birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
4hr ago
Good point. I hadn't considered his age.
birb_cromble
4hr ago
WM does more than just residential pickups, but it's all trash. I have some shares for years because they've historically been low volatility and offer a good dividend.
birb_cromble
4hr ago
Is this a riff on "it's already priced in", then?
birb_cromble
5hr ago
Would you mind elaborating on your rationale for any of these? I'm particularly interested in Costco.
On one hand, I get it. The hot dog is the only truly inflation-proof asset.
On the other hand, a multiple that high assumes some pretty massive future returns, and I don't see how Costco pulls that off without some bonkers expansion, and the last retail consumer staple company that tried that was Target, and the bet didn't pay off.
birb_cromble
9hr ago
What do you think is an appropriate P/E for the following companies? I was looking at them this week and I was a little surprised at how things have crept upwards this year.
- Costco (currently 46x)
- Walmart (currently 37x)
- Waste Management (currently 32x)
- Sysco (currently 23x)
- TSMC (currently 30x)
- Airbus (currently 37x)
- Coca cola (currently 27x)
birb_cromble
21hr ago
As somebody who lives near a few data center build outs, this would be a massive improvement over the current stance from the builders and municipal governments, which is "go fuck yourself, peasant".
birb_cromble
22hr ago
I do think the water usage thing is probably the most strawmanny of the worries, but it is probably the most visible
It's the most visible specifically because it's the weakest argument. It's a specialized variant of nutpicking. It's the same reason that people constantly (and intentionally) conflated marginal conspiracy theories with reasonable ones during COVID. If you're dunking on 5g graphene mind control arguments, you don't have to look too hard at the lab leak hypothesis. If you're dunking on a math error from Empire of AI, you don't have to talk about the noise, or the utility costs, or the municipal NDAs and corruption, or the blatant disregard for zoning and environmental laws, or anything else that's going on right now. You can just call that person "low IQ" and move on.
birb_cromble
23hr ago
anyone in the data center space running open-loop cooling?
Evaporative cooling still sees extensive use, but in the last eight months many of the hyperscalers have realized that it's not worth the ill-will that it generates. The balance may change over time for the better.
It seems genuine to me.
You're probably not going to get much buy in to that stance here. Most of the readership skews urban, wealthy, and technocratic. They don't view the negative externalities as real problems.
The Chinese interference theory is a convenient way to avoid having to confront those externalities without asking why nobody's crying out to have Fort Mason Park paved over and converted to a data center using "temporary" gas turbines for power.
It's very similar to the "Russian election interference" narrative from 2016. Sure, you can probably dig and find something, but Facebook ads for Sexy Bernie coloring books do not a complete explanation make.
birb_cromble
1d ago
How would you rate starship troopers?
I don't even think the director read the book. The two pieces really don't share anything but a name. The movie is fun, though.
birb_cromble
1d ago
How did, say, Hitchhiker's Guide and Princess Bride pull it off whereas other adaptations didn't?
Making a good adaptation is hard. Making a faithful adaptation is hard. Making a good adaptation that is faithful to the source material is a Herculean task.
Faithful adaptations are hard because when you shift medium, you lose tools that are available to the source material. The easiest example is a book written in first person. Even if you try to approximate that experience in film with tools like narration, you lose the immediacy of the written experience. This is why Stephen King film adaptations almost universally suck, for example.
At the same time, making a good adaptation is hard because you run straight into the problems of Hollywood filmmaking. Writing about things is cheap. Putting them on a screen requires money for fim crews, sets, special effects, actors, insurance, and God only knows what else. At the same time there are extensive pressures at every level for people to "put their mark" on the property, which is compounded by industry-wide disrespect for a lot of fiction (see: The Witcher).
To get both, you need a talented, obsessive individual with a ton of industry clout, fuck-you money, and a willingness to put his own ego aside in service to the original property. Good luck finding many of them.
birb_cromble
1d ago
like the gun rights
Were the gun rights positions normal for the time? I've always understood 1940-1990 to represent the nadir of pro gun stances in the US.
birb_cromble
1d ago
It's amazing how many problems time can solve.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Why do you think visual media, specifically adaptions, have declined in quality over the past decade?
I have a vague theory that it's because the writer's room is now part of the establishment.
The 1950s and 60s are generally considered to be the golden age of sci-fi. A lot of the writers during that period were some form of communist at a time when it was not a good idea to publicly be a communist. (I'll get to Heinlein. Take your hands off the keyboard and let me finish.)
Heinlein is an interesting case, because he also had some fairly controversial and unorthodox opinions for the time - just in the other direction.
The 1980s and 1990s are generally considered to the the golden age of syndicated network TV. The writers at the time were disproportionately into gay rights at a time when it was not a good idea to be publicly into gay rights.
There's also the area of literature and film outside of samizdat in Soviet Russia.
In all three of these cases, a large contingent of writers were activists in times when being an activist carried real and significant negative consequences. This had two impacts on writing quality:
- Creativity happens under constraint, and blacklisting was a major constraint.
- Activists who couldn't exercise nuance and write good stories first got weeded out.
These days, the writer's room aligns with the broader mores and taboos of the neoliberal elite. There's no risk, and anybody who has opinions that go against the grain get self-policed before they can produce popular content.
In the absence of risk, the stories don't have selective pressure forcing them to be nuanced and well written, so we get what you describe instead.
birb_cromble
2d ago
In all seriousness, the last time I needed to build muscle for a role, I had to cut my carb intake and up my fats just to get the required calories inside a reasonable volume. How married are you to those macros?
birb_cromble
2d ago
2700 calories is only two pounds of good cheese. What's the problem?
birb_cromble
3d ago
I've had contractors in the past who lose motivation if they already have all the cash.
He also didn't want it all up front for reasons he didn't explain, but I'm not going to fight him on it.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Spending is $2,317.45 lower than this day last year. My contractor is running behind schedule due to the non-stop rain, so we're splitting up payment between now and September. He's happy because he gets some cash up front, and I'm happy because I get to spread out the impact a little.
birb_cromble
4d ago
The reason is somewhat different for both, but both share a disconnected quality compared to the city at large. I'm not a Pittsburgh native, but both neighborhoods stand out for that fact whenever I visit.
Greenfield is fascinating because it's a large residential area, but it doesn't really have much in the way of shops, or services, or public transit. It's almost like the construction of 376 caused the city to forget its existence.
Swisshelm Park only really has one entrance or exit. Bounded as it is by the river and the park, you might forget that the rest of the city is even out there.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Are you planning to cover Swisshelm park and Greenfield at some point?
birb_cromble
4d ago
This would be funny if I hadn't just read the piece on leverage research.
birb_cromble
5d ago
But if you did know and you chose to accept the money anyway and that’s the full extent of your involvement, how guilty are you?
I've only been in a situation where it came up once in my life. I was working for a caterer when a local pillar of the community and upstanding businessman hired the company for a private event. The guy had a reputation for getting handsy with the help. He specifically wanted to hand-pick "the girls" who would be on the floor. I, along with several other members of the crew, refused to work the job. We all got fired for it.
It sucked living on potatoes and cabbage for a month, but I'd do it again.
birb_cromble
5d ago
You’re telling me that having a low Epstein number isn’t all that exclusive a club?
After running those searches, my main takeaways were:
- God damn Epstein really liked AI
- Academics will go to insane lengths to secure funding.
birb_cromble
5d ago
This sort of thing was like catnip for Epstein.
I hadn't considered it from that angle. I could see how that would create a self-reinforcing loop in the research community.
Guy says lofty things --> Some dude named Jeff shows up and showers him with money.
A lot of rationally self interested people would, at that point, start considering if they should wax philosophical.
The meteor was priced in
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