A P/E ratio that’s high indicates that investors think something is a growth stock. A typical mature but growing tech company has a P/E ratio of 20ish. Tesla’s P/E ratio is currently 182.

Now, there’s a saying “the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”, but TSLA is poised for a huge collapse. It was already way overvalued even a year ago when Musk was just this right-wing asshole who bought Twitter and ruined it. Everything since then has destroyed his image and made it so nobody wants to buy his cars. He’s pissed off Democrats, and now he’s pissed off MAGA Republicans. And, most importantly, Tesla is clearly no longer a growth stock. Sales are declining year after year.

If Tesla were a normal, boring car company that was competently run by someone nobody hated, it might have a P/E ratio similar to Toyota: 7. To get there from here, TSLA would have to shed 96% of its value. Keep in mind, that’s not what the price should be. That’s what the price should be if nobody hated the brand and it was a normal well-run car company.

Somebody is going to make absolute bags of money shorting TSLA. If I were rich I’d do it. But, as I’m not rich, the downside of the market remaining irrational is too big a risk. But, IMO, it’s just a matter of time.

Even before that there was Walter Cronkite, then Peter Jennings.

That was back in an era where everyone watched the same “influencers”. The good part of that was that for the most part, these influencers were rigorously fact checked so the people who watched them agreed on the same set of facts, and those facts were more or less true.

On the other hand, there were times when these “influencers” were biased or even hid the truth. The bias was often something they even had trouble noticing. Like, they all believed communism was a big threat, or that police were trustworthy. As for hiding the truth, sometimes when a politician got in trouble the news would drop the story because of their deference to power. They’d also sometimes try to repeat whatever the government said as truth without checking it, or not investigate bad things the government was doing overseas because they saw that as being patriotic.

Overall, I think it was better when everybody agreed on most things, even if sometimes the news / “influencers” were biased. At least it meant that the government was more or less functional. At least it meant that people were relatively civil with each-other.

This logic does no justice to the objective financial harm being done to the creators/owners of valuable data/content/media.

“Financial harm” is a loaded term. People expected to make money and then didn’t, but is that a bad thing?

What if the US president declared that it is now a legal requirement that every American subscribe to a new paid tier of Facebook, and that declaration was rubber stamped by the lawmakers. Anybody who didn’t capitulate would be doing “financial harm” to Meta, but is that really a fair way to frame that? If a bully wants your lunch money and you resist, are you doing “financial harm” to the bully?

The way I see things, the initial copyright laws were a relatively fair trade: a 14 year monopoly on something, that could be renewed for another 14 years if the author was still alive. In exchange, everything after that term became part of the public domain. So, it would encourage people to produce writing, and the public would benefit because a reasonable amount of time later what was produced would be available to everybody at no cost. Modern copyright terms are a massive give-away to Hollywood, the record labels, etc. So, while it’s true that infringing copyright does reduce the potential amount of money a copyright holder might hope to receive, morally it’s closer to fighting off a bully than it is to theft.

The 1950s economy was the result of:

1. The New Deal
2. A world war which destroyed the infrastructure of every developed economy except for the US.

The New Deal was only possible because of the Great Depression. Only that level of chaos was enough so that left-wing politicians could push through radical reforms that moved power from the elite to the workers. The reforms of the New Deal remained in place after the war, at least for a while.

The second world war saw the destruction of the industrial capacity of the UK, Germany, France and the USSR. Meanwhile the only attack on the US was an attack on military targets at a Navy base in a distant territory.

So, if you want an economy similar to the 1950s, arrange for a world war which somehow leaves the US unscathed but destroys every other similarly developed economy, then arrange for a great depression which destroys the economy to such an extent that radical reforms can be enacted to hand power to the average worker.

Yes, of course nothing bad would happen if we switched to a 20 hour work week. But, the people with the power aren’t going to just allow that to happen. The 40 hour work week only happened with a massive series of strikes that were brutally put down by the cops. The change to a 20 hour week isn’t just going to happen because some workers think it would be cool.

That’s absolute bullshit. When the 40 hour workweek was “invented”, men were working 12 hour days in factories and their wives also worked. The wives sometimes worked in factories, often worked as domestic servants for richer people, or did home-based work. Home based work was often laundry or cooking for other people, not just their family. They’d sometimes also finish goods that were produced in a factory. Both partners were working 12+ days. And, while women did most of the home cooking and cleaning, it wasn’t as though that’s all they did.

This system ended because the workers used their power and went on strike. The result was the Haymarket Affair and is the reason that most countries, other than the US, celebrate a worker’s day on May 1st. The striking workers were attacked and beaten by the cops, and then because a bomb was thrown at a cop, the leaders of an anarchist group were rounded up and hanged after show trials.

Eventually the striking workers got what they were working for: an 8 hour day. But, it took decades after the Haymarket Affair for it to happen, and it wasn’t something that happened because everyone agreed it made sense. It was a long and bloody fight where that was the compromise that reduced the bloodshed.

If you want a 20 hour work week, join a union, prepare to go on strike and prepare to be beaten by the cops.

You’re pretty lazy if you stopped there.

That’s all that was needed.

They can drive past stops that don’t have passengers.

Yes, and they often do. But, it’s a massive waste of money if they drive an entire route and nobody gets on or off. They only make sense if the population density is enough.

Which makes titles like “Her Worship” and “Honourable” such bullshit. We should really just get rid of those titles.

The first who joined that Safe Place for Science program. I’m sure there have been others who didn’t know about that, or didn’t want the publicity, but just left quietly when they realized how bad things were getting.

it is people, indeed

When done well, it should be pretty close every five minutes or so.

That only makes sense in a dense, built-up area where there are enough passengers arriving and departing every 5 minutes that it’s worthwhile for a bus to stop. That may be true in downtown NYC, but it isn’t going to be true of the more distant parts of Long Island.

Second, https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/plural-of-bus.

Thanks for proving my point:

What to Know

The plural of the noun bus is buses.

We have those. They’re called bikes.

Ok, I know I don’t have to take you seriously now.

Not sure how “fun” that fact is, but yeah, the number of artillery shells fired in WWI is just amazing.

And they’re loud and they smell (both getting better with electric ones, to be fair).

My city just started trialing some electric buses, man are they so much quieter than the deisel buses. One advantage to self-driving cars is that cars can drive themselves to somewhere where they can be charged, which should only make electrification easier. I’m cautiously optimistic that self-driving cars could make cities better, but we’ll see.

That may have been part of it, but another part is that there was relative peace and stability for about a century, many government reforms that modernized the country, and the industrial revolution making Germany into a world power. Also, AFAIK, iron was relatively abundant in the Ruhr valley, along with coal, which is why it became the industrial centre for the country.

but that’s more of a result of poor material conditions forcing inovations

Well, also Germany was one of the world leaders in science and technology in the early 1900s all the way up to WWII. Just look at the list of winners of the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry and how many of them are German. You could even see this in the recent Oppenheimer movie, where they showed him travelling to the University of Göttingen because that was where you needed to be to study cutting edge theoretical physics. And this was the 1920s when Germany was already suffering having to repay massive war debts after WWI.

What happened? When Hitler rose to power the Nazis drove off all the Jewish scientists, and scared off a lot of the gentiles. It’s almost exactly the same situation as in the US today. Even the chaotic Weimar Republic wasn’t enough to cause Germany’s lead on science to collapse. But, when Hitler came to power, the scientists left, and a lot of them came to the US. This was the start of the US dominating science for decades, something which may collapse now due to Trump.

First reich?

Anybody who’s interested in Ukraine should follow Tim Mak and his news site Counteroffensive

I’m not sure if he’s Canadian or American. He’s a graduate of McGill in Canada, but apparently served as a medic in the US Army. He used to work for The Daily Beast and Politico, then for NPR for 5 years. Now he’s running his own news organization out of Ukraine. He and his team are reporting on the ground in Ukraine, living through all the drone attacks, then going out to talk to Ukrainians in person. He also covers military issues between China and Taiwan.

Some of the stories he’s covered are things like the drone attacks deep inside Russia that destroyed their bombers, but also things you won’t get elsewhere like secret apartment concerts in Ukraine.

And if that doesn’t convince you, he signs off all his dispatches with his dog of war pics of puppies he and his team run across while reporting on the war.

The city is facing the worse

I think you mean “worst”

We’re basically talking about truthiness.

People fact checked a crazy uncle if the things their uncle was saying weren’t truthy. But, if a friend’s medical advice sounded truthy, they simply accepted it and didn’t bother to check.

ChatGPT and other LLMs are designed to sound truthy. If you asked “What’s the biggest planet in the solar system” they could respond “I think that the biggest planet is Jupiter. My information is that Jupiter has a mass of X and a volume of Y. The next biggest planet should be Saturn, which has a mass of Z and a volume of Q. But, you should verify this by consulting these sources…”

Instead, these LLMs are designed so that the answers they provide are incredibly confident. When a user replies that they’re wrong, they change their answer and generate a new one that is just as confident. That’s the kind of answer that is going to seem truthy.

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It seems to me that saying that someone does not neatly fit into the category of man or woman is accepting that “category of man” and “category of woman” are valid categories. Rather than fighting sexism, it’s reinforcing sexism. If someone truly believed that cultural norms about what’s male and what’s female was sexist BS, there would be no need for a “they” pronoun.