111–120 of 128 posts
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All the goods and people transported won't mind that a few shareholders were unhappy.
They might be unhappy when the profitable business are all ran out of town and the unprofitable ones collapse leaving neither behind.
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Guess all that drinking water we have is just a waste then. Highways too. Airlines are unique in that they're essentially a public good that we've allowed to be a private market (look at how often the government intervenes in the industry). That doesn't mean that airplanes are pointless.
Absolutely. The entire building-airplanes-and-flying-them "industry" is a side effect of their necessity as weapons of war and toys for rich people (same thing, really). There is no rational reason for it to exist, especially knowing what we know now, but we're not a rational species.
Airlines are not just a toy for the rich, in fact majority of the passenger traffic is shuffled around in economy.
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> there was a fairly long gap between the death of PDAs and the birth of smartphones. Only if you define the birth of smartphones as starting with Android/iPhone. Palm released their own smartphones using the same OS as their PDAs (the Treo line) prior to that, and Microsoft had Windows Mobile plus a bundle of third-party manufacturers. Plus Blackberry had been around the whole time, too. Looking it up, it seems that…
This. For me it started with the XDA (II). The telecom provider O2 had an HTC produced handset called the XDA, essentially a Pocket PC (predecessor of Windows Mobile) PDA with built-in GPRS modem (which I remember fetching up to 64 kbps, as opposed to using dial-up via GSM, which would get you 9600 bps if you paired up a Palm or psion 3/5 via irda to a nokia 6210). The XDA II followed a year later. By that time, ther…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the goods and people transported won't mind that a few shareholders were unhappy.
They might be unhappy when the profitable business are all ran out of town and the unprofitable ones collapse leaving neither behind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guess all that drinking water we have is just a waste then. Highways too. Airlines are unique in that they're essentially a public good that we've allowed to be a private market (look at how often the government intervenes in the industry). That doesn't mean that airplanes are pointless.
Absolutely. The entire building-airplanes-and-flying-them "industry" is a side effect of their necessity as weapons of war and toys for rich people (same thing, really). There is no rational reason for it to exist, especially knowing what we know now, but we're not a rational species.
We’re humans. We fuck shit up. Our goal is to do it only when necessary.
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Research proposals are not supposed to necessarily solve current real-life problems so there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But given the amount of startups coming out of universities, the mindset is crazily wrong. So many people coming with a technology. If it's software you can at least pivot easily but if you got some kind of hardware technology, it becomes much less simple to do that. > Low interest + eas…
> > It's a problem creation machine. > Not sure if I understand you correctly It is hopefully not an obtuse point but allow me to explain it with a story; Teenage girl has a beauty spot. Her parents tell her it's a princess spot. Boys think its cute. She's happy. Some mean bitches tell her it's ugly and probably skin cancer. Now it's a problem. Nothing in reality had changed of course. And that's how solutions lookin…
I really dislike these takes on low interest rates. As far back as the 70s (when interest rates were 8-15%), there have been random business ideas being started and shutdown (pet rocks, every airline ever, etc.). We don't remember those because they shutdown 40 years ago. Today, we only see the successful ones that survived (walmart, fedex, etc.). There's a legit question: why have long term interests declined over t…
If you have a constant interest rate aka exponential growth that actually means you are growing too slowly in the beginning and too quickly in the end.
Even if you subscribe to the classical time preference theory it doesn't make sense for the market to signal that you need to save more today and then signal once the future arrives that you need to save more. If the interest rate were stuck at a positive 3% this would imply that people will perpetually ignore the present and therefore some of the savings will never be spent ever. I.e. aggregate demand will be below aggregate supply.
So no, zero percent interest is not some abberation, it is simply the result of low inflation rates and high rates of capital formation and the lowering of capital intensity due to software companies.
I really dislike these takes on low interest rates. As far back as the 70s (when interest rates were 8-15%), there have been random business ideas being started and shutdown (pet rocks, every airline ever, etc.). We don't remember those because they shutdown 40 years ago. Today, we only see the successful ones that survived (walmart, fedex, etc.). There's a legit question: why have long term interests declined over t…
I thought the reason interest rates have been so low for the last ~30 years is because governments in the 90s (certainly the US and UK ones) took the decision to make it their monetary policy to keep them low.
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I thought the reason interest rates have been so low for the last ~30 years is because governments in the 90s (certainly the US and UK ones) took the decision to make it their monetary policy to keep them low.
You mean they decided to keep inflation low which obviously also means lower interest rates in the long run.