(The company is so forward-thinking that they’re already in 2027 while us peasants are stuck in 2026.)
Net income was almost $60 billion and an even-more-eye-popping 62% of revenue. For every dollar in sales, the company enjoys 62 cents in profit. The typical S&P 500 company earns about 15% in what the NYT tells us is an economy that has been destroyed by Donald Trump (the 10-year average is 11%).
(I want to pause here and take credit for my investment acumen. My standard line was that Nvidia’s profit margin couldn’t stay at 30%, despite the goodness of CUDA, because people who were big users of GPU would find better price/performance chips and recompile their software to run on those competitor GPUs. These latest quarterly results certainly prove my prediction correct because the profit margin did not stay at 30%. “Follow me for more investment advice.”)
Federal corporate income tax isn’t based on profitability, but is a flat 21% (Nvidia actually pays closer to 16.5% due to some money being earned in countries with lower tax rates, credits for research, etc.).
Bernie Sanders informs us that nobody needs to own more than 3 houses. The analogy for a corporation would be that no company needs to earn more than a 25% profit margin and, therefore, the corporate income tax rate should go up closer to 100% on the chunk of a company’s earnings that are more than 25%.
Speaking of Bernie and Nvidia, TIME’s 100 AI “innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence” does not include any current or former employees of Nvidia (sorry, Jensen Huang, Bill Dally, and the rest of the merry band identified in Even companies worth $1 trillion don’t want to pay Nvidia’s prices). Bernie Sanders, however is featured as one of the top 100:
Perhaps this is because Senator Sanders was the first author of the 2017 paper that kicked off the modern LLM:
Let’s check in on what would have been our tax dollars (capital gains tax on appreciated Microsoft stock) if not for our wise policy of allowing rich douches to deduct unlimited amounts for “charity” (not to be confused with “vanity”!)… “Gates Foundation Pledges $1 Billion to Combat A.I. Inequality” (New York Times, today):
The foundation’s annual Goalkeepers report, released on Monday, advocated an urgent effort to ensure that A.I. “helps narrow gaps between the richest and poorest rather than widening them.”
The foundation said that it would divide the new funding among external groups working on its priorities, spanning work like encouraging A.I. use among doctors, farmers and teachers, or developing data sets in more languages.
Last month, Mr. Gates warned that A.I. would spread across the economy, possibly causing job losses across the economy and leaving little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. The biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft, are racing to help corporate customers adopt A.I., and have said it could replace many workers.
The visionary was telling Americans to bulk up on low-skill immigrants just a year before Google kicked off the LLM revolution by publishing its transformer architecture (BBC 2016):
The billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has told the BBC that the United States “should set a better example” by taking in more refugees.
Mr Gates said his home country “had the capacity” to follow the examples of Germany and Sweden, who were “to be congratulated” for welcoming migrants.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Gates added that governments were dealing with “tight budgets”. However, he emphasised that the issue was largely a political one, and that “the total number of refugees is not a world record”.
The statement about “tight budgets” is confusing. We’re informed that low-skill migrants make a society richer. If true, why is a government budget a limiting factor? Separately, how has Germany done economically and culturally since 2016 thanks to its virtuous refugee policy? The refugees of 2016 are now fully established in the German labor market. With unprecedented levels of low-skill immigrant residents, Germany should thus be experiencing an unprecedented economic boom. The Wikipedia page titled “German economic crisis (2022–present)” says “[Germany] became the worst-performing major economy globally in 2023” (attributed to “slowing immigration to Germany” because, of course, the fix when open borders doesn’t work is more-open borders).
How about Sweden? With government at 50% of GDP, the country was roughly evenly balanced between those who benefit from a larger government and those who are harmed by an expansion of government, welfare, etc. (The U.S. percentage of GDP devoted to government is similar if we include nominally “private” (but heavily regulated) health care.) In a recent narrowly-decided election, the balance was tipped to the “expand the government and keep the borders open” party by immigrant voters (about 13% of those eligible; source; see also this X post).
Was Gates’s 2016 statement due to the crisp mountain air at Davos? No.
the U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name. (Bill Gates, quoted in Rolling Stone 2014)
Why do Africans need a snow white savior and 7 dwarf NGOs to tell them how to use ChatGPT? Is this new Gates Foundation program an example of epistemic injustice? (Wikipedia: “Epistemic injustice occurs when an individual or group is wronged in their “capacity as a knower”, meaning that their ability to produce knowledge is called into question.”) Here’s a still frame from Bill Gates’s video:
ChatGPT says that it is in the Wolof language, spoken in “Senegal and also in The Gambia and Mauritania”, that that’s because “I can usually read, translate, summarize, and explain Wolof documents, especially standard written Wolof.” So the video example of how AI doesn’t work for African languages is provided in a language that the most familiar AI understands well enough to translate.
(ChatGPT identifies the photo as likely from Saloum, Senegal and can give some history: “religiously motivated Muslim violence and coercive Islamization occurred in Saloum, especially during Maba Diakhou Bâ’s jihad of the 1860s”; it was a peaceful jihad according to George W. Bush that resulted in Muslims becoming 97 percent of the population in Senegal (state.gov))
Readers: since you’ll have to pick up the slack and pay the taxes that Bill Gates skipped on via his foundation, what do you think of this program? If Gates Foundation employees aren’t going to work at a company training and/or running an LLM how are they going to have a significant effect on what AI can do for the Africans that the Gates Foundation purports to understand? Unless they think that Africans are stupid, wouldn’t it make more sense just to give $1 billion to Africans and let them spend it on whatever they believe that they need? Even if having trained do-gooders spend money rather than letting the purported beneficiaries choose, s the local language idea a good one? A lot of people get motivated to learn widely-spoken languages because proficiency will enable them to play a desired videogame or watch and understand a movie (estimate of at least 200 million English learners for video gaming in 2020). Imagine the motivation for someone in Senegal to learn French or English if that were the only way to take advantage of AI (which, of course, it currently isn’t since ChatGPT actually does understand Wolof and 80 percent of Senegal’s adults already have smartphones).
Finally, if AI is unsafe, which Bill Gates says it is, why would working to make an unsafe technology more widespread in Africa, or anywhere else, be a noble endeavor?
The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor. Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.
A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program.
… believe me, Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn’t do all that poorly either.
Loosely related, my latest way of responding to anyone in academia who expresses an interest in AI safety, AI regulation (now that Trump is anti-regulation, all of my academic friends are very keen on government-imposed restrictions), etc.:
I do feel unsafe. Current models are close to PhD-level intelligence. At some point in 2027, they’re expected to achieve the intelligence of a human who decided not to enter a PhD program.
Not very related, my X response to a New York Times article about the horror of Sydney Sweeney being shown to the general public:
Thank you for highlighting this important issue. As someone who feels physically ill after exposure to photos of Sydney Sweeney, I feel seen. In case it helps others, I find that the wave of nausea can be reduced by looking at photos of Megan Rapinoe kneeling during the National… pic.twitter.com/jFCnNs4Lja
The front page of the New York Times, exactly 25 years ago:
Some excerpts, not in quote style for readability (modern correction: the Langley-based F-16s arrived in D.C. closer to 22 minutes after the Pentagon impact):
The forces or ideas that transformed Mr. Atta are not clear. What is clear, however, is that two years ago his habits began to change. He requested a prayer room at the university for himself and 20 other Arab students. He grew a beard. He listed himself at the university under a different family name, el-Amirals.
Mr. Atta, who was registered in Germany as a native of the United Arab Emirates but appears on other documents as an Egyptian, was for most of his years in Germany an apparently secular man. Then ”something changed in him,” said one of his teachers, Alptekin Ozdemir, a Turk who has lectured at the university for 15 years and helps advise the foreign students there. Perhaps 40 to 50 of them are Arabs, out of a student body of 3,600.
Rescue workers in lower Manhattan carried body bags from piles of wreckage to refrigerated trucks. One worker said he had found the remains of people strapped into what seemed to be airplane seats. Another reported finding the body of a flight attendant, her hands bound.
But despite elaborate plans that link civilian and military efforts to control the nation’s airspace in defense of the country, and despite two other jetliners’ having already hit the World Trade Center in New York, the fighter planes that scrambled into protective orbits around Washington did not arrive until 15 minutes after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
The Haitian hotel housekeepers, restaurant cooks and Uber drivers who quietly help power Key West’s tourism economy are disappearing.
Some have been detained by Border Patrol agents since late July, when the Trump administration ended a legal protection that had allowed 330,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States.
There is “violence and instability” in Haiti, but we can import 100% of Haitians and the same people won’t create any violence or instability here:
It’s a situation familiar to communities across Florida; the state has the nation’s largest Haitian population, including tens of thousands who have lost the legal safeguard known as Temporary Protected Status, which the United States had granted them because of the violence and instability in their home country.
(the violence and instability are features of the terrain, not something in any way related to the people who inhabit the terrain)
The New York Times constantly reminds us that workers should be paid more (they’re “underpaid”). But in the context of making sure that we max out on immigrants, it is also bad if workers in the U.S. get paid more:
When Mayor Sam Kaufman visited Hispanic-owned restaurants last month, owners shared stories of line cooks, busboys and delivery drivers, some with valid work permits, getting detained and deported. Those who remained were being crushed with extra work, with some owners delivering food themselves.
Mr. Kaufman noted that Key West was too far from the mainland to bus in workers.
“The price of labor is going to shoot up,” he said. “There is going to be real competition to retain the work force.”
Or will the supply of workers be reduced? Here’s the most interesting part of the article:
One such person, a 41-year-old father of two, said he had fled gang violence in Haiti for Brazil, before joining relatives in Key West in 2022. The man, who did not want his name used for fear of attracting immigration authorities, works at a supermarket deli, earning $19 an hour.
He lost T.P.S. in July. He is still able to work because of a pending asylum claim, but that offers little guarantee against immigration detention. Inside their tiny trailer home, he and his wife anxiously monitor WhatsApp for immigration enforcement updates last month as they care for their young children.
Asylum is a 10-year bureaucratic process, at least (see Will any Salvadorans in the U.S. go home to El Salvador today?). So by saying “I request asylum” this guy should be able to get W-2 work until his anchor babies (multiple “young children”) are old enough to sponsor him for a green card under family unification (U.S. citizen adult has the automatic right to bring parents here).
At what rate are migrants being detained by ICE? The NYT article says that 5,000 Haitians live in Key West and that 30 were detained in August. (I don’t think this 5,000 number counts children since they’re “American”, not “Haitian”, via the magic of birthright citizenship.)
Suppose that a Democrat wants to take a ride in a new Tesla Cybercab, coming soon to a city near you? He/she/ze/they wouldn’t want to be seen in the vehicle without a disclaimer on the back. How about selling temporary magnets and vinyl cling signs? Here are some ideas for the wording, but maybe readers will have better ones…
Democrat on board
I support autonomous driving, not autonomous trillionaires
I hate Elon Musk
I needed a ride. I didn’t join a cult.
Robotaxi passenger — not a Tesla customer
I did not choose the CEO
Vehicle’s politics do not reflect those of its passenger
(for the older rider) I booked this before I remembered who owns Tesla
Temporarily occupied by a registered Democrat
I am using this vehicle under protest
I have serious concerns about the owner of this company
This is transportation, not complicity (#FreePalestine)
I am participating in this ride ironically
NPR tote bag in the trunk
Figure $15 per magnet/sticker. A majority of Americans are Democrats. Tesla hopes to address the entire market. Each Democrat might need three stickers/magnets per year (some will fall off; the messages will lose their novelty). We can’t get money from babies, but the U.S. population is at least 343 million (nobody knows the true number because nobody knows how many migrants live among us). The total addressable market, therefore, should be approximately 150 million times $45 per year = $6.75 billion per year for Signs of Righteousness LLC. Does anyone see a flaw in this business plan?
Large Language Models (“AI”) are transforming our world. How is Carnegie-Mellon’s linguistics department preparing students to contribute to the Age of AI? Professor Uju Anya has been in the news lately. Example:
On Sept. 8, [2022, as Queen Elizabeth II was on her deathbed] Anya tweeted from her personal account, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving and raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
(Note that use of the phrase “chief monarch” shows an inability to use the English language. There are no non-chief monarchs. Wokipedia: “The word monarch comes from the ancient Greek words monos (meaning “alone”) and arkhein (meaning “to rule”).” Also, is it fair to characterize the UK in 2022 as an “empire”? “Small Islamic island nation,” perhaps? If we are looking back to the 19th century and want to paint the former empire in a better light we could say “Ender of the Arab and African slave trades that began circa 700 AD (Arab) and BCE (African).”)
As with What does Syracuse University teach for $100,000 per year?, nobody asks what students at CMU, each of whom theoretically pays $93,614 per year for the privilege, are learning from Prof. Uju Anya. (Let’s also not forget the taxpayers, who contribute in the form of subsidized student loans (sometimes entirely forgiven!), tuition grants, research grants, tax exemptions for the university’s endowment, and tax deductions given to donors (that increase the burden on other taxpayers).) She’s the author of Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil.
What if Anthropic isn’t hiring anyone for their Speaking Blackness in Brazil group? Prof. Anya teaches “Hip Hop and Funk Discourses of Black Womanhood in Brazil and the U.S.” (all course materials hidden behind a paywall to exclude those who don’t pay $93,614 per year to CMU). That would prepare a CMU graduate to work in the Black Womanhood in Brazil department at OpenAI.
More work by this professor whom the CMU administrators were wise enough to hire in 2021 (four years after Google’s “Attention is All You Need” transformer paper kicked off the machine learning/ChatGPT revolution) and subsequently wise enough to agree to pay every week until she dies (“tenure”; the lifetime paycheck drawn from the students paying $93,614 per year and from the taxpayers (“the chumps”)):
Her Instagram seems to have been locked down recently:
(Note that the “lesbian” is given priority over the “mom” role. Would that work for a cisgender heterosexual man? List sex habits before “father”?)
Google indexed her tenure announcement from two years ago, but it can no longer be viewed:
Finally, ChatGPT found that if you’re a federal taxpayer (“a chump”) you kicked in $180,000 via the U.S. Department of Education for “An HSI-HBCU collaboration to create open access Spanish language curricula celebrating Blackness in Latin America (P017A230050)”, from which Uju Anya was paid.
Here’s a report on driving a 2022 Tesla Y around Northern California. The car, built in Dec 2022, was delivered to me at SFO by Avis with over 71,000 miles on the odometer. My range anxiety began at the airport. The fully charged machine was predicted to go only 186 miles before bricking itself. No, problem, I thought. My friends in Napa are Righteous and will have a charger for anything that can reverse Climate Change (TM). The car sported error messages regarding climate control (because of #ClimateChange since 2022?) and rear tire wear:
The rear tires had at least some tread left and I wasn’t planning to use Dog Mode so these messages didn’t worry me too much. The car was pre-tuned to the Bollywood FM radio station. Just remember that it’s not a “replacement”:
I made it to Piedmont, California without incident:
A house next door to my cousin’s reminds Native Americans that America was “Built by Immigrants.” (Or maybe not, actually, since it is extremely rare to see anyone non-white in Piedmont.)
One great thing about the Tesla software/camera systems is that the machine is smart about when to cancel a turn signal, e.g., after a lane-change is complete. Sadly, though, the vehicle still lacks CarPlay and its Google Maps-based navigation display is nowhere near as driver-friendly as Google Maps. It doesn’t show stop signs or traffic lights along one’s route, for example, and, therefore, it is impossible to see that one should turn right at the second light. All navigation cues are essentially distance-based, despite the fact that “second light” is a lot easier for a human to gauge than “0.2 miles”.
Maybe it was the glass roof or maybe it was the climate system fault that I had been warned about, but the climate control system in the 2022 Tesla Y was dramatically inferior to what we’re accustomed to in our luxurious Honda Odyssey, a 2017 design. Even when the outside temp is in the 70s, the interior surfaces, such as the seats, will be broiling hot. The AC takes around 20 minutes to cool it down and the climate system seems to lack an awareness of whether it is sunny or dark outside. If sunny, a temp setting of 65-67 degrees is necessary for comfort. At night, though, the same setting will result in the interior becoming too cold. (By contrast, our Odyssey cools down from a 90-degree Florida parking experience in about 5 minutes and we just leave it on “72 Auto” independent of the insolation. (ChatGPT says that the latest Teslas have improved rejected of solar heat through the glass and also “15 percent” better cooling.)
On arrival in Napa at a worrisome 25% charge level, I discovered that Avis had either not provided me with the J1772 adapter to a “standard” charger or it was in the glove box, out of which I was locked without a required PIN code. It’s apparently too complex to have rental customers be authorized in the Tesla app and, therefore, everyone who rents from Avis is a valet and uses the valet key (which, at least in the plastic case supplied by Avis, scratches up the side of the driver’s door pillar). Did my friends in Napa have the correct hardware for charging an Elon Musk-designed Tesla? Here’s their entryway and living room:
(Yes they are white Boomers and no they aren’t paying any property tax (owned the same place for about 45 years so they pay tax on the 1980 value).)
They had an electric car charger, of course, but only for their Nazi-free Chevrolet Bolt, which uses the J1776 “national standard” that, in fact, is no longer a standard because everyone is adopting Tesla’s connector. I hit a Supercharger on the way out of Napa, though, and it worked seamlessly (just plug it in and they bill Avis and, presumably, Avis will eventually hit me with 55 cents/kWh plus an absurd markup). That said, how much time do you want to spend at a Circle K?
My second Supercharging was at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. Tesla tells you how to get there, but not that the Supercharger is on the second floor of the parking structure. There’s a slow “destination charger” bank on the ground floor. Once upstairs, I discovered that a white Model Y is the new black Model T:
Locking and unlocking was always a painful process, especially if one needed more than the driver-side door open. This wouldn’t have been as serious an issue, I’m sure, if Tesla were to engineer a Honda-style key fob intended for renters who are fully, but temporarily, authorized to use the car.
Despite the epic hassles of charging, I’m not sure that a gas-powered car would have been dramatically less expensive for fuel. Unleaded regular was over $6 per gallon ($3.90 in Florida during the same week, says AAA):
Would I want to own this vehicle for manual driving? No. Our Honda Odyssey is two years older and has almost as miles on it and is a superior machine overall. Were the deficits relative to the Honda tolerable if the Tesla would drive itself competently? Yes.
Wishlist (of stuff that hasn’t already been fixed in 2025 update of the Y):
real switches for basic adjustments, such as mirrors
gauges behind the steering wheel, as seen in every other modern car
adopt CarPlay or at least show traffic lights and stop signs on the navigation map
make the glass roof optional; I never got any value out of it while sitting in the driver seat and it is an absurdly bad idea for the Sun Belt
a new name for the car with the next rev of the design (it’s confusing if an obsolete jalopy can be rented out by Avis and called by the same name as a nice new redesigned car); how about “Tesla Le Tigre”? (optional Derek Zoolander decals and/or tiger stripes)
An engineer friend with a 2003(!) BMW M5 as his daily driver sat in the Tesla and played with the switches on the steering wheel and pronounced them to be “garbage”. It makes sense that Tesla would cheap out on everything for its current models/pricing, but why not have a “super premium” version where they put in BMW-/Mercedes-grade switches, a screen behind the steering wheel, etc.?
Separately, shout-out to California for allowing people to set up Short-Term License Plate Accounts when driving rental cars through various toll gates. Toll-by-plate charges then go, for a specified time period, directly to one’s credit card rather than taking months to get through Hertz or Avis with various markups applied.
(Traffic was mostly terrible, incidentally, though not if one stayed within Menlo Park/Palo Alto and avoided commuting hours (8-10 am and 4-7 pm on weekdays?).)
Certainly right now the singles game is typically pretty predictable and often the winner is simply the taller player. Could an amazing player 5’8″ tall reasonably hope to beat Novak Djokovic at 6’2″?
The women’s final is going on right now. Chris Evert dominated American tennis at 5’6″. Margaret Court dominated world tennis at 5’9″ (of course, today she must be condemned as a hater: “Court has been a consistent critic of same-sex marriage in Australia”). Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina (a born-again Kazakhstani, presumably after watching Borat?) are both 6′ tall.
Why not tear the whole thing down, especially since we can’t figure out what a “woman” might be and also because Science recognizes 74 genders? If there were a section of tennis competition for players 5’0″ to 5’4″ tall, for example, we might discover interesting athletes and competitions that can’t possibly happen right now (ATP top 200 currently has no players under 5’7″).
Because he is afraid of Islamophobia, the NYT tells us, Mayor Mamdani isn’t doing the things that he actually wants to do and instead is occupied with considering the New Yorkers who were killed by his fellow Muslims. The NYT reminds us that it wasn’t only Mamdani’s aunt who was a victim of 9/11:
… for Mr. Mamdani, the dual identities of being a young mayor and a Muslim has brought an added layer of pressure and scrutiny. He was 9 years old when the attacks took place and had been living in the United States for two years after moving with his family from Uganda. He has called the day a horrific tragedy for all Americans and one where a Muslim like him was officially marked as an “other.”
Do we need a word that means “fear of Islamophobia”? How about Islamophobiaphobia? Then we could say, “Because of Islamophobiaphobia, Ayatollah Mamdani did not organize a River to the Sea #FreePalestine event at City Hall as he had hoped to.”
Example hater:
25 years after 9/11 has shown that we aren't nearly Islamophobic enough
July 4, 2002, Los Angeles: Hesham Mohamed Hadayet opened fire at the El Al ticket counter at LAX. 2 killed, 4 wounded.
July 28, 2006, Seattle: Naveed Afzal Haq attacked the Jewish Federation of Greater…
I didn’t get organized to order my iPhone 18 Pro Max until 8:09 am, a full nine minutes after the start of ordering. To get in touch with my feminine/2SLGBTQQIA+ side, I ordered the new light blue color. (“All of us have a homosexual part of 25 per cent, which I also have,” Silvio Berlusconi told the crowd. “The only thing is that I, after a profound examination, have realised that my homosexual part is lesbian.”) Because I don’t want to fight with our AI overlords for SSD, I ordered the stripped 256 GB device. This should be one of the most popular combinations and yet Apple promises that it will be delivered on Friday, i.e., Day 1 of deliveries with no lining up or camping out.
For previous generations of phones, wouldn’t someone who was this late to the party have had to wait beyond Day 1 for delivery? ChatGPT:
iPhone 15 Pro Max (2023): Within the first hour, many Pro Max configurations had slipped to October or November, and some buyers who finally got through around the 10-minute mark were already seeing delayed delivery.
Update at 10:28 Eastern time (2.5 hours after ordering began): the same phone won’t be delivered until October 6-13:
