Viewing profile — vannevar

>Contracting for more chips than you can make isn't a fun situation to find yourself in, nobody is doing it for profit (it's actually quite expensive in time, money, and reputation…

>You think after hundreds of years of economic study we don't have any sort of grasp on these absolute most basic concepts? Nonetheless, even after all these hundreds of years of e…

This is a great question. Data center demand != AI demand. And chips sales at this point is driven by data center projects, not directly by AI demand.

No one has claimed that. Only that there is a risk that semiconductor manufacturers will be incentivized to overcommit, resulting in collateral economic damage when they fail to de…

Yes, it happens all the time. Sometimes it's actual fraud, sometimes it happens due to unforeseen supply chain issues. Sometimes it's a gray area in between, where production is po…

>Commodities like corn have been managing this for a long time… what’s special about chips? Chips aren't grown, for starters. They require very expensive facilities that take a lon…

"Demand destruction" doesn't literally mean all demand is destroyed; it refers to the demand curve you reference. But as a sibling commenter notes, real business is rarely as clean…

The problem isn't the price. No matter how much you pay, you can't take delivery of a chip that doesn't exist. Now, you could raise prices to the point where you destroy demand. Bu…

We could say that about a lot of infrastructure that has been recklessly placed on the open Internet because it was cheaper than more secure solutions. I would say the same about h…

>As the memory industry is still recovering from the challenging environment in 2023, this tight supply environment will help drive the considerable improvements in profitability a…

The article focuses specifically on the economic effects of tax cuts, concluding that they have little overall positive effect on economic or job growth. This is consistent with me…

Apparently there were healthcare strikes in February that depressed the numbers there, which were resolved by March. Also maybe data center and World Cup hospitality hiring. But ha…

I would hardly call it a sudden reversal, looking at the downward trend in the numbers over the last six months or so. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/non-farm-payrolls

It has to get bigger. As soon as it starts shrinking, the next round of debt will no longer be able to cover the prior round of commitments. What is happening in AI is essentially …

Anecdotal evidence notwhithstanding, EVs have much lower long-term maintenance costs. See eg, https://www.energy.gov/cmei/vehicles/articles/fotw-1190-june... https://advocacy.consu…

>But you haven't even articulated what the loophole here is. I did, but here it is again: if you book revenue for sale of an asset where you guarantee the ROI on that asset (not on…

The right analogy here is not the auto industry, but the music industry. Regulation might "win", but margins will be driven down to commodity levels. That is not the assumption tha…

A more useful comparison would be the share of new emissions that data centers represent, and a comparison of the growth rates of various sources of marginal new emissions (eg, fro…

>We don't know what the maximum is because some of the terms are confidential. So we agree on something: the $6.3B is not the cap: we don't actually know what the cap is. (And for …

>Nvidia's backstop is capped at $6.3 billion... You keep saying this. That is not what the article says. It says the backstop is currently valued at $6.3B. That is not the cap. >Q1…

I have no opinion one way or another how SF should be zoned. I'm just saying that how it is zoned is a second- or third-order effect on the rate of home-building. Land, labor and m…

You can certainly make a better case for the sentience of fish than for an abstract legal fiction like a corporation.

I think you're making the same mistake the article did, focusing on the regulatory environment. My argument is that the zoning and other regulation is not the main reason Austin ha…

>There's a problem here: you haven't actually quantified how much CoreWeave is spending versus the value of the backstop. You seem to be suggesting that for every dollar CoreWeave …

No---did you read the original article? The comment and the parent will make more sense. Basically the article compares Austin and San Fransisco and attributes the difference in bu…