His numbers are based on sources that he says he doesn’t trust, which is quite interesting. While he may be directionally accurate (eg. The revenue needed to match the spend seems lofty at best) he seems to be mixing and matching numbers to create a worst case scenario that doesn’t necessarily line up with reality. Combined with his complete unwillingness to be open minded about anything even tangentially related to AI, and I can’t take him that seriously.
Publications love a doom and gloom rant, which is why he seems to have built an entire career on hysterical anti-ai screeds. It doesn’t mean that he’s right though.
Or they’ll be mildly resourceful and pickup a cheap Walmart phone, or a friend’s old phone and learn that they can’t be open with you.
I ran a summer camp for teenagers. They know how to get around that stuff if they want. They know how to hide it from their parents to keep access.
You’ll do far better to explain how these things are harmful, and help them make decisions that are healthy.
Below a certain age I’m sure it works for a time, but you will eventually have to find a balance.
That’s why parents want bans. Their kids are going to go where the other kids are. If they are all banned on instagram, they won’t care about finding a way onto a platform where none of their friends are.
This is always the response. I'm not an idiot. I understand kids will do things to break the rules. The point is, it won't be something they have access to constantly. If they see a phone at a friend's house that's fine.
>You’ll do far better to explain how these things are harmful, and help them make decisions that are healthy.
Yes. And the healthy decision is to not have a phone. That's like saying I should let my kid eat ice cream for dinner every night but talk to them about how it's better to eat healthy. I'm a parent. It's my job to make some decisions for my children.
Passive investors and retirement accounts are heavily in on automatic indexing.
This deal has been pushed hard to be included prematurely in the indexes to the point that Nasdaq changed the rules.
The accusation is that these changes were made so that index funds will buy this stock automatically far earlier than they would have previously. Given the… uh… astronomical asking price, it looks like SPCEX is meant for Elon stans and institutional index investors to be the bag holders.
> retirement accounts are heavily in on automatic indexing
Majority are not. A minority are, mostly towards the S&P. Most assets remain actively managed, including in retirement assets (which covers 401(k)s, IRAs, pensions, et cetera).
Way outside of my area of expertise, but a quick search suggests that exact numbers probably depend on exactly how you define the question, but it would be broadly reasonable to say that the balance is about 50/50 +/-5%, and trending towards the passive side over time.
Yes. But I’d caution to not conflating passive investing with indexing to a popular index. They sound similar. But most passive assets index to one of a variety of indices, many of them built in-house by various asset managers. (Vanguard, for example, is famous for doing this.)
And just because yesterday's rules were "invest in S&P500" does not mean the governors of many (not all) funds cannot change the rules to dodge such blatant fraud
The managers of huge funds are not complete idiots- far from it- and they will do what they can, most of them, to fulfill their duties
> just because yesterday's rules were "invest in S&P500" does not mean the governors of many (not all) funds cannot change the rules to dodge such blatant fraud
There are no governors. The assets that automatically follow the S&P 500 are like individual IRAs. If a fund has a governing body, they're generally not indexing to a single narrow index like the S&P 500. They're going for a set of total-market funds, or they're building a custom benchmark.
For the assets that do follow the S&P 500, virtually nbody would be expected to react to these kinds of rule changes. If anything, you'd just create a higher-fee fund that anyone who is upset about this can switch into that equal weights or won't include SpaceX. This is what some RIAs I know in the Bay Area have done, and this entire shitshow has just been a moneymaker for them.
> managers of huge funds are not complete idiots
Zero hedge funds automatically follow the S&P 500, or any other public index, like that. That's sort of the point of being a hedge fund–you're delivering something different.
> Do you have any sources to share in support of this claim of malfeasance?
Not here, this is a casual discussion not a scientific seminar.
But use Occam's Razor and modern history
Point 1. Corruption has penetrated the highest echelons of USAnian politics. The president is unabashed in his corruption and has corrupted (is corrupting) the financial regulators (I follow Molly White who has been particularly good on this)
Point 2. Space-X is valuing itself at an astonishing value that is not anchored in its business activities. This has been covered a lot in comments here but also see Patrick Boyle's excellent commentary.
Point 3. The purveyors of these IPOs have been doing their best to get the rules changed (because reasons blah blah blah), the change will mean that managed funds, if they follow their usual practice, will feel compelled to buy in at the offer price - a massive inflow of capital that will make many people incredibly rich.
Putting all this together - a culture of corruption that has reached the pinnacles of the financial system, outrageous valuations and open conspiring to change the rules in favour of the whole scheme leads me to the conclusion that I am looking at the biggest (what is effectively the) fraud in history
I hedge my comments "effectively the" as I cannot be sure that this is conscious theft, or whether it is a confluence of powerful people facing juicy incentives who going with the flow are heading to a massive wealth transfer from working people (via pension funds) to elite capitalists
I do not think that this is not apparent to the governors of these huge pension funds. Those that have not tied themselves to an index following strategy will opt out I am sure - they are smart, studious and dutiful people by and large. So the people perpetuating this fraud may well be unable to pull it off.
But these are very worrying times. Especially for the USA.
>Point 1. Corruption has penetrated the highest echelons of USAnian politics. The president is unabashed in his corruption and has corrupted (is corrupting) the financial regulators (I follow Molly White who has been particularly good on this)
Sure, but indices are really not a heavily regulated space. The government doesn't have any obvious, direct influence here.
But uh, do you genuinely believe that the Trump admin would pull this off without the story leaking? It's an incredibly leaky administration, now supposed to be exerting influence over the most leaky industry in the world.
>Point 2. Space-X is valuing itself at an astonishing value that is not anchored in its business activities
If SpaceX is overvaluing itself, they'll look really silly at IPO! This is a very strange complaint.
>Point 3. The purveyors of these IPOs have been doing their best to get the rules changed (because reasons blah blah blah), the change will mean that managed funds, if they follow their usual practice, will feel compelled to buy in at the offer price - a massive inflow of capital that will make many people incredibly rich.
According to whom? The consensus in serious financial medias seems to be that indices are doing the rule changes to avoid divergence. I've tried to look, but I can't find any reporting suggesting that the "purveyors of these IPOs" had anything to do with this.
These companies are already among the 20 biggest in the US, it's genuinely going to be a big problem for e.g. the S&P500 to keep them out.
>But these are very worrying times. Especially for the USA.
I agree! However, not everything that happens in the USA is related to Trump.
Not if they're index funds. They buy at the price it is, until they've satisfied their holdings represent the appropriate share of the market. Which, pre-IPO and early-days-after-IPO, is likely to not be accurate to the long-term price.
It has been covered extensively. The change of nasdaq rules has been covered by Bloomberg, WSJ, NYT, and most others who have reporters on the Wall Street beat. Columnists at all three of those publications have called it out as a possible play on institutional indexing money. I don’t need to tell you who like it’s some big secret either. It was Elon Musk on behalf of spacex. The changes were openly part of the ipo.
I’m not going to cite sources for a major financial news story that is being extensively covered in the financial and general press.
Here's Matt Levine from Bloomberg saying something along the lines of "lol, obviously the indices have to do this, they'll look like fools if they don't because these will be the biggest companies on the market". He famously spends much of his time making fun of Musk, but seems to reject the idea of his influence here.
That is one of the columns. The headline makes my point succinctly. Your paraphrase of the column misses the crucial point. A Nasdaq index fund doesn’t buy a company unless it is in the Nasdaq. Under the old rules SPCEX was ineligible for listing. Now Nasdaq index funds all have to buy. Index funds by nature do not selectively buy stocks, if the stock is in the index, they buy, that’s their mandate. That’s the game, to be included in as many indexes as possible that force institutional investors to buy. That’s hundreds of billions worth of funds that now have to buy in, that previously wouldn’t have had to if it wasn’t listed on the Nasdaq.
The SP500 did not waive the rules, and that made above the fold news this week, because it is a major blow to the big IPOs happening this month since they are valued so high. It will be harder for them to move stock if the massive index funds aren’t buying automatically. The big IPOs this month are asking for prices that demand hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of liquidity. Index funds are automatic liquidity, but only if you are on the index.
They didn’t ask them to change long standing rules for shits and giggles.
No where did they say anything antisemitic, but you further diminishing the meaning of that word—just like BB has already—only enables actual antisemitism. I frequently see that label being weaponized, especially against other Jews. I see it be used when people merely report on what the President has said, or against the Pope calling for peace. At some point, I'm inclined to believe people constantly making these false accusations do so knowing it delegitimizes the word.
> I'm inclined to believe people constantly making these false accusations do so knowing it delegitimizes the word.
I’d say it’s 50/50. Half of them try to delegitimise the word while the rest use it to silence dissent against what amounts to be a genocide and a land grab.
In the context of my message it is very clear that they is SpaceX. This isn’t a secret. Nasdaq has said that they are changing the rules specifically for this listing.
It’s clear you aren’t interested in a good faith conversation. Thanks for the discourse either way.
NASDAQ and the NYSE competed heavily for the SpaceX IPO. NASDAQ was willing to do more for SpaceX, so NASDAQ won. One of the concessions NASDAQ made was to put spacex on the Nasdaq 100 index (QQQM) early.
Anyone can drive an F-22 into a ditch. Doesn't mean that it can't also be used to drop a 2k lb. bomb down your chimney from 40,000 ft.
That demonstration is interesting, but not really something new. Fooling very intelligent people into believing something completely absurd is incredibly easy. How many scientific papers have been retracted based on wholesale fabrications that fooled an entire review committee?
The question isn't "What is the dumbest thing I can do with this technology?" its "What is the most valuable thing I can do with this technology?"
The technology is so dumb can be easily made to believe there is a Google mushroom. We are way far from driving a F22 to the ditch...although I am sure with the same techniques, we could make the AI make the F22 bomb the Google headquarters....
A table saw is technology so dumb it can be made to chop off your fingers.
An air conditioner is technology so dumb that it can be used to kill an infant with hypothermia.
A human is a sentient being so dumb that it can be made to believe in things far more outlandish than a “Google mushroom”.
I can keep going. The point is that just about anything useful can do something dangerous or stupid. Most people can see that. Most people are more interested in how useful something can be, not how useless it is when intentionally misused.
Why is the comparison to someone being able to intentionally crash their own F22, to the above example of intentionally trying to get bad results from their cheapest AI, a bad one?
No, but you do want Opus-tier models to do desktop and office software automation (think about people who intensely use Excel and the like). Actually those might take even more tokens that coding in a lot of cases. Why do you think Claude Cowork is successful, and why do you think Codex is leaning so hard into Computer use?
I wonder if you will see app makers begin to open APIs (MCPs) up in ways that replace computer use. Computer use via human interfaces is pretty hacky IME, and if you can use an app that exposes spreadsheets in a way that reduces token costs by 90%.
I'm optimistic that the demand for AI accessibility will drive programmatic interfaces in places where companies were previously reluctant to.
The general thrust that everything would be online was correct, it was just that the market mistimed and misallocated of capital by a decade or more. There was massive spending on infrastructure capacity that we wouldn't end up needing until the 2010s. There were hype driven valuations completely disconnected from business fundamentals just because a company was an 'internet' company. Things were going from cutting edge to obsolete in less than a year. There were breathless promises that this was business 2.0! Of course, none of that sounds remotely like what is going on today...
I'm optimistic about AI, but I also don't think that it is going to change everything as fast as promised.
The question you always have to ask is what problems does it directly solve. I personally think most of the current problems in software development and really the world at large are not time-bound problems but alignment issues, and all an LLM can really do there is be some 3rd party oracle that gives you an answer without needing other humans to agree with you.
> The question you always have to ask is what problems does it directly solve
Most directly, human labour. Labour is always a problem for capital. At a certain level of AI competence, businesses don't need to pay humans to complete the work they need doing in order to operate. I don't think anyone would dispute AI competence isn't growing steadily.
I agree with you. I think that if we're talking about actual reliable problem solving, we have to be discussing robotic / drone systems. Software is as complex as you want to make it, and always has been.
German tank and aircraft design and logistics had their own issues that made things worse, but largely, the biggest issue was just not being capable of keeping up with American manufacturing and Russian willingness to throw bodies at the fight.
Just for context Allied tank production was 276k to the axis 67k. Most other production categories show similar ratios. Your tanks can be perfectly reliable, and superior in every way, but it will be hard to win a fight when you are outnumbered 4:1.
Even now, the emerging doctrine from Ukraine, and now Iran, is to fight using asymmetric production advantages. Ukraine is taking out multimillion dollar facilities and ships with five figure UAVs. Iran has depleted US air defense stocks costing billions with a few million dollars worth of drones powered by motorcycle engines.
Exactly. Iran is beating us with balsa wood (paper airplane) drones. We're outspending them, but they can produce them faster and cheaper. We have to spend hundreds of thousands/millions per drone and missile. They are producing them for a fraction of that. We're being sold an expensive military industrial complex that actually is going to fail when put to the test of reality.
"Russian willingness to throw bodies at the fight."
Russia also build some tanks while being invaded, ~90k at the end of the war outcompeting german output at 3:1 (I suppose they are included in your allied 276k number?)
You have some false beliefs about Detroit’s product lines.
Fords mustang mach e is unrelated to the gas one. Totally different platform. It was designed from the ground up as an electric platform. The electric F-150 was a shrewd bet that didn’t pay off, but a pretty defensible decision to try to electrify the most popular vehicle in North America without changing the outside look too much. Under the sheet metal it doesn’t share a lot of drivetrain parts with the gas truck.
Chevy makes full size electric trucks on an all electric platform with three truck/SUV models across three brands. The bolt was cancelled in 2022 with the last one produced in December 2023. They have restarted production of the Bolt for the 2026 model year. The Bolt is also built on a platform designed as electric only. The factory building the Bolt is being tentatively retooled next year to build higher margin cars as a result of Trumps tariffs. I don’t see how any of that has anything to do with appeasing Trump.
Stellantis is its own mess, and they suck at designing all cars regardless of energy source.
True, the Mach E mostly just shares the name. The E-Transit really is the same van with a different power train. It ought to be taking over fleet sales, but it only sells about 12K units/year, vs. 162K for the fuel powered version.
The Ford electric F-150 was overdesigned and overpriced.
Comments on the Bolt indicate it's being killed due to "changes in the political environment."
Depends on the plastic, but even the most benign ones put out very minor amounts of fumes if YouTube testers are to be believed. Note that fumes in this case just means that they are seeing changes in AQI meters, which is something that can happen with too many people sitting in a room.
If it’s something you worry about, the enclosed models frequently either come with, or can be fitted with a carbon filter, and if you are really worried, you can use dryer vent to get it outside.
With the most popular plastic (PLA) at printing temperatures, there isn’t any data showing toxic byproducts. When you get into things like ABS and resin you have to think more about fumes.
Do not print a key fob out of PLA. It will not survive summer car temperatures. A better choice is PETG, or ABS and ASA if you have an enclosed printer that can vent outside.
Publications love a doom and gloom rant, which is why he seems to have built an entire career on hysterical anti-ai screeds. It doesn’t mean that he’s right though.
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