Altherion

There's a fairly amusing comment in the replies to the article: Elon Musk is well on his way to making Twitter a billion dollar company. "Reverse startup" indeed... That said, it's hard to say what the valuation is based on and it might be that the people at Fidelity simply needed to come up with some number and this was their best guess. It's not at all obvious why it would be worth $15B given that it's saddled with a debt of nearly the same size and as far as anyone can tell, its revenue is continuing to drop as more and more advertisers leave. Furthermore, it's a pretty safe bet that most of its best employees have either been fired or left and it's also a safe bet that eventually its regulatory violations and non-payment of contracts will catch up to it.

I also just finished Lords of Uncreation. I thought the second book was not quite as good as the first, but this one is really good -- I don't think I've seen the idea at the heart of the story anywhere before and the ending is very well done.

What do you mean by "real south" though? Nobody knows what will happen to the economy, but a recession in the next year or two seems to be more likely than not.

OK, what exactly was that? I guess they're both really tired and nervous and playing mind games with each other, but chess is not poker -- it should not be possible to bluff and get away with it against players at this level. It's exciting and unpredictable, but this is not grandmaster level chess. If Magnus Carlsen was playing either of them and they played like this, he would be at +4 or +5 by now.

Many (but not all!) corporations pay dividends which are indeed part of the profits that are being returned to the shareholders. So if you invest in those companies, you will indeed get paid either every year or half year or quarter depending on how their dividend is structured. There is a school of investing (the "value" investors) wherein this stream of future payments should be considered the main reason to buy a stock and they avoid the companies that don't pay anything. Note that in the US (and possibly some other countries; I do not know international tax law) the dividends for stock that you've held for longer than a year are taxed at a lower rate so it's better than getting interest from a savings account (which is taxed as regular income).

I feel bad for the ordinary people who put money into cryptocurrency. This is why it is important to study at least some history: the crypto world is effectively reproducing the scams of ages gone by with the only difference being these online "currencies" (which are actually more commodities than currencies). On a different note, what do people think about investing in funds that have dual purposes: to make money and also to move the world in a specific direction? Most of the big investment platforms have these now (here's an environmental one from Vanguard as an example). The good part of this is that if it works as intended, the investors would make the world a better. The bad parts is that these funds have much higher fees (because they need active management) and they're also riskier than an ordinary broad index fund (because they invest in a specific sector rather than in the economy as a whole and possibly not even the whole sector). Does anyone have an opinion on this sort of investment?

When I read it, I thought that it might be related to Children of Ruin. That is,

It's interesting how Ding and Nakamura had completely opposite strategies from a very similar position. Based on his recap, Nakamura thought about how to beat Nepo and realized that playing for a victory with black against an opponent who only needs to draw with white is usually a recipe for disaster. Thus, he decided to go for the Berlin draw and play for second place. On the other hand, Ding was not trying to play conservatively and lost. The result is that Nakamura and Ding are currently tied for second with Caruana and Radjabov half a point behind and Nepo a full 2 points (!) ahead with two games left to play. It is mathematically possible for either Nakamura or Ding to catch Nepo, but it would mean that Nepo loses both games and one of them wins both (they play the last game against each other so there is no chance of a three-way tie). I think this scenario is extremely unlikely and Nepo will almost certainly take first. On the other hand, the race for second is alive and well. Nakamura is ahead on tiebreaks, but Ding controls his own fate as he plays white against Nakamura. Caruana and Radjabov also have a game against each other (Radjabov plays white) and it's by no means impossible that one of them can equal or surpass Nakamura or Ding.

Nepo and Caruana both won so after 6 games, Nepo is at +3, Caruana is at +2 and the closest behind them are Nakamura and Rapport at 0. There are still 8 games to play so in theory, anyone can still win (even Firouzja who is currently at -2), but thus far, it does indeed look like a two horse race.

These books are a lot of fun. My main complaint is that they are novellas priced as novels so I wound up just getting them from the library and will only buy when there is an omnibus edition. Also, the action does get a bit repetitive by the 4th one, but after that the author switches things up so it's still good. And yes, it doesn't really make sense to read them out of order.

I finished reading it yesterday. It was not the strongest entry in the series, but the ending to the series as a whole was quite good. I also liked the fact that they more or less offered an explanation for Duarte's actions from the previous books -- they make a lot more sense if he was influenced by the protomolecule from the time where he started his transformation. The one thing I did not quite like is the entities beyond the gates messing with physical constants. It's an interesting idea, but it's not clear how this would work over only a certain volume of space and interval of time. Also, I would have to double check, but I think disrupting chemistry is not actually that hard if you can mess with things like the speed of light or the mass of the electron.

I think it's not so much the popularity as that he keeps winning the speed chess tournaments and to some extent also the rapid ones. He's competitive with anyone (including Carlsen and Firouzja) in the faster time controls so they wanted to see how well he can do in classical chess.

I wasn't born here and moved around quite a lot during a long education, but for most intents and purposes, I'm from New York, USA.

Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light is $3.35 on Kindle. This is one of my favorite books and I've been looking for the e-book version of it for years.

Nah, that's fine. :) Welcome to the board!

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