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Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

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Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#221

All these things are apparently valued at trillions of dollars these days. Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life? What has gotten better other than the ability to produce more crap?

The stock market is just a game that rich people use to manipulate money. It is not a reflection of the real world. Consider for example Google, one of the companies with highest valuation in the market. If Google stops working now, the only problem we'll have is getting a few minutes back of our time. Nobody will have big issues in life because one cannot find a web page, view more ads, and watch silly videos! However they will swear that Google is the most important company in the world to justify the money people throw at it. I won't even go to Meta, which is like celebrating that people are using crack cocaine...

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#222

All these things are apparently valued at trillions of dollars these days. Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life? What has gotten better other than the ability to produce more crap?

In terms of SpaceX (the space portion of it) they've produced the cheapest way to get any payload into space. If you pay anybody else, you will overpay drastically depending on who you want to take your payload into space. In terms of AI, we've seen even here on HN everything from mathematical problems that remaind unsolved, being solved, mathematical proofs being used to disprove theories, heck we even learned more…

Isn't AI routinely making significant mistakes in analyzing medical imaging?

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#224
post #198
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have evidence of corruption, present it. Otherwise it's just generic cynicism leading to a thought terminating cliche.

At this point in US regulatory oversight I would have a harder time finding evidence of no corruption.

[deleted]

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#225
From Matt Levine’s column today:

> The index demand is not 100% of the stock available in the IPO, or 110%, or even 50%. But it’s plausibly more than 25%. It’s not a short squeeze, but it’s a lot. Add a reported 30% allocation to retail, and arguably a majority of the IPO is being sold to price-insensitive investors. That is one way to get a high IPO price.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they've produced the cheapest way Were we struggling to do this before? Was the overall percentage reduction in costs? Was some other achievement held back because we couldn't accomplish this? What is now enabled? > to get any payload into space. A limited set of payloads into space. No vehicle can get "any payload" to space at a fixed price. > The benefits are easy to miss, You've listed a bunch of reasons to publ…

> Were we struggling to do this before? We literally couldn't. > Was the overall percentage reduction in costs? Starship will bill NASA 1/20th what SLS does. > What is now enabled? LEO. Artemis. Out of all of these companies, being confused about SpaceX is super weird.

I think you missed the core of their question: What has actually gotten better in practical terms for the average American?

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#227
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that at these levels of debt, repayment is never the goal.

Repayment isn't a goal that anyone in the system should reasonably want. Federal debt is not like credit card debt. Debt is a product that the US Government sells. Me, being a big corporation or human, go to the USG and say "I need somewhere to park my money that is safeish from inflation". The USG sells me debt at X.Y% interest. The money now generates safe interest, which means its safeish from inflation. A world w…

> Repayment isn't a goal that anyone in the system should reasonably want.

Repayment to $0 isn't a reasonable goal but there are a lot of problems with your argument.

The biggest question is about sustainability. Is the debt-to-GDP ratio stable/manageable and is the interest rate on the debt below the economy's growth rate? If the answer is no, you have a problem.

> High levels of debt only signals high demand for this product.

This is backwards. The amount of debt is set mostly by government supply, which is driven by deficits. The demand signal is the price, which in this case is the yield. If the demand was high, yields would drop as the amount of debt grew. Instead, we have rising debt and rising yields, which means supply outstrips demand.

The US no longer has a AAA sovereign credit rating for a reason. When Moody's (the last agency to downgrade the US) stripped the US of its AAA rating, it cited "rising debt and interest costs 'that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns.'"

The biggest issue at this point isn't the principal, it's the interest. Interest is the fastest-growing line item in the federal budget. It's almost at $1 trillion/year now and expected to nearly double by 2035. You either have to cut from other spending or borrow more to pay the interest.

Your comment implies that this doesn't have a real cost, which is silly.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like these make me feel like we're living in different worlds. I use LLMs multiple times a day and they've significantly improved my quality of life. They are also steadily becoming more useful over time (e.g. now solving math problems).

I’d love it if for once someone on here saying LLMs are some life changing apparatus would give a single example.

I can give some recent examples.

- Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.

- Using it daily for Chinese-English translation. Significantly better than pre-LLM translation software. Also, great at teaching grammar, nuances, etc.

- General Q&A. Like "Googling" but much faster. This is probably the most common use case for me.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they've produced the cheapest way Were we struggling to do this before? Was the overall percentage reduction in costs? Was some other achievement held back because we couldn't accomplish this? What is now enabled? > to get any payload into space. A limited set of payloads into space. No vehicle can get "any payload" to space at a fixed price. > The benefits are easy to miss, You've listed a bunch of reasons to publ…

> Were we struggling to do this before? We literally couldn't. > Was the overall percentage reduction in costs? Starship will bill NASA 1/20th what SLS does. > What is now enabled? LEO. Artemis. Out of all of these companies, being confused about SpaceX is super weird.

Granted, I only skimmed some high-line numbers, but isn't their only profitable project Starlink? SpaceX is functionally a satellite internet company that happens to make rockets.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#230

> Firms in the broad Russell 3000 share index have a total market value of $79trn I sometimes try to get people to worry about the catastrophic state of American public finances by pointing out that the net national debt, including unfunded liabilities, is estimated to be $175T [0]. The government could appropriate all the equity from the top 3000 largest companies, and also the entire real estate market, and it stil…

This misunderstands the power of monetization, or mistakes "dollars" having some kind of fixed "value." They do not. Whether one agrees with that or not, thinking of this as a "debt" problem where a hypothetical move is to appropriate equity- setting aside the fact that equity ALSO is not in a fixed unit of measure- anyway, thinking of appropriating equity to solve a public debt problem is a category error. That is how accounting works for business structures that exist within a monetary system but NOT for government and currency printers that define the monetary system. The MMT people are right about this. Public debt is a measure of private sector wealth. That is how the machine works.
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