> Philippines, the weakest link in the chain of U.S. alliances in Asia.
US alliances? Funny how our alliances are with countries that we've nuked, invaded and occupied. Is it aggression or is china trying to liberate these countries from foreign occupation.
Imagine if china nuked/invaded japan, korea and the philippines and built military bases there. And then pretended they were protecting them. We'd all laugh at them.
Considering the hegemon occupying japan and the philippines committed acts of genocide against them, they have no choice but to feel 'comfortable' with it.
If the only thing that the Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos got from the United States after WWII and the Korean War was a collection of United States military bases then your argument might make sense.
Meh, people grow old and die, and old wounds heal.
Looking towards the future most all of China’s neighbors prefer something that looks more like the US system and less like being welded shut into your apartment on a whim.
I think you're referencing the Covid pandemic, but keep in mind:
- being "welded shut" happened once to a few people in one city, a few weeks into the pandemic when everyone was panicking, and it was a scandal inside China. People on social media were outraged, and the doors were immediately reopened.
- China got through the pandemic with 1/4 the death rate as the US.
- For most of the pandemic, life was much more normal in China than the US. China eliminated the virus by April 2020, and was able to keep it out of the country for about two years, meaning that society nearly fully reopened.
It isn't unheard of in the tech world. WhatsApp sold itself for $19 billion in 5 years. A lot of people thought it was outrageous when facebook bought whatsapp for $19 billion. Today, everyone views it as a great investment.
> Imagine thinking a 0.5% return on investment is a good use of money
What is waymo's valuation? How much has alphabet invested in waymo? $10 billion? What could they sell it off for today? $30 billion? More? What would the ROI be?
> when treasury bonds return almost 5%
And yet alphabet invests in waymo? I wonder why? Oh that's right. Alphabet created waymo as tax write off scheme. Absolute genius.
It's insane how ingnorant hn commentors are when it comes to finance, investment and technology. Every earnings and every financial news, it's the most ignorant who rant about nonsense confidently. But then again, according to the geniuses of hn, tesla, meta, bitcoin, etc would have imploded years ago.
If it were publicly traded, it would have a P/E of 600.
I'll help you out since you don't read, a normal P/E is 20-30. To say it is not a great financial investment is unequivocal. It is effectively a write-off for the foreseeable future.
But that is not to say you shouldn't invest in difficult problems and try to solve them, even if they don't make money. This is one of them. I hope people do the same for other challenging problems.
P/E is a good measure for value stocks, where you're looking for consistent returns.
Waymo still has to scale, the number means nothing.
Tesla for example had a P/E ratio of 1000 two years ago. Okay it's still potentially overvalued and the share price has declined but their P/E ratio has dropped dramatically.
Agreed. It's frustrating to solve a problem and being unable to check if it is correct. It's even more frustrating knowing that if you had the answer, it would help you to solve the problem. Sometimes the answer pushes you in the right direction to figure out how to solve the problem.
> with clear explanations.
Hopefully separate from the answers.
For programming exercises, we should be given datasets so that we can tests whether our code works or not. Heck books should provide links to unit tests.
> In the US, we have the Committee To End Pay Toilets In America to thank for this state of affairs.
We really have amazon to thank. Major book sellers ( Barnes and Nobles, Borders, Waldenbooks, etc ) were a major source of clean bathrooms. If you needed to use a bathroom, you could visit a bookstore, use the bathroom, browse for some books you might like to buy and go home and order it on amazon tax-free that night. Unfortunately, amazon did to bookstores what the asteroid did to dinosaurs and we are all worse off for it.
Sounds like we have you to thank, using your strange version of logic.
Bookstores struggled not just because of Amazon but because they insisted on selling everything at full MSRP, so just like you, people went and bought it for 30% less on Amazon because they were willing to have smaller margins (and it's not like BN and Borders didn't have the buying volume across all their stores).
Do you believe that the Tiananmen Square Massacre didn’t occur? If not — the parent’s question has to do with China because the parent is assuming free societies that engage in trade with China (whose governing regime has gunned down protesters) have moral authority to lose when, in fact, there is no difference between engaging in trade with regimes that would gun down its citizens who engage in protest (ie, Bangladesh) and engaging in trade with those that have and that would (ie, China).
US alliances? Funny how our alliances are with countries that we've nuked, invaded and occupied. Is it aggression or is china trying to liberate these countries from foreign occupation.
Imagine if china nuked/invaded japan, korea and the philippines and built military bases there. And then pretended they were protecting them. We'd all laugh at them.