We always expect what was promised to be different than what was delivered to some degree, but I'm not sure restaurants have fully weighed the expectations-vs-reality backlash this may cause... uncannily-wrong details aside for a sec, the AI pics always set michelin-level presentation expectations. The final promise-vs-plate pics in this post were pretty dramatic.
There's always a class of restaurants where they don't care about repeat visitors. Think the cafe in front of a major tourist attraction: every day brings a new busload of 1-time patrons, those will always want the michelin-level pics to bait the 1-time foot-traffic in. The danger is the neighborhood mom-and-pops will start using the same trick without understanding they need repeat customers, and repeat disappointment kills a repeat audience.
But who knows... people with a TV budget have been using glue in their cheesy pizza commercials, soap in their beer glass foam, and motor oil on their pancake stacks for a long time -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k7PJoNAXkk -- maybe this is just equalizing the enshittified food playing field.
This guy's car may be designed to be driven hard in a circuit or mountain roads, but that ain't what this guy is doing:
> Now when I hit a loopy freeway interchange at night and my GR Corolla carves through the turn, it’s 1996 and I’m cruising in my CRX, getting pho in San Gabriel or rushing to a flyer party at Naga in Long Beach.
So doing the famous LA Stop-and-Go Freeway Circuit.
> We published our own magazines, built our own businesses, and for good and bad, promoted our own outlaw street racer image and our own beauty standard.
Or hitting the 4-way-intersection midnight drift curves.
Lets be honest, most people who drive these kinds of cars drive as many circuits as the average F-150 owner drives on western canyon dirt tracks.
Some do, sure, and if you do that, great, get the best tool for your job. But most people only daydream about these things and simply want the image as an escape from the existential meaningless of their suburban lives (is the op's "midlife crisis" title snark or an actual cry for meaning?)
I'm not gonna prevent people from spending their money on their hobbies, do whatever floats your boat. But if your hobbies are really just reving a loud engine from one strip mall red light to the next red light 1/4 mile down the road, well, that's not the thrill and the emotion of driving, that's a desperate display of loneliness and disconnection.
My unexotic stock electric does 0-60 in around 4.8sec, +/-.
So the same performance that requires a stupid amount of wasted energy as heat and noise can be had from stock electric, with a couple hundred ms leftover. Do you care about performance, or do you just want to just fart out a bunch of noise?
I get traditional car culture, but electrics embody the "money talks, wealth whispers" truism.
What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?
And are we talking literally land, or would condo ownership suffice? (After all, you typically stack a few condos on top of one parcel of land). The smallest condo is probably dictated by some pesky human habitability rules, but what class of property has the fewest minimum-square-footage zoning rules? Retail probably has egress rules, but what about industrial spaces?
Could you create an industrial park to house a bunch of, to use a rough metaphor, independently-owned/independently-operated phone booths (or whatever other "qualifying use")?
Basically is there a category of land-use you could split ownership off at ridiculous scale, offer LLC-as-a-service to buy a bunch of them, and just for fun, tokenize the votes to provably aggregate the absentee ballots at scale via blockchain?
If it's one-entity-one-vote, what is the most cost-effective way to maximize the number of qualifying entities?
Bonus points for every order of magnitude of synthetic votes you can reasonably achieve over the fleshy variety.
> Unless the company have a lot of fairly stable semi-liquid assets (like real estate)...
That's exactly what happened famously with Red Lobster. PE sold off all the underlying real-estate to get the initial sugar-high and replaced it with a leasebacks. Those leases had escalating costs and fixed terms, which made it difficult to adapt to changing trends, and was a big contributor in what ultimately sunk it all.
> There is zero appetite for things that make a little bit of money relative to the cash cows of the company.
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".
If a corporation has an incentive to make money, it will align its priorities towards making money. Question is: are "making money" and "correct priorities" synonymous?
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.
Nvidia and Oracle are already public companies, they're just aiming for their next quarterly statements.
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?
Right. You're not a real medical group unless you go through an 18-month RFP procurement cycle including being wined and dined by the Epic rep who already knows they're gonna get your $50MM wallet because they're golf buddies with your CEO and already embedded with all your labs. God forbid anyone practicing Real Medicine tries to go the OSS route, medicine is too complicated for something like that.
They're adapting fracking techniques to use for geothermal, which opens up many more sites. Historically geothermal has had limited potential, and the best sites have already been developed. So geothermal + fracking creates a lot more viable land.
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.
You misunderstand me... I'm not saying the privatization is a bad thing, handwaving it away, or saying lets throw government at it. I'm merely pointing out that in a 4,000 word essay trying to explain all the factors that let Japan have such a good railway system, there's a huge amount of emphasis on the privatization part, and zero mention of all the public sector subsidies that enable the entire system.
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.
There's always a class of restaurants where they don't care about repeat visitors. Think the cafe in front of a major tourist attraction: every day brings a new busload of 1-time patrons, those will always want the michelin-level pics to bait the 1-time foot-traffic in. The danger is the neighborhood mom-and-pops will start using the same trick without understanding they need repeat customers, and repeat disappointment kills a repeat audience.
But who knows... people with a TV budget have been using glue in their cheesy pizza commercials, soap in their beer glass foam, and motor oil on their pancake stacks for a long time -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k7PJoNAXkk -- maybe this is just equalizing the enshittified food playing field.