New Glenn is about the same capacity as Falcon Heavy, maybe a touch less, both with full reuse. But SpaceX has also demonstrated recovering Super Heavy, which is a LOT bigger. You could pretty easily slap an expendable second stage on Super Heavy and the highest launch capacity ever.

If my conversions of crazy American units are correct you could stick an entire fueled New Glenn on top of Super Heavy and launch it.

Right. NASA, coordinating Boeing, Lockheed, North American, Rockwell, etc. were the first movers. SpaceX is the "copy cat" that takes the basic idea and mass produces it for a buck each.

It doesn't seem likely. The AI companies would have you believe that more compute equals smarter but they're already hitting dimishing returns pretty hard.

That's almost beside the point though. Railway and fiber companies built out more infrastructure than was immediately useful but then a bunch went broke and the survivors concentrated on making a profit. The big AI companies are in that first phase where they're trying to build stuff faster than everyone else. Next inevitably comes the part where they try and actually make a profit. If that involves ever more intensive investment then great, we've got a new industrial revolution, just like your semiconductor example.

* no actual numbers considered

** or we could just move the planet a little further from the sun

People understand the idea of wired displays. They even undertstand the idea of wired VR headsets, the PSVR being one of them.

If you're not making a console with the headset as a peripheral though, ARM SOCs are cheap and they let you offer a lot of features the majority of people want, like wireless and the ability to watch, um, videos in bed.

A datacentre with lots of GPUs should depreciate the same way a regular old datacentre does. If they're calculating depreciation other than the way they do for regular datacentres that would be very suspicious.

In reality, models require vastly more computation to train than they do to use, and more still to develop, so the current spending is more accurately compared to something like the costs to construct railways, which is much greater than the costs to run them, and the asset is not the GPUs but the trained models.

Sounds like they're working on doing exactly that. Chrome, YouTube, Android, and a bunch of other Google stuff seems to use FFMPEG, not to mention any other open source projects they do this to. In 90 days Google might just be saying "hewooo Internet! Here's a vulnerability in most of our software that we didn't even try to fix!"

How do you decide what the value of someone's work is?

The problem came up before the Russian revolution. The socialist revolutionaries thought yours was a great idea, but the best they could come up with for actually assigning value was "um, a committee of some kind maybe?"

The market answer is that competitive buyers will pay you what your work is worth. That obviously requires competitive buyers, and the absence of obstacles like, for example, health insurance benefits interfering with your ability to switch employers or go out on your own.

We also have 2022 and 2023 settlements of similar merchants vs. credit card companies lawsuits that haven't resulted in mass chaos.

I suppose they could take my "rejected" card for an additional fee. A great way to ensure I never go there again, but up to them I suppose.

Funny. American restaurants almost univesally expect an additional fee of 15-30% called a bri.. er, "tip" but you'll boycott one over the 2% they might pass on to you to use a reward card?

They just make insane profits because of the volume of product that they move.

Walmart's return on assets is ~7% which is not bad, but is certainly not insane. They'd do a lot better liquidating all their stock and stores and sticking the money in a NASDAQ index fund.

Microsoft's ROA is ~18% and Nvidia ~77%.

Walmart's net profit of $15 billion is a BIG NUMBER but only compared to something like an individual's net income. The median American household's ROA seems to be about 42%, although you could argue that should be a little lower if you properly accounted education as an asset.

Cars occasionally run onto the sidewalk and hurt someone. More often than planes cause injury around airports I expect. Putting sidewalks right beside roads seems like a terrible idea. Why not have at least a buffer zone? Say, a football field (choose your type) of buffer?

Same for airports. Airports do have buffers around them, especially at the ends of runways. Very, very occasionally it isn't enough.

I'm not really sure what your point is. You are correct that racers frequently sail through all sorts of weather without damage. They do sometimes take damage though, the vast majority of which is due to trying to sail through weather as fast as possible.

A cargo ship would presumably sail through storms as fast as it could without risking damage.

My, we are an aggressively stupid dipshit today.

You do seem to be yes. Maybe time to take a break?

Ships scale up pretty predictably. No, they didn't build THE BIGGEST CARGO SHIP EVAH for their prototype. That would be pretty dumb.

This thread is talking about the ship speed. And the speed of a displacement hull is intimately linked to the length. As is the capacity, incidentally.

But half the time, in particular in regattas where you race against time, you end up in 11s and 12s and you go through.

And that's when you're racing. Remove the incentive to go fast and you're even safer.