged by your friends are fair game.

How can it be an elder dude fantasy when it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck when they were in college? Robin Williams' character isn't pwning anyone. He's a therapist trying to get through to a patient who's completely walled up and trying to deflect by by analyzing the therapists' painting in his office to comment on his wife's passing.

When I think about elder dude fantasizing about pwning the rascal youth, I think of those self-written scenes of a boomer/early GenX actor asking for "black coffee", then delivering a diatribe to the Gen Z minimum wage worker who's contractually obligated to try to upsell them on the higher-priced and infuriatingly named mixed coffee beverages.

Because a studio that spends $2 billion on a game is also spending several million to track online sentiment about their games.

Piracy is only doable on PC. GTA6 is specifically excluding PC from the initial launch because it was so widely pirated and modded.

I think there will definitely be a point where code generators require a payment method to be registered before they can be used, and then generate code for paid products that it automatically subscribes you to.

WordPress and WooCommerce? Nah, here's how you set up a Squarespace Ecommerce site - if you hit publish, you'll be auto-subscribed to their $20/month plan.

There are only so many ad dollars to go around. ChatGPT getting traffic doesn't mean they can convince ad buyers that their dollar goes further than at established players like Google and Meta. AI search is a commodity at this point, even DuckDuckGo has it.

Reddit has been one of the world's top websites for over a decade, yet they are totally irrelevant in terms of ad product market share.

You're proving my point. It's no longer at the same price.

Apple soaked up all the good press about the PC-killer Macbook Neo's price point, waited until those articles seeded search results, influencer videos and AI queries, then jacked up the price by 17%.

Instead of listening to the critiques of actual Windows users? Jobs was an evangelist who couldn't see past his Nintendo-esque ecosystem zealotry, didn't use Windows and thereby couldn't understand why Windows won the enterprise and computer gaming market despite its flaws.

This is going to be the GenX equivalent to the boomer meme about not spending money on avocado toast and save for a house instead.

If you kids could stop wasting money on Spotify and Xbox Live, you could pay $200/mo for ChatGPT Pro to become AI-native.

Facebook hired a bunch of people from Google's search ads division to basically replicate their real-time bidding system.

Their innovation isn't in ads, it's in creating a sticky app experience that downranks posts with external URLs to keep people on their site, one that's now fine-tuned to retain the lowest-common denominator of technology user (boomers). Ironically, a segment that the OG Facebook avoided like the plague is now their bread and butter.

People who don't understand nor care about how the system works are the ones most likely to click on targeted ads, share sensationalist slop and comment positively on AI videos of of Hegseth fighting Godzilla.

And even then, for ad buyers, the ROI is a complete crapshoot because of how purchase attribution works on every ads platform. Every ad platform puts their marketing pixel on your site, and they all try to take credit for every sale made on it.

Those companies aren't considered "tech" so their share prices observe the laws of gravity. A single tweet about xAI-powered nuclear drones launched from the moon or whatever would probably cause the stock to go up 50%. And pumping the stock is all that matters.

Pentagon contracts.

Both of those companies were essentially expendable in terms of keeping the economy running. AOL didn't own any cell towers and Yahoo didn't have any Pentagon contracts.

We shouldn't be needing native apps at all to do things like banking. If it works in the browser on a laptop, why shouldn't it do so on a phone?

Iran is already under decades-long sanctions and have shown that their ability to wait out the US+Israel was massively underestimated.

After Vietnam and Afghanistan, has the US not learned that countries at war are willing to incur costs well beyond what the State Department thinks they should?

Why would any country trust the current US regime to follow through on its commitments? They weren't even able to maintain a ceasefire during the agreed-upon ceasefire period?

Beyond that, what would prevent the next administration from unilaterally decreeing this current agreement null and void as was done with the JCPOA? They certainly aren't going to want to bear the brunt of political unpopularity of paying out billions in war reparations.

It says right there in the article that he donates to military veterans' charities and animal rescue charities. I don't see him as a big arts benefactor considering that the main motive the ultra-rich have for making lavish donations to fancy museums is to get invited to the right parties, Met Gala and the like.

He seems like a private person doesn't flaunt his wealth and has mostly avoided inserting himself into public discourse, unlike many of his tech-rich peers.

to grow CL the way other unicorney companies grew

By hiring McKinsey to tell them they need to start selling and and acquire their competitors? That is the only way the unicorns established their position.

They're not using their money, they're borrowing it and using Special Purpose Vehicles to book the debt so it doesn't hit their own balance sheet.

Guess Musk figured out that paying all cash to acquire something was a bad idea.