whodidntante

I was at a dinner for the .01% the other night, and many of them said the problem is really with the .0001%, if they would just pay a fair tax, everything would be fine.

btw, the dinner with the .01% was 800,000 people, the room was pretty packed.And the food was not as good as you would think, and the service was lousy.

The .0001% is a lot smaller, maybe even 100x smaller, but it is still twice as large as the number of billionaires. A lot of the .0001%, in fact, about half, feel the real problem is with the billionaires.

right, author did not bother to do some simple queries for actual revenue vs actual costs

banks used to lose a lot of money on those toasters, amazing they are still in business

I see combined estimated revenue for Q1/2026 to be $15B to $20B, depending on source. I also see combined estimated spend Q1/2026 at $15 to $20B, depending on source.

Someone or something is having an hallucination that would make an AI jealous

There is a high correlation between wealth and taxable accounts. For those that are not well off to have large taxable accounts and have most of their assets in retirement funds, this should not be an issue.

I agree that the rule changes are bad and ill intentioned, but I am not sure what I can do about it. And, even if it was zero cost for me to move to an ETF without SpaceX, I would not do it. The market does what the market does, that is what I signed up for, it is a lot smarter than I am. It is not worth changing that for an insult to what will be a few percent of my portfolio. Even if SpaceX drops to 1/2 of its IPO, it will be like having a typical down day, and it will recover. I do want a piece of SpaceX, I just wish it would be at a better price.

As far as the appreciated gains go, I agree with you. However, there is a strong correlation between someones wealth and how much they have in taxable. For most people, especially those that are not wealthy, their equity investments are heavily weighted to retirement accounts,so I look at this as more a rich persons proble.

I am not looking at the "pure" numbers, and many investors do not, they look at potential. They look at what the possibilities are. If you believe that space will be a significant part of the economy in 20 years, and that SpaceX will be a large participant, the current numbers do not mean a lot, this is not a large established company in a static industry. In 20 years the market cap of just the US could very well be $200T, if space is only 10% of that, there is $20T of valuation for space, and that is just US.

Google when it ipo'd about 20 years ago had a market cap of $23B. It is now close to $5T. Even if it went over 10x overvalued at $230B when it ipo'd, it would still have been a good investment. That is because the internet became a large part of our economy, and Google is a major player.

If you really want to compare the two, Google had a market cap/revenue of $2B/$2.7B, SpaceX is currently $1.8T/$20B, or about 10x the ratio of Google back then.

Yeah, very pricey. Crazy ? Not sure. Do I like the valuation ? No. Would I buy more SpaceX than what will be in my equity ETF ? No. But I am not unhappy that I will own a piece when it comes out. Do I like the change in rules ? Absolutely not, but that is just the way it is. The market, over time, is, and always be a lot smarter than I am.

If you do not like Elon, you can simply move your assets to a direct indexing fund, there are plenty of them at reasonable cost, including from the large brokerages.

If you believe SpaceX is overvalued or do not like the way it is being handled by the big index funds, again, use direct indexing.

akademikerpension is pretty decent fund, it is about 50/50 asset allocation, losing out by only .9% per year compare to a US equity/bond portfolio. Better than many active funds:

https://www.finanshus.dk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pensions... https://testfol.io/?s=h8azNZvMICk

You do not like the valuation ? What should a company that launches 98% of the world's non government tonnage to space (80% if you include the Chinese government) be valued at ? The only company that has figured out how to very reliably launch at a sustained and rapid pace ? Pioneered and is perfecting rocket reuseability ? The only thing we can can say with a degree of certainty is that $2T is either very overvalued or very undervalued. If you believe that space will become a huge part of our economy in the future, and believe that SpaceX will play a significant role, $2T is cheap. Dirt cheap. The only way to prosper is to be bold.

For all those who come here to say that they do not like Elon or that the valuation is ridiculous, or that SpaceX will not succeed, that is perfectly fine - you are just a few clicks away from making it happen. Sell your assets and buy a direct indexing product, simply buy the stocks you want, buy ex-US, or any other number of options you can do on your phone with a few clicks. Less clicks than it takes to virtue signal on this forum.

Immense power and profits attracts certain behaviors. This has happened throughout history. Finance is a lot more efficient, flexible, and powerful than other mechanisms, and has become the modern choice.

The Audacity of these people

Very good advice. I was at it for 40 years, actually did some MUMPS (for those of you who watched The Audacity), as well as every tech from the old days, even some hardware, and kept current and on the very edge up until the end. I also loved it and thought I would do it forever, I felt so grateful that my hobby and passion as also my career, and very well paying (eventually, back then no one thought it would be a career).

I retired 10 years ago when I had enough (money) and had enough (of the industry). Always lived below my means. I cannot imagine what it was like to be in the industry for the past 10 years.

As far as the nonsense that is pushed top down, it is not so simple. I was at/near the top. I know what was happening, what I was doing, but everyone has a boss, even the boss. The industry is too important, too big, too critical for it not to be run by human nature. So glad I got out when I did.

The "imbalance of power" can only be "fought" by eliminating the concentrations of power. This is not a capitalist vs communist thing,it is, at least, a human thing, as humans need hierarchy, and power ends up being held by the few. The Romans, the Ottomans, the Persians, the Qing, and many, many other empires all have had the same "issues". I am sure this "problem" goes back to antiquity.

As I commented elsewhere, everyone gets affected by a wealth tax, as it will affect how assets are priced and how businesses operate across the board.

For those who have little hope of the wealth tax applied to them (me for example), but as as someone who has investments and need them for retirement, I need to decide if this will affect bond prices or equity prices in a positive or negative way as their attractiveness will change in relative terms, or if publicly accessible funds will get devalued in favor of private investment opportunities and all public assets get devalued. Oh, wait, I am not wealthy, so I do not have the option of private equity, and cannot participate in what would be an attractive investment opportunity when investments shift towards more opaque assets.

For those that have zero assets, I do not think that a shift by the wealthy to private equity is a good thing, unless you want to work for a private equity company. A government job would be your best bet. And a shift to private equity would have a downward pressure on tax collections, so whatever projections for how much a wealth tax would generate, I am suspect.

A lot of people complain about private equity. This scourge was, to a small or large degree depending on your viewpoint, an unintended side effect of SOX compliance, meant to protect investors, and in the end narrowed down the amount of public companies, and created more opportunities/demand for PE. I think it is debatable how much protection investors actually received.

We live in a system, and making a fundamental change to one part of that system has effects on all parts. Raising the amount of taxes under the current system ? That is one thing. Introducing a whole new tax concept, difficult to predict. Especially if this is done by states, which could cause capital movements with their own unexpected consequences.

A wealth tax will affect the distribution of investments. It might make higher risk investments like stocks more attractive as compared to bonds, it might make them less attractive. More likely it might make publicly available instruments less attractive in general, as private investments have more flexibility in how they are evaluated. In any case, there will be winners and losers as the investment landscape shifts, which affects everyone. If equity becomes more attractive, it could force less wealthy people into equity, which means they will take on more risk. If private investments become more attractive, less wealthy people will lose out. It might not affect those with no assets, but that is not certain either. So, everyone will be affected, in some way. Impossible to model due to unintended side effects.

Not sure I understand why you would not want to separate your personal machine from your dev machine. Even more importantly, I do not know what you want to tie yourself to a piece of hardware.

I like having multiple personal machines that are always in sync with each other. I also like have multiple dev machines that I don't care if I (or my AI) messes them up.

I agree I would rather have something other than chrome, but I need to trade that off with my desire for the benefits of a simpler system.

If Apple came out with a SafariBook equivalent, I would consider it. Might even do both if I could auto sync between them.

It is very simple:

I have multiple Chromebooks and an extra monitor, and use Google for files, email, photos. I can grab my cheap Chromebook and throw it into my backpack, don't bother with a case. I have learned to live without using installed apps.

I have a couple of beelink boxes at home that I stash in the corner of a room, connected to my home wireless. I use Crostini to remote into these boxes to do any development. I treat these boxes the same way I treat my Chromebook - disposable. I have scripts that will reconstitute my dev environment from GitHub and my backups.

If I trash a chromebook, I grab or buy a new one. I can do pretty much anything (except dev work) from my phone if needed. If I trash a dev server, I use another one. I also have some virtual machines at Hetzner. I keep my backups there, as well as any apps I want public.

My only concern is my Google dependence. That is the trade-off for being 100% cloud based and treating my devices as disposable.

also - I do not like developing on my personal machine. I got into this habit a long time ago - I would always use a remote Linux box, and now with LLM's I ride them bareback (or maybe they ride me). If I trash a machine (which has not happened yet), I just rebuild it or find another box.

I am retired, and don't need to - I have a couple of beelink's (just need my home wireless running) and a couple of VPS if I really want to do things away from home, which I don't

I cannot remember the last time I wanted internet access but could not find it. Cell coverage is pretty good and reliable these days.

actually both. vim for "real" work, but also vi when I am moving though different machines that have minimal tooling (production or production support machines, which may not have vim installed). I have been retired for some time, so I am programming for fun, and have recently gotten into it a lot more with Codex/Claude. Before I retired I also used more visual editors with debuggers since we were on Macs in addition to vi/m. I have found that I don't need those fancy editors with the LLM's as I am just editing markup/config files and browsing code.

While I think Chromebooks are great, I would consider that if your company grows, not everyone is comfortable with vi/m, and a Mac does give you some nice options for higher end dev systems.

Just use Chromebook via Crostini to remote access a headless Linux box. For me, the Chromebook is the right tool in both directions.

Crostini is kind of a joke, but I use it to remote into real Linux boxes. For me, best of both worlds.

With ChromeOS you get both.

I have used Linux for 20 years, but only for development, and I will only develop on Linux.

For everything else (email, files, photos), I want a browser. Used to be Mac/Osx, but got tired of being managed by it.

Just my preference. You can do everything on Linux, just never felt comfortable with it.

I used DOS,then Windows, then Mac for a total of almost 40 years. I think using Windows and OSX are insanity, but to each their own.

I now have a machine that boots almost instantly and just works without maintenance, upgrades, or compatibility issues. I can throw it in the river, and for $300 get a machine that will be up and running in about one minute. I can use multiple machines (small/cheap to bring on a trip, laptop for casual working, larger machine for more serious work, even at the same time. I have full access to everything from my iPhone, or access to some computer anywhere. I use remote VSCode via Crostini to do development work (terminal, vi, Codex, Claude Code) on a bunch of beelink boxes and Hetzner servers.

I cannot run installed software and I am dependent on Google for email, files, photos. For the latter, I have backups of my email and files (photos are not as easy).

Life is simpler this way.

Chromebook users.

I loved my Pixelbook, fantastic piece of hardware. When that ended, I went with an Acer Chromebook. Works fine, just not the same.

I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.

I will most likely get a Googlebook, and would be more likely to do so if it was not named Googlebook and did not have Gemini built in.

Yes, that is true. However, each time this happens, those people are eventually labelled as getting in the way of progress, luddites, etc, and it is easy for those that benefit (cheap food, cheap products) to simply go on with their "better" lives.

I don't think there was a lot of support, outside the farming industry, to prevent machines from taking over peoples jobs even though 1/2 of the workforce were farmers. Similar for manufacturing.

And I do not believe the answer to those changes was to do farming or manufacturing by "hand". I also do not believe that the answer to AI is to not use it.

But, in the same way, I also do not believe that people will really care that call center workers will be replaced, that designers will be replaced, that many programmers will be replaced, that most admins and middle managers (anyone who pushes paperwork, creates reports, that just communicate and report on work "progress") will be replaced.

I also believe that these workers will get retrained and find better jobs is a fallacy - because it has not happened in the past. Farmers may have done this, but those who lost their well paid manufacturing, most lost their place in society. Blue collar workers in Detroit are not today's laptop warriors.

We will be undergoing a fundamental change in how society functions. It is quite possible the end result will be good, or at least looked at as good. But there was a lot of pain in the previous transitions, and the distribution of "winners" and "losers" will undergo significant change.

+1

50% of the workforce was in farming near the end of the 1800's. Today, 2% 40% of the workforce was in manufacturing early to mid 1900's. Today 8% 60+% of the current workforce is white collar. What will it be in 20 years ?

LLM's are only a couple of years old, we have no idea where this will go. Maybe it will be a big hallucination, maybe we are looking at the very early version of farm and manufacturing machines.

The ENIAC was larger than a person, we now have watches that are significantly more powerful. Maybe in the future, your Apple watch will have more compute than several racks of H100's.

When they came for the farmers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful food. When they came for the manufacturers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful products. Now they are coming for the white collar workers, and their highly paid laptop lifestyles.

Who is left to care ? The billionaires ?

I think that if you go to an AI for advice and emotional support, it will do what most people will do - tell you what it thinks you want to hear. I am not surprised about this at all, and I do notice that when you veer into these areas, it can do it in a surprisingly subtle and dangerous way.

I try to focus on results. Things like an app that does what you want, data and reports that you need, or technical things like setting up a server, setting up a database, building a website, etc.

I have also found it useful for feedback and advice, but only once I have had it generate data that I can verify. For example, financial analysis or modelling, health advice (again factual based), tax modelling, etc, but again, all based on verifiable data/tables/charts.

I am very surprised on what Claude is capable of, across the entire tech stack: code, sysadmin, system integration, security. I find it scary. Not just speed, but also quality and the mental load is a difference of kind not quantity.

Personal advice on life decisions/relationships ? No way I would go there.

It is also good for me to know that the tools I have built, the data I have gathered, and my thinking approach places me as one of the most intelligent developers and analysts in the world.

With AI, as we currently understand it, we may have stumbled upon being able to replicate a part of the layer of our brain that provides the "reason" in humans., and a very specific type of "reason" a that.

All life has intelligence. Anyone who has spent a lot of time with animals, especially a lot of time with a specific animal, knows that they have a sense of self, that they are intelligent, that they have unique personalities, that they enjoy being alive, that they form bonds, that they have desires and wants, that they can be happy, excited, scared, sad. They can react with anger, surprise, gentleness, compassion. They are conscious, like us.

Humans seem to have this extra layer that I will loosely call "reasoning", which has given us an advantage over all other species, and has given some of us an advantage over the majority of the rest of us.

It is truly a scary thing that AI has only this "reasoning", and none of the other characteristics that all animals have.

Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos and Peter Watts Blindsight have different, but very interesting takes on this concept. One postulates that our reasoning, our "big brains" is going to be our downfall, while the other postulates that reasoning is what will drive evolution and that everything else just causes inefficiencies and will cause our downfall.

ok, I will be the dumbass here - I am a retired software engineer who has not used any of these tools, but when I as working on high volume web sites, all I wanted and needed was access to the log files. I would always have a small terminal session open to tail and grep for errors for the areas I was interested in. Had another small window to tail and monitor specific performance values. Etc.

I do not know how this concept would work in these agentic environments, but would seem useful, in an environment that has a lot of parallel things going on, with a lot of metrics that could be useful, you would want to have multiple monitors that can be quickly customized with standard linux utilities. Token usage, critical directory access, etc.

This, in conjunction with a config file to define/filter out the log stream should be all that's needed to provide as much or as little detail that would be needed to monitor how things are going, and to alert when certain things are going off the rails.

He is an equal opportunity a-hole, though my personal feeling is that he looks up to Putin, and wants to be like him

Some things he has done that Putin is probably not fond of:

Javelins in his first term, I believe that was the time the us supplied military weapons to Ukraine. These weapons made a big impact during the invasion

Tried to get Europe off of Russia gas, making very public warnings about depending on Russia. This was first term

Tried to get Europe to invest heavily in thru military, first and second term

Syria, Iran and Venezuela, all allies of Russia, especially Iran for military technology and Venezuela as part of its shadow fleet.

Sanctions