Chuck Schumer is trying to mollify his constituents. The one thing a politician can never tell his constituents is that they are being morons, even when it's true.
Your last link has the officer claiming it doesn't give off heat like regular drones, but just like the OP story where a police officer claimed the "mystery residue" reacted "violently" to a lead pencil, what does that even mean? Can we get an A/B test of what this officer calls a "regular" drone on heat vision versus one of these mystery drones?
And oh yeah, at about 4:30 into that link, the reporter puts up his own "authentic drone footage" that I am absolutely certain is a perfectly normal airplane.
The airport shutdown was real, sure, but that was dumb wannabe sleuths who were going to "solve the problem" using their own drones, thereby becoming the problem, or smart trolls who knew exactly how best to get a laugh out of the gullible public.
Rapid iteration at the component level would obviously require custom components, and maybe vertical integration, which clearly conflicts with point #1 about riding existing supply chains. But you can still iterate parts of the design that you more or less "have" to customize, such as the body material, axis geometries, and dozens of other factors I can't think of off the top of my head. The collected data can both be used to improve training and as input into the design iterations.
Demoralization of the enemy. Every single Hezbollah member is now paranoid that every single surface they touch is either listening to them or trying to kill them.
In five years you might be able to start teasing out the effects of the sudden rise in interest rates. Right now, we're still feeling echoes of the pandemic and subsequent "snap-back" in economic activity.
Look at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCSA, set the units to "percent change from year ago," and zoom out to "Max". The pandemic effect dwarfs anything else in the entire history of the unemployment program. I think future economic research may well have to discard the years 2020-2024 because the circumstances were so unique and the distortions were so severe.
Does it matter? It's a wasteful process, and not the only one that has been introduced into the parent commenter's workflow.
In a private company, you can just say "I don't care if we lose 1-cent screws, just order more when we open the last big box of them." You don't ever have to count them, unless you notice that you're spending an awful lot of money on replacing them.
In a public company that is legally required to keep track of its assets, you have to keep track of stuff that is really not worth keeping track of. Even if that's only on a periodic basis, there are literally dozens, probably hundreds of new "just one more things" you have to spend time on in a public company.
Yes, all those "one more things" keep you honest and accountable, but it has real, and rising, costs that can distort rational economic decision-making.
>it has real, and rising, costs that can distort rational economic decision-making
I'm not saying it doesn't, I'm just wondering how often it has to happen. If it's just a snapshot of inventory on one day and everything pans out, then great. If it's something that has to be tracked 365 days a year because the taxman will audit all 365 of those days, then that's a lot of effort that's being spent on something for seemingly very little benefit.
There are definitely companies that are winning from the tech you pointed out, sure. The companies that make robotaxis and the companies that sell AI subscriptions are going to make bank.
But at an aggregate level, that robotaxi means a human tax driver is no longer working, and if every sales person has their own personal robot translator for talking to foreign clients, then none of them has a competitive edge over the others, they've just had to invest that money in order to avoid giving up a competitive edge.
That OP paper's argument is basically that the only rising tide that truly lifts all economic boats is being able to keep more of the money you make instead of having to spend it on interest or taxes. So the age-old wisdom of "just buy an index fund" may have run its course, and you will actually have to pay attention to valuations instead of just blindly buying the market going forward.
> So the age-old wisdom of "just buy an index fund" may have run its course, and you will actually have to pay attention to valuations instead of just blindly buying the market going forward.
The efficient-market hypothesis would probably disagree. If "paying attention to valuations" ever consistently produces greater returns, then index funds will start weighting their holdings in such a way to capture that value. If it produces greater returns, but not consistently, then we're back to gambling and things like technical analysis and trying to time the market.
I’d argue productivity measured in economic activity is measuring the wrong thing. Looking at my personal life I have paid about the same amount for an iPhone since they came out, and probably less on computing hardware YoY over my life time. However it’s impossible to say my iPhone today is equivalent to the iPhone I bought 15 years ago, even though the nominal price is the same. What these nominal values fail to price is the “quality” of stuff improving while prices and demand for “more shit” doesn’t keep up. At some level we have enough shit, and we expect things to be about the same price year over year for something that has improved materially over that time. Where does this get valued?
I also think a goal of full employment naturally leads to a flattening of productivity. We hire a lot of people to do work that isn’t super productive because we consider employment more important than raw numerical superiority. We probably could let go many people and improve productivity at a great expense to social cohesion. This doesn’t seem like progress to most people if we had 30% unemployment. To the papers point low interest rates and reducing taxes creates a lot of space for inefficient employment. There even might, if you get particularly breathless, be a time post scarcity when employment itself is anachronistic. But as we have no method of social or communal distribution today in capitalists societies, we would need to find a way to keep people pecking for food pellets. Productivity would fall off a cliff at that point.
I thing what this paper illustrates more than anything is that productivity as a measure of value is pre-automation industrial thinking that we largely stick with because it’s really a lot harder to measure anything else. Valuations in the stock market IMO have decoupled from traditional economic measures because those measures are flawed and don’t explain how we value things in modernity.
Zoom out to "Max" to get the full 60 year history. You can clearly see a full four decades of declining interest rates running from 1981-2020. That very neatly corresponds with the amazing stock market growth most HN readers, myself included, have grown up with.
The stock market growth is neatly correlated with declining interest rates, not with the actual value of the interest rates currently. That is, until the interest rates can't go any lower. The 10-year yield got as close as I hope it will ever get to zero back in 2020. There's nowhere to go but up from there.
For myself, I'm dusting off the old magic - a 60/40 stock/bond portfolio, with the stocks focused on value funds, plus a relatively small amount in "breakout" funds that could multiply a few times if technology goes the way I think it will. Maybe if interest fall a little bit I'll dial it to a 70/30 mix, but bonds are definitely part of the equation now.
But if interest rates rise, bonds lose too. That is, the bonds you hold today lose market value (the value you could get if you sold them today). The longer the duration of the bond, the more they lose. So if you expect interest rates to rise, I'm not sure holding bonds (especially long bonds) is the protection you want.
On the other hand, I may be missing something. Ray Dalio's All Weather Portfolio is 55% bonds, and it's supposed to be safe-ish for any market conditions.
They lose in the short term, but if you're buying and holding to maturity, you get that money back. If you're worried about losing "market value" in a rising interest rate regime, buy shorter-term bonds. You can buy short-term bond funds, or buy bonds individually on Fidelity, Vanguard, etc.
A large part of the United States' economic leadership is specifically concentrated in the tech startup sector.
Whether or not you think any of the companies funded by YCombinator[0] are actually worth their valuation, you have to realize that there will be fewer such startups if a tax on unrealized capital gains is passed, and that VC activity, along with the future startups chasing their money, absolutely will move to countries without such a tax.
Again, maybe you actually believe the startup scene in the US is worthless, in which case, go ahead and advocate for an unrealized gains tax Just be honest with yourself that it will entirely shut down sectors that others view as critical to the country's future dominance.
> you have to realize that there will be fewer such startups if a tax on unrealized capital gains is passed, and that VC activity, along with the future startups chasing their money, absolutely will move to countries without such a tax.
That's a bold claim. The tax-averse amongst us say that, but in my experience investment flows to the best ideas / best distribution / best businesses. If those people are in the US because they're citizens, the capital will flow to the US, and investors will take the hit.
I wonder if something like Slashdot's metamoderation system could be used to tamp down such abuse.
One problem with metamoderation is that once a particular forum becomes an echo chamber, even metamoderation will unconsciously but repeatably ignore "valid" information from the other side and amplify misinformation from their own side. But if the site owners specifically searched for good-faith users from multiple viewpoints to serve as the jury pool for metamoderation, this could be workable.
> But also going to the dentist already isn't exactly pleasant, the pokes, scrapes, drill noises, etc. Maybe we improve that first before sticking it in a robot?
From the article:
> The machine's first specialty: preparing a tooth for a dental crown. Perceptive claims this is generally a two-hour procedure that dentists will normally split into two visits. The robo-dentist knocks it off in closer to 15 minutes.
So this robot is actually improving the dental experience for the patient, which will hopefully reduce anxiety as well as reducing costs.
Your last link has the officer claiming it doesn't give off heat like regular drones, but just like the OP story where a police officer claimed the "mystery residue" reacted "violently" to a lead pencil, what does that even mean? Can we get an A/B test of what this officer calls a "regular" drone on heat vision versus one of these mystery drones?
And oh yeah, at about 4:30 into that link, the reporter puts up his own "authentic drone footage" that I am absolutely certain is a perfectly normal airplane.
The airport shutdown was real, sure, but that was dumb wannabe sleuths who were going to "solve the problem" using their own drones, thereby becoming the problem, or smart trolls who knew exactly how best to get a laugh out of the gullible public.