psud @ psud @aussie.zone

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2 yr. ago

There have been a couple (or maybe one or a few) that started with very little. A lot more had a gift or loan from a parent for enough to buy land or start a business, often that was less than $100,000

As much as Musk's family had money before, his initial big money came from his share of his brother and his city guide software "zip2" which they sold to Compaq for a few hundred million. Lots of people have made more complex or bigger programs with no more wealth than an average middle class family.

Then x.com (the 1999 one, a bank) which became part of PayPal which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion which Musk got a share of

Then he made SpaceX then Tesla* and Tesla made him a billionaire through his ownership of a large part of it

*Tesla was made of Musk's money and A/C Propulsion electric vehicle conversion system. It was incorporated with SpaceX's incorporation papers with the company name changed. A/C propulsion's drivetrain was replaced by a new system after a year of production of the roadster

Having listened to 'good bad billionaire' for several episodes the formula is

1. Create or inherit a company
2. Do good at it
3. Float it on the stock exchange
4. Now own the bulk of a company whose stock values it at enough that your share is worth over a billion

Or

1. Make an insanely popular game
2. Sell it to Microsoft

Or

1. Be the child of someone who did one of the above

Index funds are pretty incredibly safe. Pick one of the big US indexes and look at the graph since before the global financial crisis

For safety.

When you back in you have good visibility on your way in - you see in and behind the spot you're taking as you drive past it to line up

When you leave you have excellent visibility ahead as it's on front of

Also the car is easier to steer into the spot in reverse

I guess some people are really bad drivers

Leave the spot just the opposite way to which you entered the spot. Then try again.

Ideal: exactly centered between whatever defines the spot (lines, cars, kerbs)

Ideal': close to a kerb and far from the neighboring car/line

That's "parent" not "adult"

I with no kids at home have excellent sleep

Teens are the ones (after new mothers) who suffer the most, with natural sleep cycles starting around midnight or in the early morning and wake times in the late morning or early afternoon, but school schedules that force them to be active at school from 9am

My sister got told off regularly for reading after lights out

As adults my mother told me that after they found books for me I liked they pretended to never notice the light leaking through my doona, they were just happy to see I was reading

It's not like the US manufacturers anything anymore, and Hollywood has forgotten how to make movies

It's like you don't even try to export your culture anymore, when I was a kid everyone watched Sesame Street, now all the kids in all the English speaking world are watching Bluey

Yeah public transport is ideal for most transport cases and should be funded by cities to the level to allow it to provide that

But still some cases call for individual transport and my preference on that is taxis over Uber and the like as taxis have a duty to pick up anyone who can pay which the newer companies don't

I hope that self driving taxis include accessible ones, I expect there will still need to be a class of staffed cars to help people who need assistance - eg those who can't lift their bag into our out of the vehicle, those who need assistance to put on a seat belt

Mine are grass finished, and watered with rain - the most environmentally friendly meat available. I expect the cheap meat in Texas is grain finished, which makes each animal fatter and heavier and cheaper per unit weight

I got server space pretty cheap recently. There's a lot of competition in that space and they compete on price as well as quality

So whatever performance level you need doesn't cost a lot more than the fraction of hardware lifetime you're buying

"Harder" depends on what services you're offering. Email is hard now; web is no harder (though web sites are as hard as you want them to be), hosting a game server is as easy as it ever has been

And that cost of labor

I buy a fair bit of meat. At my nearest butcher scotch fillet steak (rib eye, I think, in American English) is $35 per kilo. It is from a meat packing plant with reasonably cheap labor, with expensive equipment amortized over thousands of cattle a year, cutting up cows all day

At my next nearest butcher it's $60/kg. It's cut off a cow carcass hanging in the back of the shop by a butcher with a knife

On the good side there are few middle men in meat

We are more efficient. In my work computer automation has saved the equivalent to five thousand workers

Those five thousand workers don't get to work a fraction of a day for the same pay, the saving is made a level or five above the workers

Some of our savings are hidden by inflation, but many products are far cheaper now

I have lots of books in paper. I have dozens electronically

The paper ones are good. I can lend them to friends, smell them, have them looking good on a shelf, can read while I'm doing something else on my phone

The electronic ones are with me. I can read them when I find myself surprisingly with nothing better to do.

That assumes the work of creating or collating the information has been fully amortized. The cost of information should tend toward zero, but it should start high enough to fairly reward its creators and those who made it visible

I don't think any wild animals other than humans have obesity problems

Bees are a symbol of labour. You couldn't make them work harder if you tried. European honey bees collect far more nectar than they will ever eat, it's like they're planning for fimbulwinter

So what exactly is the problem with using honey?

Like when Ukraine was an SSR?

Insects