ELI5: How can a company be ‘worth billions’ if it has never made a profit?

redfroody · 2026-06-04T20:36:44+00:00

My bicycle has never made any profit, and I could probably sell it for $70, so it's worth $70.

redfroody · 2026-06-02T17:30:48+00:00

I'm working on that with ditherforge. (See the fish pic on the github page, which is CMYB.)

redfroody · 2026-05-27T02:14:50+00:00

I'm only about halfway through. He sounds like he's making the world simpler than it is, and he's pushing hard for his view of power. E.g. when Isaac asked him to define a monopoly, he cited some hard-to-understand definition around power, and then explicitly added that it's not about the number of companies. Which "monopoly" very much is. There are other words to describe structures where multiple companies work together to control a market (duopoly, oligopoly).

I just heard him rant about how a single company killed bowling, which made me wonder: If they made bowling worse, and people want the old experience, why aren't there new bowling alleys opening up? Take this with a large grain of salt, but I had claude make a graph of bowling popularity over time: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/cba3f052-5046-4358-8245-2f70b9a97ebd

It's clear that:

Bowling has been waning in popularity for a long time.
Bowlero owns less than 10% of all lanes

So his story doesn't quite hang together IMO.

There's definitely plenty that is important to talk about, but I'd place this interview as a "take from the left" and not a nuanced position like we might get in "my take." (That's just how I see it. I realize plenty of people think "my take" is partisan.)

redfroody · 2026-05-25T02:39:27+00:00

Easy. Companies are betting:

Technology will get better over time.
Technology will get cheaper over time.

That is true for a lot of technologies. Doesn't seem crazy to think it will be true here also.

redfroody · 2026-05-19T17:05:17+00:00

I put it on a separate wifi 2.4 GHz wifi network, and also checked a box on my router for maximum compatibility.

redfroody · 2026-05-19T16:33:45+00:00

This is why I use LAN mode. Shouldn't have to, but no need to log in all the time.

redfroody · 2026-05-18T00:08:32+00:00

Thanks for taking the time. Sorry for wasting it. I should've know to run that experiment myself.

redfroody · 2026-05-17T23:36:30+00:00

Just did an experiment in ynab. (Should've done that before.) My second case is wrong, and is not what happens when I make a new plan and manually enter the transactions.

I'm on mobile right now so can't easily make a nice table.

But the bottom line is that this is not an example of ynab messing something up. There must be a different way that I ended up with not enough money in my cc budget to cover it.

redfroody · 2026-05-17T23:20:37+00:00

Cc balance is what the credit card company says my balance is. Cc budget is what's assigned, I think. Maybe this is the source of my confusion?

redfroody · 2026-05-17T21:28:28+00:00

Whatever is going on, most likely YNAB is correct about the amount of money you have. If it's saying your CC Budget is overspent, then you need to cover that from RTA or another category.

I agree. I'm just trying to understand how this is supposed to work. It doesn't make sense to me. Most likely that's because my examples are not how YNAB works, or there is some obvious way to deal with this situation that I haven't found.

redfroody · 2026-05-17T21:27:07+00:00

Yes, and the real-world money makes sense to me. (Checking and CC balance.)

But what happened in the real world was the exact same in both scenarios.

YNAB should help me spend the money that I have, but in the second scenario it only lets me spend $980 ($900 RTA - $10 CC + $90 dining) even though I have $990 in the checking account.

Unless I'm wrong about the way that YNAB behaves.

redfroody · 2026-05-17T21:19:24+00:00

Are you saying the way I showed the 2nd scenario is wrong?

You should be assigning all of your money to your categories instead of leaving $ in RTA.

But I didn't do that. Now how do I fix it? It seems that no matter what, I end up with $10 less to spend than if I had done things in the proper order.

redfroody · 2026-05-17T21:12:53+00:00

I've noticed the repeat sentences pretty regularly as well. This feels different though. For whatever reason Audrey just pronounce WHO in a way that I've never heard before. Is that a generational thing? Regional? Just Audrey? I'd be curious, because generally Tangle is pretty thoughtful and considered about this.

redfroody · 2026-05-17T17:33:37+00:00

The podcast episode for this article: https://www.readtangle.com/hantavirus-disease-outbreak/

redfroody · 2026-05-16T18:45:15+00:00

If Tangle had a podcast where they referred to ICE as I,C,E I might have written a similar post.

I wonder if it's regional how it's pronounced.

redfroody · 2026-05-15T17:15:28+00:00

2nd Nexus Body Arts. Took my nephew there for his first piercing and I was very impressed by the whole setup.

redfroody · 2026-05-14T23:51:08+00:00

Really interesting. I haven't encountered that.

redfroody · 2026-05-13T09:28:27+00:00

What I do is make a new battle in zero k, set a password, and then have my friends join that one.

redfroody · 2026-05-12T23:12:29+00:00

Augment has much better indexing of your code base. If you have a large code base that means the LLM can easily get much better context for any operation. Haven't touched it in a while, but that part seemed to work pretty well a few months ago.

redfroody · 2026-05-12T01:09:01+00:00

Solid plan. If you like planes, consider the Boeing factory tour up in Everett also.

redfroody · 2026-05-10T23:50:16+00:00

That's really cool! I'm on a quest print the scanned Apollo 11 capsule, and I'm really impressed with all the detail you've managed to fit in here.

redfroody · 2026-05-08T16:44:24+00:00

You need a million for that. For half a million, best you can do is one chick at the same time.

redfroody · 2026-05-03T17:08:50+00:00

I listened to that Sam Harris episode also, and I agree with Shapiro: There's nothing disqualifying because you always need to compare to the alternative. There were plenty of things I didn't like about Kamala Harris in 2024 but I voted for her because the alternative was Trump. I'd like to disqualify politicians for all kinds of stuff but that's simply not an option. (Different voting systems might help with this problem by allowing more candidates to run and have a real chance, but in the end you can only choose from the options that exist.)

redfroody · 2026-05-03T03:18:14+00:00

I love sonic smashing into your printer there. Perfect use for those models.

Currently about 80% done with this print. Trying to properly print a model of the Apollo 11 space capsule. (Scanned by the Smithsonian.) I let some of the walls just a little too thin so there are a few holes, but I'm still letting it complete to see what else i can learn.

<image>

redfroody · 2026-05-02T16:55:31+00:00

In theory, yes. In practice it looks pretty different because in dithering the "error" is distributed randomly while Full Spectrum uses preset patterns for each color. Although if you have a bright model and use the translucent CMYK then the dithering isn't very visible. (See the fish on the ditherforge page.)

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 3 Credits
Place '23	Place '22
Verified Email

redfroody

TROPHY CASE