If it costs Apple $5 to fully manufacture a iphone, how much for one of these $10? So why is it $500?

its the default

actually the problem was population boom. FDR raised the rate from $20 to $35/ounce, and by timeNixon took the USA off standard the global population 3x. So gold is no longer scarce because it isn't backing real currency anymore. Its just metal

Ebay bro, play 2020 was $25 last time i got one. dont mess with fb sellers

10% of Meta's revenue was from AI backed scams on users, that's $16 billion. They have no intent to stop it, merely to not get caught and fined.

I was aware of that. Not everyone reads HN but enough people will surely know about this if they continue. If they are not fined then people should just stop being so naive. I'm tired of seeing well-designed lies on Facebook and people clearly believing the lies in the comment section.

edit: by well designed I mean that they put the lies in a chart or something. The lies themselves may be quite obvious to spot, like saying that 86% of marriages in Spain end in divorces (when the reality is hard to measure but more likely about 50%). Still, Facebook users don't seem to spot them (or maybe the ones spotting them don't comment?).

Isn't M$FT a $Trillion dollar company? They can afford it on their own bootstraps

You dont get a billion dollar loan if you have no money. You are still expected to pay it back in the end.

Maybe the loan is cheaper than using their own money.

More critically: just because a company is worth $1 trillion doesn't mean it has anywhere close to $1 billion in cash at all, let alone able to be earmarked to a given project (at the presumed exclusion of other projects).

Granted, a project like this probably doesn't strictly need all $1 billion all at once, but I'd argue it's better to get whatever necessary funding upfront instead of risking having sunk a partial investment without being able to obtain the rest should the company's financial situation change.

Microsoft had over 94 billion in cash and cash equivalent as of June 2025.

My assumption is that the real reason this is a loan from the government and not paid directly by Microsoft has to do with other factors, like Microsoft not waiting to be in the hook for the billion dollars if the partner company folds, or the potential for loan forgiveness, or other incentives that make the effectively loan cheaper than cash.

They do have money earmarked for this…its just a line item though called “lobbying”

It hasn't been like that for quite some time. The corpse is sold off to mutual funds and pension plans

Thats how it started with that plane and military copter pretty much right at the start

There's no such thing as a loneliness epidemic, it is a problem of money, simple economics. The young generations are living shorter lives are are the poorest generations, even by modern standards.

pop