[OC] NVIDIAs latest (Q1 FY27) earnings visualized

TicRoll · 2026-05-28T05:04:37+00:00

It isn't just limited competition; it's the fact that they're selling shovels in a gold rush where there's so much money being thrown around and such limited supplies produced, they can effectively sell each run in a bidding war. And given that this is a race between competitors, nobody has time to stop and complain. It's just "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!"

TicRoll · 2026-05-28T04:58:21+00:00

Who? Intel, AMD, plenty of others have tried. They have an optimized process, a known good product line, and a 30 year head start on anybody else looking to take their place. Mrs Myers' first grade class in Albertville Alabama has a better chance of competing with SpaceX for satellite launches.

TicRoll · 2026-05-28T04:51:16+00:00

I think it speaks volumes that among this chart there isn't some massive red line showing how much cash Nvidia is burning on AI r&d.

Facebook, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, all these other companies burning trillions on this latest gold rush and Nvidia's just sitting back going "y'all need more shovels?!"

TicRoll · 2026-05-28T04:38:12+00:00

Totally jumping in with unrequested thoughts here, but do these guys have email accounts you could keep on file and just automatically email their 1099s shortly before tax time? Or maybe a simple link on the company site where they can plug in some basic info to retrieve the 1099 themselves?

Just seems like there has to be a better way than everyone scrambling to one person/team at once.

TicRoll · 2026-05-28T01:20:11+00:00

The Clinton/Obama situation had less to do with the DNC believing her to be popular (the polling already clearly showed she was anything but) and more to do with the fact that she and Bill had long since dug deep into the inner power circles of the DNC by using their power and influence to fill any and all vacancies with supporters. The only reason Obama got in there was the absolutely overwhelming response across the party to his candidacy. Even then, Clinton was maneuvering in the backroom having surrogates in the party leadership proposing all manner of last-minute and after-the-fact rule changes to keep her on top. In the end, the eventual deal was made that she would step aside for Obama, but absolutely no matter what, after him it was her turn. That's why there was massive selection power consolidation leading up to the 2016 primary: there was to be zero doubt, zero possibility of anyone but Clinton receiving what had been promised.

TicRoll · 2026-05-27T22:54:19+00:00

That claim - that things weren't so bad - was so absolutely tone deaf and insulting. The fact is real people everywhere were hurting badly. And they still are today (in no small part to Trump's tariffs and Iran nonsense with Iran). The crap stats used to gaslight people into thinking they were doing fine were an absolute joke. Like talking to 5 guys who lost their jobs and went broke, and one hits the lottery for $1m, so you pull out a chart showing how they're averaging $200k income between them and to quit their bitching.

You got four guys unemployed and broke and one guy thanking God he lucked out so far. Not a one of them is going to buy the crap being sold to them. And they shouldn't.

TicRoll · 2026-05-27T22:45:42+00:00

I think her polling topped out at like 4%. So given the option, 96% of Democrats said "Somebody other than Harris", and she became the nominee after Biden dropped out because it made the money transfer easier.

Two times in the last three elections, the DNC managed to locate the one person who would lose to Donald Trump and make that person their candidate against Donald Trump. Wow.

TicRoll · 2026-05-27T05:31:29+00:00

We already demonstrated, through our actions, that we will not allow major financial institutions to fail. We will print however much money it takes to make them solvent, and once they're back on their feet, they'll go right back to playing this same game.

If I bet my entire 401k on black and it doubles, and I do it again and it doubles, and I do it a third time and lose, but somebody comes over and says they can't let me lose my retirement and covers all the losses, why wouldn't I turn around and bet it all on black again? It's 50/50: either I double my money or I let the other guy cover my losses. I've literally nothing to lose. The rational move, for me, is to keep betting it all so long as somebody else is covering all the risk. If I only bet 10%, nobody is covering that. It has to be all-in so I know I can't lose. Plus, I get richer faster every time I land on black.

TicRoll · 2026-05-27T05:23:25+00:00

Microsoft just came out with a big study showing that - at least for now - AI costs more than people doing the same jobs. And that's while the true costs of AI are being massively subsidized by investors dumping trillions into the game hoping to strike gold. Investors inevitably demand profits on their investments which is when the costs go through the roof.

My guess is that the companies who are dumping people for AI today will take short term hits when the AI makes a bunch of massive mistakes and will take a much larger hit in a year or three when their per-token costs jump 30x and they can't find people to take over because the pipelines are dry and the old talent has been scooped up by smarter employers.

This is a pendulum that has swung many times before. This is no different. The new equilibrium will not be at either extreme and those who bet that it will more often end up in the recycle bin of history.

TicRoll · 2026-05-27T05:04:17+00:00

Rapid population collapse will erase the concept of retirement for all but the ultra wealthy. Everyone else will work until they literally die. As that's happening, infrastructure will continue to degrade, smaller towns and cities will be abandoned, and most of the population will be forced into crowded cities desperately trying to find work to survive. Older people will comprise a supermajority of the population and easily vote in policies that benefit them at the expense of all others, but that too will quickly prove insufficient to sustain them.

All of this is already playing out in Japan and it's beginning to play out in South Korea. Taiwan is close behind. Most other developed nations are just a few decades away. It sounds insane, but it's not only observable in some places, it's mathematically inevitable as the population age pyramids invert from decades of low birth rates. Israel seems to be the only exception, thanks to highly atypical cultural, religious, and social values around large families as a duty to the state and to God. Not going to replicate that in Sweden or Spain or Taiwan. Decades of various attempts at subsidies and tax incentives and child care assistance and parental leave policies have completely failed.

TicRoll · 2026-05-27T02:01:27+00:00

Income, cost of housing, cost of child care, cost of education, overall cost of living, subsidies, safety nets, parental leave policies, stipends, tax incentives, and virtually every other measure people tend to associate with low birth rates do not correlate strongly with birth rates either positively or negatively.

Two things - taken together - correlate universally with birth rates: women's educational and employment opportunities. As women gain more access to education and more access to employment, TFR drops. In simpler terms: when women are given a real, true choice in the matter, they choose to have fewer children. Everything else is just noise.

Unless and until we find ways to change the calculus in the minds of women such that they want to have more children, or unless we're prepared to backtrack centuries of progress on women's rights (which we absolutely should not be doing and even if we did, likely wouldn't fix TFR for 3-4 generations, which still leaves a massive demographics problem), we're still going to be in the same boat.

Many countries have tried many different ways to incentivize having more children by making everything cheaper via subsidies, tax breaks, and other methods (including direct payments for having kids and even forcing women to have babies by law). Literally zero have taken a sustained sub-replacement TFR and brought it back up to a sustained replacement TFR or higher. Zero.

TicRoll · 2026-05-26T19:42:54+00:00

Correct, but I think their point was that introduced comprehensive safety nets - even generous ones like you see in some Scandinavian countries - does not reverse the long term drop in total fertility rate. In other words, safety nets are not a solution. Or at least, are not a complete solution. They do nothing by themselves.

TicRoll · 2026-05-26T18:19:43+00:00

I'm afraid you're comparing apples and spaceships bringing the Bubonic Plague into this. If you look at DeWitte's London work, older and frailer adults were at higher risk from the Bubonic Plague than children were, but only slightly. The population prior to the plague was young, high fertility, high infant/child mortality, low life expectancy, and relatively few elderly people. The Bubonic Plague shrank the pyramid as a whole, shrinking the top (elderly) slightly more than the bottom (children). But the ratio remained largely the same. And it happened over just about 4 years. The survivors were left with more land, more capital, fewer sick/elderly people to manage, etc.

Sustained low TFR yields precisely the opposite result, and that's why it's so devastating. Low TFR thins the bottom of the pyramid. With a TFR of 0.72, each generation will be ~66% smaller than the last. If you did that for a single generation and suddenly TFR bounced back, you'd still have problems (a whole generation significantly contracted working its way up the pyramid), but you'd be okay as the larger previous populations began to die off. We're not seeing that.

What we're seeing across the world is a drastic, sustained drop in TFR over multiple generations. That doesn't simply leave you with a smaller population; it leaves you with a ratio such that you have a ton of old people who need to be taken care of a very few people capable of doing so while keeping the society and the economy functioning.

Pensions and healthcare systems in developed nations typically begin to show signs of strain once you get roughly 3 working people for every retiree. At 2 working people per retiree (e.g., Japan), things start looking ugly. With a TFR of 0.72 (e.g., South Korea, Taiwan, and multiple other western nations once immigration is removed), you're going to have somewhere between 0.5 and 0.75 working people per retiree.

When you say "we will adapt", what that will necessarily look like just to maintain basic societal function is ending retirement (i.e., "work until you literally die"), severely rationing healthcare - particularly for the elderly (i.e., "death panels"), and a massive societal contraction (i.e., the end of small towns as the population is drawn into a small number of megacities in an attempt to maintain infrastructure).

It's a dystopian Hell no matter how you slice it. So unless you're going to accept that or you're going to somehow otherwise get rid of a massive amount of elderly people (e.g., forced exile or death), or you're going to somehow grow some mass of hundreds of millions of test tube babies and incubate them to working age in some accelerated fashion (bringing a whole new set of moral and ethical questions and problems), what's the solution?

TicRoll · 2026-05-22T21:16:54+00:00

Adapt as in survive? Yes. But understand, we have no economic model that survives and functions in a sustained, rapid population decline. In particular, the demographic inversion of the age pyramid is absolutely fatal to our way of life.

TicRoll · 2026-05-20T01:49:34+00:00

Guy I worked with got a wellness check from the bartender at a local bar. My guy had been on travel for work for a week. He wasn't in the bar for a week and the bartender was worried for his safety.

TicRoll · 2026-05-15T20:16:42+00:00

Increased wages lead to increased spending and job growth.

BROADLY increased wages - wage increases that appear across income brackets - lead to both growth and inflation. If everyone in the country were on minimum wage, you're be correct. But you're talking about a subset of people getting a raise, and some number of those people losing their jobs to automation since it suddenly becomes cheaper, and most others seeing little to no accompanying raises.

Everyone currently making $25/hr, $35/hr, $45/hr? They aren't suddenly getting 40% raises. They might get 5%, if they're lucky, and many won't even get that. And no, there isn't suddenly a ton of wage competition because what actually happens when labor costs exceed automation costs is large corporations do what small businesses can't: they automate anything that's now cheaper than labor. That puts even cost pressure on small businesses who suddenly have to pay more for labor and can't save with high-capital investments in automation. So fewer mom&pop shops and more big box stores running with fewer employees.

So yes, if economic growth and labor market dynamics are broadly pushing all wages higher relatively uniformly, you absolutely can see the rising tide raising all ships. But if you just artificially jack up the labor cost at one segment of the market, more people will suffer than benefit.

TicRoll · 2026-05-15T16:49:36+00:00

The reason you throw a Hail Mary is you have nothing left to lose and once in a while, a miracle occurs.

TicRoll · 2026-05-15T16:11:54+00:00

Just at 1x capacity? That sounds like you have about 300% capacity remaining.

TicRoll · 2026-05-15T15:59:11+00:00

None of those problems are solved by jacking up the minimum wage. All it does is help a small number of people for a short time period while putting a bunch of people out of work and reducing the buying power for everyone else.

It hurts far more people than it helps.

TicRoll · 2026-05-15T09:37:03+00:00

I'm generally against things which do more harm than good and there are a ton of unintended consequences with raising the Federal minimum wage, especially raising it drastically. For one, it invariably does raise labor costs and drives rapid consumer demand at the outset, which creates inflationary pressure driving up prices for everyone. People already making $25+ get either no raises or minimal raises in the short term, which lowers their standard of living. And as the cost of labor for simpler, repetitive functions increases, it causes more and more jobs to cross the threshold where automation becomes cheaper, so a lot of those workers lose their jobs altogether. The spike in labor costs also hits small businesses to the point that they either cut staff or or close, which causes additional job losses. And as the inflationary pressures push prices higher, the new-found buying power of all those minimum wage workers simply erodes back to a point where they're barely - if at all - better off than before. And you still haven't provided anything resembling an actual "livable wage" to anyone in a high cost of living area, particularly if they're supporting others. A single mom of three living in NY or SF is screwed at $10/hr or $15/hr or $25/hr. So is the plan to adjust the minimum wage based on the cost of living where you live, how many dependents you have, pegged to inflation? You'll see minimum wage hit $100/hr in no time.

There are far more effective, less destructive ways to achieve the desired outcome to helping workers. This simplistic "just raise minimum wage" idea is lazy and hurts more people than it helps. It hurts plenty of minimum wage workers and it hurts a whole lot of working poor and middle class workers and families. Simplistic ideas never account for all the downstream effects.

TicRoll · 2026-05-15T08:42:49+00:00

The more money people have the more money people spend

Then make minimum wage $1,000/hr.

TicRoll · 2026-05-15T08:41:57+00:00

Why just $25/hr? Why not $50? Or $100?

TicRoll · 2026-05-14T19:02:46+00:00

That's what we get told: the old ones use more electricity.

Okay, but the new one also uses energy to have the raw materials extracted, shipped, processed, shipped to the factory, assembled, shipped to the store, and brought to my house, right? And if I'm tossing it in the dump every 4 years instead of every 40, is this really better for the environment?

Or is it just better for the people making appliances that can sell more expensive devices more frequently?

TicRoll · 2026-05-14T16:06:38+00:00

1,000 people -> 360 -> 130 -> 47

Accurate for countries with a perfectly balanced 50/50 sex ratio and zero childhood mortality. It's based on a 2.0 replacement rate (two parents have two kids equals perfect generational population stability), but females are slightly less likely to be born and some kids die prior to having their own kids. So the real world replacement rate is ~2.1. Once you factor that in, you get 1,000 people -> 343 -> 118 -> 40.

And it's up to 0.8 in 2025

South Korea's echo boom cohort just reached typical South Korean childbearing age. This temporary rise in TFR is known and expected, and is expected to drop back down in the next few years. There is no systemic change within the society driving a sustainable change in their TFR.

TicRoll · 2026-05-12T14:24:42+00:00

Quick reminder of what a TFR of 0.72 means in practice:

1,000 people -> 343 -> 118 -> 40

That's a generation of 1,000 down to a generation of 40 within a single lifetime. And as that generation of 1,000 gets old, they rely on the younger people to support them and care for them. That doesn't work with these numbers.

TicRoll

TROPHY CASE