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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Also a Canadian living in the US, and I would tend to disagree. In major US cities, with good health insurance, there are plenty of PCPs, and availability of specialists.

    For instance, I had a ganglion cyst that I went to see my PCP for. We decided to give it a couple weeks to see if it would go away by itself. It didn’t, so I messaged him, and was scheduled to see an orthopedic surgeon (probably overkill) within 3 days to have it looked at and drained. Total cost: $0 for PCP; $40 co-pay for the specialist.

    Meanwhile, my father in Nova Scotia waited close to a year for a knee replacement surgeon consult and is now waiting for surgery slot, which is expected to be another 6-9 months, despite being in significant pain. That just would not happen in the US.

    There are many problems for sure, and I don’t have a universal measure for efficiency, but anecdotally, in my experience, there is just way less waiting in many parts of the US. I also acknowledge how privileged I am to have good insurance, resources to not worry about large out of pocket maxes in an emergency, and to live in a city with some of the best hospital networks in the country.






  • Okay. Trying picking up a iPhone X (releases Sep 2017) vs iPhone 14 Pro and see the difference. There are a lot of quality of life improvements that make a noticeable difference in user experience.

    • 120hz
    • better battery life
    • 2x as fast charge
    • much brighter screen, always on if that interests you
    • triple camera sensors, with wide lens vs double, no wide lens
    • LiDAR to improve portrait photos
    • faster Face ID (used 100s of times a day)
    • satellite communication for emergencies
    • MagSafe charging/docking ability
    • 5G (really only find it useful for hotspots)

    I can confidently say everyone of these features has improved my user experience. None of them by their self are earth shattering, but taken as a whole, the constant iterative improvements have amounted to quite a lot.



  • Not sure I agree that phone tech has peaked a couple years ago for the average user. What technology peaked years ago?

    Camera? Efficient processors? Display panels? Biometrics? Batteries? Cellular/Wi-Fi modems? Emergency satellite connectivity? I cannot think of a single technology (I am on iPhone 14 Pro) that is not at least marginally better than a year or two ago, and pretty meaningful improvement from ~5 years ago.

    The rate of technological improvement has slowed or plateaued, but there is a pretty reasonable argument that current flagship technologies are the “peak”, even for average user, if only incrementally. I agree that this plateau, coupled with upgrade cost, is making it a harder choice to decide to upgrade for average user.










  • He did not borrow 44 billion to buy Twitter.

    He put about ~13 billion dollars of debt on Twitter itself, so he had to come up with about 31 billion in equity. He was able to secure third party equity commitments of around 7 billion (Larry Ellison, the Saudis, etc.). He also held a minority interest of about 4 billion in Twitter. He funded the remaining 20 odd billion with a combination of cash (from cash holdings and selling Tesla shares in early 2022) and equity margin loans on his remaining Tesla shares. It is understood that he likely paid off most of his margin loans as he continued to sell further Tesla shares in late 2022.

    The 1.5 billion interest expense you mention is just for the bank debt (that the banks still hold, and have been unable to sell), and is Twitter’s responsibility, not Elon’s.

    This is a long way of saying that I think the banks will own Twitter within 6-12 months. They will not roll over like landlords, and its far more clear cut for a missed loan payment.




  • I think delivery workers deserve a fair, livable wage, but I am not sure that this is the way to do this.

    If this goes through, I could see this playing out in a couple ways:

    1. I would guess that fees go up to cover increased mandated wages. However, since the apps will not want headline costs to rise much more (already have a reputation for large markups, large percentage of fees, and consumer is getting more and more stressed), they could remove the ability to tip, and advertise that slightly higher fee is now “all-in” pricing, to keep headline costs similar on average. This is potentially detrimental to delivery workers depending on earnings/tip mix and shares that the apps skim from each.

    2. Adding an additional fee per order (on average $5 per order as quoted in a NYT article) on something that has relatively elastic demand, will likely be detrimental to all involved, as volumes could drop more than the increase in price. In this scenario, everyone loses: the consumer, the delivery worker, the third party, local restaurant.

    3. Adding an additional fee per order, and the apps experience little to no change in demand (relatively inelastic). This would only hurt the consumer, and would benefit delivery work and tech co’s. However, I have a hard time believing that demand for delivery is super inelastic given food inflation, state of the consumer, and generally perception on food delivery price already.

    Not trying to be a corporate shill, but the economist in me is always hesitant when the solution is market interference. In reality, its probably somewhere between the extremes of 2 and 3, and determining where on that spectrum it ends up is quite nuanced.