Climate tipping points

Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against

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MannSciAmFeb19 – THE WEATHER AMPLIFIER

tech people fixation with tunnels

“for example, when New York decided to build the subway in 1900: 4.7 years later, they opened 23 subway stations, and in 2019 dollars, they spent just over a billion dollars doing so. So 23 stations, just over a billion dollars”

Relative abundances and scarcities define the economic times, I would for example expect that NY 1900 would be abundant of  cheap workforce employable at very flexible terms, which I am sure it is not true today where most people works in services and with much higher protections on the job

The quote was from Patrick Collison, founder of Stripe in a chat with Tyler Cowen and Mark Zuckerberg https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/mark-zuckerberg-interviews-patrick-collison-and-tyler-cowen-on-the-nature-and-causes-of-progress-30de2e2c48f2

My opinion is just general but I think in the right direction. one has to understand what drives development and growth, and today it’s not what it was 120 years ago. In 50 times someone will muse the good old days when Mark could amass 2 billion users in 15 years while now no matter how much money you spend you might expect just 2 o 3 hunderd millions. Oh cruel times, we are so bad compared to the intenret pionners, glossing over the fact that the users will have much more protection from spam and aggressive marketing (yeah, pipedream)

gullible, unprotected users is the relative abundance of our times

link full of tunnels prices https://nypost.com/2018/08/25/why-nyc-is-priciest-city-in-the-world-for-infrastructure-projects/

I said tech people fixation with tunnels, let’s not forget that one day Musk, frustrated with the time it takes to build tunnels today, bought a boring machine and started digging a hole under his company’s parking.

Yes! Tyler Cowen on Subway Cost Desease

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Wealth and charity US

Rich people propensity to philanthropy same as general population, exceptions Buffet & Gates

Bezos tax rate is )% it is extreme but most 0,01% rich pay less

Piena 2019

Trouble started in the Tanaro watershed, as usual. Bormida and Orba flooded

Montecastello gauge topped at 10 on the 24th NovemberScreenshot 2019-11-26 at 09.31.48

Further down Isola Sant’Antonio top at 8 meters 14 hours laterScreenshot 2019-11-26 at 09.36.04

Finally Ponte della Becca reached the top 12 or 13 hours later at 5,90 meters

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Ticino run a 1,000 cubic meters throughout the flood wave, LakeMaggiore was getting 1,800 cumecs and growing.Flood at Pavia therefore lingered a bit longer than usual

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the high

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was 1st step at Pietro house, white road in front of the cascina dry. in 2014 it was higher

AI took over in the 80’s

If you are worried now that AI will took over the world and take away our jobs, think better, the AI took over the world in the 80’s

for example, one sign that the AI’s rule is that they push humans into lower productivity jobs, exactly what happened in the 80?s when the first robot arms appeared in the factories

Maybe you did not notice, Trump successful campaign in 2016 was bankrolled by the Mercer family, billionaries since they built in the 80’s a robot-trading fund which netted 100 billions of profit since 1990.

Maybe you should also notice that latest Tesla Cybertruck with futuristic shape come straight from Giorgietto Giugiaro prototype of  1978, don’t be supreised if maybe one day Musk is outed as an AI built to reenact Vincenzo Lancia’s genius

Octopi

A single drop of blood, from a finger prick, it’s not  Theranos but Octopi, a cool  medical innovation for the 3 billions at risk of malaria: “a low-cost ($250-$500) automated imaging platform that can quantify malaria parasitemia by scanning 1.5 million red blood cells per minute.”

Malaria diagnosis today takes 30 minutes to 1 hour technician’s work on a manual microscope, putting a limit to the capacity of diagnosis centers in poor countries. Octopi combines microscopy, spectroscopy and flow cytometry to deliver a result in few minutes . Screenshot 2019-11-22 at 10.31.18.pngScreenshot 2019-11-22 at 10.32.13.png

Octopi works off a phone charger. It analyzes slides at speeds that are 120 times faster than traditional microscopy. Weighing fewer than seven pounds, it’s portable. And at a do-it-yourself cost of $250 to $500. Its modular architecture means that it takes only changing the camera/imager to detect other parasites. It’s open technology, hardware and software

“We further implement a machine learning classifier and obtain anticipated performance of higher than 90% specificity and sensitivity for parasitemia of 50 parasites per µl and 100% sensitivity and specificity for parasitemia of 150 parasites per µl. Our results suggest that low-cost automated multimodal microscopy combined with machine learning tools have the potential to address the unmet needs for diagnosis of malaria and many other diseases.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/cheap-automatic-microscope-could-change-how-diseases-are-detected/596440/

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/684423v1.full

 

Asset valuation? Really?

hope it is not lost on you the humour of an investment banker, not any one, the CEO of Goldman Sachs who claims assets cannot be valued,of all assets, houses https://twitter.com/thomaskaplan/status/1196844704916287494

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This argument has some merit, for example Goldman Sachs at some point valued WeWork at 47 billion, that point was right before selling it to investors in the IPO, the investors balked nd WeWork was refinanced by its current owner, Softbank at 8 Bln valuation https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/report-softbank-is-taking-control-of-wework-at-an-8b-valuation/

“The global market for private equity, including venture capital, has swelled fivefold in the past two decades to $4.2tn,” says the FT—they become increasingly dominated by more public-style investors who don’t have that discernment.  Matt Levine in newsletter

 

Warren Buffet & Zeno Cosini

Moats & Trenches

“Voleva sapere che cosa c’entrassimo noi in quell’articolo e supponeva fossimo mandatarii di potenti concorrenti esteri. La prima volta era sconvolto e temeva il peggio. Quando indovinò la nostra ingenuità, ci rise in faccia e ci assicurò che non saremmo riusciti a nulla. Finì ch’ebbe ragione, ma prima che ci acconciassimo alla condanna durò non poco tempo e da Carmen furono scritte non poche lettere. Trovammo che l’articolo era irraggiungibile perché circondato da trincee.”  La Coscienza di Zeno, Italo Svevo

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“The most important thing [is] trying to find a business with a wide and long-lasting moat around it … protecting a terrific economic castle with an honest lord in charge of the castle,” Warren Buffet

Ancora nella Coscienza di Zeno: cut the loss soon let the profits run

“Curioso come a questo mondo vi sia poca gente che si rassegni a perdite piccole; son le grandi che inducono immediatamente alla grande rassegnazione.”