Perhaps a huge tell about national strategy is the fact that the owner has $10s of millions to loan to the company? US economic structure in post WWII era has increasingly focused on return on capital (and value extraction). How can that compete in long term with an economy which prioritizes reinvestment *in industry*?
One would presume that the founder is investing their money into something, probably equities, that is an investment in industry. They could be either selling those equities for a loan here or taking a loan against those equities to loan to GoPro (if the cost of capital is lower for them than GoPro, which seems plausible.)
I generally agree with your point about value extraction vs. re-investment.
Exactly. How can they come into existence except via an IPO or similar mechanism? At that moment, investment happens. The rest of the time, it does not. The stock market rising does not increase investment in industry. When you buy stocks at a stock exchange, you aren't investing in industry
You are saying that "investment" only happens when you provide capital to a corporation.
Presumably, under this definition, when you sell stock that is not "disinvestment".
Unless you are selling it back to the company itself. Then it is "disinvestment", because the total amount of capital provided to the corporation has gone down.
That is not what people mean by the term "investment". You need to find a different word, because "investment" has a more general meaning than the concept you are talking about.
Voice of American *capitalists* used to the idea of investing capital to generate rent. Maybe AI can rebalance the market of capital and individual labor.
I can't decide if in my life span we did anything beyond the internet to actually make life better as a primary driver of economic growth. it feels like _everything_ is just rent seeking now.
I surprised myself by reading some content without knowing where it came from and it had a position that owning more than one home is hoarding. It dug into the relationship of landlords and buildings providing apartment homes vs single family homes. I'm not going into the whole property is theft part of it but it really struck a chord with me. I have a personal friend who constantly goes on about how great renting properties is and how much money his family makes and it really smacked me in the face how it really shouldn't "be this way".
anyways... we feel this rent seeking everyday with the death-by-a-thousand-papaer-cuts that is SaaS and subscription revenue.
i'm getting tired as i get older and i'm not sure how to make the most of the next ~half of my career and life.
Solar panels, battery storage, micro mobility (partially), quite a few internet driven innovations (wise, free communication, etc etc) the list goes on and on.
The problem is that investment used to be to fund risky businesses with unlimited upside and now a lot gets funded for capture / rent seeking behavior...
Anyway don't know your background but there are plenty of projects to work on that are a net positive
I know people honestly working to make government taxation efficient to help people, but they then take those profits and buy 3-4 houses in lower income communities and rent them out at exorbitant rates once renovated. None of this would be an issues except regulation prevents affordable and non market housing.
I found this article frustrating. In my experience, the students who participate in the “co-creation of a contract” would likely also have done their best to comply with Professor induced rules. The challenge is the 10-20% who, stressed and overworked, will be just as likely to ignore this contract as any other. I would have liked to understand how the situation is changed compared to no rules at all…
Comparing with China, I’d be curious about whether their companies face the same return-on-capital forces that US (and to a lesser extent western) companies do. So when we outsource to them, it’s to a vendor who is not needing to promised 10%+ returns. As I understand it, this is because the central government exerts pressure on banks to make loans at low rates, so that capital can be raised more easily for targeted industries.
I agree that onshoring is likely impossible without some sort of contextual reimagining of US industry.
Pretty different tasks, environments, outcomes, metrics, goals, and other things in a warehouse vs. a factory… really have no clue how this is supposed to be relevant. Why not mention farms or libraries?
Libraries are typically either governed by a municipality's rules around employment and treatment of employees, or part of a school/etc where there are again additional guidelines about these things to be sensible and not leading people into unsafe behavior.
Training data of task completion. See, e.g., robots doing backflips. Presumably there’s an optimal robot for gymnastics but if you start with humanoid form you can train based on many videos of human movement. The alternative - world model sim with physics and loss functions- perhaps ends up being too unconstrained when you add in optimization of the robot form…
AI watching videos of humans seems an incredibly inefficient way to solve acrobatic balance. It is just physics and engineering. The hard part is in the materials and assemblages for enabling complex and subtle movements and the fine motor control, not knowing what the motions are.
Lots of complaints about corruption. It’s worth imagining how you would run a very low income developing country. Remittances and tariffs are the easiest items to tax for revenue. I’d love suggestions for better alternatives…
There's an important difference between tax (predictable, evenly applied) and corruption (uneven, unpredictable, and doesn't go to the government but individuals)
Curious about the design choice. Why not use the TI parts with integrated microcontrollers rather than two separate chips? Or even a FPGA with integrated ARM9 like the Zynq family?
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