It never priced flexibly because the company that makes it kept a total stranglehold on the IP through patents and basically requires you to buy both the panel and the controller from them. I think it's actually quite a simple technology but I think it's tough for them to get the economies of scale they really need to be competitive as a display technology. I'm starting to see the older-style black and white eInk displays used as Electronic Shelf Labels more often now and I think it has to do with the patents finally expiring so you can buy the components from more than one supplier. The technology they're replacing, paper labels, costs thousands of dollars per week per store to update and more so when there are sale prices. The eInk displays cut most of those costs in favor of capital and then once in a blue moon battery replacements.

The value of employee equity is approximately zero, but sometimes people get lucky. Don't let these arguments fool you into thinking you're definitely in that 5%, because in the absence of information about the market, the product, and the other people you're working with you're probably in that 95% that makes nothing. By all means update your priors but arguments about expected value assume that all things are equal, and they are manifestly not equal.

the article takes this into account with EV

obviously vol is not the end all be all but one of your main advantages as a startup employee is access to the insider info and being able to walk away

> Even if they somehow imagine themselves as philanthropists or minimalists, they tend to put off giving away too much too soon under the rationale that they'll be able to eventually share more if they hold out and use it more practically.

What you're describing sounds exactly like Effective Altruism. The issue is that the expected value of an act that happens at an unspecified time in the future is zero.

> the expected value of an act that happens at an unspecified time in the future is zero

It doesn't have to be an unspecified time. Imagine you make $100K and want to donate $50K of that every year. One might say "well, I will bank that money instead, buy a property for $250K, then donate the rental income forever". You now have a specific time in the future (almost, depending on how property prices fluctuate in the next 5 years).

Family apartments could be really desirable, but nobody builds them because of the building codes so people don't look for them. The point that a single-family home costs 1.5 million dollars is very applicable here, as the monthly payment on that loan is cripplingly expensive or totally out of reach. A 4-bedroom apartment for a family of 4 would be extremely desirable in that market.

Or that time that we parked an army on the Rio Grande because a bunch of people from the US decided to settle in the Mexican territory of Texas? That was a whole thing and the President of the US at the time, James K. Polk, ran on a platform of "Manifest Destiny" -- that the US should span "from sea to shining sea." There were a whole host of other countries with interest in that territory, not to mention the Indian tribes who would be displaced by that policy. The US has had a lot of dark periods in our history, and we shouldn't let those periods displace us from the moral certainty we derive from the Declaration of Independence and things like The Bill of Rights.

I believe that's covered under MIL-SPEC-M00-BAAA

I always thought raw, unchecked Capitalism sucked. I've thought that my whole life. "Welcome to the asylum" and all that.

Next you'll tell me that doing something at cost as a public service is somehow better than getting the same thing but with a 20% margin tacked on for the shareholders.

The hard part is that when you have a few companies competing to do something, they very quickly start doing it for less money than government does because they innovate to compete with each other. You can take a snapshot in time and pretend cutting 20% off the top is worth it, but by the time you do the political organization you've usually lost the plot. Plus all of the mechanics of taxation and bureaucracy are usually more expensive…

That can be true in some cases, for sure. For example we probably don't want government-run fast food or government-run rental cars because of that "race to the bottom" you're citing. But there are also things where that 20% margin actually makes it more expensive. Managing utility poles and electrical infrastructure is a pretty good example. There's a strong public interest in having poles and electrical wiring in every house, and so a government monopoly is probably good. You're not going to have more than one electrical system in an area, and if you did it would substantially increase cost of delivery. Roads are another good example -- you're not going to find yourself in possession of more than one driveway to your house and pay differing prices for different driveways. You could also argue that things like healthcare, education, and maintenance of shared public spaces is also something we should probably do through government because consolidated physical infrastructure allows us to substantially reduce the cost to the taxpayer versus what they will pay out of pocket when these things are privatized, and you can experience those costs when you use for-profit public spaces like indoor play parks and such. And then the elimination of that profit motive absolutely does reduce costs even further. There are examples of this you can look at where IE emergency services are privatized and they immediately get more expensive for everyone and with less actual service provided.

I think it will greatly benefit politics in the US to stop looking at this tension between government services and private services as all or nothing and start thinking about what is most beneficial to the public economically.

Assuming a good enough LLM, you can say something like "Please find me a site with optimum growing conditions for beetroot in the next year and arrange to have the field planted and maintained until the harvest season for beetroot is over" and then just let 'er rip.

What's crazy about that is it's essentially post-scarcity if we want it to be. Or what's most likely to happen is that in the US we'll all be sucking down water laced with contraceptives in terrafoam while our corporate masters wait for us to die off so they can inherit all of the land.

The problem here is you're missing the middle steps.

As AI gets better and cheaper farm owners don't hire as many hands. Their tractors become more automated. The building do more with less supervision. This is already what we see, this is why we dropped from something like 50% farm employment to like 1% in the US. But when your employment levels get that low on non desirable jobs it gets very hard to find the next generation that will be the farm owner. The hands these days are much more like gig workers, it's very unlikely they'll buy/inherit a farm and work it in the future. The family of the farmers has all gone to college and is working in a city somewhere that can get an Amazon deliver in 6 hours rather than 4 days.

It's not that AI will even be optimal to manage, it will just occur with the massive consolidations that are continuing in farming communities.

Yeah here's an example of an autonomous tractor: https://www.agxeed.com/. You buy this and program it with what you're going to do. Right now you still have to keep it fed with seed, and I think you have to run spray and some of the other equipment manually. But the more sophisticated this stuff gets the more we're going to see "robofarms." If you can have a tractor, sprayer, and combine that can be assigned self-contained tasks within a field, then you can have an LLM manage those systems by feeding them self-contained tasks. You could intermediate by having the LLM provide you with a "task list" in whatever control environment that equipment uses and then validate that the task list is correct with correct settings and boundaries. But I think technologically we're within striking distance of this today.

Yes, that makes more sense. AI is the continuation of automation. I don’t think it’s going to eliminate management entirely, but you can certainly get to the point where the owner is basically just an investor and they hire a professional management firm.

This happens a lot in real estate. The work is all contracted out.

good enough LLMs aren't genies lol

Except very few people will actually be able to buy beetroot or anything else because there won't be any jobs. The wealth is all concentrating at the top into very few hands.

> I think a large amount of the danger American police face is due to how easily a single arrest can ruin your productive life. One facing the loss of their home, pets, job, important documents, sentimental items might not see the difference between losing everything, and losing everything and taking the guy who's taking it from you, with you.

I don't think it's that complicated. Rather, I think that a lot of cops think they're in more danger than they really are. The vast, vast majority of people aren't going to gun them down for a traffic stop or for providing a warning about something. The situations where they're likely to get shot are exceedingly rare. By treating policing as some tremendously dangerous job we're completely ignoring the actual statistics, which show that firefighters and construction workers are far more routinely in physical danger.

The police then get carte blanche to walk around treating everyone like some dangerous creature ready to explode at the slightest provocation when most of us are just trying to get by and are pretty accepting of the benign law enforcement interactions we get.

Isn't it maybe because of the gun use here? in other countries is not like anybody can shoot you, even a civilians here feels like sometimes people get mad and just shoot each other

If you've ever walked up to your neighbor and politely asked them to do or not do something then by that logic you're putting yourself at immense physical risk. I think the vast majority of people, even gun owners, are generally civil and don't wish other people harm.

Given that gun owners skew conservative and the Republican party seems to currently exist to harm people conservatives don't like (e.g. trans people). I'd say that the majority of gun owners defiitely wish other people harm, if they didn't then they wouldn't have voted for the guy who ran on a platform of causing other people harm.

You're trying to apply too much reason to an environment that runs entirely on emotion.

> even a civilians here feels like sometimes people get mad and just shoot each other

Outside of Florida, with its incredibly relaxed "stand your ground" laws, this isn't really an issue in most of the US. When civilians do go around shooting people like that, they usually get arrested and imprisoned. In Florida, especially if you're a retired cop, you can shoot people for talking on their phone in a movie theater, though. So maybe avoid that state if you value your life.

Or South Carolina where you can shoot or shoot at or wave your gun at people who are shoplifting or who you just feel like are shoplifting. Hell, shoot them in the back as they run away, having not stolen anything, after you waved your gun at them, and find yourself acquitted. Better not tell the jury that this isn't your first time doing it, though, or they might be prejudiced by thinking this is starting to become a habit!