I'm not sure exactly what kind of point you are making but the valuations are at least nominally based on the expected value of the business far into the future and aren't comparable to, say, purchases done over a year despite both being denoted in dollars.

That might happen for a year or two but it's not like they're getting refreshers priced at 180. After paying all the taxes, and factoring in the HCoL area they probably live in, I doubt many people are retiring early on that. Very few high earning people would quit their high paying job so they could live a "normal" life and worry about bills and expenditures.

But they were fine with the hiring in the first place. Making mistakes is allowed - it's worse to pretend like everything you did in the past was flawless.

Also, Zuck controls 61% of the vote for Meta. Investors knew that it was his show when they invested

Why does the market need to acquire and represent novel/useful information?

It's ordinary gambling, but more in line with poker than with roulette. Theoretically there could be some skill that comes into play in predicting it, but there is also a large element of luck. This is just an entertainment product.

There's absolutely zero evidence Trump was behind those oil trades.

There might be these wizards, but probably most of them are dudes who were attached to something successful 15 years ago and have been riding out their time at an inflated level.

In the US, ageism is allowed as long it doesn't discriminate against older people(45 years old or older I think?). You're allowed to discriminate against youth all you want.

Offering a buyout is in no way discriminatory since it is voluntary. If it was forced buyout, then yes it would be discriminatory

> In the US, ageism is allowed as long it doesn't discriminate against older people(45 years old or older I think?). You're allowed to discriminate against youth all you want.

I think it's 40 https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination. So for 40 or less years + X years worked to be more than 70 they'd have to work there 30 years starting at 10 years old or younger. Granted, some of the decisions I saw Microsoft make do look like they were made by 10 year olds, so maybe there is some truth there.

> Offering a buyout is in no way discriminatory since it is voluntary. If it was forced buyout, then yes it would be discriminatory

Still, what if they offered it based on gender, religious belief, or race? Would that look just as good or bad of an offer.

>Still, what if they offered it based on gender, religious belief, or race? Would that look just as good or bad of an offer.

Those would be illegal. Based on age + tenure is not. Simple as that

But in terms of optics, I think this comes out positively. They're basically letting people retire early with a generous buyout offer that they are not required to take instead of just laying these people off with or without severance, which they'd be within their legal rights to do

By that logic a job offer is in no way discriminatory since it is voluntary?

Yes, that is exactly my point. "You were our only female employee, so we're offering you VR"

Oh, I see. The difference there, I think, is that you're illegally discriminating against men by doing that, which is not allowed. However, by law, you can't illegally discriminate against youth, so it's ok.

...there are a lot of answers on the "why not?"

"Hey, John. I see here that you didn't volunteer to retire. I admire your dedication to your job and to the company. However, I just got a troubling message from HR about your recent performance/allegations of misconduct/social media postings/<etc insert other BS excuse that HR makes up etc> and I need you to come with me to the board room so that we can sort this out. Don't bring anything with you. Just leave it on your desk. That'd be grrrrreat..."

Is Gemini cli not an agentic model? Or are you just saying it's built poorly? Gemini 2.5 didn't really work for me but Gemini 3 seems fairly solid

Gemini fairs poorly at tool use, even in its own CLI and even in Antigravity. It gets into a mess just editing source files, it's tragic because it's actually not a bad model otherwise.

It frequently fails to apply its diffs at first but it always succeeds eventually for me. I'm happy with it. I understand it is slower than other models but it also costs barely anything per month.

AIUI plants are actually only responsive to a few wavelengths of light for most of their growth. I've wondered, if solar panels can collect energy over a broader spectrum, if it could actually be more efficient to drive LEDs tuned to just what plants need, driven by broad spectrum solar power. In this way you could, theoretically, power a 3d growing operation based solely on the solar panels on the roof.

Back of the envelope math:

  Solar panel captures energy from an 800nm wide range (300-1100nm)
  Plant captures energy from a 300nm wide range (400-700nm) 
  The solar panel could reproject and amplify the 300nm range at (800/300=) 2.7X more power than the sun

The reason plants capture energy from this range is because that's where most of sunlight's energy is concentrated, which is going to drop this quite a bit further. Glancing at a solar radiation spectrum curve makes it look a lot closer to ~1.5x. Combine that with inefficiencies of both the panel and the LEDs and it really doesn't look that good.

But solar panels are only about 30% efficient, so that kinda kills any gains.

Thanks, this is exactly the comment I was looking for. In addition to the 70% loss due to the solar panel efficiency, I think we should also lose some efficiency in the conversion to light via leds (although I expect that’s much more efficient, perhaps at like 80%).

I’m curious what is physically possible, if we assume we can achieve the max possible efficiency. I’m guessing there’s behavior like a Carnot engine, and the energy transfer can only be up to ~86% efficient (but please correct me if I’m wrong!!). In that case, conversion from light to energy via solar panels -> conversation back to light via leds should be 0.86*0.86 = 73% efficient in best case. And the full effect should be (800/300)*0.73 = 1.94, about twice as good as growing plants with the sun’s direct light. I’m surprised that seems possible!

p.s. My efficiency guesses are probably wrong. Please correct me.

By using multiple junctions and stacking them, top one converting the most energetic photons, then the second-most etc, one can approach the theoretical limit of about 95% or whatever it is. However in practice it's very expensive and difficult as I understand. AFAIK the current state of the art is about 6 stacked junctions at around 60% efficiency, at great cost.

And as you say the LEDs aren't 100% efficient either, though both deep red and bright blue are among the most efficient, about 85% there.

So that leaves you with about 50% overall just from those two.

I thought that efficiency was governed by the wavelengths they absorb? Ie absorb all wavelengths == 100% efficiency.

So that would imply they are inherently more efficient just looking at the figures provided.

Every vertical farming company says this in their advertising. That didn't stop them from going bankrupt.

Conventional agriculture works much better. You can build acres of greenhouses and make a profit.

Vertical farming is such an abject failure that every single vertical farm is biomass constrained, meaning that they have to stretch their biomass with water. This is why vertical farms generally only sell "leafy greens", a marketing term that tries to sweep the inherent technical failure of vertical farming under the rug.

I love this idea and it's one of those ideas I categorize into the bucket of "when all the other lower hanging fruit has been picked", just because it's more complicated.

When we've got actually braindead policy like ethanol fuel mandates, the ROI of switching a corn farm to solar is so incredibly high that solutions like this just aren't competitive.

I wish some of our billionaire class would turn their attention to these things rather than building yet another rocket company. Maybe that's why Gates is buying up farmland, who knows.

Maybe present it as proving out technology that could be helpful in building a self-sustaining Mars colony?