Why do you think they would stop in their tracks every time there's a power or cell tower outage?

Yes, there have been some issues with widespread power outages causing the cars to get confused because things don't look right, but that's a bug, not expected behavior.

And although they won't have fares if they have no cell service, there's no reason to expect them to stop being able to drive. They will do whatever they normally do when they have no fare — find a place to park. Other than for learning about pickups and dropoffs, robotaxis use cellular networks only when they break down, to request remote driving assistance (i.e. relatively rarely).

Oh, yeah, I just realized that this is an expense on the Roku side, so the taxes would cancel out. Ugh.

Then yes, you're correct that there's no possible way for consolidating two businesses to save money without direct job loss, other than perhaps reducing payouts to external companies for things that they both do (e.g. accountants).

You know that as orbits decay the satellites move to lower orbits, right?

Starlink operational orbits are (slightly) higher than the ISS orbit. If they stop being operational, they will move through successively decreasing orbital altitudes, including orbits that intersect the ISS orbit. (But note that "intersecting the ISS orbit" does not necessarily mean "intersecting the ISS".)

Deliberate antisatellite destruction is something we reasonably ought to worry about, but it is not the same thing as Kessler syndrome.

It may not have been in the spec, but if it was widely known that the chip could do it, then it very well could be the case that people purchased the chip because of that, in which case the company unjustly benefitted from the widespread belief that it was supported, and is now seeking to further unjustly benefit by forcing those buyers to spend more money if they want to keep that feature.

Their failure to explicitly make clear that this was a bug and fix it in a timely manner is at least potentially an implied representation that could be subject to promissory estoppel.

In other words, they're probably doing something that violates the law, but we won't know for sure unless someone cares enough to sue over it.

Nope. You forgot the government factor:

($Fox + $Payment - (corporate_income_tax_rate * $Payment)) + ($Roku - $Payment = $Fox + $Roku - (corporate_income_tax_rate * $Payment).

So depending on what state the income is earned in, Anywhere from about 21% to about 30% of that could be going to taxes. So they could easily save $400M in taxes if that payment happens to be at least $1.3 billion or so. I doubt that's the case, of course.

The most critical skill is knowing when you're going into an AI rathole, shutting it down, and coding the relevant bits from scratch. There's nothing like wasting more time on iterative refinement than it would take to write the code by hand to sour an engineer on the use of AI.

The top 1% of the U.S. have $55 trillion dollars. The total U.S. national debt is only $38 trillion. That costs the government $1.4 trillion every year in interest alone. Leveling the playing field by capping everyone's total savings at 8 million per person would wipe out the national debt completely.

Mind you, wiping the national debt out still won't help as long as the Republicans keep overspending and undertaxing to the tune of two trillion a year, but even that should be easily fixable by more sound tax policy, coupled with laws mandating that the federal budget be revenue neutral or positive going forwards.

We've done the math. Have you?

I assume you're saying Pro is massively better for your workload. IMO, thinking is either good or bad, depending on whether it moves you closer to or farther away from correctness.

For example, I've seen certain types of workload (e.g. anything involving image recognition or image segmentation) be massively better with Flash, because Pro overthinks things and ends up changing perfectly correct answers to be wrong, either by coming up with creative ways to misinterpret the prompt or by screwing up the JSON image segmentation fragment so that it can no longer be parsed.

And I've also found that LLMs struggle to understand existing terms in a different context that they weren't trained on. As a result, I've had to substitute nonsense terms in place of terms based on common English words and phrases so that it won't ignore my definitions of those phrases in context and substitute its own understanding of their meaning and give incorrect results. The more thinking you allow, the more likely it is for that to occur.

Wow, I've never heard anybody suggest this. Deflation is almost never discussed; it's hard to consider it "overhyped" when nobody thinks about it at all.

There's a reason nobody cares about it these days: deflation simply isn't a problem with government-issued fiat currency. If there's not enough currency in circulation, just print more, problem solved. There are many problems that you can't solve by simply printing more money (or, more accurately, problems of which if you try to solve them by printing more money you create worse difficulties), but deflation is the one case where it works, and as a result, deflation just doesn't happen any more.

I'm afraid the rest of your comments don't address money supply, so they're not really relevant to a discussion of inflation and deflation. Remember, currency is not value in and of itself. It is a medium of exchange. If there's too much currency, the currency loses value, and it becomes useless as a medium of exchange: that's inflation (and, in its worst form, hyperinflation. If there's too little currency, however, the currency becomes overvalued, and stops flowing because people hold it rather than spend it. That only happens in a system in which currency can't be added to the system, but if you have such a system, it fails.

When someone has created a successful product, they usually think it's because they're smarter than other people, and they're usually wrong.

Facebook is the only really successful product Zuckerberg has ever created. It succeeded because he was in the right place at the right time, and that doesn't happen very often. All of Meta's other major products are things they bought instead of building themselves. His attempts to build other things from scratch have mostly failed.

He decided "the metaverse" was the future of computing, just as everyone else was embracing AI as the future of computing. If he weren't the founder and single largest shareholder, that would have gotten him fired.

Ironically, Quest is actually the most popular platform for VR gaming. If he'd been content just to create a gaming platform, it would be considered a success. Instead he blew $80 billion trying to turn it into the future of computing, making it a massive failure.

In fact, the government has to print more money if there is economic growth. Ideally, the money supply would grow exactly as the economy grows.*

*Unless the velocity of money changes.

I agree with your points completely, but just as a pedantic note, when the value of a currency increases, this is deflation, not inflation. Inflation is when the price of goods, measured in currency, increases. So if the price of currency goes up, that's negative: deflation.

Deflation turns out to be actually very bad, because it means people would rather hold currency than spend it, and that kills the economy. Fortunately, the deflation of bitcoin doesn't kill the economy because people simply use other things as currency.

(William Jennings Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech of 1896 was in some ways about deflation: the supply of gold, which underlaid the dollar back in 1896, couldn't keep up with the growth of the economy, and the fact that the currency was increasing in value was killing farmers.)

The point was quite obvious in context. You stated, and I quote:

"Two years of testing and development doesn't seem unrealistic."

I pointed out the obvious. It's been over 50% longer than that.

But beyond that, "solid state battery is eternally a few years away" has been a thing for well over a decade at this point. It's the same marketing category as "fusion on planet's surface is 50 years away" and "lithium air batteries are 20 years away".

Water is wet.

This sort of "let's state the obvious and pretend something so profound was uttered so it can stand on its own with no other commentary"-posting is not helpful.