If he sold all his stock today, it'd tank the value. Supply and demand. Selling it gradually is sensible, although I don't know if 20 years is needed. No doubt the reason he picked 20 years is because that's as long as he's likely to live and he wants it to be a project for the rest of his life.

The real question is, why didn't he do it 40 years ago? And why do we give billionaires the power to decide where all the money they passively earn faster than they can ever possibly spend gets donated instead of using it for priorities decided by democracy?

All they had to do was put the word "diversity" somewhere in the database and the US government would delete their all copies.

The USA and other countries publish tons of fake research papers too.... at crisis levels. The difference is you attribute those to unscrupulous individuals, whereas you attribute tens of thousands out of 1.4 billion Chinese people as being "China" because American propaganda convinces you that their government controls every single thing that happens there and spins everything bad that happens there as if it didn't happen elsewhere.

And it ought to be a 'swing around the target star and return home' mission so our great-great-grandchildren can recover it if they choose to do so.

That makes it 1000x harder. If you're going fast enough to get there in a century, you're going way too fast for a star's gravity to slingshot you or slow you down significantly, and too fast to be in the target system long enough for a light sail to slow you down significantly. So you're carrying all the fuel you needed to build up the speed again to scrub it, plus the fuel to carry that extra mass, and then the fuel for that mass, etc... the rocket equation isn't kind.

Seems like LLM transcriptions should be able to put text in different colors to indicate different confidence levels, or the like... and that ought to be a priority customer need. But it's better marketing to pretend your product is always 100% able to do the job and 100% certain that it's right, and never draw attention to the possibility of mistakes. So I think part of the problem is humans here, not allowing the machine to say "I can't really make out what you're saying but here's a wild guess."

It's the other way around: the unprofitable parts (search, browser, OS) would remake the profitable parts (advertising). An advertising company has no chance of making a popular search engine. The profitable parts of Google are super easy to do and nothing special, it's just that they only work when you have the reach that the very complex unprofitable parts provide.

Anyway, I suppose a solution would be to explicitly forbid the company from re-entering the advertising market. Not an elegant solution but not entirely unprecedented. That'd leave the company that makes the useful things reliant on partnerships with other companies for advertising revenue.

Their first step would have to be to move every financial asset of every person in the company offshore to avoid confiscation for breaking US laws against export of that technology. And then they'd have to build a navy capable of defending their sea platforms from US navy attack. And then some sort of strategy to come up with all the resources and employees they'll need to build and fly rockets without operating on land. Good luck.

And no, none of them remained upstream -- they can't live there, they can only spawn and die there. Young salmon have to go downstream and live most of their lives in the ocean and only return to the mountains to spawn and die.

Near the dams on major rivers, you find a fish hatchery. People build a fish ladder to capture the fish on their attempted migration, cut them open, artificially spawn them, and raise the fish until they're ready to be released downstream. Usually the public can view this and feed the baby fish, so I'd suggest going if you're near a hatchery -- personally I've been to the Nimbus fish hatchery on the American River many times.

I'd assume there was a hatchery on the Klamath. Now, that constant human intervention will no longer be required there.

Disney's asserted right to arbitration was based mostly on the terms for the ticket the patron had just purchased... and then a foolish lawyer mentioned the patron had also agreed to Disney+ terms years ago, thinking that would tack on a tiny little extra bit of evidence that they were bound to arbitration.

Naturally, the media picks up the absurdly stupid Disney+ part of the argument and runs with that so nobody ever hears about the ticket purchase terms again.

I doubt the purchase did a sufficient job of ensuring that the terms were understood, so it's quite plausible it shouldn't be enforceable, but it's not blatantly stupid in principle to require agreement to such terms to enter an amusement park and have them apply to the immediate consequences of that entry... whereas of course it is blatantly stupid in principle to imagine that a Disney+ trial's terms bind someone for their rest of their life in unrelated dealings with different properties owned by the same company.

The real growth advantage will come from having an effectively infinite workforce. No matter how high of wages you offer, there's only so many people you employ -- especially if they need a specific education for it. If you can use an AI to do the job, suddenly your company has the ability to scale to an effectively infinite number of workers -- which I'd think would equate to serious output gains for certain lucky companies and the economy in general.

Of course, the problem is that the owners of said companies are going to fight hard to keep that windfall for themselves and not let the general public benefit. But that's a political problem.

If you're not working with government or an industry of strategic importance, there's something to be said for the security of using an unfriendly country's products. American antivirus products may be doing who knows what on behalf of the US government (usually whatever the US government is accusing other countries of), which actually has an interest in and power over your company, whereas Russia probably couldn't care less about you.

The benefits of a Mars colony to those of us smart enough to stay on Earth are likely to be immense. To achieve such a thing is absurdly difficult, so it requires a wide variety of innovations. It requires finding ways to use limited resources in far more efficient ways than we've ever done before. It requires recycling of everything you build into other things you need. It requires massive improvements to 3D printing to create things on site you can't wait for delivery on. One Starship a day is minuscule compared to for example the total weight of the 230,000 cars per we produce per day, so what we learn and innovate from forced conservation building the colony can easily can make it a net benefit to Earth's resources.

Yes, you could develop those technologies on Earth for Earth's sake, but nobody will because there's nothing forcing them -- just like all the tech that resulted from Apollo that wouldn't have happened without the visits to a barren space rock.

When it comes to the humanity's eggs in one basket argument, it would be dramatically cheaper and more effective to build self-sufficient colonies deep underground that can survive even a comet strike. But that'll never happen, because nobody dreams about living in such a place. Leaps forward happen when they're forced to happen, be it by a war or a space race, and personally I prefer the latter.

Nearly 7 billion in revenue this year with only 3 million customers, by most estimates at least half a billion in profit. Starship makes the costs plummet and the customer capacity skyrocket. Doesn't take a genius to figure out how profitable that's going to be, with competitors all at least 5 years behind and facing drastically higher cost to orbit.

No amount of gaffes, nor even Biden's death, nor even Biden dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump, could convince democrats to vote for the worm brain RFK Jr. running against him.