Nvidia plans new 'reptile HQ' to match its IT aggressiveness Move over Apple. Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang wants to build his own futuristic space-station campus – and as you might expect, the Nvidia design is black and green and built from triangles, the basic building block of the mathematics around graphics processing. And, as it turns out, the strongest shape in …
I saw in one of the defense magazines where they advertise that they make the electronics for the heads-up displays for the F-22 fighter. I even hit nvidia.com to doublecheck the same logo and everything.
That does tend to explain their "we never release specs/code EVER" stance, if they're involved in military stuff.
I'd think that the market would be a bit more depressed than it seems.
Good for Nvidia though, as an occasional gamer I admire their GPUs! Also good for the many working-class residents of the Valley, who can use the construction work!!
Bad sign, Johnny!
Skyscrapers and Business Cycles
"The skyscraper is the great architectural contribution of modern capitalistic society and is even one of the yardsticks for 20th-century superheroes, but no one had ever really connected it with the quintessential feature of modern capitalistic history — the business cycle. Then in 1999, economist Andrew Lawrence created the 'skyscraper index' which purported to show that the building of the tallest skyscrapers is coincidental with business cycles, in that he found that the building of world's tallest building is a good proxy for dating the onset of major economic downturns. Lawrence described his index as an 'unhealthy 100 year correlation.'
The ability of the index to predict economic collapse is surprising. For example, the Panic of 1907 was presaged by the building of the Singer Building (completed in 1908) and the Metropolitan Life Building (completed in 1909). The skyscraper index also accurately predicted the Great Depression with the completion of 40 Wall Tower in 1929, the Chrysler Building in 1930, and the Empire State Building in 1931. There are, however, important exceptions in the ability of the index to predict, so the first question is: how good of a predictor is the skyscraper index?
Changes in the rate of interest (the relative price between consumption goods and capital goods) can have three separate Cantillon effects on skyscrapers. All three effects are reinforcing and all three effects are interconnected to the transformation of the economy toward more roundabout production processes. When the rate of interest is reduced, all three effects contribute to the desire to build taller structures. The world's tallest buildings are generally built when there is a substantial and sustained divergence between the actual interest rate and the natural rate of interest, where the actual rate is below the natural rate as a result of government intervention. When the rate of interest increases, the financial effects all reduce the value of existing structures and the demand to build tall structures and when combined with depressed economic activity, the desire to build at all."
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