Something that people don't seem to understand is that a system where negative yields are not permitted (e.g. negative interest rates), all capital must be at 100% utilization or be liquidated since idle capacity does not bring in revenue.
Since it is impossible to build a continuously scalable fab [0], the fab has a fixed maximum output with falling marginal costs. Since the price of idle capital has to be spread over the sold product, producing more means lower cost per unit as utilization of the fab increases and the percentage of unpaid idle capital shrinks.
The opposite is also true. If for some reason you can't find enough customers, your idle capacity grows which in turn means that you have to pass on the cost of the full fab onto the remaining customers, leading to higher prices, making your product even less attractive.
Now consider the case where one company's fab is at 90% utilization and another fab is at 50% utilization. If both were at 70%, there wouldn't be such a big problem, but if there is a big skew, the company with the higher utilization will have lower prices.
What this means is that both companies will scramble to maximize their utilization to undercut the competitor, leading to a glut in the market that will threaten both companies. The company with the highest utilization has enough customers to buy out the the companies with the lowest utilization, leading to an oligopoly or a monopoly. In the monopoly case, the company has enough monopoly power to raise prices to pay for the idle capital. In the oligopoly case, the industry members have to collude to create the collective monopoly. This makes commodity markets with many competitors unstable over the long run, with monopoly being the stable attractor.
When you think about it for a bit, the principle of competition by definition requires a unutilized capital surplus, otherwise choice was not possible. If 10 customers buy 10 products from 10 different manufacturers on a shelf, then there can be no meaningful competition, since one customer choosing one product means another customer has to choose a different product. There has to be some degree of overcapacity so that a customer can choose between the different companies.
This makes the concept of a zero lower bound on interest inherently incompatible with the idea of competition and all the good things people claim free markets will bring about. The absence of a truly free capital market will by necessity result in the real world economy mirroring the incomplete capital market [1].
[0] Neoclassical economists assume that all capital is perfectly divisible/liquid and can be scaled up or down instantly and all manufacturing use the most optimal process, thereby resulting in the assumption of permanent rising marginal cost.
[1] Under the assumption that the modern economy cannot be organized without money which primarily acts as infrastructure akin to telecommunication utilities and not "value storage". The fact that the monopoly nature of money rubs off onto the rest of society to encourage monopolies is just the boring logical conclusion of overregulated banking, central bank paranoia, the tendency of governments to avoid solving problems until they are too late and not the result of a conspiracy by shadowy elites or a popular scape goat (foreigners, people of a different religion, etc). The tendency for the average person to treat these interconnected problems as independent problems to maximize does not help since the citizens themselves are to blame for getting the system they so desire.
No they didn't. Any judge would laugh the big corporation out of the courtroom over this. The amount of evidence in favor of the employee would turn this into a frivolous lawsuit.
>Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but it would have been hell for him.
You're assuming that an improbable event happens and are extrapolating from there. A more realistic case is that this is settled out of court simply to avoid involving the court, which is exactly what happened here: they fired him.
>They also had a case for criminal fraud.
No, they didn't.
I'm not sure in what alternative universe you're living in here.
$250k/hour is half a billion USD per year. Nobody is paid that much.
Based on such a basic mistake, I wouldn't trust the rest of your comment. Everything you listed feels like made up arbitrary excuses. Most of the overhead per employee is fixed, that doubling rule of thumb is assuming an employee with a salary closer to the median. At the salary you're claiming, the overhead shrinks to something like 30% on top of the base salary.
If anyone took your numbers seriously they would run into the weird conclusion that an employee paid $50k actually costs a company $300k. That's the type of math error you're doing here.
Overhead is not fixed per employee - things like taxes and benefits scale with salary, not to mention the cost of tooling (hardware, software, AI token budget, etc) tend to be higher for higher-compensated employees.
You definitely shouldn't plan your business based on my comment, but you'd be foolish to ignore it.
When you look at the salaries that the average HN poster brags about, that's at least ten thousand dollars worth of tokens or a billion input tokens per year. That doesn't sound like an unreasonable spending limit.
It's called AI because it drives the behavior of the NPCs, hence the name "artificial intelligence". I couldn't think of a better fitting term, especially if you know it is in the context of games. Everyone who actually plays games knows what AI in gaming means and that it doesn't need to involve LLMs or neural networks.
The thing about artificial intelligence is that it doesn't necessarily have to look or behave like biological intelligence. It could very well be a very alien and foreign form of intelligence.
The problem is that the same people who say this also argue in favor of optimal extinction.
There is clearly something broken about the neoclassical market economy where it is optimal to not have children and to collapse the ecosystem with climate change (the economist who got a riksbank price for his climate change work suggested that 4°C warming is economically optimal).
Except this inflation is not a direct fee charged to every holder of money. Inflation primarily affects people purchasing consumer goods.
If anything, inflation is the hoarding.
Rich people indirectly hold money by owning shares in companies that hold the money on their behalf. If the money is paid out via stock buy backs, the money is in the hand of the investor. Said money is reinvested into companies, those companies may temporarily pay out salaries, but eventually the money returns back to the investor leading to a dynamic form of hoarding. They started with less money but ended up with more money. The only way dishoarding can happen is if the money is spent on consumption.
Let me repeat:
If you understand the above, then inflation doesn't impact the rich who don't consume anything. If anything the opposite is true. The government/central bank throws just enough money into the system to prevent the economy from collapsing from the hoarding since money is needed as a tool or utility the same way housing is needed. As far as we know the preferred method of giving out that money to cause inflation has never been helicopter money, it's been quantitative easing which historically benefits the capital markets more or basically made the government take on more public debt.
Then there is the fact that any system where income is proportional to ownership basically negates the impact of inflation for said income. If you earn 3% yield at 3% inflation you might say that this nets out to 0%, but it doesn't. In nominal terms that is still a net inflow of money. You might counter that multi billionaires only turn into trillionaires on paper from inflation but they are still just multi billionaires. The point is that despite this real yield of 0%, the total share of money held by said multi billionaires can still go up and increase inequality even if in real terms their actual wealth did not change simply because consumers pay inflation and the billionaires don't.
If you ever bothered doing even a little bit of research the standard solution to "growing past money" is either something like a demurrage currency or the banking version called oeconomia augustana by dieter suhr (the bank charges a liquidity fee on both positive and negative balances to encourage getting to 0 residual balances, the liquidity fee is automatically determined by competition between banks, it is essentially a private implementation of Keynes' bancor proposal).
The memory crunch started October 2025. DDR6 will come out in 2027. At that point you're investing new capacity into an obsolete technology.
If I was a memory company, I would try to bring DDR6 to the market as soon as possible. DDR6 allows high end CPU based server platforms to reach the memory bandwidth of an A100 or half a H100 without the costly HBM.
This is true, the only practical place where romaji might be used daily is for IME input.
This is why I think all the commenters obsessing over romaji just add fuel to the fire by being elitist over something that should only matter to an absolute beginner.
It's especially vain if the primary reason to choose one romanization strategy over another is to save keystrokes on a keyboard.
Since it is impossible to build a continuously scalable fab [0], the fab has a fixed maximum output with falling marginal costs. Since the price of idle capital has to be spread over the sold product, producing more means lower cost per unit as utilization of the fab increases and the percentage of unpaid idle capital shrinks.
The opposite is also true. If for some reason you can't find enough customers, your idle capacity grows which in turn means that you have to pass on the cost of the full fab onto the remaining customers, leading to higher prices, making your product even less attractive.
Now consider the case where one company's fab is at 90% utilization and another fab is at 50% utilization. If both were at 70%, there wouldn't be such a big problem, but if there is a big skew, the company with the higher utilization will have lower prices.
What this means is that both companies will scramble to maximize their utilization to undercut the competitor, leading to a glut in the market that will threaten both companies. The company with the highest utilization has enough customers to buy out the the companies with the lowest utilization, leading to an oligopoly or a monopoly. In the monopoly case, the company has enough monopoly power to raise prices to pay for the idle capital. In the oligopoly case, the industry members have to collude to create the collective monopoly. This makes commodity markets with many competitors unstable over the long run, with monopoly being the stable attractor.
When you think about it for a bit, the principle of competition by definition requires a unutilized capital surplus, otherwise choice was not possible. If 10 customers buy 10 products from 10 different manufacturers on a shelf, then there can be no meaningful competition, since one customer choosing one product means another customer has to choose a different product. There has to be some degree of overcapacity so that a customer can choose between the different companies.
This makes the concept of a zero lower bound on interest inherently incompatible with the idea of competition and all the good things people claim free markets will bring about. The absence of a truly free capital market will by necessity result in the real world economy mirroring the incomplete capital market [1].
[0] Neoclassical economists assume that all capital is perfectly divisible/liquid and can be scaled up or down instantly and all manufacturing use the most optimal process, thereby resulting in the assumption of permanent rising marginal cost.
[1] Under the assumption that the modern economy cannot be organized without money which primarily acts as infrastructure akin to telecommunication utilities and not "value storage". The fact that the monopoly nature of money rubs off onto the rest of society to encourage monopolies is just the boring logical conclusion of overregulated banking, central bank paranoia, the tendency of governments to avoid solving problems until they are too late and not the result of a conspiracy by shadowy elites or a popular scape goat (foreigners, people of a different religion, etc). The tendency for the average person to treat these interconnected problems as independent problems to maximize does not help since the citizens themselves are to blame for getting the system they so desire.
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