but because that would indeed kill their market because most people don't have motorcycle licenses, no one gets them approved, or countries won't allow them.

Though one thing that I might think researchers might not want is people may be too sick to recover even if their cancer disappeared tomorrow.

But the battery is a nice philosophy, similar to hybrid/mild electric cars. You don't need all the power forever. You just need more than a 120V circuit can provide.

my vision of them is that the engineering side can be great to deal with when they want to be (and my personal experience is they want to be). but the other part of their business is like set the standard, and then enforce it.

With immigration are unquestionably tough decisions, tradeoffs, philosophies on the issue, and demographics in general. It gets heated, fast. I know I'm biased, but I wish trust had not degraded to such an extent you could believe people could deal with these topics in good faith.

But how can anyone support this kind of craven policymaking where uncertainty and cruelty are features and not bugs? Just shock and awe and deafening silence.

That's what's so dishearterning. Is that who we are now, or is this just a timely excuse to be who we always have?

I assume Apple probably do that more than I know, it is just interesting that their vertical acquisition history feels the most boring and the most interesting.

At least looking from the outside, it feels like relatively small pieces develop into pretty big differentiators, like P.A. Semi, Intrinsity and Passif paving the way to their SoCs.

The payment networks have power, and if you can twist the arm of the gatekeepers, people subvert that power.

The only thing I don't know about these days is with the stablecoins, how do you avoid the government sinking their claws into you if you intrinsically (esp. if successful) have to hold that much in cash or short-term instruments? Or you have something like tether, which leaving aside anything else, you can definitely say is comically opaque for an entity that is nominally running $160B.

The three-sided conflicts and aesthetics of the civilizations also felt a bit ahead of their time, with the NATO-like, Eastern Bloc, and the Middle East civs.

Though to be fair, before Chromehounds was Armored Core, so it's not like FromSoft's mecha pedigree is that obscure.

It's all so divisive, but it frustrates me to no end that likely the biggest end that people trying to defend this, without any admission this is a crisis of confidence waiting to happen if it's not already there.

The amount of political capital immolated for the sake of this course of action is flatly embarrassing. It doesn't really matter what they want or how long they think it's going to take to get it, the damage is already done.

When you distort risk pricing, you distort the market, and if you do it hard enough for long enough, you are basically pulling back the slingshot.

While this also applies to mutual insurers, my philosophy is being serious about solvency is the best way to know if you are properly underwriting and pricing. I feel like the government operates too much knowing that they can backstop it either themselves or by imposing an assessment on the market.

You are right that the really big disasters are very correlated events. While not a silver bullet, reinsurance and other risk transfer stuff can help smooth those kind of events out. The good-ish thing with those risks is that while they are uncertain, they are sort of identifiable, known unknowns in Rumsfeld parlance.

I agree with that sentiment, the thing that always seems crazy to me is that California's housing pricing in the face of all these things, but perhaps it's sort of pick your poison. Like I don't want to harp on it, but the only implicit or explicit thing everyone appears to agree on given the decisions that have been made is protecting housing prices above all else. But don't expose people to the ramifications of the housing appreciation (Looking at you, Prop 13).

On its surface, nothing crazy for long/short funds, the notable part was that basically all the effort was on the short side, and the long side was implied to be very humdrum. And the short book had like negative returns over a long period. It just struck me as a really elegant (if extreme) example of what uncorrelated returns can do if you do somehow have some edge over time.

And I'm not sure what Hindenburg's holistic picture is, but whether rightly or wrongly now I usually assume most of the kind of very public shorts operate similarly. I was never really on board with the "short sellers are evil" train of thought, but I did believe, "oh these very public short sellers only short things, they just go around all the time thinking everything is awful". And my assumption now is that they are like, kind of really theatric long/short funds.

Matt had some line like if you extremely good at something, you can get rich doing it, even if it loses money. As long as it's not correlated.

I don't even know if it counts as culture, but the US inevitably seems to have such a refined sense of litigation and, insurance mindset for lack of a better term?

Anecdotally, schools are indeed a prime example, we had cooking classes in high school that were stopped because of the costs to insure for it.

It could be he thinks this is as good as it's going to get for a while, don't know.

At this point I usually look at the cash as being as much directly insurance related as it is business/investing related. They are a massive insurance and reinsurance writer.

Obviously it's up to them. But to me there's a little temptation that if you're going to be this kind of 'pocket universe economy' for lack of a better term that it tries to be a little less straight beta.

I don't want to open it up and see "hey 20% of your maket cap is just apple? I already have a lot of that, can't you have something else?". Which firmly falls into the camp of not their problem.

So I guess now it's only 10% of its market cap, so progress :)

The vibe I always get is that they won't hesitate to abandon stuff that doesn't get huge fast, but a big part is that the manager or teams don't want to get stuck with something that isn't a juggernaut or obviously on its way.

And heck, maybe that is just everywhere, but anecdotally at google, from an outside observer, it looks like the culture dictates being on the 'Big Thing' is how you succeed there.

But yeah part of it is like, it's really weird. If you asked me how much consistently better sleep would be worth, the answer is how much do you want?

But phrase that as "Bed as a service" and my reflex is "you're kidding, righr?"