Geekbench is basically trash. People keep using it for comparing Mac performance because many of the things people usually benchmark don't run on Macs.
But single-number outputs like that are useless. Is the number ~10% higher because it's consistently ~10% faster at everything, or because it's 100% faster on a minority of things and slower at everything else? The first one is pretty unlikely when comparing processors with different designs, and indeed that isn't it:
The CPU in those charts with a similar TDP to the M4 is the Ryzen HX 370. You can see that the M4 is ahead of it in a few of the tests (C-Ray, DuckDB, PyBench, FLAC) but in even more of them the M4 is at the bottom of the stack. (Only a third of those charts are actually performance; each performance chart is followed by two power consumption charts.)
And the ~20W TDP is a nice parlor trick (the HX 370 is the only one on the list that competes with it there) but in a desktop CPU that's pretty irrelevant. Whereas if you compare it to the CPUs that can be had for a similar price (e.g. Ryzen 9700X, 65W), it's only ahead in C-Ray and FLAC while losing quite badly in most of the others and subjecting you to unupgradable soldered memory that the PC hardware doesn't.
Meanwhile doing ray tracing on a CPU instead of a GPU isn't much fun, and FLAC is an audio codec so a ~10% improvement there is probably not going to be a big part of your day if you're not a full-time sound engineer. So does averaging those kinds of things in to make a single benchmark number make sense? Or should you be looking at the results on applications you actually use?
Chernobyl was supposed to be an economically viable means of generating electricity. Comparing a tiny billion-dollar submarine reactor to a power plant simply doesn't make any sense.
The reactors on aircraft carriers have a similar thermal output to many commercial power reactors. The ones on submarines are around a third of that size, about the size of SMRs like NuScale VOYGR or the Xe-100 reactors proposed to be built at Long Mott in Texas.
Chernobyl was supposed to turn low enrichment uranium into plutonium for Soviet bombs. They made design choices that compromised safety to make plutonium production more efficient.
> So nuclear plants, by and large, get the market price whenever they produce (which is most of the time) and this does not equal the average price as they will be producing a higher share of total production at times of low demand (and low prices), and a smaller share of total production at times of high demand (and high prices).
The assumption here is that the price is set by only demand rather than the combination of supply and demand. Under that false assumption, generating power when demand is lower (i.e. at night) is bad. But how much solar generation is there at night, and what does that change in supply do to prices if you make solar a higher percentage of the grid?
It does the oppose of this:
> whilst the capture price for solar is often higher than the average price (thanks to power demand generally being higher during the day)
Because solar generates only during the day, in order to supply power with solar at night, you would need it to oversupply power during the day and then pay extra for storage to resolve the undersupply it leaves at night. So once you have a certain amount of solar, you end up with lower prices during the day, when solar is generating a higher proportion of the power, and higher prices after sunset.
And solar is double screwed by this. Not only does it get the soon-to-be-lower daytime prices for all of its output rather than half, its output is further regionally correlated, so that on sunny days when its output is highest, even the daytime price is lower than it is on cloudy days, because higher or lower solar output is a cause of lower or higher prices, i.e. the daytime price anti-correlates with its output.
The fossil fuel industries and their shills? Probably not lamenting the delay in moving way from fossil fuels the same way the environmental groups ought to be.
Notice that it was also them (specifically Russia, a major petroleum exporting country) funding those anti-nuclear environmental groups:
The premise of accelerationism isn't to destroy the world, it's to escape a local maxima.
You have some medium-okay but clearly sub-optimal status quo and then a bunch of defenders resisting all change because "things are fine" even though they should be better than fine, or institutions that have been captured by corrupt interests but that situation is stable as long as they continue to provide bread and circuses. If it stays mediocre then everyone muddles along; if it gets worse then people stop ignoring the issue and actually address it so that it gets better.
The problem is, it's not just bread and circuses. People have been divided into camps for the purpose of directing their dissatisfaction against each other instead of the entities responsible.
So people get mad when things go wrong but the perpetrators convince them that the enemy is their neighbors and they need to direct their resources to defeating each other instead of working together to solve the actual problems.
For example, when SOPA/PIPA was defeated, it not only wasn't just along party lines, there was more opposition to it from Republicans than Democrats:
So who we like here are e.g. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY), because they both opposed it, even though they're in different parties. But then the "parties matter, not candidates" people would have you trying to oust everyone with the disfavored letter next to their name even if they did the right thing there. Which helps the baddies win by convincing you to oust good candidates from the "bad" party in favor of bad candidates from the "good" party, and over time makes both parties worse even as people become increasingly dissatisfied with the way things are going.
The first is the anti-trust angle. Some subset of bank apps don't work because of attestation and that's a significant barrier to adoption for switching to competitors, so it ought to be an anti-trust violation for the platform to do that.
The second is, you try it and discover that your bank doesn't work. If you want it bad enough you can switch banks, and the fact that it doesn't work is a signal that your bank has a weak security team who is just cargo culting deleterious vendor nonsense without evaluating whether it has any real security value.
(The use case for attestation is completely orthogonal to bank apps because it can't prevent credential stealing from compromised phones running a fake app since the fake app won't require attestation, and it can't prevent attackers from using stolen credentials to transfer funds because once they have the credentials they can just use a normal phone, and that's the case even if the attestation was completely airtight, which it isn't. Meanwhile the devices that can pass attestation are generally more vulnerable because it implies they're running the more-likely-to-be-outdated OS that came with the device rather than a third party upgrade with more recent patches, so they're essentially encouraging their customers to not upgrade their OS. Banks that do this are wearing clown makeup and you have to ask if you trust them with your money.)
> there is no legitimate reason for preemption to apply to labeling laws (even as broken as California's labeling law is), as labeling a product a certain way is not a mutually-exclusive action.
That's not really what preemption is about. A major point of having "interstate commerce" -- actual products crossing state lines -- at the federal level, is to prevent states from enacting trade barriers.
Suppose California disproportionately has more organic food producers and other states make higher proportions of food products grown with glyphosate. California then passes a law requiring the latter (i.e. disproportionately out-of-state) products to carry a scary warning label based on inconclusive evidence. Are they trying to enact a trade barrier? It sure looks like one. Meanwhile if the stuff is actually dangerous then it's dangerous in all 50 states, so the warning label should either be everywhere or nowhere according to the evidence, right?
Relatedly, having dozens or (at the city level) hundreds of different sets of rules is also a kind of trade barrier. Some small business in Ohio is willing to ship nationwide but every state has different rules, they might be inclined to cut off everyone who isn't in the local area since that's where they get most of their current sales, but that's bad. So then there is a legitimate interest in being able to say the rules have to be uniform if the states start trying to micromanage too much.
The better way to do this would be to only apply the interstate commerce rules to actual interstate commerce. So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California. A lot of states would then say you have to follow the federal interstate rules even if you don't cross state lines, but it would be their decision and some might not.
My point was specifically in regards to labeling, for which it's an awful stretch to call a trade barrier. If a label is "scary" enough to dissuade a potential purchaser, then it seems like the purchaser wasn't really informed about what they might have bought in the first place.
> So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California
In my ideal world I'd slightly adjust the framing here. California law should apply to products that are being sold within California, regardless where they may have previously been (yes, that would be a complete repudiation of Wickard v Filburn's declaration that a butterfly flapping its wings is interstate commerce). A California distributor or retail store that gets shipments from Ohio but then sells locally should be required to follow California law about what they're selling, as those sales are occurring wholly in California. Also if Ohio and California can agree on something that differs from federal, then that should also take it out of federal preemption territory. But of Ohio and California cannot agree, and someone in California orders direct from Ohio, only then federal law should step in with preemption.
More importantly in this case, a commitment to federal preemption allowed Congress to come to an agreement on a more ambitious set of federal regulations than would have been obtainable without it.
> Meanwhile if the stuff is actually dangerous then it's dangerous in all 50 states, so the warning label should either be everywhere or nowhere according to the evidence, right?
Only if other states or the federal government give that much of a shit about food safety, which is not a guarantee, both in theory and in practice. They might, for instance, care more about agri-profits than California does.
> So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California.
That's just a regulatory-arbitrage race to the bottom. You'd just have out-of-state producers that don't have to follow any of your laws out-competing local ones.
It's the opposite of a race to the bottom. The federal government sets a single standard for the country. The same logic you're advocating is also the conservative argument for health care regulation --- that is, allow the states to preempt the federal standards so they can offer cheaper insurance by lowering standards.
That's exactly how it currently works, though. Different states can and do set different healthcare standards, above some minimum floor.
I'm not sure why you think there's a problem with that. (I mean, I think it's a problem for the residents of a lot of states, but that's their problem, that they have agency to fix, not mine.)
If the Midwest likes using paint chips as food coloring, that's not my problem. And it should still not be my problem if they elect some brain-worm addled moron to a federal office who goes and raises the federally permitted amount of paint in my food.
> One time out of five, the consequence of that investment strategy is 'The market had a crash and I lose everything'.
Which is why that strategy doesn't actually beat the market. Keep using it for 30 years and you're bankrupt.
Whereas if you put your money in a major index 30 years ago and left it there, or even 50 or more years ago, what result? Are you even in a bad place if you put all your money into the market in 1926 and left it there for 100 years?
Yes, if a retirement fund had put all their money into a stock index in 1926, it wouldn’t have been able to pay out pensions throughout the 1930s and 1940s and would have been bankrupt before the market eventually recovered.
Going full index is a great strategy for an individual person aged 20-50, but not a strategy for a pension fund which needs to continuously pay out.
During the Great Depression, the stock market stayed below 50% of its peak value for about 20 years. Imagine that the $600 billion turns into $300 billion overnight. It will only last 5-10 years without inflows, but the GDP has also dropped by 40% and inflows have plummeted.
It's still going back to the same assumptions that you're not only timing a depression but also
(a) don't have pre-funding (i.e., millions for an individual at the start of the depression),
(b) don't have CPPIB guardrails and auto-adjustment mechanisms,
(c) and it's not a partial income replacement scheme.
> It will only last 5-10 years without inflows
Without inflows? That's not realistic because people would still be contributing. In fact, CPPIB has triannual resets of contributions and in a recession, they'd up the contribution rate. In a recent actuarial audit, they found that if real returns dropped to 2.5%, then they'd only need to boost contributions from 9% to 11% to keep their 75-year sustainability target.
The advice that you need to taper off your investment portfolio risk as you get older doesn't really apply to people that have a nest egg. I know a lot of people that aren't necessarily living frugally and are told by their financial advisors that they might as well upgrade their cars, travel more, etc. They can cover their costs and don't have net worth > ~$3 million.
I have no idea what you’re talking about at this point. Do you have any interest in understanding why CPPIB invests the way they do and doesn’t seek the highest returns?
> if a retirement fund had put all their money into a stock index in 1926, it wouldn’t have been able to pay out pensions throughout the 1930s and 1940s
Point was that this/your rationale doesn't apply to CPPIB's situation.
The gravitational field of indexes that large is one of the reasons why it works. The stock price of a company will generally increase when it's added to a major index because there are now so many more people trying to buy it as part of the index.
The risk is nominally that if you ever wanted to move a fund that large into some other investments, the act of selling would lower the price of the assets in the fund. But that's what happens no matter what you invest that amount of money in. But then widely distributed whole-market indexes would tend to mitigate that.
The real problem with this is that it disconnects what people invest in from the fundamentals of the companies. Promising companies don't get as much investment if they're not in an index, and mismanaged companies get too much if they are.
> The gravitational field of indexes that large is one of the reasons why it works
I'm confused because my question was whether a sovereign wealth fund could move an index by too much. Not about the issues with index investing (which IMO are mostly overblown).
But single-number outputs like that are useless. Is the number ~10% higher because it's consistently ~10% faster at everything, or because it's 100% faster on a minority of things and slower at everything else? The first one is pretty unlikely when comparing processors with different designs, and indeed that isn't it:
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/4
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/5
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/6
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/7
The CPU in those charts with a similar TDP to the M4 is the Ryzen HX 370. You can see that the M4 is ahead of it in a few of the tests (C-Ray, DuckDB, PyBench, FLAC) but in even more of them the M4 is at the bottom of the stack. (Only a third of those charts are actually performance; each performance chart is followed by two power consumption charts.)
And the ~20W TDP is a nice parlor trick (the HX 370 is the only one on the list that competes with it there) but in a desktop CPU that's pretty irrelevant. Whereas if you compare it to the CPUs that can be had for a similar price (e.g. Ryzen 9700X, 65W), it's only ahead in C-Ray and FLAC while losing quite badly in most of the others and subjecting you to unupgradable soldered memory that the PC hardware doesn't.
Meanwhile doing ray tracing on a CPU instead of a GPU isn't much fun, and FLAC is an audio codec so a ~10% improvement there is probably not going to be a big part of your day if you're not a full-time sound engineer. So does averaging those kinds of things in to make a single benchmark number make sense? Or should you be looking at the results on applications you actually use?
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