Investors have a lot of faith in Elan because of his track record of achieving very unlikely challenges (design and mass produce electric cars, design and launch rockets, ...).
The problem is that a lot of its supporters and investors cannot distinguish between solving complicated problems (the ones Elon Musk excels at) and complex problems (the ones Elon Musk is trying solve now: FSD, robotics, etc...).
For reference, a complicated problem is one that you can break down into pieces and solve each individual piece within some tolerance and as a result solve the whole problem. For example, how do I build a rocket that can get X kg of load at a given orbit or how do I design an electric car to transport 4 people 200 miles.
Complex problems are problems you cannot break into pieces and plan for before hand, usually because you have unknown unknows and you have a lot of feedback loops (when you change something it changes something else you though you had already solved). This are the types of challenges Elon is taking on now: FSD, robotics, etc...
Shahed where originally designed and manufactured by Iran. Russians initially bought and licensed them. And I assume are now improving upon the original design.
Russian is top down innovation with a thick layer of corruption. No matter how much you want to claim strategic depth, they are always several steps behind Ukrainians. No matter how many advantages due to size they have.
> The trouble is that AMD just didn't take AI seriously.
Until a couple of years ago, AMD was in survival mode, fighting Intel on one side and Nvidia on the other. Two rivals that were making money hand over fist while AMD was bleeding money.
AMD picked open standards and made investments on open source frameworks and libraries commensurate with their financials, the hope being that the community could help pick up some of the slack. The community, understandably, went with the proprietary solution that worked well at the time and had resources behind.
The net results is that the Nvidia ecosystem has gained a dominant position in the industry and benefits from being perceived as a quasi-standard. On the other hand, open source efforts by AMD or others get viewed as "not serious".
The financial situation of AMD has improved somewhat over the last couple years. So AMD is "taking AI more seriously now". But it might be too late and the proprietary ecosystem has probably won.
> Why should middle class in the West vote to allow outsourcing to cheaper countries?
Because you can run but you can't hide. If you institute protectionist policies, you will in turn become less competitive. Hence, you will require even more protectionist policies, that in turn will make you even more uncompetitive. In the end, you will have higher prices for lower quality domestic products.
I don't like gravity, but it doesn't mean I can ignore it and jump from tall buildings. While economics is not an exact science (probably not even a science), you cannot ignore its principles.
If protectionist policies worked, we would have figured out by now. The truth is that limited protectionist policies might work to give a push to a nascent industry in the short to medium term. But it does hurt the country as a whole in the long term.
Stock brokers track perfectly the transfer of people rights to stocks millions of times a day without any decentralized ledger. In fact, a SQL DB has worked quite well for many years now.
If the wine cellar wants their customers to trade wine, I'm sure a centralized ledger based on a SQL DB would be much easier and cheaper to implement and scale to millions of transactions.
Originally, SQL was sold as a way to make programmers redundant by allowing business people to write their own reports.
In theory, with SQL any executive could write his own report instead of having to wait for weeks for those pesky software guys to write the reports.
For many decades, different waves in the industry have tried to bring tools to the market to allow non-programers to write programs. The thinking is that the tooling or the grammar are the obstacles for regular people to write programs (applications).
The issue is that it is not the syntax or the tools that are the barrier. The barrier to write programs is that the author has to thing about all possible states and conditions and handle them. That requires patience and a certain mindset. If you are not able/willing to be that exhaustive, you will not be able to write general programs. Conceptually you could write programs (or web applications) that have been narrowed to very specific choices of workflows with most of the conditions already taken care of for you.
Creating a website with drag-and-drop tools is not that difficult; until you start to consider: what happens if the user shrinks the window below certain width? What happens if he views the site on a phone? What happens if I have to change the length of a piece of text?
This is not a good argument. It would be the equivalent of me asking:
Does the trash pickup service, repairing potholes or patrolling the street cost more if the home owner just moved in than if has own the house for 30 years?
He doesn't have to move far and away, he can go live to the other side of the San Mateo bridge and pocket at least a million dollars on the house price difference.
And as others have mentioned, there are other mechanisms to defer the tax payment based on the house equity.
The real cruel thing is to lower the bar for the "have" (as in have a house in SV) and higher it for the "have not".
I never say it is fair to evict them. What is unfair is to have a two tier tax system: one for nubs and one for the established.
The noob faces a double whammy, he needs to put a lot of money for the house and he has to pay a higher tax rate (and he has to live there because his livelihood depends on it). The established has an incredible investment in his home with a big market value giving him many options.
>> So a retired person should be forced to move from his little 3 bedroom house because some Googler decided the house next door was worth $3.5MM and his property tax goes up to $75,000/year? That's pure evil.
Nope. A retired person should have the CHOICE to pocket the $3.5MM the Googler is ready to pay for his house in Palo Alto and buy an even fancier house in Livermore knowing that his property taxes is not going to substantially change much.
But with the present system instead, another Googler, let say the food service employee, will never be able to pay the mortgage for a one room apartment PLUS exorbitant "nub" real state taxes. At least the retired guy has a large amount of equity in the house and choices.
Prop 13 doesn't change the property tax rate, it changes WHO pays the full
"nub" rate and who enjoys a "nobility" rebate.
It disincentives home owners from moving, even when their new jobs are far away, increasing commuting time.
It also creates a resource allocation imbalance. Folks that are retired and don't benefit so much by living in highly concentrated job areas tend to remain there. Even when younger people who would benefit more from living in these areas would be willing to pay more, providing an incentive for retired owners to move to a less concentrated area and making a profit.
But with Prop 13, we have instead a system that artificially distorts the housing market(and not in a "just" or "deserving" way).
I don't know if this has happened to other people, but I sometimes read a whole book and at the end I realize I do not know the names of the main characters.
I can recognize the names in written form by the shape its shape, but since I never bothered to pronounce them in my head when reading the book I just cannot tell their names.
Leaving aside the GPU market, if you believe AMD is going to take and sustain a sizable share of the CPU market in the next 2 years (in particular server, mobile and high-end desktop), then the answer is yes.
If Intel manages to keep AMD market share below ~18% in the next couple of years, then probably not.
The value of the stock revolves around how much money AMD is able to generate and the biggest variables here are volume of sales and margins on those sales. AMD's variable costs are probably higher than Intel's since they outsource their manufacturing to TSMC, but their fixed costs dwarf Intel's.
Intel AMD
Market Cap $252B $44B
Revenue $19.2B 2B
Earnings Q3 $6B $0.12B
Keeping aside the fact that AMD's numbers include GPU sales, notice how AMD's earnings to revenue ratio is very small compared to Intel's. Also notice that Intel's market cap is almost 7 times AMD's (again, AMD has a GPU business too).
So the key is really, do you believe that AMD will be able to break the ~18% market share (in particular in high margin segments)? My back of the envelope calculations indicate that at around 20% market share AMD should be able to generate earnings close to the billion dollars per quarter, making AMD a buy. If they cannot break and sustain a market share close to that, my answer would be not.
Disclaimer: I have AMD shares and I don't plan to buy or sale given current pricing.
Let's take your own reasoning and let's apply it and see where the numbers fall.
The Bart cost was $1.586 billion (according to Wikipedia) or around ~$10 billion of today's dollars.
Let say that back then we had put that money ($1.586 billion) into an annuity in perpetuity and given the money each years to the riders so they will find alternative means of transport.
So if instead of building bart back in the 70's we had put the money into a perpetual annuity, we would be receiving the sum of $63.5 millions a year from the annuity (your own numbers seem to indicate a 4% yield). That is less than 50 cents per ride (according to Wikipedia Bart gives 129 million rides a year).
I don't think the cost is insignificant compared with the level of economic activity that the 400.0000 daily riders generate for SF and the Bay Area in general.
And now imagine 20 years from now how much $63.5 millions a year will buy you compared with the benefits of mass transportation.
The problem is that a lot of its supporters and investors cannot distinguish between solving complicated problems (the ones Elon Musk excels at) and complex problems (the ones Elon Musk is trying solve now: FSD, robotics, etc...).
For reference, a complicated problem is one that you can break down into pieces and solve each individual piece within some tolerance and as a result solve the whole problem. For example, how do I build a rocket that can get X kg of load at a given orbit or how do I design an electric car to transport 4 people 200 miles.
Complex problems are problems you cannot break into pieces and plan for before hand, usually because you have unknown unknows and you have a lot of feedback loops (when you change something it changes something else you though you had already solved). This are the types of challenges Elon is taking on now: FSD, robotics, etc...