I think the distinction the politician tried to make, was that you don't "earn" a billion dollars the same way the vast majority of people make their money. You become a billionaire by company ownership, not getting cold hard cash.
The hierarchy of wage looks something like:
1. hourly pay (how many hours you can work sets the maximum possible salary)
2. base pay + cash bonus (the cash bonus starts to increase your earning potential. Sometimes the bonus can be huge, for traders, salespeople, etc.)
3. base pay + stock options (the stock options can outsize your base pay by big margins)
4. stock ownership (almost all your wealth is tied up to the stocks)
The vast, vast majority of people are stuck at (1), and will never move to (2). Nearly all billionaires are at (4).
The average worker will work around 100k hours in their lifetime. If you started working today, with a 2% inflation rate, you'd have to start getting paid close to $6000 / hour in order to reach a billion dollars (pre-tax) in total income by the time you retire 50 years from now.
Another factor to consider, is that salaried workers can't use leverage to increase their earnings. A startup founder can find investors and raise money, which works as rocket-fuel for their company. You can practically outspend your competition. That is simply not possible for regular workers, without breaking rules (as in outsourcing your job, taking on several jobs and outsourcing those, while collecting).
You say "stuck at (1)" as if most people actually desire this kind of wealth and are trying to become entrepreneurs.
The simple truth is that many people don't want to step into that kind of intensity and uncertainty, or lack the skills to succeed in a cutthroat industry.
The idea that founders are somehow "cheating" is hilarious to me. Anyone in the developed world can easily become a founder, why don't you try it?
The stock, and subsequently the stock market, is so detached from reality. For the life of me, I can’t understand why investors will literally put a 100x premium on Musk, and the things he touches. I feel like I’m living in some alternative universe.
SpaceX had this similar mystique to where owning a private share was something rich people bragged about like having a rare Lamborghini.
A lot of these modern bubble stocks are underpinned by a bunch of intangible collectibility reasons that realistically only exist because of a huge cash glut in the US stock market.
Maybe it goes on for a long time, but realistically as baby boomers start drawing down on their retirement portfolios and/or dying there's reason to believe money will start leaving the markets in the next 20ish years.
I am a mechanical engineer, I have a multi decade career doing exactly these kinds of thermal analysis.
This video is basically saying that cooking data centers in space is possible. It is.
The question is if it's better, in any way, to putting them on earth. It isn't.
The common misconception I see is that people think that space is cold like Antarctica is cold. It isn't. Antarctica is cold because there is lots of matter, very cold. Space is cold because there is no matter. No matter to put the heat into and take it away.
It's the same reason that a hard boiled egg takes minutes to cook in water, but 30 to cook in the oven. Now put it in a vacuum insulated thermos and see how long it takes to cook.
Radiation is the weakest of the three heat transfer modes. So much so that in engineering school we often cross it off as negligible compared to the other two (convection and conduction).
Do the heat transfer math yourself, let us know what you find.
One of the comments on the YouTube video you linked says it best. " The only reason to do this is if you have a company who's business is to get things into space".
You seem to live in the real reality, and presumably people care about what you think there because it’s actually real. So why not enlighten us, help explain it to us deluded people? Or you can just be rude and vague.
The stock market is not definitionally "reality" in the sense being used. It's perfectly fine to look at the stock market and consider it "detached from reality", in the sense being said.
I live in a country (Norway) which has been a early-adopter market for EVs. In 2014 Tesla cars were endemic, you could see them everywhere. I was a big believer in Tesla cars.
But things obviously changed. We're still a lead market as far as Tesla sales go, but right now it is just another car. There's absolutely no rationale to automatically go for Tesla.
Which is why I find it incredibly difficult to see how Tesla is valued. The Tesla market cap is more than all other EV producers combined.
Musk evangelists will now yell "Self-driving cars! AI! Robotaxi!", and rationalize that the value behind Musk is potential. The potential that his products will be some fantastical thing in the future.
Money attracts those who seek money and those who seek money for the sake of money will as one would expect prioritize money above other things such as ethics as there is a natural feedback loop there.
I'm not yet dependent enough on any AI to shell out anything more than $15-$25/month.
If I lose it, it will not be the end of the world. I'll probably start digging into local models.
I suspect there are many like me. Far more than there are totally dependent users. I also suspect that the AI economy is some sort of "whale economy", where a minority is footing the bill, by paying outrageous amounts to Anthropic/Open AI/Google.
i just hooked up to local LLMs. feels much slower, more controlable and doesnt change unless i choose.
if i were in business, the idea that my employees would lose skills and be dependent on a third party that controls both price and quality with zero feedback would be insane.
A problem with the arctic, is that infrastructure becomes a problem the longer north you go. Even in western countries like Norway, the power grid is simply too small to handle any data center in the northern-most counties. Not to mention the political issue, where those living there would face higher utility bills.
It is assumed that if you want to build lots of data centers up north, you also need to invest in infrastructure. I've seen discussion about smaller modular nuclear power plants, but those things take years. Another thing could be other renewable energy sources.
More than once I've read stories about small local counties selling huge plots of lands to companies promising to build data centers, only for those companies to flip the land instantly for double or triple the price.
There seems to be no shortage of desperate rural areas that are more than willing to sign ridiculous no-strings-attached deals with companies, in the hopes that they'll geta a couple of years with economic stimuli.
I can't blame them, I'm from a small place like that, and have seem some atrocious deals go through.
I think that if you're unscrupulous enough, there's a killing to be made by those type of grifts.
Lack of network/connections. The first company that flips the land, will go into the deal with potential buyers, and lowball the crap out of the seller.
Sometime the sales (when they flip) are done via acquisition by the target company.
In all practical sense, the first buyer functions as a scout, doing research and negotiations, and make at tops a couple of million. A nice payday, but not enormous amounts of money. But for sure money that would have come handy for the county that owned the land.
Well the city could just sell the land for 2-3x the price from the get go, but Karen and the people she elects wants to pretend like their zoning and red tape policies are saving the spotted owl or keeping their retirement nest egg valuable or whatever, so inevitably they red tape themselves into a corner at which point the grift just becomes too juicy and the greedy voters hand the opportunity to an even greedier and cunning bastard on a silver plate who will package it up and sell it to a fake "data center" and the developers get their way anyway.
Social media feeds have been completely broken for many years. What social media used to be, has now moved to group chats and channels.
But, I guess, there's still room for those channels to be run through the enshittificator. Wouldn't surprise me if we in the not-so-distant future start to see random ads and paid content in group chats.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that dreams are often just that, dreams. Once they are realized, many will not live up to the expectations.
Managing your expectations plays a big part.
So at least for me, that knowledge has helped. Another discovery I made, was that some of my best experiences and decisions have been by pure chance. Things I never planned to do, or had any desire to do, but turned out to be more than I could ever imagine.
It’s ironic how some things you plan for your whole life, but never get to do, while some things you never planned for, ended up overshadowing those initial dreams.
And lastly, many things in life is like a bus stop - there’ll come another bus if you just wait.
In my professional life I chases “prestige” for the sake of prestige, and ended up hating those things.
Of course, there are things I really wanted to do, but never got the chance to, and I’m too old to do now, but that’s just something I’ll live with.
My FOMO and regrets plummeted as I started approaching 40.
It's also worth reflecting on what's underlying the dream. Your "dream" was prestige. You obtained it and it disappointed you. My hypothesis would be that underlying your desire for prestige was a fundamental desire to be loved. Then you realized that prestige only looks superficially like being loved but it's actually something very different and materialistic. If you had reflected that earlier you could have avoided wasting effort for obtaining prestige. The same mechanism is true for all dreams.
Having grown up in Norway, where soccer has always been very popular, accessibility is a factor - I'd agree with that.
The majority of soccer we played as kids wasn't even on a pitch. If you had a wall, a football, and two objects (usually jackets) to mark the goal - you could play - and that's exactly what we did.
But yeah, small neighborhood pitches were usually easy to find.
My pet theory is that it is more nurture than nature. These (VC) veterans have seen thousands of startups come and go, and become so desensitized to the ruthlessness.
Of course to people like the author, it seems borderline sociopathic to casually suggest such levels of betrayal. It is like trying to get into the most exclusive nightclubs, and when you're finally in the front, the bouncer will look at the group and say "You can get in, but not those two". It sucks, but to the bouncer it is just business as usual, and you're just another face.
Nah, he was talking about taking their stock. That’s morally theft even if by some convoluted reason it’s not legally theft.
I get the business as usual analogy but the specifics of the interaction are different. You just showing up to your club with your friends is different than having equity in a company you cofounded.
The hierarchy of wage looks something like:
1. hourly pay (how many hours you can work sets the maximum possible salary)
2. base pay + cash bonus (the cash bonus starts to increase your earning potential. Sometimes the bonus can be huge, for traders, salespeople, etc.)
3. base pay + stock options (the stock options can outsize your base pay by big margins)
4. stock ownership (almost all your wealth is tied up to the stocks)
The vast, vast majority of people are stuck at (1), and will never move to (2). Nearly all billionaires are at (4).
The average worker will work around 100k hours in their lifetime. If you started working today, with a 2% inflation rate, you'd have to start getting paid close to $6000 / hour in order to reach a billion dollars (pre-tax) in total income by the time you retire 50 years from now.
Another factor to consider, is that salaried workers can't use leverage to increase their earnings. A startup founder can find investors and raise money, which works as rocket-fuel for their company. You can practically outspend your competition. That is simply not possible for regular workers, without breaking rules (as in outsourcing your job, taking on several jobs and outsourcing those, while collecting).
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