That statement lacks any kind of historical context. "Realtors in the market for over 2 to 3 decades" ought to recall that for long stretches of time, the interest rates we see today would have been seen as 1) normal, or 2) a bargain. The recency bias of seeing 3% a few years ago was a bonkers-crazy anomaly.

A 30-yr mortgage today comes in around 6.25%. As it so happens, that matches the introductory 5-yr rate on the ARM I used to buy my first house 20 years ago. My parents like to tell me that, when they purchased their home in the early 1980s, mortgage rates were around 12-15%! See here for historical data.

Higher mortgage rates do make it harder to buy a home. And for someone sitting pretty on a 3% rate from refinancing a few years ago (like myself), it makes selling not very appealing. But to say the higher rates of today "have f***** everyone over" is half wrong, and wrongly implies some grand conspiracy with malicious intent. Home ownership rates have hovered in the mid-60% range for decades, with almost no correlation to interest rates.

You need to also look to home prices for the "f***** everyone over". Those prices have increased at wild rates, doubling since the 2008 recession, and going crazy since COVID. The higher costs have various reasons, but it's mostly because of a serious supply shortage. That contributes at least as much to the "what's my monthly payment going to be?" as interest rates.

Consider $385k @ 3.7% - the average sale price at the average rate circa 4Q2019, just before COVID: monthly payment $1772.
Now consider $385k @ 6.5% - same price, but at today's rate: monthly payment $2433. Ouch.
Then, consider $515k @ 3.7% - today's average sale price at 4Q2019 rate: $2370. Also Ouch: the increase in home price is about as bad as the change in rates.
Finally: $515k @ 6.5% - today's average price at today's rate: $3255. Bloody hell!

The monthly mortgage payment has roughly doubled since COVID, but interest rates are just one part of the picture. You could whine about the Fed, but 30-year rates are more closely tied to the bond market than to the Fed rate. Those higher 30-year bond rates are driven by 1) uncertainty about the future, and 2) the US Government's wild, irresponsible deficits. You won't really be able to do much about interest rates. But you can do something about home prices by advocating for more home building and density. That's driven by state and local policy, which you do have some influence on.

He could easily have been a billionare with Jobs. Jobs wanted him by his side the whole way, but Woz is built different. He doesn't really care about doing the billionare thing , he made enough from his apple shares that he'll never want for anything. Hell, I doubt apple would even let him go broke, he was the left hand of their god-king Jobs.

He just wants to do cool tech and make the world around him better.

I did a diploma in performing arts in the the 90ies. The first half of my 20ies was dancing 5+ hours per weekday. I still benefit from that phase. As a teenager I was into climbing. I still have the shoulder muscles from that time, despite totally slacking on strength training. But no smoking, no drugs, no alcohol. And I have been dancing Argentine Tango for the last 18 years, 9 of which where an artsy minimalist lifestyle built around intensely dancing Tango 3+ times a week. My sleep schedule was as off as with my other thing, software development, but otherwise my health was awesome, physically and mentally. Intensely hugging hot ladies 3+ times a week for hours on end does wonders for a hetero-males well-being. I regularly get judged 10 years younger than I am.
Processed foods are organic as much as possible, I avoid junkfood 95% of the time and I've started cooking for myself 10 years ago. Huge impact.

I've since have taken Tango down a notch and picked up motorscooter/motorbike as means of travelling and getting around. Getting slightly overweight for the first time in my life. Not good, don't like it. I'm roughly 10 years too late in picking up a daily excercise/yoga, cardio and strength schedule, a thing I definitely need to get going this year. Started hiking with my sweetheart, we want to pick up the pace and intensity of that to stay healthy in old age.

I keep telling my 28 year old daughter that she dare never not stop her daily yoga practice. I hope she can do that.

It's this simple: Objectively the very best retirement plan is actively working on your health, strength, endurance and flexibility multiple times a week. Way more significant than being wealthy at old age.

I'd rather be top fit at 70 living off 700 Euros per month than overweight with two bipasses living off 2000.

People with my genetics start dying around age fifty - polycystic kidney disease.

I'm ten years older than that, my blood pressure earlier this evening was 120/70something, my last fasting sugar was around 85, I weigh ten pounds more than I did in college, and I've walked 1,393 miles in the last year. My last vice is caffeine and I will go off it periodically, in one instance for seven years.

I got dealt a terrible hand, health wise, Lyme at forty that triggered a complex immune condition, but I refuse to feel (or look) bad. A lot of it IS in your hands, you just need the will to change. It's not easy ...

Musk brought xAI (maker of Grok) into the SpaceX umbrella. SpaceX is reasonably profitable, xAI is burning money. So Musk, who controls both companies, incestuously merged them together to cover the losses. Musk has pulled similar self-deals to merge X (formerly Twitter) into xAI last year, and SolarCity into Tesla years before that. SpaceX/xAI has a large AI datacenter that its leasing to Anthropic, and has plans to build its own AI chip fab (in partnership with Tesla - more corporate incest). And SpaceX is pretty bullish on using its rocket capabilities to make AI Datacenters in Space a real thing (or, at least, that's what they're selling to IPO customers). Plus SpaceX has StarLink, which isn't AI exactly, but certainly adjacent.

So while you might think you're buying into a rocket company, at least 20% of the valuation is xAI+Twitter, and a lot of the projected future growth is in datacenters (on the ground and in orbit). Without the AI fluff, there's no earthly way to justify a $1.25T valuation just on being able to launch rockets and StarLink. (Even with the AI, the valuation is still bonkers - costs vastly exceeding revenue for years into the future.)

Where is the shovelware? Where's the killer app?
Shovelware requires some form of userbase. That doesn't exist anymore if every software solution any normal person can think of is just one Google query and one URL away. The Web has won. Nobody will go through the trouble of even installing software these days in most cases.

If they think it's worth it, on the balance, yeah. I'm not telling people where to put their money; or how to weigh the risk of Musk skimming the till on the actually-profitable rocketry in order to cover losses building mechahitler or trying to make orbital datacenters work.

I was mostly responding to the "I ask because I'd imagine the first thing the collective shareholders will ask for is that the crappy bits of Musk Inc. get divested as quickly as possible." part of the above poster's post. This is 100% an IPO where, to the degree legally possible and potentially beyond, and more so than even typical tech IPO voting structures, anyone who thinks that they are getting even a whisper of oversight, even at institutional investor scale, is kidding themselves.

It's up to you whether or not you think that a security representing whatever basket of endeavors Musk feels like conducting will be worth it; or if the risk that he'll bleed the winners to prop up his more dubious bets is too high; my note is purely that this IPO is genuinely rather novel in the degree to which it's designed to put the current CEO in effectively total control. Even compared to something like the mostly-unremovable Zuckerberg voting/nonvoting shares arrangement this has additional curbs on shareholder resolutions and litigation options.

Anyone who is hoping to avoid Musk's dumber ideas should probably just stay the hell away. Even by the standards of the classic "oh, there's actual-votes stock and peon stock; guess which kind we sold during the IPO" stuff; spacex is pushing things. The boy-king of mars holds 85% of the voting power; shareholders are required to waive the right to jury trial or class action and submit to arbitration only, only class B shareholders(mostly Musk) can remove the chairman of the board, CEO, or CTO; and similar enthusiastic use of Texas' provisions for 'controlled companies' that really don't want to take any pesky outside input.

Putting your money on that is pretty much entirely just making a bet on whether you think the dictator for life will make line go up or not; not even pretending to be analogous to an ownership stake.

If it weren't a technical issue; would it actually be a moral issue?

I suspect that there are lots of ways, including some surprises, of getting the problem wrong to some degree and introducing nasty developmental issues; so I could see an IRB having very plausible objections to the "eh, we'll keep pumping out flipper babies until we trial and error our way to what an embryo requires to develop a brain stem properly!" R but, if for sake of argument, you had a system that actually worked wouldn't that basically just be surrogacy without the seedy undercurrent of economic conscription?

Unfortunately, Musk and friends took that into account. They demanded, and received rule changes to get rammed into indexes as fast as possible. They'll certainly be happy to take direct purchases from any of the weirdos paying for blue checks on twitter; but the strategy is clearly intended to not require the bagholders to bite directly; instead hitting anyone with index exposure as rapidly and automatically as possible.

I dont expect that 2025 ruling to last forever. Other than flying in the face of a couple of hundred years of precedent it effectively leaves the supreme court as the only court able to rule against the government in countless cases reducing lower courts to only being able to say 'This unconstitutional law is bad but we can only block it for the person who made the suit" which in turn has absolutely flooded the lower courts with backlogged cases.

Needless to say, outside of a badly corrupted supreme court, pretty much every judge below that court thinks the ruling is bullshit.

I remember a time when any stupid idea that you could put ".com" on would get shit tons of investor money. The only thing it produced mostly was bankruptcies and the opportunity for small companies to buy needed equipment for pennies on the dollar. This AI craziness strikes me the same way. AI can be useful but it'll never be the "be all things", they rarely to live up to the hype. I've seen it too many times, the dotcom boom-bust, nano-technology, Ruby on rails; anyway COBOL had a good run.

... might just give the IC industry the kick in the butt it needs, just like with spacecraft and electric vehicles. He recently stated that the whole IC-Fab thing is done wrong these days and that he might just end up eating a hamburger and smoking a cigar right next to a microfab with higher cleanroom efficiency to prove his point once the first Terafab is up and running.

I'm no engineer, but the "copy-exactly" and "clearroom design" of the late 70ies sure has become long in the tooth and my intuition says Musk might actually be on to something (once again). It's going to be fun to watch how this Terafab thing plays out.

DDR6 isn't any faster than DDR4. The only real difference is that DDR6 is less reliable.

I happen to know Germanys most popular fantasy author Bernard Hennen a bit. He is mentally preparing for AI to take his job and has been for a few years. He says it's likely that he'll just be managing and steering the world and it's characters and that AI will do most of the writing and come up with new ideas that he then decides on.

That sounds very plausible and AFAICT as someone who GMs table-top RPGs and does quite a lot of writing as a naked ape this is basically where we are at right now already.