The other side of this is only new baby firms invest in that thing that makes a little bit of money. But given enough refinement, that thing starts making more and more money as it gets better and better. And soon, that new baby firm outshines the incumbent. The incumbent's wasn't incentivized to invest in the thing that started off worse but eventually became the new model. Think Kodak with film-vs-digital cameras.

This was the thesis of 1997's The Innovator's Dilemma, written by the guy who coined "Disruptive Technology".

You use "zombie companies" as a universal pejorative and suggest we should all be instead worshiping at the alter of economic efficiency, JIT-delivery, and maximizing shareholder value without really considering the critiques there.

Yes, the "zombie company" strawman is paying people to move dirt from one hole to the other and back again which is dumb, but the "efficient company" has its own strawman, one drowning in manufactured debt, peeing in pee bottles in-between amazon warehouse isles, and unable to manufacture its own medical equipment when a black-swan pandemic event hits.

Which one is "better" largely depends on if you value societal stability or shareholder profits.

Or, in the framing of the article (which is summarizing Aoki, Milgrom, and Roberts), J-style companies exceed in periods of moderate volatility where 1) things don't change so much that you need the money-above-all-else incentive that favors strong hierarchical Jobs-like leadership that finds the visionary new solution, but 2) they change enough that the money-above-all-else incentive that favors value-engineering enshittification loses out to competition. The "societal stability" is just a part of the incentive bundle that forces the adaptation called the J-style approach.

Your accountant can clarify the difference.

SpaceX is getting dressed for their debutante ball and is putting on the makeup to make a grand entrance on the auction floor.

Is there a difference? I legitimately have no idea. You are right that we can add another entry to the list of interconnected circular dealmakings. All this ain't gonna end well next time the music stops playing.

Since Cursor often relies on Claude models, some of those services will flow back to their own datacenter compute. Especially if there's, lets call it, "customer demand loadbalancing optimization agreements" that makes those Cursor services prioritize Claude models using the app keys that get load-balanced onto the SpaceX datacenter.

Did SpaceX just spend $10B to rent out its own datacenter, juicing their recurring revenue metrics with their own AI services investment?

Traditional geothermal is you dig a really deep well and get a geyser of hot water or steam to come up.

Fervo is doing "Enhanced" or "Engineered" geothermal where you dig two wells: an injection and an extraction well. You frack the rock in between, creating lots of small channels for water to flow between them. The water absorbs the heat from the rocks as its circulating from the injection well to the extraction well.

The kind of rock that's good at this heat transfer is different from shale rock that oil & gas frackers have experience with... it's harder, less porous, not partial-dino-juice. So they're taking a lot of the same core concepts from the oil & gas industry (horizontal drilling, geology simulations, etc), but their IP is in adopting the techniques to work with geothermal-favorable rock.

Another interesting concept I heard Fervo researching: this kind of geothermal is not "baseload" style power, so there's a few tricks they can do to get better cost efficiency and peaker-like or battery-like behavior. Remember the two wells that form the circulation loop: injection and extraction? Well, you need pumps on both sides (remember, this isn't "geyser-style" geothermal where natural pressure and geology do all the work). Pumps take energy to run, something like 20-30% of the overall extraction output (you put a unit of energy in to run the pumps and you get 3-5 units of energy back out the other end). Not great, not terrible either... it's an energy return comparable to solar and wind. But what you can do is run the injection pump when power prices are low (ie when there's an excess of solar on the grid), pressurize all your fracked channels underground (the reservoir), and then when grid prices rise in the evening you run just the extraction pump to pull out the pre-heated, pre-pressurized water. You're still at a 3-5x energy return, but the time-shifting has made the cost multiplier more favorable.

My understanding is it's still in research phase, but Fervo is piloting this technique. Like another thread said, they're pre-IPO now, so they've been flooding the renewables media with all these stories. They filed an S-1 recently, but always read the eventual S-3 before considering your investment options blahblahblah.

> Video Playback: Up to 27* hours

> *: 25 hours in the EU

It's fine to talk about the efficiency of the private operators. No problem there. The dishonesty is in omitting any discussion of how the tracks that the whole system depends are built with heavy government support. Without that, one could be forgiven for reading that article and thinking "oh, just privatize it and you'll be as successful as Japan."

I think the take-away here should be more along the lines of what a working public-private partnership can look like and what roles each can play. I'd love to see a 4,000-word article that compares this model to the regional transit authority models we have in the US.

Yes, they're private companies, and they do diversification like investing in real estate around their rail cooridors to grow towns and grab people looking to do some shopping in their adjacent department store as passengers are walking through the stations. This is transit-oriented development at its best. (Also, ask google why land property lines in the US western states often look like big checkerboards)

But there's no mention of the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency (JRTT). That's the government entity that builds many new Shinkansen lines. It then leases them to the JR companies at a fixed rate for 30 years. This keeps massive construction costs off the private companies' balance sheets.

Or when they do need large capital spends, there's no mention of the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (FILP) which provides loans in the form of low-interest credit backed by government guarantees. Their creditors are effectively lending to the Japaneese government, not the JR company.

Is that kind of system really privatized? It's hybridized at best, and it shows that you really need government support of some sort to push country-scale infrastructure like this forward. Sorry free-market absolutists.

They sold the Allbirds brand and IP for $39M:

> The company, valued at around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million.

...used the ticker to build stock hype that will bring in another $50M:

> The company, which according to the release will be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50 million in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.

...and is planning on using that $90M of capital to sell a few extra shovels to the marginal buyer in the latest hype market.

> “The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service,” the company said in the announcement.

This is really just picking the corpse clean... company lost 99% of value, dropping from $4B to $0.04B. This is just redirecting what little capital is left into something that might get a small return for whoever is left holding shares.

Technically, yes, the JR's are private companies.

But track construction is generally done by a government construction company financed with Japanese sovereign debt. The completed tracks are then long-term leased to the JR's at favorable rates.

Is it really a private company if the key capital outlay is done by the government and given to you with a sweetheart deal? ehhhhhh.... you can call the operator company private, but you're being dishonest if you call the system privatized.

Yes, PE enshittifies the experience. You can be a better human and win customers that way.

The headwinds are the usual david-v-goliath going up against scale/consolidation stories:

- consolidation gives more purchasing power. When all the PE-controlled pest control vendors in the state are negotiating as one, they get bigger cost breaks

- PE has a bigger war chest. They'll enshittify eventually, but they'll undercut you longer than you can stay solvent. At that point, they'll happily buy you for pennies.

- The end-game is always monopolization. A PE firm bought up something like all the concrete mills in Georgia or one of the southern state. Any building or municipal project in the state effectively buys from that one company, even though it looks like a bunch of different local concrete mills.

- Any AI you throw at the problem presumably PE can handle more efficiently at scale.

What's the strategy that outcompetes?

- Another plane was out of position, grabbing some attention of the controller

- Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck

- The colliding plane didn't have "explicit" landing clearance, but a "follow previous plane and land the same way unless told otherwise" implicit landing clearance. In Europe, planes need an explicit landing clearance, the act of granting it may have brought attention to the runway contention. US implicit system (arguably) is a bit more efficient, debate will now be is it worth it (pilots are now required to read back instructions because of past blood... will this result in same thing?)

- This was around midnight and apparently a little foggy, making visual contacts harder

Remember folks, disasters like this are rarely caused by a single factor. NTSB reports are excellent post-mortems that look at all contributing factors and analyze how they compounded into failure. Be human here.

Internet promised ability to connect with anyone anywhere around the world. It felt limitless and infinite.

Turns out in an infinite world, the loudest voices are the ragebaits, the algorithmically-amplified, or the outright scammers.

Human social brain doesn't work in an infinite world, it works for a Dunbar's Number world. And we all like our psuedo-anonymous soapboxes (I'm standing on one right now), but trick will be to realize that the glitter of infinite quantity isn't the same as small-scale connection.

Whether it's the TV hardware or the streaming service in your house, your standard of living is now judged by whether you pay extra for the ad-free tier.

Apple tends to skew luxury purchase, so it makes sense it hasn't been riddled with adware yet. The Apple logo is a status symbol that you're not being bombarded with ads in every corner of underutilized screen real-estate.