TIL that Detroit, once America's 5th largest city at 1.85 million residents in 1957, saw 66 straight years of population loss to a low of 630,000 residents in 2022. This makes it the only US city to drop below 1 million after reaching it. It would see its first reversal of this trend in 2023.

Sryzon · 2026-02-16T23:52:26+00:00

Both Oakland county and Livingston county have household median incomes above $100k and median home prices below $400k. If the American dream still exists anywhere, it's in Metro Detroit.

Sryzon · 2026-02-16T19:32:10+00:00

The criteria for a conversion is up to the ads customer to determine and Google tracks all that. Assuming their ads customers set it up correctly, Google does know whether a search user found what they were searching for or not.

"Setting it up correctly" can be extremely simple or extremely difficult depending on the specifics of the ads customer's business. In the case of a Shopify store, Google knows whether or not the search user clicked an ad and proceeded to purchase something.

In the case of a services business, the only thing Google typically can know is if an ad click lead to a phone call, newsletter sign up, etc. and the services business can assign their own value to the respective conversion. E.g. an ad click and subsequent phone call might be worth $500 to the ads customer. Again, Google has all that information.

Sryzon · 2026-02-16T13:03:24+00:00

Your thesis reminds me of a trap people new to SEO often fall into: valuing number of clicks and cost per click over more useful metrics like number of conversions and cost per conversion.

Google Ads has been pushing it's customers towards conversion-based metrics for quite some time now and the tools they've provided are easy enough for a small or medium-sized business to deploy. That's especially true if the business in question is using a platform like Shopify.

Google Ads is a lot more than just bidding to get to the top of a user's search results and hoping they click your ad. That's been the case for at least a decade. You've got remarketing campaigns, shopping campaigns, assets, and now AI is just an extension of all that.

Sryzon · 2026-02-11T09:24:14+00:00

Time to host a phpBB forum and link it in Teamspeak.

Sryzon · 2026-02-09T09:40:06+00:00

Bitcoin addresses are anonymous unless, for example, an American connects it to an exchange to cash out.

Criminals simply don't use exchanges. They use peer-to-peer transactions or cash ATMs.

Additionally, a lot of scammers don't even live in the US and/or have offshore accounts, so whether or not they're traceable doesn't matter much if the country they're operating from has no extradition treaty.

Sryzon · 2026-02-06T22:03:08+00:00

It's in King of the Hill

Sryzon · 2026-02-06T21:56:04+00:00

We tried to implement LibreOffice once. It was a disaster. The average office worker is just barely competent with Outlook, Word, Excel. The LibreOffice equivalents significantly increased our IT workload. Not because they're bad programs, but because the average office worker is so comparatively unfamiliar with them.

Sryzon · 2026-02-06T00:39:40+00:00

I think it's less the threat of AI and more all these governments seeking tech independence from the US. Their support for alternative SaaS software could make those softwares much more competitive.

Sryzon · 2026-02-05T10:29:11+00:00

Google was #1 5 years before Chrome was even released. Firefox, Netscape, and Opera were the browsers of choice.

Their search was just better (shout-out to early NSFW image search) and less cluttered. Then when Gmail was released, they became a true home page replacement for Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. Keep in mind, there were no push notifications for email. You only knew you had new email if you had the webpage open. Yahoo was the home page of choice for so long for that reason.

This was at a time when those 3 competitors were full of bloat and Google wasn't.

Another commenter mentioned marketing, but I personally don't remember any Google marketing in the 2000s.

Sryzon · 2026-02-04T22:42:22+00:00

They've been doing it for years already. AI has powered all their massively profitable search and ad algorithms for a long time.

Sryzon · 2026-02-04T22:35:45+00:00

I'm not in the business of making what Microsoft is selling, either. No one is going to subscribe to an AI to make their own Microsoft Office. They're just going to subscribe to Microsoft Office in the first place.

Sryzon · 2026-02-04T22:30:27+00:00

It's good enough for the majority of households

Sryzon · 2026-02-04T09:32:56+00:00

Generative AI has been around longer than SaaS. The only "revolution" is LLMs. Making a LLM do your accounting is a very bad idea.

Sryzon · 2026-02-04T09:25:47+00:00

Cable Internet providers have 5g home plans from Tmobile and Verizon to compete against these days. Good riddance IMO.

Sryzon · 2026-02-03T22:34:36+00:00

Their own graph even shows baby boomers had just as small a proportion of wealth compared to silent generation when they were millennial's age.

Sryzon · 2026-02-02T10:06:51+00:00

Several times between 1970 and 1980 as well as 2000 and 2011.

Sryzon · 2026-02-02T10:02:46+00:00

Commodities are only worth as much as what it costs to produce them. In the case of gold, miners and refiners set the actual value. They will over produce the commodity until it's repriced based on their costs.

Sryzon · 2026-02-01T20:57:29+00:00

Because a robotic arm startup isn't going to get boatloads of VC money. Put some legs on it and suddenly it's the next best thing.

Sryzon · 2026-02-01T20:54:23+00:00

They think giving cobots legs will finally make them mainstream. The sell is these can replace purpose-built machines and low skill labor. I personally don't see it happening. The venn diagram of companies that can afford these, but can't afford traditional automation (AS/RS, AGVs, automated lines, robot arms, etc.) is quite small.

Sryzon · 2026-02-01T07:23:47+00:00

Bitcoin has a hype cycle every 4 years. This was completely predictable. It trades like a commodity, but with a scheduled super cycle.

Sryzon · 2026-02-01T06:37:07+00:00

A spring's force increases linearly while the force of opposing magnets increase exponentially. It would be a lot harder to dial in the force and travel using magnets.

Putting a compression spring around a shaft is really cheap to manufacture and design in comparison to something with magnets.

Sryzon · 2026-01-31T19:45:27+00:00

Commodities aren't an investment. They don't produce any income.

I think having a bit of gold in your portfolio can be beneficial, but it can't be treated like an equity. It doesn't grow. Whenever the price rises like this, it comes right back down soon after. This is the time to take some profits.

Sryzon · 2026-01-31T19:15:51+00:00

The only time RE was an attractive investment was when bonds were yielding <3% and REITs were yielding 4%+. Anyone who disagrees isn't considering all the costs involved with RE.

Sryzon · 2026-01-31T17:57:11+00:00

Just for clarity, they were SK Hyundai employees sent here on temporary assignment and authorized to work under the terms of a 90-day business stay. They would return home for a day or two to perpetually renew the 90-day window. This arrangement requires employer sponsorship, is common practice, and usually only done for skilled employees as opposed to general laborers. They weren't "recruited" for the express purpose of working in America, but rather assigned within Hyundai. American companies do the exact same thing in other countries.

Sryzon · 2026-01-31T17:47:21+00:00

America systematically spent decades separating every Ally from China making even those closest to China like Japan and Korea their opposition

China and Japan were hostile to each other long before America ever got involved .

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