All of you are assuming that buyers are rational, as if pump and dump in crypto was somehow isolated to the online world and not possible in the housing market. You don't have to have complete market capture to make that happen. All you need is to have enough volume that it causes potential buyers and sellers to play along.
If you're big enough, you can cause prices to ripple, get others to lose rationality and buy in on the ascent as you cash out and leave everyone else holding the bag for the crash.
If you could get an AI to listen to the conversations that happen in your sphere of influence and simply jot down the problems it identifies over the course of the day/week/month/year, that in itself would be an amazing tool.
Doubly so if you could just talk and brainstorm while it's listening and condensing, so you can circle back later and see what raindrops formed from the brainstorm.
But, if Americans ate more meat then the people who grow and sell that meat would make more money, and they would spend more of that money to lobby congresspeople to convince the populace to eat more meat so they would make more money so they would have more money to spend lobbying the congresspeople to convince the populace to eat more meat so they would make more money
It doesn't have to be advertising; if policies were enacted to either restrict supply (by making it more difficult to produce in favor of some perceived public good) or to raise the price by reducing (currently significant) subsidies or imposing taxes on the supply chain, that might make your fridge less likely to contain those things.
Policy and advertising both work at the margins; if something affects consumer choices such that they swing 10% to or away from a sector, that has a huge impact on the sector. Can you imagine no changes that would convince you to eat 10% more or less meat?
I am allergic to legumes (the only viable source of vegetarian protein really), as are many others... so fuck you for trying to outlaw my main source of nutrition.
To be clear: I'm not trying to outlaw anything, just demonstrate to the parent how they could be subject to the lobbying/regulation/consumption feedback loop without being susceptible to advertising. I'm sorry if that offended you.
Which meat alternatives can you eat? Most of the current options are heavily processed, small-scale and heavily tied to brands, all of which raise the price. Once we see the commodification and white-labeling that we see in the rest of the grocery supply chain, I'd expect the prices to come down. As an aside: TVP looks to be about $0.04/gram of protein, which is about half the price of a gram of protein in ground beef.
Lobbying is a real thing, propaganda is a real thing, corporate-government collusion is a real thing. The meat and dairy industries are definitely things, and are GIGANTIC, pouring millions and billions into deceiving the public.
If you're looking around the room and don't see the sucker, it might be you.
I'm sure that some of these patents happen by slipping the examiner a few bands in the application paperwork. Afterwards it's on other people to defend themselves to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if they lose you can get an entire company and all of its IP, property, and money.
$5k under the table is a small price to pay for such potential payoff, not to mention the value of the chilling effect on competition.
It's unethical, seedy, shitty, banal, and pestilent, the kind of thing that only the most hellbound and soulless of sleazebags would ever even think of to do, but it's profitable.
How many patents do you have? Or are you just making assumptions and defaming people who could very well do an honest day's work? I assume the people at the US Patent Office go through thousands of patents, I would imagine it can get pretty exhausting reading each and every patent, especially after you ran through hundreds of unpatentable documents. You literally have to look up prior patents, and make sure its not already a thing, and figure out, is this really the same or not?
Funnily enough, one of my former bosses has one or two patents on something really simple that he came up with. It's a really clever piece of tech that the military uses, stupid simple to implement too.
I'm hoping the new Valve headset will be like, 60% of what the Apple vision is. My boss got the Apple vision on launch day and it is really premier hardware, visuals that are almost exactly like seeing the thing you're looking at in real life, and the hand sensing / interactivity was the best I have experienced, even though it still had flaws.
But being tied to Apple's ecosystem, not being really useful for PC connection, and the fact that at least at the time developers were not making any groundbreaking apps for it all makes it a failure in my book.
If Valve can get 60% of that and be wirelessly PC tied for VR gaming then even if they charge $1800 for their headset it will likely be worth it.
Making the mental adjustment coming from a public college to a private company regarding money has been one of the most difficult transitions I've ever faced.
At the college I had a $250,000 annual budget for IT that had to be planned out to the best of my abilities nearly a year in advance of the actual physical year, get approval from 2-5 levels of management for the budget, and then be flexible on when the money became available to purchase depending on the states fiscal economic factors.
In a private company now, even when I volunteer to do something to save money, they say it's not worth my time and effort, pay someone to do it.
Purchases under $25,000 can be made without approval, over that I just have to ask my direct report for approval.
I'm still personal finance budget minded, so they don't have to worry about me buying gold plated toilet hinges or anything, but it's still financial whiplash even years later for how they do things.
You can ask, but you can't really trust the results as the differences between AI generated text and human text are getting smaller every day AND LLMs aren't typically created to specifically identify the difference.
LLMs aren't intelligent. They're just very fancy math and a lot of smoke and mirrors.
Not all crimes. But many crimes.
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