Then you'd just be optimizing even more for sociopathic politicians. It's not like caring more about your children than power is some universal behavior in humans.
There is undoubtedly some hardliners that want the nuclear program to continue so they can develop nuclear weapons in order to provide a reliable deterrent against Israeli aggression.
Israel's goal in the region is to be able to legitimize itself vis-à-vis other Arab states, without stopping any human rights abuses.
Since the alignment of the gulf states with the US, the only obstacle to that is Iran and Iranian influence.
Because of this, Israel is very willing for Iran to be militarily destroyed, and members of the Israeli government have called for the invasion of Iran multiple times.
Simply self defence is far from the goal. Israel would not be able to survive without changing its internal structure unless the Arab world is dominated by the US which prevents actions that go against Israeli interests.
It's more like the middle class is bifurcating between upperish middle class and lower-middle class. In-demand tech workers, doctors, high-level admins/managers, etc. are getting higher and higher wages while other professions that used to be middle class as starting to stagnate and fall behind such as low-level office workers, journalists, teachers, mid-to-low level managers, etc. I wouldn't consider either group to really be upper class, but I guess there's always going to be differences in how people are sorted into those categories.
I think the issue is that the article is inflammatory click-bait because it makes it seems like rich people are getting a break while poor people are getting shafted. It's not until you've read through most the entire article that they finally get to the point, which is that 'rich' people are buying houses in the suburbs/exurbs now that they can work remotely. Unsurprisingly this means prices are spiking in those areas while rent for high-end apartments are shrinking as demand dries up. So rich people aren't really catching a break so much as exiting the rental market in major cities and redirecting their spending to the suburban housing market.
> I think the issue is that the article is inflammatory click-bait because it makes it seems like rich people are getting a break while poor people are getting shafted.
Why? Do you seriously think that is untrue? Go talk to some poor people. Hell, just talk to someone who is 18-29: there is a 52% chance they are stuck living with their parents[1]. We're definitely getting shafted over here.
It's just supply and demand. The rich are leaving the cities for suburbs, so more of the higher end apartments are available. Which will lower those rents because there is low demand and high supply.
Meanwhile, there is a moratorium on evictions so cheaper apartments are not becoming available at a natural rate. So you have high demand and low supply, which will drive prices up.
Of course there are many other factors in play too. Such as zoning issues preventing new building, NIMBY preventing affordable housing being built, environmental restrictions preventing building in certain areas, etc. Plus the fact that developers will make much more money building luxury apartments than they will make building low income housing. Sometimes governments will offer tax rebates to builder of low income housing, but this then upsets a lot of the same people who want the low income housing to be built so it goes on and on.
> Meanwhile, there is a moratorium on evictions so cheaper apartments are not becoming available at a natural rate.
If there weren't a moratorium, then there would be a surge of homelessness. Is that somehow better?
The amount of available high-end apartments never mattered to the people who couldn't afford them. Where the rich people move has literally zero effect on that.
The fact that rich people are leaving "high-end" apartments vacant should demand that rent go down in those apartments. That's what would be happening if supply and demand actually had an effect. Instead, even with significantly fewer tenants, landlords are still able to charge obscene rates for their "high-end" apartments, leaving no supply for the growing population of poor.
So what part of this is inflammatory click-bait? The rich are getting a break (more housing opportunities at lower cost) while the poor are getting shafted (fewer housing opportunities at higher cost).
This isn't just about zoning and NIMBYism. The housing exists, and so do the people who can't afford it. Landlords are simply demanding a higher return than the poor can afford, without a care in the world about homelessness, just as every socialist in history predicted. This is a system of greed, and we desperately need it to change.
But it also has property taxes and maintenance costs, which will likely be higher than inflation. So it's not a great passive investment unless you expect the value minus costs to gain faster than inflation. Otherwise you gotta live in it or rent it to make back your money, and that's no longer passive.
>(he could literally just liquidate a portion of his wealth and have someone else elected in your place through campaign contribution)
That's a HUGE over exaggeration. Yes money matters, but only so much and it very much matters where that funding comes from. That's why McConnell still has a job despite his opponent spending three times as much. People knew that money was coming from outsiders trying to unseat him. Bezos or some other billionaire trying to pour an ungodly amount of money into a political campaign is more likely to backfire than help.
The main problem was that Kentucky went R+26. Throwing money at a Dem candidate who isn't Manchin, hoping to overcome that difference was an exercise in futility. You'd have better luck trying to primary him.
Sure, money can't do the impossible, but if you only need a few percentage points it's pretty likely to help
Yea but the OP was making the claim that no US government official would dare stand up to Bezos for fear of him outspending them out of office. Entrenched incumbents in non-battleground states/districts really don't have that fear at all.
>If it got answer right 1 time in 100, that would be amazing and you'd be foolish not to use it!
Except you have no way of knowing if the answer it gives you is one of the 66 right predictions vs one of the 33 wrong predictions. You could say it's likely correct, but not to a high enough degree of confidence that you could really trust it without verifying using the old established techniques.
You missed my point - there are not 33 but billions (an infinite number, really) of wrong protein structures. There is only one right structure, not 66.
Also important - verifying that a given model has a signature that matches the established techniques is far easier than using those techniques to generate the complete model from scratch.
The 33 vs 66 is in reference to the percentage chance that a prediction is correct. But if you have no way to tell if a given prediction is correct or not without doing the tests that you were trying to avoid in the first place then it's not really worthwhile except for perhaps some exploratory research.
> But if you have no way to tell if a given prediction is correct or not without doing the tests that you were trying to avoid in the first place then it's not really worthwhile except for perhaps some exploratory research.
This isn't really how it works.
To quote the CASP competition organisers:
The organizers even worried DeepMind may have been cheating somehow. So Lupas set a special challenge: a membrane protein from a species of archaea, an ancient group of microbes. For 10 years, his research team tried every trick in the book to get an x-ray crystal structure of the protein. “We couldn’t solve it.”
But AlphaFold had no trouble. It returned a detailed image of a three-part protein with two long helical arms in the middle. The model enabled Lupas and his colleagues to make sense of their x-ray data; within half an hour, they had fit their experimental results to AlphaFold’s predicted structure. “It’s almost perfect,” Lupas says. “They could not possibly have cheated on this. I don’t know how they do it.”[1]
So you have experimental results, but still don't know how it folds. You aren't trying to avoid the all the experiments, just understand them.
>If you support your "values" only on a reciprocal basis, essentially you renounce them. And you certainly lose the moral high ground when you try to get others to adopt these values.
I can't agree with that at all. I hold non-violence as a value, but I'm also going to defend myself if attacked and I don't think that means I renounce my values or lose any moral high ground.
There are plenty of situations where supporting a high-minded value requires reciprocation.
But you'll notice the companies that successfully gain value through merging are typically competitors that are able to generate more value together instead of fighting for the same profits.
The same does not seem to be true for any of the Alphabet companies, except in the sense of being able to leverage shared user data for better targeted ads. Perhaps that does make it worth it to remain one company, but it's debatable, especially for something like Waymo which likely won't benefit from having access to search data.
There are tons of industrial conglomerates, from GE to Samsung to Siemens and there's not really any universal agreement that they're any worse than more focussed companies.
This goes all the way back to the most basic theories of organization - why do companies even exist? Why is everyone not effectively a contractor? Why do companies not outsource every non-core function? And there are good reasons why companies exist - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm External transaction costs are real and breaking Google up could significantly increase those.
Someone from Siemens once told me "Siemens is an investment bank that happens to own all of the companies it has invested in." I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but it's a good description of conglomerates in general.
So there was this thinking in the 60s that the key skill of a firm is management, and so if one firm was a market leader in manufacturing pipes, they could buy up a struggling auto rental or accountancy firm and with their superior management skills they would make those better as well. This at least was the justification for a wave of conglomerates buying up smaller firms.
Others might say a better justification was the cheap corporate credit available to some (but not all) firms, and thus the competitive advantage of conglomerates was access to credit, rather than management. The smaller firms and individuals did not have the same access to credit.
But in the 80s, the pendulum began to swing the other way. The problem from the perspective of the credit markets -- whether shareholders or bondholders -- was the difficulty in obtaining detailed operational information from these large conglomerates. They became very opaque, as they could use the losses of one firm to subsidize another, and it was hard to drill down and figure out what was happening by looking at the financial statements. So then began a wave of slicing these companies up and selling off the pieces.
Or from a completely different perspective, it was the extension of new types of credit such as junk bonds that allowed insiders to do leveraged buyouts, which tipped the scales away from the conglomerates and led to a lot of asset sales that "unlocked value" while other operations were shutdown.
Not saying who is right, just offering some perspective that these arguments have been engaged with 60 years ago, and ended up with mixed results.
Yes, exactly. The notion that there's clear evidence that breaking up firms unlocks value is simply not true. What is true is that not all firms are well-run and when you change the corporate structure or management style you sometimes make a huge improvement. But it's certainly not universally true.
I vaguely think people have written how having the insurance business attached to the others is a useful/complementary structure, compared to a regular mutual fund or something.
Maybe you could ask from the opposite perspective, why aren't all mutual funds organized like BRK?
You say that with such conviction when you don't have any better info on what the future holds than anyone else.
The unemployment benefits (which for many of the unemployed will actually be higher than their regular pay) last for the next four months. If the quarantine lifts by the end of May and businesses reopen then it will be enough. Obviously that's a big if, but for you to come out here and act like you know something with 100% certainty is absurd.
We've had plenty of recessions before and not once has the economy simply been restarted. To use an example, I work on software for a company in the dental field. The circle is:
Nobody is going to the dentist because of Covid -> Dentist stops using my client's services -> Client cancels my project -> I get laid off -> I can't afford to go to the dentist -> Nobody goes to the dentist because they can't afford it.
That story is true for every industry. And it gets worse. In anticipation of the economic storm coming we have stopped all non-essential purchases. Which means a whole lot of businesses are out of revenue. Multiply that across the economy and everything but essentials is grinding to a halt.
The only way out of it, that I see, is the government stepping in and guaranteeing, without a salary cap, unemployment benefits at 80-90% of salary for as long as the crisis lasts. Even then I'm not sure it's enough to fix the actual damage that has happened.
Exactly, and because everyone is leveraged, unless they magically extend the terms on your mortgage (not just delay them) your going to be behind by a month or two for a lot longer than 3 months. Many people have been saying for the last decade+ that a huge portion of the population is working paycheck to paycheck. That means that they don't have enough savings to absorb an extra rent payment, and they won't have them if/when they start working again. either.
This might have worked for a couple days, but no way it works for multiple weeks.
My statement was based on an interview with Congressional representatives aired on NPR yesterday afternoon after APM's Marketplace. They were the ones who said what has already been passed is woefully insufficient, and I agree.
> If the quarantine lifts by the end of May and businesses reopen then it will be enough.
> Obviously that's a big if
Show your work. Forecasting does not align with your statements.
We do know that things will get worse as we've seen how things have tracked in China, Iran and Italy. And if this quarantine lasts till May, I foresee many small businesses won't be around by then.
> I foresee many small businesses won't be around by then
And I wouldn't be surprised if it starts to hit some mid-size businesses as well. A lot of places are getting hit hard right now, and that just flows up the chain. My company hasn't announced any layoffs or cashflow problems, but I can do the math -- most of our customers are relatively small businesses. Pretty quickly their problem becomes our problem.
