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$150 mm with a gross margin of 80% and low capital is great. $150 mm when you spent a few billion not so much.

What reputation? These people don't know you.

Everyone knows Marriott.

How is the E-7 the wrong solution? It's worked fine for Australia.

An extra reason for the victim not to go to the cops!

The US will fund as many people who will develop this tech as need be. The national champion approach produces a too big to fail lazy company.

Wouldn’t any form of government funding produce a lazy company vs companies standing on their own two feet with the free market acting as drill sergeant?

Suppose you have to do some R&D in order to make something happen. There is no way to keep it a secret and China isn't going to enforce a patent on it, so if you pay to do the R&D and then have to charge prices high enough to recover it, they undercut you on price and you go out of business. But if the government covers the R&D then you can do domestic production at a competitive price.

Meanwhile the subsidy should be going to every company in the industry so then they still have to compete with each other.

Or to put it a different way, what's really the difference between a subsidy and a tax cut?


The funding can get companies spun up and competing.

Assuming they are picking winners. Western government's usually just throw money at existing legacy organizations, not up and coming companies.

In this case it's an institute attached to a big university (University of Texas) that is scaling up an R&D idea, that happens to be useful for the military https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2024/07/18/semicond...


Chance favors the prepared mind.

And compounding works wonders over the long run.

Apparently he started his first investment at age 11. 8 decades is a long time to compound even at low rates.


Compounding is great, but so is return to the mean. The comparision should be his rate of return. If its continously above the average over a long period, its not luck.

Compounding ensures that he will probably have a lot of money either way, which is why total $$ is a bad proxy for luck vs skill.


Many people manage to reach bankruptcy much faster than eight decades.

A nuclear weapon does not do very much to a tank unless it is extremely close. You are better off with a guided munition.

A tank doesn't do much without a significant amount of combat support and logistics backing it up.

It wouldn't be clear of the fallout before it ran out of fuel.


In the war plan under discussion IIRC all the nuclear bursts were air bursts, so minimal fallout, not enough to kill anybody even right after the strike.

Or all the bursts in the territory earmarked for invasion were air bursts while some of NATO's air bases outside the invasion area get hit with ground bursts (to maximize destruction of the runways).


Akamai, CloudFront, whatever Googles service is, a bunch of other ones I can't think of compete in the same market. Cloudflare obviously is good at what they do but there decently are many fine CDN/DDOs prevention companies.

If we are considering the social implications of Cloudflare being pressured to deplatform anybody who disrespects intellectual property, then why should we simultaneously assume that the other handful of companies offering a comparable service wouldn't be similarly pressured?

The courts can absolutely get Cloudflare to comply with orders. The only reason this doesn't happen is that the people asking for the blocking come with a list of IPs.

You’re eSplaining my own argument back to me. Cloudflare’s whinging is they shouldn’t be required to block entire swaths of IP ranges because they have legitimate customer traffic there; their opponents (rightly) state that because of how Cloudflare and the internet works, the only real way to stop these piracy streams are wholesale service blocks, because of how easily specific IP or domain blocks can be bypassed.

The centralization of power is the problem, and as I say near the end:

> …I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.


Cloudflare could be told to kick the streams off and they would stop

The New York Court of Appeals agrees, at least for purposes of the Deed of Gift governing the Americas cup.

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