i heard they cost the US taxpayer literally twice as much, possibly 3x as much as a taiwanese graduate student. it's incredible, sometimes they cost as much as a million dollars per year which gets funneled straight to the CCP.
Uni for international students in the US is extremely expensive unless you're pursuing a PhD, in which case you're usually fully covered by your PI. Although I don't really see how that's costing the taxpayer much unless that number is somehow accounting for the lost value of what someone who stays in the US after finishing their PhD would contribute to the economy.
Universities take most of the money from the student's funding source such that the student is only left enough to take care of their basic necessities, so it definitely isn't costing much in terms of stipends,
The tell is that a PhD position in the sciences that's worth anything is fully funded - the PI has grants that he will use to pay his graduate students. This isn't about undergrad education, it's about graduate level studies.
not just china. the ccp has operatives in every country. they can blackmail anyone at any time.
they have stolen trillions of dollars this way. possibly quadrillions, but we have no way of knowing. the scale of the theft is mind blowing. in the future it may go even higher.
yeah, it's totally useless.... unless of course, you have only one image of the thing you're trying to model. and getting a second image will take millions of dollars or another trip around the earth from orbit.
i ran a hosting company. a successful one that made money for years. it made me millions of dollars.
i knew it was time to sell when prospective customers literally couldn't believe our prices. they thought we were full of shit, and accused us of being amateurs, fly-by-night scammers. and our prices weren't low - they just weren't insanely inflated like public cloud. we didn't deliberately try to undercut anyone on our quotes. it just started happening one day.
of course we raised our quotes to test the market but then they became too expensive for what we offered. lol. lmao. okay. as you can imagine running infrastructure is something people do not take lightly, so this is an uphill battle all the way. once you have no service or price edge the game is up.
so anyway, long story short, i can take a hint. i'm not nearly as smart as jeff bezos so it was time to gtfo of dodge. luckily with those 0% interest rates we found a buyer and anyone stuck in public cloud hell due to their own incompetence can kiss my ass because we fuckin' told you so.
Sounds like customers were saying "the price seem suspicious", but what they were really thinking (and maybe they didn't even realize it themselves) is "I don't trust this company because it isn't one of the 5 that runs everything else in my life".
I don't get it. Surely there was a middle ground where prices weren't so low customers didn't think you were running a scam, but weren't so high they became "too expensive for what we offered"?
What you're describing doesn't seem to be anything unique to cloud; it's something every business deals with. Figuring out the right market segmentation to deliver cheaper prices to those who are more price-conscious, and more functionality to those who can pay.
> Figuring out the right market segmentation to deliver cheaper prices to those who are more price-conscious, and more functionality to those who can pay.
yeah smart guy, that's what we did for over 10 years. then it became impossible (because it's AMZN and MSFT and GOOG, remember???). then i sold. now i never have to worry about that shit ever again.
No need to be snarky/insulting here. It was just that your explanation purely on prices being either too low or too high seems incomplete. It's not clear why there wasn't a middle ground.
On the other hand, not being able to compete against the scale of major cloud providers makes sense. It's just not clear how that's related to you starting out with prices that were too low.
to keep it simple, think of a 42u rack stuffed to the gills with servers and switches.
that would cost us maybe $10k a month on the margin, and we could resell and manage it for nearly $50k a month. i'm betting amazon could milk it for $200k a month, possibly 2-3x that if it's GPU's.
i stopped using ALL personal hygiene products except for generic unscented soap over a decade ago. for laundry i use unscented arm and hammer detergent. i used to stink after workouts or stressful workdays but now i basically do not smell at all, ever. confirmed by multiple partners after sexytimes over the years.
as i entered my late 20s i got weird scalp issues and that prompted me to look into it - turns out NOT using the products is what helped.
so the guy with the super duper chinese sounding name who works for the company literally just told the investigators they were doing a bunch of illegal super-villain shit there like genetically modifying animals to spread covid? like, he just said "yeah, we're doing that." ... what?
this is all according to some podunk newspaper called the san joaquin valley sun, of course.
pretty much everyone else with a public platform in geopolitical analysis has a low opinion of zeihan. this includes shapiro, papic, and other stratfor alumni who i pay attention to.
zeihan's analysis is performative and is designed to make him money, not provide value to anyone in the real world. wow, america's geography makes it invincible and china will collapse any day now because they suck at innovating. that's super insightful and original. i definitely haven't been hearing that repeated ad nauseum for literally 40 years.
