You’re the worst at everything when you’re the only one measuring it. There are parts of the world where vegetables are grown next to where factories dump toxic waste. Pretty sure no one is measuring that.
As a non-American, that mostly is a reaction to rabid US jingoism, as in the US claiming themselves as "Numba 1" in everything, when usually, they are in the 10s or 20s at best.
And to many Americans this is even worse: If you are not best™ or worst™ ... you are unremarkable, 'E pluribus unum'.
Agreed. Nobody really talks about most other countries, while the US is pretty much top of the list of nearly every topic. So we're constantly a target.
> while the US is pretty much top of the list of nearly every topic
s/is/was
The US is trying really hard to lower its position on these lists. The US has not been near the top of reading/writing/arithmetic in a long time. The US is undoing a lot of federal regulations by eliminating/reducing agencies meant to regulate things like EPA, FDA, Dept of Education.
Feelings aren’t fact. A lot of data shows the doomerism is not reflected in the actual numbers and much of it has to do with rapid inflation and continued vibes.
Consumption has risen, inflation adjusted wages have risen for blue collar and white collar alike. Most social mobility has been the middle class moving into the upper middle class, not moving to the lower class.
The main thing holding people back is the housing crisis. This is orthogonal to the value creation of businesses.
Value creation is growth. If it didn’t exist the S&P would still be 42.55$.
> The main thing holding people back is the housing crisis. This is orthogonal to the value creation of businesses.
This feels wholly at odds with saying most social mobility is upwards. So most of the social movement is into a class where a home and vacations are a given, but we also have a growing class of people who can't afford a home? Per BLS, average real wages are down 0.3% YoY https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm .
> Value creation is growth. If it didn’t exist the S&P would still be 42.55$.
This reductively assumes "value creation" is the only effect on the S&P pricing. You'll note a ton of graphs correlate with it, e.g. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi is the US inflation rate, which also tracks the S&P pricing. Ie if a company is worth $100 a year ago and inflation was 4%, I'd expect to pay $104 for their stock with 0 value creation whatsoever.
Home ownership is not the definition of economic class.
The s&p has vastly outstripped inflation, this isn’t even an argument. It’s a very bizarre and uninformed opinion to say “inflation is correlated with s&p value”.
In economics, you deduct the inflation rate from growth to get the real rate of return.
I wonder why so many people with such little understanding of financial markets make comments like these.
> Home ownership is not the definition of economic class.
It was at one point, so if you're saying it doesn't now then your "social movement" is really just goalpost moving. I'm sure the upper class does grow if you just declare that the boundaries of it are now lower. We're all millionaires if we just redefine millionaire to mean "not currently overdrafted".
> In economics, you deduct the inflation rate from growth to get the real rate of return.
Which neglects the impact of inflation on the principal. If I put $100k into the S&P in 2016 I'd have 303k now (303% value). Cumulative inflation during that period was 38.8%, so your metric says I'm at 164% rate of return. $303k today is only worth $218k in 2016 dollars though, so I'm really only up 118% in absolute value.
That's also only using the CPI, and neglecting asset inflation which impacts stock prices outside of actual value creation. More money floating around means more gets parked in index funds, regardless of whether the company is actually doing anything better.
> Consumption has risen, inflation adjusted wages have risen for blue collar and white collar alike.
My wages haven't risen for nearly 5 years, while inflation has occurred over the past 5 years. Why the blanket statements?
> The main thing holding people back is the housing crisis. This is orthogonal to the value creation of businesses.
Are you suggesting a "housing crisis," in your words, wouldn't impact consumption? I'm watching my spending (and living like a child in his parent's house, except it's not my parent and I have to pay for it) in the hopes that in about a decade, I'll have saved up enough of a down payment for a home somewhere in my state that I could actually afford the mortgage on the remaining amount. There are plenty of things I'd potentially spend money on but won't as long as I feel like I'm economically stuck and have a chance in hell of saving my way out of it. So this feeling translates to fact.
If you think my personal experience is just an anecdote and doesn't count because it's not being told through the lens of large-scale numbers, fine. But I really agree with the person you replied to that you're gonna have to be a whole lot more specific than "value creation" if you want people to spend money on your AI products "in this economy," whether it's because they're actually strapped for cash or just pretending like you seem to think they are.
The upper decile of income earners account for more than half of all consumption in the US. Household balance sheets and wealth have never looked stronger, again when you account for all the appreciated stocks and properties owned by the upper quartile. True incomes for the lowest decile rose significantly for the first time since 1970 in 2022 and then sort of stayed flat again. Sure, statistically significantly, not "significantly" as in personally meaningful after figuring in rising consumer costs. There is a narrative where you can see all this as hugely positive but this is also largely a "vibes" based narrative. I don't know why you'd expect most people to care about what the "vibes" are like for the best off in society, that's a bit removed from their daily concerns.
NYC was built without alleyways and much of NYC is single vaulted sewer systems due to its age. There is no space to put underground trash bins.
NYC is also non-uniform, so there are different types of trucks and streets.
Adam's admin largely solved this during his term, but the above ground bins are unpopular because they're ugly and then it takes time to retrofit the garbage trucks for mechanical pickup.
Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable to do instead of charging once every three to five years or so. I guess it depends on the quality and retained capacity on the batteries being swapped in.
The vast majority of charging is done at home, though. Five-minute-charging/swapping is basically a gimmick to show off to your friends, and only really sees (questionable) use during that once-a-year road trip.
The main value in these technologies is to shut up the "But sometimes I want to drive for 20 hours without being forced to take even a single 30-minute break!" pseudo-argument as to why an EV is "impossible" for their lifestyle. Same with the Lucid Air and its 1000km range: basically zero people truly need it, but it needs to exists in order to drag the last few holdouts into the future.
When my road trip is in negative temperatures, I appreciate not having to be in the cold for too long. I think the bigger adoption issue is thoughts of scaling the charging stations. If there’s a line of cars at a liquid fuel pump, one can still get fuel in twenty or thirty minutes. If there’s a line of four cars at every charger and every car takes 15 minutes to charge on average, that’s an hour before you can start.
That was assuming, based on their recharge count, daily 10% to 98% rapid charging. You’d only see that in a vehicle of this range if it’s being used as like a courier vehicle or moving billboard. Pretty much the actual worst cases.
> Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable
eh? are you saying that something that is done once every 5 years has to be done inside 5 minutes? I strongly disagree.
As someone who suffers from a complex autoimmune disorder which has caused dysautonomia and suspected mitochondrial dysfunction, stress flares and exacerbates symptoms. This has a physiological basis in the complex way the HPA axis/cortisol affects us at the cellular level. My primary diagnosis is sarcoidosis with small fiber neuropathy, but they don’t fully understand all the mechanisms of auto-immune fatigue and dysregulation.
Though I am not fully subscribed to the internet school of ”just ignore the trolls”, I think they should all be countered once or twice before being added to a blocklist. That way other people see that those trolls are not welcome and that voices are being raised against them.
I’ve seen minimal gains trying to adopt agents into my workflow beyond tests and explanations. It tends to be distracting.
It’s so interesting that engineers will criticize context switching, only to adopt it into their technical workflows because it’s pitched as a technical solution rather than originating from business needs.
Believe me, the majority of “The rest of the world” does not protect its citizens from harmful food contamination.
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