Tag: analysis

Mitigating X-Risk

The initial advocate for off-planet colonies now concedes that the additional difficulties associated with constructing a space colony would encourage the successful construction of terrestrial lifeboats before attempts are made to construct one on another body. The only reason to still countenance their construction at all is an issue which revealed itself to the advocate for terrestrial biospheres towards the end of the collaboration. A terrestrial lifeboat could end up being easily discontinued and abandoned if funding/political will failed, whereas a space colony would be very difficult to abandon due to the astronomical (pun intended) expense of transporting every colonist back. A return trip for even a relatively modest number of colonists would require billions of $ allocated over several years, by, most importantly, multiple sessions of a congress or parliament. This creates a paradigm where a terrestrial lifeboat, while being less expensive and in many ways more practical, could never be a long term guarantor of human survival do to its ease of decommissioning (as was seen in the Biosphere 2 incident). To be clear, the advocate for terrestrial lifeboats considers this single point sufficient to decide the debate in its entirety and concedes the debate without reservation.

Symptom, Condition, Cause

The saying goes: all models are wrong, some models are useful. I don’t think existing psychiatric diagnosis is particularly accurate, but I think it’s the most useful thing we have right now. And I don’t think talking about how each condition is probably made up of many root causes is a particularly damaging objection to it. We should keep the likely heterogeneity in mind and pull it out when we need it, but we shouldn’t use that as an excuse to abandon the whole nosology.

Index fund confusion

Index providers should do case-by-case studies of stocks? Look, if you said to me that investors should do careful case-by-case analyses of the stocks they want to buy in order to make sure that their valuations were justified, I’d be like, sure, yeah, that sounds like investing all right. But if you told me that the indexes used by passive investors should do careful case-by-case studies of all the stocks they include in order to make sure that their valuations were justified, I’d be like, no, wait, that doesn’t sound like indexing at all. That is fundamental analysis; it is subjective and controversial; the whole business of stock markets is to adjudicate disputes over whether valuations are justified. The general idea of indexing is that you stay neutral in those disputes, and just buy stuff at whatever valuation the market gives to it.

Apple Monopoly

It’s that last bit — the multiple generations bit — that is of interest here. Apple first released its notorious butterfly keyboard in April 2015, and has only now replaced it in 1 model in November 2019. Over that time period the company has sold $99b worth of Macs, the majority of which have been laptops. This is truly the power of integration! Or, to put it another way, the power — and downside — of monopoly. No, Apple does not have a monopoly in computers — how amazing would that be! — but the company does have a monopoly on macOS. It sells the only hardware that runs macOS, which is why millions of customers kept buying computers that, particularly in the last couple of years, were widely reported to be at risk of significant problems.

2021-02-04: On the many ways Apple is sketchy as hell, and what can be done about it.

Into the Abyss

Within 2 months of Mackey’s inspection, the Lyubov Orlova and its crew would be abandoned in the harbor by the vessel’s owner, as lawsuits and liens piled up. In fact, it would be nearly 3 years before the Lyubov Orlova would leave St. John’s Harbor. When it finally did, the vessel, named for a Soviet movie star, was described in international headlines as a “cannibal rat-infested ghost ship” drifting on a crash course toward Britain. But the Lyubov Orlova never made it across the Atlantic; it’s believed to be rotting somewhere at the bottom of it. The Lyubov Orlova’s journey from cruise ship to ghost ship left financial hardships, a humanitarian emergency and a political controversy in its wake.

The Google Squeeze

1 answer, perhaps, lies in Google’s behavior itself: unlike traditional monopolies, it is hard to argue that Google’s product isn’t getting better. Sure, OTAs need to pay to play on the hotel module, but the hotel module is a genuine improvement over 10 blue links. The same can be said of the other areas where Google gives answers instead of options. I absolutely get the argument that this might be an unfair extension of Google’s search dominance, but the possibility of stifling innovation, both directly and also its incentives, are worth consideration.