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.

Length, which is the relevant metric when you're considering the speed of a pure displacement hull.

And need more wallspace.

Are you sure about that? I heard MBS through a Canadian wealth management firm.

True, and that system does work pretty well.

Of course, it's not the whole story. Vietnam is far from the only time the US got up to some unilateral shenanigans (i.e. bypassing all that nice world institutions stuff).

The US has a long and copious history of invading other countries, destabilizing governments (democratic and otherwise) and assination plots of everyone up to and including heads of state, and there's no shortage of it after WWII.

The outright annexation did stop post WWII. Well, except for a bunch of Pacific islands, which was done with UN endorsement.

The recommendation was not to expose babies to tree nuts in any form because so-exposed babies seemed to be more likely to develop nut allergies. It turns out that was due to recall bias and the opposite is actually true.

Assuming you are older than 25, you (and I) were probably exposed to peanut butter, along with other common food allergens, on purpose by our parents around four or five months old. As I recall (can't confirm) that was the general recommendation prior to 2000. Around 2000 the EU said five months and the US said 36. Current guidelines are 4-6 months.