Last week I was at the bank in my hometown, a small rural community. The teller took a phone call, and I overheard her say "You have $1.53 in your checking account, and $150 in savings".
Presumably this is their total net worth. I think this is way more common than people on this type of forum realize. Most will work until they literally can't anymore, then scrape by on social security until they die. I think it's important to keep that perspective.
These companies are never, ever going to make their money back off of retail customers. It's not even clear if those customers would be profitable at all, let alone enough to justify hundreds of billions in capital expenditures.
Didn't see it mentioned in the article, but Apple also had a program called "An Apple for a Teacher" which allowed teachers to purchase directly from Apple at a big discount for personal use. My dad secured a IIgs this way, which mostly found use as a gaming machine for myself. But it certainly helped to reinforce the Apple -> schools pipeline because teachers wanted to use what they knew.
This is true. It is also true that waiting until things bottom out will make things even worse. It will be more expensive and options will be more limited.
There will need to be a federal bailout to relocate everyone who needs help. The government should also probably announce a policy that there will be no future disaster relief that involves rebuilding, only relocating.
New Orleans will be the first, but not the last American city to collapse. Miami is probably next. Salt Lake City could very well run out of water, nevermind the increasingly toxic lakebed. Phoenix too. In the next hundred years people are going to learn why environmentalists use the word "sustainability" so much.
The difference is that schools, crime, etc., are all what they are right now. It's there, it's verifiable. Anybody buying in has access to the full information. They can walk around the neighborhood and see for themselves.
The flooding and inevitable destruction of the city is decades away. It's still abstract. Some people might even think it is preventable.
I don't think it's unethical to sell. People have their own motivations. Maybe a buyer just wants it for 5 years, who knows. Probably the risk will get baked into market price. What does need to happen though is the federal government needs to step up, because they're the only ones who can, and guarantee they will buy it for a certain percentage of appraised market value. I would imagine that percentage will decline over time until they declare the city a total loss, after which your property is declared worthless. If they do this now, they can make it possible for people to leave with some semblance of dignity and mitigate hardships.
For those interested, Relisten is another repository of live concert recordings. It skews heavily towards improvisational music, ie jambands, but there's some indie rock on there as well.
Because the "it'll create X jobs" implies it's ongoing. It's a disingenuous attempt to oversell the benefits because they know if they're transparent about it, suddenly it doesn't seem like such a great deal.
"If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity..."
This assertion is doing a LOT of heavy lifting, and when it isn't true, it can cause huge externalities not just for the local community but possibly an entire region. It also does not address the noise problem.
Additionally, your jobs estimates are likely high and include short-term construction jobs which may not even go to locals anyway.
I think the differentiating feature is that capitalism used to be tethered to producing things that were useful. The current model of wealth acquisition, so called "late-stage" seems to have shifted more towards rent seeking and extraction.
Is there a viable career path for researchers who choose to focus on replication instead of novel discoveries? I assume replications are perceived as less prestigious, but it's also important work.
Billionaires are allowed to have their cake and eat it too in the form of loans backed by their stock holdings. This is how they get to have $500MM yachts without having to actually sell their stock and lose control of their companies. It's how they pay themselves without having to pay taxes, because it's treated like debt and not income. Treating these like capital gains would be a start.
Presumably this is their total net worth. I think this is way more common than people on this type of forum realize. Most will work until they literally can't anymore, then scrape by on social security until they die. I think it's important to keep that perspective.