Then your problem is management. If someone is not productive remotely, then they need to improve, come in to the office or be fired.

You listed a lot of AI advances, but people making fun of Bard specifically.

Consumers don't care about any of those, except the self-driving car, which is not available for purchase. Google was and still is a great engineering company, but they have never been good at delivering products people actually want.

Also they're nowhere near AGI and probably aren't even trying to get there. The largest neural networks have ~200 billion parameters. The average human brain have 600 trillion synapses. They're different by a factor of 1000. I have no doubt we will have AGI eventually, but the hardware's simply not there yet. If Moore's law holds, we can be there in 2 decades, though I'm skeptical of transistors that are hundreds of times smaller than a single atom.

The real problem is there's no alternative to Boeing except Airbus. We are one company away from a global monopoly.

As such, the FAA will never put the screws to Boeing and force them to make expensive but safety-critical changes.

Imagine you run a restaurant, business is doing great and you think you can make more by expanding to another location. However, you don't have enough money to buy the new place and kitchen equipment. So your friend Joe comes along and offers to provide the cash, in exchange he wants 20% of the new store's profits and a say in how it's run. You say yes and writes up a contract, both sign and you move on to set up the new restaurant.

Joe is now a shareholder of your new store.

Is this a good deal for Joe? Or is it a scam? Well that all depends on whether Joe trusts you to actually start a restaurant. You could also take the money he gave you and blow it on blackjack and hookers. Or you could simply fail to run the new restaurant well and lose money. He's taking a risk, but if it pans out, then he'll make money without having to put in any work.

The same thing happens when you buy for example Shake Shack stock.

Though there's a few minor differences that I should mention. You're not buying a share of any specific new Shake Shack they're opening, but a fraction of the entire company. Nor are you signing the contract with Shake Shack directly, but rather someone who did do that transferred their rights to someone else, who transferred to someone else, who transferred to someone else etc. etc. who transferred it to you. However, the fundamental thing you're doing is exactly the same as Joe: you are taking on a risk in exchange for a potential source of income that takes no effort from you.

Of course, you could play the stock market as if you were gambling. At any moment, a large number of people might believe that Shake Shack will not make money in the future and sell their shares. Then the stock price will tank and you might be led to believe that you have lost money. And if you bought into the hype and sold your shares, then you would have indeed lost money. However, as a shareholder, no matter how the stock price changes, what you own has never changed. You own a right to a share of future profits made by Shake Shack. That's it.

...if you're already gifted with STEM talent. You don't get to bullshit your way to success in STEM, so if it doesn't come naturally, then you'll be pulling your hair out all the time and banging your head against the wall while your more gifted peers finished their project days ago and are now goofing off.

Not to mention 60 hour weeks are pretty common, at least in tech.

Getting drunk and shitting in the bathtub isn't shocking to anyone who's been to a college party.

Media is too effective at spreading negative news. This includes both traditional and social media. You usually hear bad things about someone long before you hear any good things.

Case in point, the only things I heard about Ron DeSantis is an attempt to ban books, prosecuting people publishing real Covid statistics and fighting with Disney over... not exactly sure what. Generally, I feel he has a heavy handed authoritarian approach to doing things. What I haven't heard is any of the good things he's done. How did Florida improve under his watch? How much of that is his accomplishments versus a broader trend (e.g. baby boomers retiring to Florida)? A lot of Republicans seem to like him, but none of their reasons have made it into my ears. I'm sure the same applies to Gavin Newsom for someone living in Florida.

As for actual living conditions, having vacationed there, it seems fine. It's really just trading one set of problems for another. I saw more run down buildings, but there's fewer homeless people. There's bad traffic and potholes, just like in California. Parking is expensive too. Food and gas is definitely cheaper, though AFAIK income is also much lower. The weather is more interesting, but being sunny all the time has its benefits too.

Find me a service business that spends 40% of their revenue on office space. If you're the CEO of such a business, I suspect you'll probably be fired next quarter.

A more fair comparison is 40% the total payroll for that business divided by the square footage occupied by their workers' homes (note some are sharing space with a spouse or kids), versus the cost of office space divided by the office square footage.

You don't need containment policies, just stop reserving land specifically for industry and commerce. Once they have to compete with residential housing, their costs will rise appropriately to discourage positioning themselves in very busy areas.

Also even without new regulations, you don't really see new factories popping up in downtown Manhattan anymore. Workers are recognizing the cost of a long commute or living in a high cost area, and passing it onto their employers, who in turn are choosing to locate themselves further from major hubs or allowing remote work.

Banning long term rentals will create far more problems than it solves. A lot of people simply won't have a place to live or are forced to move constantly because they can only afford to rent.

There's still the same amount of people competing for the same number houses in <insert desirable area>. As someone who wants to live there, the only way you can get a place is if you pay more than the next poorer guy. And if we assume incomes didn't change, then whether it's renting or owning, you're still paying the same amount in order to win because that amount is simply "slightly more than what the other guy can afford".

The only real difference is who gets to benefit. If there are rentals, then even long-term residents who are renting have to compete with newcomers. If everyone owned, then the existing residents are excluded from the competition. As such, a pure owner-occupied city would be great for people who already live there, but tough luck if you want to move there for a job or swap to a larger house to start a family.

Also, landlords are not purely draining value. Even if the landlord is not building the house themselves, when a house is built, the existence of landlords allow the builder to quickly recoup the capital and move onto building the next house. This increases the rate at which houses are built and reduces the risk for the builder. You can potentially substitute the landlords with the government, but that's not straightforward. Quality might fall as builders building sub-par construction can still sell it to a government that either doesn't care enough or can be paid off.

Just about every government. The only ones who are policing the content themselves are countries like Russia. Everyone else have laws against government censorship, so they need a henchman to do the dirty work for them.

The only saving grace is that these companies haven't figured out how to turn their control over public discourse into something profitable. So they are unwilling participants... for now.

Why "taxed into oblivion"? There is a cost to global warming, but it's not infinite.

All we have to do is tax anyone taking carbon out of the ground by an amount that is the lesser of (1) harm that will be caused by global warming attributable to it and (2) the cost to put the same amount of carbon back into the ground.

Then you spend the money to deal with the harm and use the leftover to pay anyone putting carbon back into the ground.

What's funny is under Soviet-style communism, you have even less ability to move into <insert desirable city / district> because all housing is government housing, people pay nearly nothing and therefore have no reason to move, ever. Not that they could easily do so, since the government simply doesn't allow you to do that for no reason. And new housing? There's so few of those that you better be one of the privileged and well-connected class to get one.

Do you have any evidence of this?

Also, even if this is true, Google does not pay per view. It pays based on the ads that viewers have seen or the ads that the viewer clicks through on. If the viewers have adblock or don't click, then there's no revenue to be shared. If 90% of the viewers use adblock, then 90% of the views won't pay and are "invalid". If anything, this anti-adblock effort would put more money into the hands of the creators.

Do you have any evidence of this?

Actually I know you don't. The advertisers would pay you a lot of money in exchange for such evidence, so if you had any, you wouldn't be talking about it in public.

The ones I've seen are complaining about YouTube failing to promote them or unfair "demonetization" (actually they can still get paid by some advertisers and from direct payments, but it's a lot less than full ads). In that case Google's getting less ad revenue too, so they're not violating the 55%-45% split part of the contract.

It's been 55%-45% as long as I can remember, and I started watching YouTube long before creators could get paid.

"Resorting" is a word you're using to appeal to emotion. A more neutral way to say it is "take advantage of".

Regardless of whether Google is being fair to them, it's always in a creator's best interest to increase and diversify income streams. It's also in their best interest to point the finger at Google and complain about how poor they are so it doesn't look like they're doing it to get rich (which they totally are).

By the way, I have never once seen a single person who complained actually show their financial documents. Any honest non-profit that takes donations would happily share that (you can find Wikimedia's here). Strange isn't it?

I don't think you can make that prediction so easily. Being ahead is very hard, because instead of trying to get one thing working, you need to explore dozens of possibilities, most of which will fail. That costs an order of magnitude more money than playing catch-up.

I think it's most likely that they'll end up only little behind, such that the sanctions don't matter. Of course that's not good for Nvidia since they'll have a bunch of competitors, but great for us as consumers who'll have more choice than ever once the pointless sanctions inevitably comes down.