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domoniki-11-11 · 1 day
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Comfortable business man finds the hot water bottle
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this-acuteneurosis · 2 days
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Behind Closed Doors
Dealing with Senator Clovis continues to be a petty trial, and Padmé takes her concerns to a new battlefield.
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homeland-heritage · 23 hours
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Before | After ..
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businessmemes · 10 hours
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Phil is correct to run this up the ladder, but doing so will cost the team much-needed efficiency points. perhaps Jan should help out instead of being so negative.
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phoenixyfriend · 2 days
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Ko-Fi prompt from Isabelo:
Hi! I'm new to the workforce and now that I have some money I'm worried it's losing its value to inflation just sitting in my bank. I wanted to ask if you have ideas on how to counteract inflation, maybe through investing?
I've been putting this off for a long time because...
I am not a finance person. I am not an investments person. I actually kinda turned and ran from that whole sector of the business world, at first because I didn't understand it, and then once I did understand it, because I disagreed with much of it on a fundamental level.
But... I can describe some factors and options, and hope to get you started.
I AM NOT LEGALLY QUALIFIED TO GIVE FINANCIAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.
What is inflation, and what impacts it?
Inflation is the rate at which money loses value over time. It's the reason something that cost 50 cents in the 1840s costs $50 now.
A lot of things do impact inflation, like housing costs and wage increases and supply chains, but the big one that is relevant here is federal interest rates. The short version: if you borrow money from the government, you have to pay it back. They higher the interest rates on those loans, the lower inflation is. This is for... a lot of complicated reasons. The reason I bring it up is not:
The government offers investments:
So yeah, the feds can impact inflation, but they also offer investment opportunities. There are three common types available to the average person: Bonds, Bills, and Notes. I'll link to an article on Investopedia again, but the summary is as follows: You buy a bill, bond, or note from the government. You have loaned them money, as if you are the bank. Then, they give it back, with interest.
Treasury Bills: shortest timeframe (four weeks to a year), and lowest return on investment. You buy it at a discount (let's say $475), and then the government returns the "full value" that the bond is, nominally (let's say $500). You don't earn twice-yearly interest, but you did earn $25 on the basis of Loaning The Government Some Cash.
Treasury Notes: 2-10 year timeframe. Very popular, very stable. Banks watch it to see how they should plan the interest rates for mortgages and other large loans. Also pretty high liquidity, which means you can sell it to someone else if you suddenly need the cash before your ten-year waiting period is up. You get interest payments twice a year.
Treasury Bonds: 20-30 years. This is like... the inverse of a house mortgage. It takes forever, but it does have the highest yield. You get interest payments twice a year.
Why invest money into the US Treasury department, whether through the above or a different government paper? (Savings bonds aren't on sold the set schedule that treasury bonds are, but they only come in 30-year terms.)
It is very, very low risk. It is pretty much the lowest risk investment a person can make, at least in the US. (I'm afraid I don't know if you're American, but if you're not, your country probably has something similar.)
Interest rates do change, often in reaction or in relation to inflation. If your primary concern is inflation, not getting a high return on investment, I would look into government papers as a way to ensure your money is not losing value on you.
This is the website that tells you the government's own data for current yield and sales, etc. You can find a schedule for upcoming auctions, as well.
High-yield bank accounts:
Savings accounts can come with a pretty unremarkable but steady return on investment; you just need to make sure you find one that suits you. Some of the higher-yield accounts require a minimum balance or a yearly fee... but if you've got a good enough chunk of cash to start with, that might be worth it for you.
They are almost as reliable as government bonds, and are insured by the government up to $250,000. Right now, they come with a lower ROI than most bonds/bills/notes (federal interest rates are pretty high at the moment, to combat inflation). Unlike government papers, though, you can deposit and withdraw money from a savings account pretty much any time.
Certificates of Deposit:
Okay, imagine you are loaning money to your bank, with the fixed term of "I will get this money back with interest, but only in ten years when the contract is up" like the Treasury Notes.
That's what this is.
Also, Investopedia updates near-daily with the highest rates of the moment, which is pretty cool.
Property:
Honestly, if you're coming to me for advice, you almost definitely cannot afford to treat real estate as an investment thing. You would be going to an actual financial professional. As such... IDK, people definitely do it, and it's a standby for a reason, but it's not... you don't want to be a victim of the housing bubble, you know? And me giving advice would probably make you one. So. Talk to a professional if this is the route you want to take.
Retirement accounts:
Pension accounts are a kind of savings account. You've heard of a 401(k)? It's that. Basically, you put your money in a savings account with a company that specializes in pensions, and they invest it in a variety of different fields and markets (you can generally choose some of this) in order to ensure that the money grows enough that you can hopefully retire on it in fifty years. The ROI is usually higher than inflation.
These kinds of accounts have a higher potential for returns than bonds or treasury notes, buuuuut they're less reliable and more sensitive to market fluctuations.
However, your employer may pay into it, matching your contribution. If they agree to match up to 4%, and you pay 4% of your paycheck into an pension fund, then they will pay that same amount and you are functionally getting 8% of your paycheck put into retirement while only paying for half of it yourself.
Mutual Funds:
I've definitely linked this article before, but the short version is:
An investment company buys 100 shares of stock: 10 shares each in 10 different "general" companies. You, who cannot afford a share of each of these companies, buy 1 singular share of that investment company. That share is then treated as one-tenth of a share of each of those 10 "general" companies. You are one of 100 people who has each bought "one stock" that is actually one tenth of ten different stocks.
Most retirement funds are actually a form of mutual fund that includes employer contributions.
Pros: It's more stable than investing directly in the stock market, because you can diversify without having to pay the full price of a share in each company you invest in.
Cons: The investment company does get a cut, and they are... often not great influences on the economy at large. Mutual funds are technically supposed to be more regulated than hedge funds (which are, you know, often venture capital/private equity), but a lot of mutual funds like insurance companies and pension funds will invest a portion of their own money into hedge funds, which is... technically their job. But, you know, capitalism.
Directly investing in the stock market:
Follow people who actually know what they're doing and are not Evil Finance Bros who only care about the bottom line. I haven't watched more than a few videos yet, but The Financial Diet has had good energy on this topic from what I've seen so far, and I enjoy the very general trends I hear about on Morning Brew.
That said, we are not talking about speculative capital gains. We are talking about making sure inflation doesn't screw with you.
DIVIDENDS are profit that the company shares to investors every quarter. Did the company make $2 billion after paying its mortgages, employees, energy bill, etc? Great, that $2 billion will be shared out among the hundreds of thousands of stocks. You'll probably only get a few cents back per stock (e.g. Walmart has been trading at $50-$60 for the past six months, and their dividends have been 57 cents and then 20.75 cents), but it adds up... sort of. The Walmart example is listed as having dividends that are lower than inflation, so you're actually losing money. It's part of why people rely on capital gains so much, rather than dividends, when it comes to building wealth.
Blue Chip Stocks: These are old, stable companies that you can expect to return on your investment at a steady rate. You probably aren't going to see your share jump from $5 to $50 in a year, but you also probably won't see it do the reverse. You will most likely get reliable, if not amazing, dividends.
Preferred Stocks: These are stock shares that have more reliable dividends, but no voting rights. Since you are, presumably, not a billionaire that can theoretically gain a controlling share, I can't imagine the voting rights in a given company are all that important anyway.
Anyway, hope this much-delayed Intro To Investing was, if not worth the wait, at least, a bit longer than you expected.
Hey! You got interest on the word count! It's topical! Ish.
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technoturian · 8 months
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I will not be calling Twitter “X”. I will not be calling HBOMax “Max”. And I will never call Facebook “Meta”.
These names are the branding equivalent of greige. Uninspired, personality-less “minimalist” rebranding die challenge.
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What kind of bubble is AI?
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My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.
Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.
Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.
AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.
So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means
But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.
Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).
Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).
Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.
These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html
The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.
What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop
The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/
But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.
Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.
The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.
If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:
https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509
These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.
Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.
These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).
So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.
But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.
This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space
But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop
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Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/
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prokopetz · 7 months
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We don't just need to bring back mixed-use zoning, we also need to bring back corner stores where the owner lives on the second floor. Heck, I'm pretty sure that's the only way to prevent mixed-use zones from being cannibalised by corporate horseshit in our present climate: only allow businesses which are also the owner's primary residence.
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unbothered · 7 months
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woo · 1 year
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Here’s the secret most ecommerce platforms don’t want you to find out: with most of them, you don’t actually own your store. They own it – along with your data. WE KNOW. Kinda backwards, right? Instead of renting your store, own your future. Make it yours with WooCommerce and start selling online today.
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brandgurus · 6 months
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Convert Images Between WebP and PNG Formats for Free
As someone who runs a small business online, I'm always looking for ways to optimize my images without sacrificing quality. That's why I was excited to find webppng.com, a free online image converter that lets you quickly switch between WebP and PNG file formats.
For those not familiar, WebP is an advanced compressed image type created by Google that can drastically reduce file sizes compared to PNGs. The only catch is that some older browsers don't support WebP.
That's where webppng.com comes in! Their free WebP to PNG converter lets me upload my WebP product photos and download optimized PNG versions compatible with more websites and apps. And when I have PNGs, their PNG to WebP converter lets me benefit from the smaller file sizes of the WebP format.
I love that webppng.com offers:
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Being able to seamlessly switch between WebP and PNG has been a huge help for my small online store. I can have smaller WebP files for modern browsers while still supporting PNGs for maximum compatibility across platforms.
If you work with lots of product images like me, I'd definitely recommend checking out webppng.com's free WebP and PNG converter. It's an easy way to optimize your site's images for speed and performance.
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maddystuart11 · 3 months
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Hi I'm newly here and I'm ready for all kind of fun and vibes🥰
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