What's interesting is that broadly speaking, people acknowledge that negotiating with asymmetric information is immortal or wrong. Take the stock market for example, insider trading is illegal and you don't often hear calls to reverse these laws.
But when it comes to private markets and semi-private negotiations that same sentiment doesn't easily transfer. Does society benefit in some unique way for allowing asymmetries in labor negotiations, private markets like Uber, or B2C relations like Robinhood (1,2)?
1. https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020-321
2. Note, Robinhood was fined not for front-runniny customers, just for falsely claiming customers received quality orders. I suspect theyve only stopped the latter behavior.
> broadly speaking, people acknowledge that negotiating with asymmetric information is immortal or wrong
I don't think that's true at all. Companies and individuals negotiate all the time with information the other party doesn't have. Insider trading is about fairness on public markets so every negotiating party of the same type has the same information, and is quite specific to that.
> What's interesting is that broadly speaking, people acknowledge that negotiating with asymmetric information is immortal or wrong. Take the stock market for example, insider trading is illegal and you don't often hear calls to reverse these laws.
Insider trading is not about fairness. It’s about theft. If you overhear someone in a public place talking about an upcoming merger, you can trade on it.
> What's interesting is that broadly speaking, people acknowledge that negotiating with asymmetric information is immortal or wrong.
They do? I’m quite happy when I have more information than the party I am negotiating with.
Do you tell your customers all of the input costs of the product or service you sell? I doubt it.
Also, certain parties that trade in public markets have way more information than any retail investor could ever hope to have, hedge funds buy satellite imagery of parking lots, track oil tankers at sea, etc to gain an edge.
Insider trading rules are meant to prevent the public bagholding stocks from the management team having insider information that no other market participant could or should have, there are no rules against legally gathering or purchasing information on your own to gain an edge over other market participants.
Incentive wise you're probably a lot better off if your own broker is front running you than if a HFT desk at a liquidity provider firm is doing it since the broker is at least in a position to kick some of that back to you in the form of reduced fees or whatever.
I agree with you. I'd go further and suggest that candidates should get anonymized information about applicants in the pool. Nothing like negotiating with yourself for a job...
There's also another angle. During the call with Lex last week, Dario seemed to imply that future models would run on amazon chips from Annapurna Labs (Amazon's 2015 fabless purchase). Amazon is all about the flywheel + picks and shovels and I, personally, see this as the endgame. Create demand for your hardware to reduce the per unit cost and speed up the dev cycle. Add the AWS interplay and it's a money printing machine.
If you're quick to judge someone's character based on their tattoos, it suggests a tendency toward superficial assessments. I find it difficult to trust critical decisions made by someone who relies on such surface-level judgments. In my experience, those with narrow, dogmatic worldviews are often less interested in finding real solutions and more preoccupied with adhering to authority and bureaucratic norms.
Even if what you’re saying is true, you have no way of telling what someone thinks of tattoos. People who think tattoos show low impulse control can tell immediately. So, technically speaking, only one opinion matters in regards to hiring, which is probably why you see so few tattoos in high paid engineering jobs
> you have no way of telling what someone thinks of tattoos.
Disgust is one of the most easily telegraphed human reactions. Also, haters with suboptimal impulse control can't avoid using any and every soapbox at their disposal to make sure you know where they stand on the matter.
Is the organizational pressure that seeks conformity filtering out tattoos based on tattoos or the lack of conformity? It's tough to understand whether you're saying more about self-perpetuating hierarchies or tattoos.
I'm aligned with your base point. I'm not seeking to extend my rational to anyone other than people who make their opinions well known.
actually i think the organizational pressure is not about what people in the company think about those with a tattoo, but what they think how it will make their company look in public. to customers, business partners, investors, etc.
You do know that a transparent tattoo doesn't mean 100% transparency, right?
A transparent tattoo has parts inside of it where the skin is still completely visible or the skin is partially visible.
A solid tattoo blocks out your natural skin color entirely and is generally associated with criminal gangs such as the Japanese Yakuza or tattoo addictions.
It's unfortunate that it's not better regulated and thus safe to yolo just get one, but glow in the dark tattoos that use ink that can't be seen in ordinary light are particularly cool.
High tech manufacturing at scale is often equally as challenging as development work. Starting with a proven design let's teams focus on leveling up their manufacturing capabilities prior to introducing the double complexity of manufacturing a part that just made it out of CDR.
A bit of a tangent, but this is the genius of Musk's Merlin engine. Simple design utilizing RP9 allows the manufacturing staff to hit their stride before introducing the raptor (methalox).
Against the Gods by Peter L. Bernstein is a fantastic book that has a few chapters about this family. It's worth the read if you're interested in the history probability and risk
Also relevant and stated publicly by John, Blue Origin expects to cover more than 50% of the total cost.
To put this into perspective the DoD will happily invest north of $1 Trillion for a single fighter pilot development program (F-35) and I doubt Lockheed is willing to front any of that...
The DoD didn't pay Lockheed Martin anywhere near $1 trillion to develop the F-35. The $1 trillion plus figures you see are for total program lifecycle cost including a lot more than just development.
Back in 1996 when the DoD awarded initial JSF prototype development contracts to Boeing and Lockheed they actually prohibited those contractors from putting in their own additional funds. There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base after the end of the Cold War and the DoD couldn't risk having any of their few remaining prime contractors fail.
> There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base.
Maybe from the military industrial complex that was pulling in billions annually. Everyone else hoped that we would scale back after the insane global c*%k measuring contest that was the Cold War.
In retrospect, was the peace dividend a good idea? We got a europe that couldn't protect itself, the US playing bombs in the desert for 20 years and building anti-terrorism focused systems which will have no value against a near peer adversary, a navy that forgot how to build good boats, and a general refusal to learn the always relevant lesson of "build more ammo"
We did scale back. Military spending was cut back in real (inflation adjusted) terms at the end of the Cold War, and bottomed out as a percentage of GDP in 2000.
After 2001, military spending went way up of to fund the Global War on Terror. Most of that was a total waste and failure. Now the GWOT is essentially over and funding priorities have shifted to containing expansionist regimes in China and Russia (and to a lesser degree Iran) as part of Cold War 2. It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down to the minimum size necessary to defend the homeland, but you might not enjoy the results of letting hostile foreign powers dominate the rest of the globe.
The real spending went down a tiny amount despite the largest army of the world was no longer in existence and there was no credible threat what so ever.
I always love how people fall for the false military budgets, the war cost, the veteran health, the nuclear cost and a lot of other associated cost that is conveniently hid outside of the 'military budget' despite it very clearly should be in the same bucket.
> It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down
Ah the old 'anybody that doesn't believe absurd amount of military spending is an isolationist trope'. Never stops getting old that one.
How much should we cut the military budget? Please give a specific number and show your work.
We all understand that there is a huge amount of waste. But in practice it seems to be difficult to cut that waste without losing essential capabilities.
It's redundancy, not waste, in the majority of cases. Look at what's happened to the Russian army to see what happens when there's no redundancy built-in to your logistics and supply chain, redundancy is essential to the capability of US military might.
This is what happens when multiple influences combine to get the system completely off the rails. It is a worst-case, lowest common denominator perspective that would completely destroy society were it applied everywhere. There’s no reason to use it as a productive reference point.
I think your point is fair, but the point I'm making is that we should applaud when private industry is willing to shoulder a large proportion of the risk (vs. the traditional externalize risk, internalized profit).
There's something deeply ironic about a person commenting from a highly-engineered device, operating on a highly-engineered network, sitting inside of a highly-engineered building, in a highly-engineered city debating the merits of progress.
I read their comment as underlining the uncertainty about what the cost or the reward is. Maybe we can't flippantly declare that it's "a small price" if we don't know what we're paying or what we're going to get in return. (I have no position on that.)
There actually is precedence to this, albeit not in transportation. If you own a superfund site, the owner or operator of each facility must establish financial assurance for closure of the facility. Many times that assurance comes in the form of a surety bond.
There are few books by the American Statistician Edward Tufte worth checking out. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations, all exceptional works of art. The books act as both a teaching guide and a compendium of beautiful historical infographical-artifacts.
But when it comes to private markets and semi-private negotiations that same sentiment doesn't easily transfer. Does society benefit in some unique way for allowing asymmetries in labor negotiations, private markets like Uber, or B2C relations like Robinhood (1,2)?
1. https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020-321 2. Note, Robinhood was fined not for front-runniny customers, just for falsely claiming customers received quality orders. I suspect theyve only stopped the latter behavior.