Viewing profile — spacebanana7

Exactly- owning one home is actually the neutral position. Renters are persistently taking a short position on real estate and landlords/multiple owners are effectively long.

In the UK at least there’s significant tax advantages to home ownership compared to renting. Easily 30-50% of the money you pay in rent is immediately burned in tax/letting agent f…

The negative metric is more important - if you can cut staff costs by 20% with only 5% reduction in revenue/innovation that’s a win from an investor’s perspective.

> They discuss the changes as the team are doing them (software design and architecture) I find the format of PRs to be better suited to discussion than slack/teams messages. Key d…

Rome lost loads of soldiers in the Germanic wars too. The parallel is that these wars are too expensive (for a non-existential conflict) to take to fulfilment, but also can't easil…

From Ukraine's perspective it's existential for sure. Russia however, just revises its objectives every few months according to how well/badly its prospects on the battlefield are …

The “special military operation” euphemism that both the US/Russia used in Iran/Ukraine does have a degree of truth. These wars are really military engagements with directional obj…

This makes stripe more valuable. No company on the web wants to manage dozens of local payment methods with slightly different rules and possible local bank account requirements. S…

There are huge military advantages right now. The US military will not willingly give up starlink, and they can use it in every country without permission.

It's hard to get right when OSs, programming languages, browsers and sometimes other applications have their own opinions about trust stores. I understand why our IT department wan…

Not your keys, not your computer

The (optimistic?) take is that xAI is genuinely better at building datacenters at scale than anyone else, and the freedom to use Nat Gas as the primary energy source allows them to…

Franco, at least in the sense of GDP per capita indicators and escaping WW2.

But with RT, my government does the ad blocking and the Russian government pays the paywall

One major benefit of Russia Today’s news site is that there’s no ads, because of sanctions. If you’re comfortable ignoring the Russian government propaganda on many topics it’s act…

Yes but that’s a blunt instrument, which would risk reaction. However putting an individual on a sanctions list is routine and easy. And a president could always just call up the C…

Most of the GDP per capita divergence has happened since 2008. My same comment could’ve been written when Biden was president.

A couple of decades ago both France and Britain had higher per capita GDP than the US. Now they are significantly behind. Similarly top European companies used to rival American co…

Usually export controls are applied to stuff where some significant % is made in America so a few US based engineers could make the project export controllable.

There’s a difference from being able to protect privacy, and doing so in a way that complies with EU law

Cars can still show that they're poorly made pretty quickly.

Additionally, vertically integrated companies don't get to tag along on innovations produced by upstream suppliers. Many EV companies will effortlessly have their range increase by…

I used Gemini to fix my new boiler by taking various photos and asking it for help. It saved me a plumber call-out (this was a user error issue, nothing safety critical). Gemini al…

Google too, and this was in the long term best interests of shareholders. Imagine in 2010 if investors had real transparency into how much money YouTube or Maps was losing, along w…

Why not Anthropic? They’re a very rare company capable of charging $200 per month per seat level fee across the corporate workforce. Yes their compute costs are astronomical, but t…