Look, MMT really annoys me in its attempt to rebrand Keynesian fiscal stimulus as some kind of magical new discovery, but COVID certainly demonstrated that you can boost an economy in freefall if you just pour enormous amount of fiscal stimulus into it.

I mean, even the Neoliberal prophet Friedman was unequivocal about how the govt can create any amount of inflation if it really really wants too (helicopter money).

Now, whether that's what you should do, or the exact details of how you do it, or what the end goal of doing it, are all very debatable. But make no mistake, if the govt wants to go on an 'MMT' money splurge to stimulate the economy they most certainly can.

Fundamentally, you have to realise that having an economy with stable 0% real interest rates is an enormous privilege - it allows you to extend and pretend forever. All those crazy valuations you can just kick down the road because the holding cost of maintaining your position is zero. Personally I think the deregulated financial system requires either a reset (massive crash) or for this situation, and returning to the moribund ZIRP economy is probably the best of the two worst options. So when the AI bubble burst I think you will see a quick return to ZIRP, QE and then they will be able to raise (through QE) whatever level of debt is required to prop things up.

The post GFC was the new normal, and that is where they will try to steer things.

I appreciate that you seem to really care about your children. But as someone who was homeschooled, what are you going to do when you kids eventually have to interact with the shitshow that is the real world? I for sure do not want my children exposed to the bullies and psychopaths of the world, but on the other hand those people are everywhere in life. You have to learn to deal with them. I got burnt extremely badly early in my career because I assumed everyone was inherently decent, and my ability to judge character was limited.

My children now go to a state school with a very diverse and fundamentally decent community. There are still a broad range of people there. I've taught my kids to be generous and share, and for the most part they have very healthy relationships with other children. But they have also already encountered the kid who just takes takes takes. And the kid that manipulates the group emotionally to try to get all the attention. They are learning how to recognise these types of personalities, and how to integrate them into their lives without allowing them to dominate. I think these are really important skills. Even learning that sometimes you have to follow stupid rules that make no sense I think is an important skill (I spent a long time being frustrated about all the idiotic things around working a job).

In the end though we just have to use our best judgement - I won't know for another decade whether I've made the right choice. Anyway, just some things that you might want to consider.

This makes no sense at all. Even if you don't want them, if Europe wants to continue running its economy on car exports it doesn't take a genius to see that developing your own driverless system might be useful. Further, there are plenty of uses in Europe beyond personal transport (e.g. long distance trucking) where a working self-driving system would be useful. There are loads of trucks criss-crossing Europe. The idea it is a public transport utopia is myopic.

Perhaps even more importantly, autonomous driving is just part of the development of automation stacks in general. The technology pioneered by Waymo etc will be useful for many other automation tasks. Things like SLAM/perception algorithms, simulation training etc would all be really useful for any next gen robotics (not taking stuff like humanoids, just all sorts of task automation). That's a good enough reason to pour money into the field even if you want to keep driving your own cars.

As someone living in the UK, honestly, the trouble is that Europe is so conservative when it comes to investment. To get money you have to find some rich aristocrats, and then plead with them to stop investing in expanding their stupid property empire and give you a bit of money. If you then fail to deliver, or they get cold feet, they will demand their money back and an official inquiry as to why you failed. Then they'll go straight back to stuffing their money into property investments again and tut tut about how risky all this fandangled tech stuff is.

Further there is just this persistent belief outside FAANG that someone who monkeys around on a computer all day couldn't possibly be worth paying banker sort of wages. So the smart tech people go into finance or work for a US company, while the average ones work for local companies for what are frankly insulting wages. This then reenforces the idea among the local companies that engineers aren't very good, so they refuse to pay more, further destroying their ability to get good engineers. If companies tripled engineering salaries here, they would suddenly find a whole lot of very competent people move across from finance.

I would have agreed with you if I hadn't ridden a bicycle around SF a few months back. I mean, sure the roads are wider, which means you just get delivery drivers double parking everywhere, people with gigantic cars everywhere, people driving faster, cars always parked on the side of the road which limits your visibility everywhere. I get you on the pedestrian thing, but I suspect that is because only crazy people try to walk (or ride a bike) around the downtown area. Then you have the street cars, and the tourist street cars, and the tourist in general, and the crazy four way stop thing. Add to that all that the potholes everywhere, faded road markings, and guys with shopping trolleys wandering in the streets (admittedly didn't see that until the mission). It's not this magical driving utopia. Any northern european city (e.g. Copenhagen, Berlin) would be way more suitable than SF.

I was honestly blown away with how the Waymos seemed to just deal with it all. I spent a good half hour just watching them drive through an intersection. They've absolutely nailed it.

Wayve is taking a VERY ambitious approach (end to end neural nets). This sounds great, but as with all probabilistic models, they are going to have a fun time trying to chase those 9's of reliability. Doesn't mean they won't catch up, but there are a lot of players (including Tesla) promising to catch up, but none have managed to do so yet and, frankly, after seeing those things in SF, Waymo is already there.

It's all the same bubble. It's caused by central banks intervening in the credit market to artificially suppress the price of credit. Combine that with a deregulation of credit creation (there is no concept of fractional reserve ratios etc now - credit is limited by the 'discipline' of private banks) and you just have gobs of cheap money going everywhere. When they did the COVID stimulus this just supercharged the process. If you have credit expanding beyond the capacity for real investment to absorb it (new machinery, building etc), it can only inflate asset prices and more than likely a bunch of Ponzi schemes.

If you could just flood the economy with cheap credit at any level to get whatever real economic growth you want then we would just do that and we'd all be living in gold palaces. But it doesn't work like that. Credit can only facilitate economic growth but it has to be part of an overall strategy to direct the broad economy where you want it to go. Our current system is like if someone proposed that the government just build more casinos to grow the economy. Everyone then goes to work either gambling at the casino (to earn money) or working in the casino itself. You have full employment and everyone's busy making money, except when they all go to find a doctor they can't because everyone is working in the casino. The problem is if you leave it to 'the markets' they quickly conclude that it's way easier to setup a casino then train a whole lot of doctors. The whole thing takes over your economy and that's what we have now.

When this current bubble burst all that will happen is that they will go back to ZIRP and QE faster than you can imagine. In fact, if the bubble destroys large parts of the real economy this will make their job a whole lot easier. We are just going to return to the moribund economy of 2012 to 2019 when they kept telling us who things were great while everyone had been slowly slipping backwards for nearly a decade.

Another thing to consider is that we are making rapid progress in terms of treating cancers. We are basically learning how to hack the human immune system to enhance its error correction abilities against genetic damage.

By the time we are regularly sending people to mars, it's not unreasonable that we will just have such good cancer treatments (or treatments for all sorts of genetic damage) that the effects of the radiation can be mitigated therapeutically.

It's like how explorers used to be at risk of scurvy, until science figured out how to mitigate that. Now nobody worries about getting scurvy when travelling on a ship.

I think the biggest concern I have with Starship right now is that the dry weight appears to be very high and they haven't proven rapid reuse. If they had either a good mass fraction, or had a stack with proven rapid reusability (at this point, just not having tiles falling off) then they'd have wiggle room to trade one for the other. But at the moment they don't have either. Of course there will be a lot of optimisations they can make, but countering that they might have to add a lot more weight to get rapid reuse.

The entire thing is such a knife edge. For missions like Starlink I think they will be okay, as even if the stack can only launch a small number of satellites, if it is truly reusable, then that's unlikely to matter vis a vis Falcon 9. But for the moon missions if you start cutting payload fraction it dramatically increases the number of tankers you need to send, which complicates your launch operations (must have a very rapid cadence), complicates the time you have to sit on orbit refuelling and just overall makes the mission much more complicated than originally planned.

My guess is it's very likely they can get something working that is viable for Starlink, but extending this to a platform that can do lunar missions might require a lot more work. Things like moving back to composites for parts of the space craft (realistically, a composite booster would likely be quite a bit lighter, but incredibly expensive and complicated to make compared to what they have) are all options but would add huge amounts of time to the project.

I mean, this is a moonshot, so those are exactly the sorts of questions they will be looking to answer. More than likely the answer will be the rather obvious 'not easily' but I guess if you have billions of dollars and can make a few extra billion on your stock price by doing press-releases like this, then it's not an entirely stupid idea to get some grads to look into it and write a report.

The other thing is that having some sort of edge compute in space is probably going to be a thing in the next few decades, probably through systems like Starlink. You can imagine at some point having sections of your CDN on the satellites might make sense for when they're out over the middle of the Pacific and you don't want to set up a bunch of relay stations out there. I'm sure there is also a lot of military interest in reducing the cost of on satellites processing through commercial avenues.

These sorts of studies are really about identifying the issues that need to be addressed and then they will be able to either invest some money into dealing with them, or monitor the landscape for technologies that will fix them. I don't think it's an unrealistic thing to consider at all for Google. But yeah, the fact they have to tie everything to AI is getting pretty tiresome.

Well, to be fair, all these AI companies are currently running on the old adage 'we lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume'.

It doesn't matter how much he spends on infrastructure, at some point he has to charge people more or cut his costs to run these models.

I thought they would wait for the AI bubble to pop before flogging the quantum one, but instead they're just going all in on everything. They won't have anything left to hype when this whole thing goes up in flames.

If they announce they are going to power these AI quantum computers using fusion reactors in space, then I'm moving to a cabin in the woods.

Except that isn't what you're paying for with a lot of consultant work. For many business people, the idea behind hiring consultants is that if the project works then you proclaim yourself a business genius, and if it doesn't you blame the consultants. If you hadn't hired the consultants and the project didn't work out then you would have to take the blame. This is what you're paying for.

Just consider things like the EV transition. I bet you across the world, there are boards going 'why are we having to pivot away from the EV strategy?' and management is pointing to the logo on the report and saying 'the consultants got it wrong'.

I absolutely thing AI stuff will reduce the number of consultants required, but unless it becomes culturally viable to blame the AI, the consultants are not going away.

Seriously why are investors so quick to forget about Zuckerberg's all-in bet on the Metaverse? He spent billions on it, and I believe it was part of the reason for the whole renaming/restructuring of FaceBook as Meta.

I guess it's the same with Musk and his endless promises, and now even Apple with their iPhone 16 debacle. It's like markets just reward making huge claims, not delivering, and then declaring that 'oh but don't worry about that previous mistake - i've found an even bigger next big thing'. Capitalism needs discipline in the form of a market beat down when you get things wrong. Without this it just rewards stupidity. At a minimum there may be much more talented entrepreneurs getting starved of capital because whatever idea a FAANG gets sucks up all the money.

Yeah this is basically it. I think the existing car companies really have no idea how to compete with China though. They thought they'd just be doing the Tesla playbook - make a bunch of high end premium cars that are EVs, do that until volumes ramp up, and then use that to slowly move down into cheaper cost tiers. They likely thought they had at least a decade of this, with big fat margins from the premium line to pay for it.

China is speed running this whole process, and Korean isn't doing too badly either. If western govts didn't put up barriers to trade (tariffs and quotas) the reality is that western manufacturers are likely all done. But trade barriers are giving them a lifeline, but the work required to catch up is just insane and they don't seem to be taking it seriously - even Tesla with their needless distractions like the CyberTruck.

I think this is really a hangover from the post COVID financial craziness. If you look at the numbers, basically there was a massive shortage due to supply chain issues, combined with people having lots of money from the free COVID money. So automakers quickly figured out that there was no point selling the budget versions because they couldn't make enough of their high margin versions to keep up with demand. They kept focussing on these high end, high margin versions and kept putting up the prices - and people paid them.

It's been nearly five years now of this dynamic. It looks like it might be coming to an end, in which case the car manufacturers will have to rediscover the econo-box. But this is going to crater their profit margins, which should tank their stocks, which is a huge crisis for them, so you can imagine why none of their leadership wants to accept that the party is coming to an end.

This. Before they started putting stupid glass backs on iPhones, they were pretty robust. I had a 5 and 7 and abused them without a case. The aluminium got extremely scratched up, but they didn't break. One month into having a 13 without a case and the rear glass shattered. I don't even know how, I just noticed a big crack in it one day. It probably came from just sitting with it in my back pocket.

So now I use a case. And, frankly, at that point I don't care about the industrial design anymore. I actually quite like the ID of the iPhone, but I can't see it because it has to live in a case so it could be anything for all I care. The only reasons I would consider the air is so that it isn't so bulky once I've put the dumb case on the thing - and it's not worth the premium for that since it will still be really thick and bulky.

The reality is that it would be way better if the iPhone just had an ABS sheet on the back instead of the stupid glass. It would be basically indestructible, dirt cheap, and lighter. It could be made to look cool, but who cares since everyone puts their phones in cases anyway. But no, they keep with the stupid glass panel. I must be galling being on the ID team and spending all this effort designing the phone knowing that even people like me who really really don't want to have to use a case will have to put their work into an ugly case.