Well, the vibe I'm getting from these comments is people reacting emotionally, and assuming the study concludes that smoking cannabis causes memory problems. But the article itself says:
> The study has limitations. It was an uncontrolled, cross-sectional study, so the association seen between cannabis and brain function can’t be considered causal.
So even this study doesn't say it's causal, and admits to many other limitations. I agree with your point about evidence and science though, but this is hardly a smoking gun that cannabis makes you dumber.
I love that you included numbers, but that is for all of Alphabet's "other bets" which includes Waymo, so it's not entirely Waymo. It still helps give ballpark figures though.
I would be astonished if Waymo has profitable unit economics. They're probably closer to spending $10 for every $1 they make. I made my initial fortune working on self-driving cars and there are many reasons the revolution that was supposed to come 10 years ago has yet to arrive.
I'm not talking about net loss, I'm talking about operating costs.
The maps they make for self-driving cars are made constantly - it's not something they make every year. They're updated weekly, if not daily - and they use a separate much more expensive car to do it. There's a whole separate team just for dealing with this. The amount of data the taxis collect is insane. Terabytes of data per car per hour, which needs to be stored and processed and transported (the data is so much it often makes more sense to physically ship hard drives than to send it over the internet). The "phone home" team is paid employees, and in order to have cellular service to the cars the companies pay a much more expensive plan with cellular providers than you're used to with your cellphone. The engineers who are maintaining the software and making fixes cost money. The people that clean and maintain the cars cost money. Not to mention the wear and tear on the vehicle (which includes the extremely expensive sensor suite) and the electricity to move the vehicle.
I am saying the unit economics, which has nothing to do with the previously spent billions of dollars or efforts of expansion, is currently dogshit for self-driving cars. Theoretically it will improve with scale, but Waymo isn't at scale yet. I think people that haven't worked in robotics have this notion that robots are wildly profitable but this is a common fallacy. Robots almost always lose money, and usually a shitload.
Robots can be profitable, but they almost never are. I'm telling you this with over a decade of experience of watching companies, some of which have multibillion dollar market caps, lose money on robots.
Do you have any experience (or preferably data) to suggest otherwise?
Yeah, supposedly Verily had $559 MM in revenue in 2022, so total revenue for other bets (including Verily and Waymo) being 65% of that is pretty weird.
Blind optimism is just as obnoxious as blind pessimism - both are based on ignorance. Boom still hasn't solved the 2 hardest problems after nearly a decade. Currently regulations prohibit supersonic flight over land. It's a total guess whether or not they'll be able to overcome this, but I remain skeptical both of their noise claims and their ability to overturn legislation. Also they don't have a real plan for an engine...9 fucking years later (because all the big engine manufacturers refuse to work with them).
If anything the pessimists are being proven right.
Disagree that blind optimism is just as obnoxious. Blind pessimists are much less likely to reach beyond what's currently considered possible. We need irrationally optimistic folks.
Irrationally optimistic people will tell you they have a device that defies the laws of physics (I mean hard laws, like conservation of energy or the speed of light), and investors will give them money. I have seen this happen enough times I'd actually have to stop to think of the correct number.
The point is both are disconnected from reality. What we need are people that aren't full of shit. There is a place between "everything is impossible" and "everything is possible" that works better for getting things done.
Well, it's hard to fly a plane without an engine. Just a minor detail though. How hard can the hardest part really be? Also you should always save the hardest part for last if you want to be sure you'll succeed.
It's only been a decade, they're only behind by an order of magnitude on their timeline, and they don't even have a concept of a plan for the critical component. It's fine.
There is no such thing. Humans are giant bags of emotion and pain avoidance.
Pessimists get the warm satisfaction of knowing their choice to not try anything interesting and never take risks in life was correct…most of the time. They cheer on failure from the sidelines so as not to suffer the ego-death of comparison.
Optimists…as the saying goes…they don’t get to be right most of the time. But they do get rich.
"Over land" in this case is just the US. and that was driven more to hamstring the uk/euro Concord. Sell this to rich playboys in the mediterranean or middle east.
Yes, I'm sure for the rest of human history we're never going to break supersonic flight commercially, after having done it already for many decades. Because "regulation." It's not like we'd have the power to change that if we wanted.
Now let us chant the HN pessimists rejoinder in unison.
LLMs are a fad. Bitcoin is a fad. Saas is a fad. Dropbox will never work as it can be trivially replicated on Linux using FTP, curlftpfs, and SVN...
Personally I hate that all of these topics get flagged on HN and I wish we could discuss it here. So from my perspective, you are making HN worse by stifling interesting topics.
Are you willing to pay 10x the price for 1/2 the travel time? And even if you are willing to pay that, are there enough people besides you willing to pay that to sustain this business model?
I'd imagine most people in this wealth bracket would just fly private. I'll happily spend 5, 10, 15 hours in a plane if I don't feel like a sardine in a can.
The Concorde failed for a reason (actually multiple reasons). And they actually had an engine supplier - the hard part - whereas Boom has been shunned by the entire industry for this critical part.
The most powerful country on the planet has been taken over by oligarchs and your concern is for the investors? As someone who regularly invests in high risk stocks, you'd have to be a complete fucking idiot not to see this coming.
The investors backed Elon Musk, a man with a long history of picking fights with the SEC, breaking labor laws, and being a manchild - why would they expect something different?
You haven't been paying attention. This guy famously called a diver a pedophile because he insulted his half-baked submarine idea. That was 7 years ago.
Also, if you were really an investor ready to commit large amounts of money, you could do a basic amount of research and talk to people that have worked with Elon. I've known people that have worked for him going back over a decade and they have all had horrible things to say about him.
Right, he did call a diver a pedophile. But overall he seemed sane back then. As far as people who worked with Musk saying horrible things about him, isn't that true for just about every CEO?
There is a difference between "wow my CEO really sucks" and "wow my CEO had another kid with an employee, regularly talks about the importance of breaking labor laws, shows up to work visibly high on a regular basis, and enjoys making racist comments about Apartheid."
Why do you think this sticker [1] is so popular? It is because prior to Twitter acquisition, despite some blemishes, most people thought Elon Musk is a smart but otherwise normal person. Most of the things you mentioned came later.
Most people were _not paying attention_, until the Twitter thing made it impossible to ignore. But there was all sorts of unhinged behaviour for years before.
I never said he was unpopular. I said you weren't paying attention - and every single thing I mentioned happened before the acquisition. You are being willfully ignorant.
The comment is only the most visible bit. He hired a private investigator to find rumours about him as well. And tripled down with various arguments like a supposed child bride.
Musk has so many wacky things, public spats with his trans kid. Attacking the kid publicly. Imagine how hard that would be, your name is out there. Your extremely famous dad is talking about you? You are just a very vulnerable avg person.
Are you able to succinctly explain how it works, with meaningful references (not posts in a controversial subreddit)? Because if you can't do that, you're never going to convince anyone and it seems you care more about being "right" than having a conversation.
Random recent example:
Page 8, Paragraph 37: describing how Robin Hood was engaged in Naked shorting. I could give you a long list of such SEC documents/fines for RH as well as other major market participants. But that's a lottt of work, I hope this triggers people's curiosity. https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2025/34-102170.pd...
A more general one about how the markets (don't) work:
Naked, Short and Greedy Wall Street's Failure to Deliver - Susanne Trimbath (book)
Nobody is denying naked shorting exists. What I want to hear is why your beloved GME is going to go up as a result of something that happened 4 years ago.
So your thesis is that the market is rigged, and has always been rigged, but this time it's going to work out for you when it never has before and after 4 years of being wrong?
What? I wasn't even talking about GME at all before you brought it up. I definitely didn't claim that it was going to go up, so why should I find arguments for your statement?
You are repeating all the talking points of GME holders, including obscure things almost nobody knows about, and it's just a coincidence? At least have the decency to be straight-forward with your arguments.
A comment containing a few terms I can google and educate myself on, if I'm curious, has far more value to me than "having a conversation" (or whatever engagement metrics you're optimizing for).
He's regurgitating all the GME holder talking points. I'm challenging him to present his conspiracy theory because I know it is full of loopholes, inconsistencies, and is built on almost no evidence at all.
Or better yet I'm wrong and he can tell me why GME is going to moon soon and will explain why with data instead of numerology.
SEC report on GME since you want to talk about that. Page 25: Some institutional accounts had significant short interest in GME prior to January 2021.61
GME short interest (as a percent of float) in January 2021 reached 122.97%
https://www.sec.gov/files/staff-report-equity-options-market...
No biggy, (naked) shorting to the tune of more than every share every issued by the company?
What is the point you're trying to make? That FTD's don't exist?
Or that not delivering stock that investors have purchased (not at all or not on time) is super obviously not a big deal in any market?
My point is you're a bag holding conspiracy theorist who brings up irrelevant talking points as though it's a viable investment strategy.
Yes, the markets are poorly regulated. Everybody knows that. You've been consistently wrong for years and have been losing money but are incapable of learning from your mistakes.
I'm angry because apes are the most obnoxious people on the internet and you never shutup about your stupid conspiracy theories.
So you're just pointing out that markets are poorly regulated and it's a total coincidence you're repeating all the talking points that apes never shutup about?
Wow, I had no idea. Thank you for providing the valuable additional context of the above being potentially from one of those "GME to the moon"... pauses ... people.
Made them much more efficient, reliable, and greatly improved quality control.
I get the point you're trying to make and I think AI right now is mostly hot garbage, but physical automation has drastically improved the quality of so many products we use today. Cars are safer partially because the robots are so much better at building cars.
Do you have a source on this? I am aware the auto industry is highly automated and robots outperform humans at a lot of the manual labor, but the word "partially" is hand-waving away a lot of big shifts in industrial engineering and national regulations. It just seems difficult to disentangle. (E.g. it is difficult for shops to automate until they get their systems in logistical order, and a low-regulation environment might encourage a race-to-the-bottom of pushing cheap robots way too hard and ignoring QC failures.)
I'm not saying it's better! I'm saying it's not that far worse off that it would start an introspective for people to question the current state of affairs. Most people get a decent amount of care, despite all the negative side effects (debt, premiums, uncovered areas due to lack of private hospitals and etc.).
A healthcare CEO was just murdered and the killer is considered a hero. Many are even referring to the dead CEO as a serial killer because of all the preventable deaths he profited from. You're not paying attention if you think people aren't already introspective about healthcare in this country.
People say a lot of things, but given there's no action, it's just... words. It's weird for me to say this, as I consider myself a general optimist. But when it comes to navigating layered political structures that involves trillions of dollars, it's hard to believe that anything of significance will be done.
The assassination itself is one hell of an action, though.
Also, police has already said that they are concerned about the lack of cooperation from the public at large when it comes to success of the manhunt. The people who usually jump onto that kind of stuff are explicitly disengaging.
You can argue that this all does nothing wrt navigating the politics that would actually lead to change. But I think that, at the minimum, it creates some incentive for the people who work with those structures on a day to day basis to do so. If CEOs of healthcare companies are now a socially approved assassination target, apparently, what does it say about healthcare lobbyists?
The killing could have happened to nearly any CEO and the response would be similar. The issue is of wealth inequality, not strictly healthcare, though it certainly exacerbated the response in this particular case. See the social media response to titan submersible deaths.
> The study has limitations. It was an uncontrolled, cross-sectional study, so the association seen between cannabis and brain function can’t be considered causal.
So even this study doesn't say it's causal, and admits to many other limitations. I agree with your point about evidence and science though, but this is hardly a smoking gun that cannabis makes you dumber.