Cheaper than rental costs (in Australia), additionally Australia has excellent "Grey Nomad" facilities as a very big country relative to a small population (same land area as 48 state mainland US, ~ 25 million pop.).
It's always been a country of swaggies, less so now, but working on the move and camping are in the DNA of many.
There are manufacturing processes that benefit from microgravity (e.g. growing protein crystals for the pharma industry, producing semiconductors, etc).
Beyond that it would be a significant boon for science.
Seems like the primary benefit comes to silicon wafer manufacturing. Growing pure silicon crystal is much easier to do in a microgravity, vacuum environment:
> The study reported that for semiconductor crystals processed in LEO compared to terrestrial samples, more than 80 percent improved in either one or a combination of structure, uniformity, reduction of defects, and/or electrical and optical properties–and some by orders of magnitude
For actual device manufacturing, there are potential benefits as well, but this is less well researched area (possibly as a result of the difficulty of getting advanced IC manufacturing equipment into earth orbit).
I do somewhat doubt that the economics would work out. Silicon wafers are expensive, but I'm not sure if the price is currently higher than that of launching a bunch of sand to low earth orbit.
What fraction of machine time is currently spent pumping wafers down to molecular-beam vacuum? What fraction of machine mass is dedicated to holding that vacuum? Vibration isolation would also be much easier. Not sure if these are enough to matter, let alone enough to justify a rocket, but maybe the math can be made to work.
Well... It's not like it can get any slower, can it? Waymo is the industry lead and yet it offers rides to only a small closed group of beta testers. They only deploy it in geofenced areas. It seems that they deploy the driverless variant, but every Waymo I ever see has a driver behind the wheel, driving it manually, night time or daytime. This rollout is glacial.
It's been 16 years since the DARPA Urban Challenge. I'm happy to be wrong, but I really don't think robotaxis will penetrate the market to mass adoption like many predict, and if it does, it will be in 50 years or more. In 20 years robotaxis will still be a problem of legislation and struggling with adoption, not a technological problem. American car culture is too ingrained.
At most, driverless robotaxis will be symbols of tech companies along the coastlines. They won't transform transportation for the working class because in 20 years, 95% of drivers will still want to drive themselves.
You say "along the coastlines" like that's supposed to represent a tiny sliver of the population.
In fact, depending on how exactly you define coastline (does the gulf of Mexico count?), probably the majority of the population lives "along the coastline".
As for the definitely landlocked populations, they have already been enjoying the benefits of self driving vehicles for many years in the form of autosteer on their tractors.
This looks amazing, but installing the Firefox extension I am worried about all the permissions it asks. I am surprised how comfortable people are signing off on these permissions. How do people at HN put these security worries to rest?
This (your fear) is a result of bad policy by Firefox. This is why a lot of useful add-ons or plugins died, and, overall, Firefox became a shittier browser.
Neither Vimium nor SurfingKeys don't hold a candle to KeySnail because back in the days add-ons worked you could control the browser's chrome as well as a bunch of other non-HTML elements.
Today, you cannot even use browser extensions to close a browser window if the page didn't load in it.
These tools were intended for "power users", who could establish for themselves if the piece of code they want to use is doing something malicious or not. Also being an easy way to extend the browser without a need to recompile it and a need to understand a huge project with a ton of infrastructure... flushed down the drain.
This reminds me about how Alan Key said in one of his interviews that if a motorcycle was invented today, it would've been outlawed right away due to safety concerns.
Auditing each tool by ourselves would cost a lot of time. Not to mention that it would not be a one-time thing. At each update, another check would be required for "peace of mind".
Curious to discuss if there is a way to trust these extensions without establishing ourselves that the code is not harmful.
But you don't audit it entirely by yourself. Nor were you expected to before. It's the same idea as with other programs or add-ons you use. Don't you use some add-ons in the code editor you use not authored by the authors of the editor itself? And why would you believe the authors of the editor in the first place?
Of course you need to do some due diligence, but it isn't anywhere near as taxing as you seem to think.
Security is worthless if it prevents you from doing useful things. Given a choice between a chance of security breach and not being able to do the useful thing at all, in the circumstances like using a Web browser, I'd definitely choose to have the useful thing w/o security.
It seems it would depend on the persons risk tolerance.
And assessing risk of freely available open source software is still difficult, you either rely on all the authors being standup citizens, or on the bulk of the reviewers to be truthful and knowledgeable.
It's open-source, about 10K lines of good quality self-contained JS code with no obfuscation so it's not that hard to go through it yourself. It moves fairly slowly these days so once you have done this once it's easy to stay on top of the changes.
Work and personal, but also as dedicated offline password managers. If I don’t need camera functionality or wifi, then can simply pop those out. The options are endless.
Could you please explain in more detail how a CEO of a profitable massive corporation signaling desire to pay higher corporate income tax is a loss for the economy and the common man.
If anything he might be suggesting in the letter that corporations aren't paying their fair share relative to the common man.
He understands how finance works, and he understands how compound interest rates work; he got the benefit of "low interest rates" on taxes and generated a lot of wealth; if he increases taxes for upstarts and himself, the upstarts are harmed more, since he has the legacy wealth from the historical discount.
Aristocrats made the laws favor themselves, and since they already owned all the land and wealth, no one was going to challenge them inside the legal framework.
There is a tendency, once you make your own fortune, to get political influence and make laws that make it harder for others to do the same thing. Change the rules of the game so you can't fall. Lobbying is a key business skill these days.
That's not true - they are not always passed on to the customer. It depends. Unless the corporation has a monopoly, it can not just increase the prices. There is a concept in economics called elasticity of demand, to simplify, it states that with increase in price there will be a drop in demand. So corporations have to balance, and in most cases the tax increase will be shared between the consumer and the corporation.
If corporations are accepted to be "evil" (and we have lots of examples of mega-corporations that haven't held to "don't be evil"), then simply taxing them and having them continue to be evil doesn't make a lot of sense. Perhaps it would be better to abolish corporate structures and find a new paradigm with greater personal responsibility with small companies more responsive to customers and their customers' values? If people feel responsible for their actions, then they are more likely to "not be evil", instead of being a raindrop in the flood that believes they should just do as they are told. A large part of the US economy is small business, small businesses can live by their values instead of the inexorable pull towards more profit. I'm not saying all small businesses do, but it's more of a personal choice of their values and their customers' values rather than a large tendency to "become evil with more profit and seeking monopolies".
Most people are not debating the building of roads, and most of those are at state and local levels anyways. The bigger debate is on the actual federal budget, which has ballooned over time into all sorts of items which cannot be assumed to be uncontroversial or even generally agreed on by a majority of citizens.
A lot of us would prefer if the federal government actually did allocate some more of its funds to maintaining the roads and infrastructure that we have; that would be a great start.
They probably agree that A road has to be built, but exactly WHERE gives you about as many opinions as 5hwre are participants in the discussion. This requires some approach for structuring the decision making. Representative democracy is one. And yes, for such hands on topics it is relatively simple. But "big topics" have equal problem with many opinions, where some form of consensus has to be found.
Warren also seemed to strongly hint (quoted below) that Treasury should be getting more of its revenue from corporate income tax. Maybe your quoted part was him reinforcing that point and putting BAs money where its mouth is.
"The $32 trillion of revenue was garnered by the Treasury through individual income taxes
(48%), social security and related receipts (34 1⁄2%), corporate income tax payments (8 1⁄2%) and a
wide variety of lesser levies. Berkshire’s contribution via the corporate income tax was $32 billion
during the decade, almost exactly a tenth of 1% of all money that the Treasury collected.
8
And that means – brace yourself – had there been roughly 1,000 taxpayers in the U.S.
matching Berkshire’s payments, no other businesses nor any of the country’s 131 million
households would have needed to pay any taxes to the federal government. Not a dime."
I don't get the enthusiasm for raising money from corporate income taxes versus individual income tax. Mr. Rich Moneybags pays the same corporate income taxes per share of Berkshire as Joe Schmoe, whose entire retirement pot might be a single BRK.A.
Mr. Rich Moneybas probably pays no personal income tax, and certainly pays a lower effective rate than Joe Schmoe.
Taking the tax money as corporate tax means they end up paying the same percentage, without Moneybags’ CPA leveraging shell companies and loopholes to avoid tax than Schmoe pays.
Suppose I have 100 million in my investment portfolio and a 5% interest rate. I want to buy a house for $10 million. So I withdraw 2 million in cash and get a margin loan for 2 million so I don't have to sell any securities. I take the 2 million in cash, get a mortgage for 8 million, and buy the house. On average the market returns 7%. So my $100 million portfolio is earning $7 million per year less the loan interest of 100k which comes to $6.9M. After 2 years I pay off the mortgage and repay the margin loan. I now have a house and I didn't have to pay any taxes on my securities to buy it.
What if the market goes down? Well, I just wait for it to go back up again. I can easily afford to wait, my margin of safety is huge. Since the margin loan is for 2 million, and I need a 50% margin of safety by law, then the portfolio value would need to decline to 2 million (98% decline) before my loan gets called.
Because of the class difference between working/labor and capital owning classes. One has a hedge against bad decisions based on the backs and labor of the other.
Could you elaborate on "the way reviews are incentivized". As I understand it, guests review of the host is only visible to the host after the host has also reviewed the guest or a deadline has passed.
Do hosts look at the reviews the guests have left to previous hosts and that incentivizes the guests not to give bad reviews? Or am I missing something?
Yes, if you give sub-five-star reviews it seriously messes with the hosts’ bookings, from what I’ve heard. And it’s pretty common for one person to manage a bunch of properties for the owners, so a bad review is messing directly with that person’s livelihood. The profit from your booking is not worth the risk of a negative review.
Additionally, I’ve heard stories of negative reviews getting “disappeared” but I’m not sure how that works.
Tangentially: this is why I read lots of reviews before booking, because you can sometimes spot rotten host behavior hiding in the five-star reviews.
this is precisely why a bad review should be left for hosts doing this sort of practice. They are likely running this across large operations, extorting “hidden fees” from each stay at each property.
Their profits should be systematically targeted if the fees are undisclosed upfront and they’re abusing it.
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