USD remains and will remain dominant. Trillions in dollar denominated debt and derivatives, insurance products and assets exist globally. No other country willing to run prolonged & massive deficits required for a reserve currency. No other country, of sufficient size, has as predictable legal and regulatory dispute resolution environment. No other country currently has capabilities to protect overseas shipping - a key component of global trade.
USD dominance isn't going anywhere despite hurt feelings over Trump or US policies.
Manus was pretty damn good at delivering impressive results well before other providers. I stopped using it because I was concerned about data privacy and and whatever extent one particular foreign country might (or might not) have hooks into Manus. Now that Meta has purchased them I know I'm safe ((sarcasm)).
I have many questions:
- Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions? Oculus? Drop.io?
- Did they grossly overpay?
- Will innovation slow to a crawl (eg. Instagram, Whatsapp)?
- Will Manus' top talent bail?
- How is it conceivable Meta couldn't build this themselves. It can't possibly have been Manus' user base they were after, can it?
- How much trouble am I in for telling my wife to sell her Meta stock two weeks ago?
Metals, eWaste, Batteries ... all profitable to recycle.
Paper & cardboard ... depends on market price.
Plastics ... depends on oil prices, market price and type of plastic.
Tires ... usually profitable, usually involves a hauling fee.
AMP's robotic solution is going to face immense competition from general edge models, probably very soon. The mechanical piece is simple engineering. All the magic is (was) recognition.
Everything here other than Metals and Tires are basically only useful in the extremes where your inputs are exceedingly clean.
Sure, if you somehow have 99.9% cleaned and sorted plastic it can be maybe worth recycling at the margins. Same with paper and cardboard. The quality of these input streams needs to be so good it basically is nonexistent.
This might work somewhere like Japan, but in a major US city with "single stream" recycling it's a joke. One person tossing a bag of fast food trash into a recycling bin ruins the entire thing. Or a pizza box. You name it.
I'd be surprised if even 10% of the stuff put into the "blue bin" recycling bins here in Chicago actually makes it to recycling. The metals are near 100% since scrappers drive the alleys and scavenge anything of value before it even makes it to the recycling truck.
The amount of human labor to make recycling "worth it" makes it uneconomical. Either that labor can be done on the consumer side (like Japan seems to do) - or centralized - but most things only pencil out when you assume this cleaning and sorting labor is effectively free.
It is a mixed bag but the way it’s handled and marketed in the US is absolutely a sham. Consumers are led to feel good that they are recycling when often that item is getting tossed in the landfill.
But your callouts don’t make sense to me. Paper is rarely economical. We were mostly shipping it to China for the longest time. Only like 8% of plastics in the US are recycled. Most local waste systems don’t bother because the cost to sort far exceeds the value of the plastic. That’s the sham part and it’s prevalent across the country. The only reason tires work is because of government programs.
Again I am not saying recycling is bad but I wish in the US it was clearer and more strict. I would rather my local trash pickup tell me exactly what they want instead of following the propaganda that I can throw in paper and plastics when I know they are mostly throwing those in the dump.
The revenue from AI is growing at a much slower rate than recurring capex and depreciation is accumulating. This will create distress opportunities that cash-rich companies like APPL may seize. Might be a private equity deal, might be in the public markets as some of the players dip hard after IPO.
As this plays out, APPL's silicon has unified memory, power consumption and native acceleration that gives it an edge running SLMs and possibly LLMs at scale. Wouldn't shock me to see APPL introduce a data-center solution.
Have used Alfred for 10+ years at this point. Some colleagues are hyped about Raycast, but to me the pricing model is a joke. Pay (monthly) for AI - how about I bring my own API key? Pay (again, monthly) for unlimited clipboard history - lol. Free plan, "Free, forever". Yeah, until it isn't.
Alfred isn't the shiniest thing anymore but it's stood the time remarkably well, something I value very highly for tools as central to my workflow as Alfred.
How will they prevent the application from being used by Hamas and PIJ for repressing ordinary Palestinians, and for coordinating more attacks against Israeli civilians?
AI processing hardware deprecates (and depreciates) at a much faster rate than conventional CPUs, as much as 50% per year. Consider the billions being dumped into compute at that rate of depreciation and explain to me:
1. How will tangible assets generate profit net of near term capex requirements and interest on debt?
2. Why wouldn't payroll shrink as a result of the increased AI capabilities emerging from the capex spend?
3. If AI lives up to the hype & given recent news that public backstops are being requested, why shouldn't the US quasi-nationalize cash strapped players and distribute equity to every American?
4. As NVDA and AAPL local models and local compute eat into utility and base automation business, how do edge players maintain profitability without pricing capabilities well beyond the affordability of SMBs and individuals?
- Demonstrable ties with US adversaries Hezbollah and Iran.
- Close ties with US adversary Russia.
- Close ties with US adversary China.
- Indisputable drug production and transit.
- Threatened neighboring Guyana and previously Columbia.
- Rigged at least one and likely two elections.
- Ruined its economy for most of its citizens.
- Strategically aided illegal immigration of criminals into US.
No responsible government would permit a country this hostile to US interests to persist. This build up is part of a high stakes negotiation to peacefully change regimes in VZ. If Maduro rejects it, he and his cronies will be forcibly removed.
Random people in boats are getting killed; the dictators are fine. And who decides who is guilty and what they deserve? A single person? That's against freedom, democracy, and everything the US stands for.
> They're shipping poison that kills our people to our country
Drugs transit many countries; can we arbitrarily convict and kill everyone connected to those countries?
Most of the people involved are Americans, in the US.
USD dominance isn't going anywhere despite hurt feelings over Trump or US policies.