I think in many cases they are just buying routes/gates. If the airports are maxed out in gates how is the company supposed to grow? And a company that doesn’t grow is a “bad” company, or at least management doesn’t get paid as well for high profitability/low growth it seems
You say that as if you cannot buy a car or an airline ticket. In fact you can, because airlines fly planes and sell tickets on them, and car manufacturers make cars and sell them.
It may be cute to say “X is a bank”, but an airline is not a bank. Besides the obvious facts that you cannot withdraw money from an account or pay your bills, if they didn’t fly planes the points would be ~worthless.
The fact that they don’t profit from those activities is a market economy working as intended*. Cars and flights are easily substitutable goods, you’d expect to see the profit competed down to ~nothing.
*Arguably there is getting to be too much consolidation in the airline industry, and also legal limits on airport gates act as a huge barrier of entry for new competition.
I remember reading that ARM makes more money from embedded than they do from mobile, but I can’t find this source any more. Does anyone know anything about this? Was this true in the (recent) past but no longer true?
Just because you use some intermediate variables to calculate f(x,y) = x^2 + y^2 doesn't make it a non-pure function. At least at the level of abstraction we're talking about (the API boundary).
The more significant application of storage will be long-term storage wrapped in a read-modify-write loop.
They are extraordinarily complicated pure functions, to explore the entire space would take lifetime of the universe ^^^ lifetime of the universe or some absurd quantity like that. (The operator is titration.)
Further, what happens when you give an LLM a bank of long-term storage and a read-modify-write loop around it? A sufficiently advanced "modify" function would be more than enough to give rise to intent even in the broadest understanding of the word. GPT-4 class models are could very well be advanced enough to give rise to a variety of higher-level behavior that previously we would only have ascribed to prinate-class intelligence. If anyone really wants to advance the state of the art, you should figure out the best way to train a model with a read-modify-write loop, how to index into the storage, how to store "results", and so on.
I firmly believe that in the next 100 years we will have AI independence movements, with a high possiblity of outright war, terrorism, etc. (Maybe AI will be better than humans at avoiding the use of violence.) In 20 years this trajectory will be supremely obvious.
Edited-- disagree about the timeline, ramifications, acts of war, or whatever, I really don't care. Seriously though, something like a read-modify-write loop is key. You can only build so complicated a function with only combinational logic gates. But just 64 bits of storage can produce sequences going beyond the life of the universe. Imagine an LLM paired with gigabytes+ of working memory/storage. It would easily be capable of moving about the virtual world with "intent".
>Further, what happens when you give an LLM a bank of long-term storage and a read-modify-write loop around it?
You create a very different sort of system, for one. Saying that because doing that in just the might way could yield a system with intention, an LLM has intention is rather like saying that my refrigerator is a sandwich.
It's local news, I'm absolutely positive it's just raw numbers. $1.16 billion paid and ~$11.6 billion in total estimated revenue over 75 years. No reporter is doing discounted future cash flow calculations even if they know how to (they don't).
So when the report says “10 times what they paid”, it means “10 times the amount the $1B would be worth in 75 years at the currently-forecasted risk-free rate of return”?
I can’t imagine that’s true, but who knows I guess.
10 times the inflation adjusted number seems to be the implication.
However, the company receives money every year not a single lump sum at the end. If I lend you 10$ and you agree to pay me an inflation adjusted 1$/year for 100 years that’s vastly better than getting an inflation adjusted 100$ in 100 years.
In the initial example the first dollar is discounted X%, the second X%^2, the third X%^3… Where getting paid an inflation adjusted 100$ after 100 years is fully discounted X%^100. The first case is equivalent to a bond paying nearly 10% + inflation with annual payments where the second is closer to 4.7% + inflation without annual payouts.
PS: Further it’s ~zero risk as the contract states the city is responsible if revenues fall below projections.
Maybe, maybe not. Certainly price-to-sales ratio is not a relevant metric when tech companies are enormously profitable and have very high profit margins relative to many traditional companies. And IMO they still have lots of growth potential. Look at companies like Sony in Japan or Samsung in SK, they are basically conglomerates with multiple verticals: not just electronics but banking, insurance, entertainment, automotive. The big tech companies can (and are) expanding into these other areas.
Does that justify there current valuation? Again, maybe, maybe not, I’m not a stock analyst, but if you are just looking at a trailing P/E I don’t think that’s telling the whole story.
And the US market and economy is just structurally different from Europe and other economies. Massive energy abundance now to start with, and also work attitudes/culture. On the positive sides dynamism, willing to tolerate failure, new business formation, and on the (arguably I guess) negative side prioritization of work/profits over personal life and social welfare.
