u/Gratitude15

For a long time in America, if you wanted to bake a cake, you had to bake it from scratch. Then, at the early stages of the food industrial complex, companies came out and started testing pathways to sell you easy ways to bake cakes. Companies like Betty Crocker tested different ways to sell very simple tools that you could simply put in the oven and have turn into a cake.

What they found was that people rejected it. They couldn't accept doing so little work, until companies like Betty Crocker figured out a hack: they needed to give the human just the tiniest little bit to do. That tiniest little bit became cracking an egg. The advertisements would say, "Just add an egg. It's that simple." All of a sudden, people began accepting the product, and the journey of industrialized home cake production took off.

I was reflecting on this story today as I made an app. I am not a developer, but I have ideas, and apparently nowadays that makes me quite powerful.

For a period of time, I was conjuring up what I wanted to create, which was a mathematical app for my child. Over the course of three hours, while I was working on other things from time to time, Claude would come to me and ask me to click a button or to generate a token and paste it in. At the end, I received my cake—which I call an app—and it was quite fantastic. I felt like I played a role in making it happen. Kind of.

My sense is that this level of input may continue to be required, lest people reject having too little to do in order to manifest their cake.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

It seems clear to me that when intelligence itself is on the line, and enough people understand that that is the case, there is going to be enough of a movement for everyone to put all their chips on the table.

What this means is that either you break through or you break down. Obviously, we know the breakthrough side for those who are on the upside, but the breakdown side is worth thinking about as well.

Having a situation where you have borrowed an obscene amount of money—that would make COVID stimulus and the real estate stimulus after 2008 seem paltry in comparison—creates an austerity requirement on the other side of not being able to hit metrics. That is quite sobering and, from what I could imagine, would bring this system to its knees.

This is not happening in a third-world country. This is happening in a country that is the currency of record.

What are the odds of this?

he has owned the team for 3 years and 3 months. the valuation has gone from $4B to about $5.5B. he owns 57%, so about $850M in gains in 3 years, over 35% returns total and over 10% a year. he has paid $270M in luxury taxes in that time, including the most expensive nba team ever, and yet that only dents the value creation. the assumption is the Suns as a yearly business make some money (before luxury tax) as well, probably less than $50M though.

his capital expenditure on practice facility ($100M) and investments in over-the-air TV (forgoing up to $10M/year), among others are going to pay big dividends as well.

additionally, his real estate business is up 15% in that time also. looks like he is through the early years with a solid investment gain and plenty of opportunity for way more upside in coming years, even with luxury tax spend.

goes to show you can have your cake and eat it to if you know how to do things. Sarver had something like a 7x equity return over 18 years, which would need the suns to be worth over $40B by 2040 for ishbia to match - which frankly is not impossible with the world we are headed to.