That’s a loophole. Regulation hasn’t caught up to the innovation of non-exclusive licensing deal. Hopefully we’ll get some competence back in government soon-ish and can rectify the mistake
And then we wouldn’t be wasting time and energy on it. Someone else would be. Seems like a net win for us, since the entire industry produces zero value. This is like lamenting the departure of the industry of digging holes and filling them in again.
Sure, but those applications may actually do something useful. Crypto mining is entirely useless, except as a way to facilitate black-market transactions.
This makes so much sense to me. If the public sector is compensated the same or slightly better than the public, then naturally we’d attract the best people to the public sector.
Personally I never considered a career in the public sector mostly because there is an expectation in my country (US) that I would be poorly compensated.
You seem to be ignoring the vast majority of human history before we developed farming. Agriculture societies are a relatively brief period of our collective history.
But it also contain the most people. Industrial age contains even more people but it hasn't defeated agricultural age yet because it's still so recent.
This wisdom is preserved for us in the story of Esau and Jacob. Esau was a hunter and Jacob was a farmer. When hunting went badly, Esau's desperation for protein, which Jacob could guarantee a supply of by cultivating lentils, was such that he gave up his whole birthright in exchange for the food.
The era in which humans chose whether to continue with a hunter gatherer life or join the new farming communities also seems to have influenced the stories of Adam and Eve ("cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread") and Cain and Abel.
Some have also suggested that archaic prohibitions against eating the food of fairies were a taboo designed to warn off young people from leaving farming or herding groups and joining hunter gatherer communities. They would be 'enchanted' by the easy going lifestyle but then end up hungry and sick.
The need to spend hours every day working a field, in a season when food was plentiful, in order to prepare for another season 6 or 9 months away, must have been a huge cultural crossroads, possibly a bigger break from our close animal ancestors than tool making, and its influence is still with us. Rules around not eating animals who are needed to supply milk and to reproduce the herd similarly cast a long shadow.
That is a very interesting take. Would you mind sharing some sources, preferably academic, that discuss the topic of agrarian/hunter-gatherer relations and its influence on historical stories and myths?
- The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture by Jacques Cauvin (1994/2000)
- Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods by David Lewis‑Williams & David Pearce (2005)
- Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth by Walter Burkert (1972/1983)
- Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion by HC Peoples et al. (2016)
- Subsistence: Models and Metaphors for the Transition to Agriculture by H. Starr (2005)
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Myths didn’t juts reflect the shift, they were also one of the cultural tools that made the shift psychologically possible.
For instance, the H&G worldview is cyclical (time repeats) but the agricultural worldview is linear. H&G myths emphasize eternal returns, cycles of creation and destruction, spirits of rivers, trees, animals. Agricultural myths introduce beginning of time, progress, destiny, apocalypse.
As animals became domesticated, their spiritual status from H&G mythology declines, while the status of plants and land rises under agriculture. There’s agricultural symbolism in Christ’s body being bread and his blood being wine.
The shift the agriculture produces surplus, property, inheritance, kings, priests, and so myth arise to justify social structures that don’t make sense in nomadic foraging bands.
Sacrifice is an agricultural logic. Classic pattern: god dies, god’s body becomes food, eating is communion. It is directly agricultural: plant dies when harvested, seed is buried (like a corpse), resurrection in spring. Sacrifice becomes cosmic agriculture.
The Garden -> Exile story is a pattern we see in Genesis (“By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread”) but also in Greek mythology; Kronos’ Golden Age changes when Zeus forces humans to work.
In H&G, the trickster gods (Coyote, Raven, Loki, Anansi) are central, but with damaging they become dangerous, marginalized, punished because agriculture requires law, calendar, taboo, not chaos.
Another pattern might be that, whereas oral culture matched the 'sufficient unto the day' ethos of hunter gatherers, writing reflected the new agricultural process of carefully building up and storing for the future. Rather than a neutral technological innovation, it embodied the psychological shift.
No, it was easier. Not just lower risk. It gave you advantages both in terms of self defence, resources and even aggression toward surrounding group if you were collectively assholes.
It was easier to make your numbers go up, raise more kids which made you stronger.
> People moved from a hunter gatherer society to an agrarian society because the latter was easier.
Agriculture began from a convergence of climate stability, resource abundance, sedentary living, population pressure, and co-evolution with useful plants and animals.
Hunting and gathering alone cannot feed everyone. Farming is harder, less healthy, more labor-intensive but yields more calories per acre.
As a population grows, farming becomes the least bad option.
It looks more like agrarian society outcompeted hunter gatherer society because the agrarians got more surviving kids. This replacement and assimilation happened in Europe, for example, where it's visible in genetic and linguistic history.
The population increased because half of it wasn't dying off immediately. You have to include the half that dies off early in the calculations of QoL for hunter/gatherers.
It is actually the plants (barley, grain, grapes, millet, potatoes, taro, maize, rice, sorghum, manioc) that tricked the humans into cultivating (reproduce) them/
I think there’s a version of the Malthusian trap that has explanatory merit - the idea that as population increased, you got diminishing returns from more people farming the same land. Population would therefore increase until famine, after which there would be good times until the cycle repeated. This cycle was broken by the industrial revolution.
Isn't this the same "trap" that any living life "falls into"? It gets many offspring, and only those survive who can feed themselves. Exponential growth fills up the niche until there are no more resources: any successful species is trapped against some kind of resource or environmental ceiling, unfortunately.
Is there a ceiling in the industrial revolution era? Famously the 1972 book Limits to Growth says yes for that question.
I don’t understand why anyone would think LLMs have a good moat. There’s no evidence to suggest that’s the case, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Maybe hubris?
Starlink is not going to be a monopoly. The other big countries won’t allow it.
Like Tesla, SpaceX was ahead of the game by making big bets on new technology. Over time, that lead erodes when other players start competing. Tesla is now a declining player in EVs rapidly falling behind market leaders in AV and battery tech. I suspect spaceX will have a similar trajectory
Tesla never had unique technology, except maybe the 'software defined car' but that wasn't the big sellers on its own.
Tesla integrated other peoples cells into a nice system, but they were never uniquely good at that. They were successful because they invested a huge amount into scaling battery manufacture faster then anybody in the beginning. Something that everybody could replicate.
SpaceX on the other hand has a true technical advantage. But its also a much smaller market.
Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same.
Access to space is a national security thing so all big countries will fund their own alternatives.
Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
> Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same
China and Blue Origin are Europe may be funding the research, but Arianespace ensures it's more than a decade away from matching today's Falcon Heavy.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
The thing is that you can't put a price tag on national security. For example Ukraine got F16s. Good plane. However after a spat between Zelensky a Trump, Ukrainian F16 got no new updates to their jammers, which temporarily degraded the plane performance and Ukrainians needed to pull them out of frontlines.
Sometimes it is just better to fly on a plane which is not the top performer, but which you can control and manufacture or which a neighbor with same geopolitical problems like you can control and manufacture - i.e. Swedish SAAB JAS39
Same with space launches. Furthermore SpaceX is US company, so US government will want to know everything about the payload, probably down to the schematics and software, which is a big no-no for national security, but even for IP protection - what is stopping US government to supplying your IP to your US competitor? Nothing.
Of course you can. It costs more, but a finite amount more.
Your argument is it'sz worth paying that cost. I agree. But those cases are limited, both by the customer base and that additional cost.
SpaceX is not launching non-U.S. national security payloads. That's not great for American power. But it's a rounding error for a launch provider putting mass in orbit over three times a week [1].
Reusable rockets aren't magic. There is a long distance between 'reusable' and reusing something many 100s of times to reach scale.
Blue Origin is losing billions every year, its not hobby of the richest person in the world, not true competitor. Remember rockets are small markets and everybody other then SpaceX is losing money.
Europe and China has literally 0 shot at breaking into the places SpaceX dominates. Europe will take another 10 years before they get a reusable rocket and even then, launching something like Starship wouldn't happen for another long time after that.
China simply can't compete in these markets by law, in the US. Them having reusable rockets doesn't matter for SpaceX. I don't think China will have Starlink competitor that can compete globally anytime soon. But that might be a real competitor eventually.
Kupiter is arguable a more real competitor.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years.
That's a gigantic, gigantic, huge and absurdly large assumption.
A lot would need to happen for all current US allies to block all SpaceX products.
Not to suggest that 61x multiple is justified, but your counter argument doesn't really work.
I think the better argument against the 61x multiple is that the overall market simply isn't big enough. SpaceX would have to break into many other markets and how to do that is difficult to say for a number of reasons.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies
I wouldn’t make business or investment decisions based on any assumptions about “alienation.” I was just in Tokyo for a week of meetings with various business professionals, and there was zero sign of any “alienation.” I was expecting to spend most of the time talking about tariffs and nobody even about them. Everyone instead was focused on the new Prime Minister’s faux pas commenting on the security of Taiwan.
Just one set of data points, of course, but consider whether this concept of alienation is real or a creation of US media.
I dunno, I've noticed quite a bit of hesitancy. Like they want to figure out "which kind" of American you are before they will even nudge the topic of US politics.
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