17 ms·

The Rot Economy

349 points by hodgesrm 3y ago

darth_avocado 3y ago
Why Adam Neumann still gets money for a startup that cannot even fully define what he is trying to build after running we work to the ground is exactly why most people in this country are angry at the current state of things. Normal people have consequences for the smallest of the mistakes they make in their lives. You can go to jail for failing to pay a parking ticket and have your life ruined if a medical bill goes to collections because your insurance wrongfully denied your claim. Meanwhile corporations and connected individuals see little to no consequences of their direct actions. Ceos and founders mess up, and workers face the consequences. Real estate companies can literally walk away from their obligations and surrender buildings to lenders, and can still operate with no consequences. Banks can shut down and the executives can keep their millions in bonuses, while you who put your money in, should’ve known better about FDIC insurance limits.
- rnk 3y ago
  I think it's because he seems like that God,-like man who is going to lead you to the promised land! He's like a TV preacher, he's got that charisma and you went to follow him! And give him a billion dollars.
  - Keegs 3y ago
    To paraphrase Matt Levine: the fact that you lost a billion dollars means someone else trusted you with a billion dollars, and that’s reason enough for financiers to trust you with yet another billion, thinking surely you’ll get it right this time.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      Yup, you see this pattern elsewhere whenever it comes to credentials. Oh they went to __ school, they must be good. Oh they worked at __ co, they must be good. Oh they worked under __ [team/manager], they must be good. Oh they launched a [fund/startup] before, they must be good. Once you get the foot in the door once, it's easier to get your foot in the next 10 doors.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - lisper 3y ago
        This is true, but it's a two-edged sword. If you don't continually open new doors it becomes, "Oh, they haven't done anything new in N years, they must be bad."
        noisy_boy 3y ago
        That would perfectly explain why such people pursue short-term gains over everything else and once things start to look bad, take the golden parachute and start another initiative to repeat all of it again while being lauded as "serial entrepreneur".
    - darkerside 3y ago
      Reminds me of the story about not firing the programmer who just caused a million dollar bug in production. Why would I fire him? I just spent a million dollars training him.
      - throw__away7391 3y ago
        You really do learn a lot with these big mistakes though. I mean you can read all the books you want, until you’ve actually lived through a major outage on a high traffic system I think there’s certain things that are just really hard to understand.
        ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        programming dies not have the element of chance that incesting does. Its a bit like conoaring exact science and gambling
    - rchaud 3y ago
      That's the public-facing reason. The real reason is that dropping him after the first big losses would make it clear that you f'd up by backing him in the first place.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    The article says basically the same thing (though I suppose messiah is a bit of a demotion from god). > because he has the resemblance of the kind of messianic white guy that is able to take a product and sell it
    - paul_grisham 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - dmurray 3y ago
        So was the Messiah!
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Judaism is a religion so, not a ethinicity. The last time enough people thought it was the latter, it didn't end well.
        _dain_ 3y ago
        Ashkenazi jews are a distinct ethnic group. You can easily distinguish them from other Euro and Levantine populations with whole-genome sequencing.
        hef19898 3y ago
        You can also distinguish Chinese Catholics from Caucasian ones genetically, doesn't make a religion a genetic trait. This casual form of anti-semitism displayed here, is somewhat bothering me. Edit: Out of curiosity, since you seem very knowledgable, what's the exact gene sequence identified as being "Jewish" between those groups you mentioned? Honestly, I really thought actual genetics would be the end of that stupid eugenics crap, and not be used to sell the same shitty ideas in new disguise.
        _dain_ 3y ago
        > doesn't make a religion a genetic trait Yeah and I never said the religion was a genetic trait. There are ethnic Jews who don't practice the Jewish religion, and there are practicing Jews who aren't part of the "classical" Jewish ethnic groups (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and so on). "Who is a Jew" is a big and complicated enough question that it has its own Wikipedia article. "Jewish" does not just mean religion. I don't see how knowing these basic things has anything to do with "antisemitism". > what's the exact gene sequence identified as being "Jewish" between those groups you mentioned? There's no exact gene that is dispositive. Human ethnic groups aren't genetically divergent enough for that. But there are alleles that are more or less common across groups. You might have some SNP that's 70% prevalent in group A, and 40% prevalent in group B, and 10% prevalent in group C. That SNP alone isn't enough to tell you what group someone belongs to. But there are millions of SNPs, each of which has its own frequency distribution. There is structure within all that variation. When you aggregate that information you get a pretty strong signal, enough to reliably cluster the genotypes, and those clusters correspond with identifiable ethnic groups. You can estimate how much Jewish ancestry someone has, or indeed how much ancestry from any ethnic group that we have enough data for. So, there is no "Jewish gene" (or "Chinese gene" or "Scottish gene"), but ethnic Jews are nevertheless genetically identifiable, from having higher or lower probabilities of having many different genetic variants. And this is not some academic matter, it is very important for human health. There are a few genetic disorders that, while not exclusively found in Jews, are unusually common among them. For example, Tay-Sachs disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease For decades now, there have been Tay-Sachs genetic screening programmes among Jewish communities. This reduces the probability of two recessive carriers marrying one another. It has been very successful: >Screening for Tay–Sachs carriers was one of the first great successes of the emerging field of genetic counseling and diagnosis. Proactive testing has been quite effective in eliminating Tay–Sachs occurrence among Ashkenazi Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora.[13] In 2000, Michael Kaback reported that in the United States and Canada, the incidence of TSD in the Jewish population had declined by more than 90% since the advent of genetic screening.[14] On January 18, 2005, the Israeli English language daily Haaretz reported that as a "Jewish disease" Tay–Sachs had almost been eradicated. Of the 10 babies born with Tay–Sachs in North America in 2003, none had been born to Jewish families. In Israel, only one child was born with Tay–Sachs in 2003, and preliminary results from early 2005 indicated that none were born with the disease in 2004.[15] Would you describe this as "stupid eugenics crap"?
- spicyusername 3y ago
  Can't agree more.
- throwawayout 3y ago
  [flagged]
- fallingfrog 3y ago
  No, no, you don’t understand, it was all those darned gays ruining everything! Sounds like a farce but Fox really did try to blame “woke banking” for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    Those grifters at Fox are geniuses. They know their audience very well and how to take an uninformed mind down any path they wish.
    - Aerbil313 3y ago
      I strongly dislike this kind of take. They believe what they are saying themselves. Try talking with a person you deem as a right wing nutcase.
      - rchaud 3y ago
        They absolutely don't believe what they're saying, they know it's political kayfabe. That was one of the findings during the deposition phase of the Dominion Voting Systems legal case.
        Aerbil313 3y ago
        Okay, maybe their bullshit doesn’t make sense even to them, but I believe fully in my ideology which you’d deem the most backwards and right-wing of them all: Islam. Sorry, my mistake to generalize my experience to American conservatives. Still I’d say a great percentage of them believe in what they are saying, maybe not Fox but their audience.
        rchaud 3y ago
        What does that have to do with anything? This was a court case brought on by repeated lying from Fox News anchors about the validity of election machines and thereby the 2020 election itself. Islam is nowhere is the picture. Fox News doesn't care about other flavours of right-wing politics unless it directly helps their preferred candidates get elected.
- Fomite 3y ago
  Whenever I want to get really angry, I convert the funding the latest Uber But For Pets On The Blockchain Using LLMs into "R01s" - the standard $1.250 million dollar NIH grants that are considered career making in the biological sciences. You could change the world with the amount of money he's been given to...do whatever it is he can't even articulate.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    Yeah, but you can change the world, and it doesn't necessarily mean you'll make a lot of money, and that's all anyone cares about, so what are you gonna do?
    - asimpletune 3y ago
      I think one of the problems is there are ludicrous amounts of money to be made changing the world, enough to make whatever's happening for 99% of most hype-fueld ventures today look like drops in an ocean. So if what I'm saying is to be believed then why doesn't the market optimize for it? Like, if there's so much money to make why doesn't it happen? I think the answer is in two parts. One, there is a political environment that is very much interested in preserving itself regardless of whatever so-called benefits could come from actually changing the world, and two the market isn't really some kind of god like oracle that always does the "right" thing. I'll give you an example to better explain what I mean to say. The Roman Empire had a lot of good things going for it. They had many of the necessary ingredients for an Industrial Revolution to take place more than a thousand years earlier. So why didn't it? Clearly there was a lot of money to be made in hindsight, but in their political environment it was never going to happen. Rome, as impressive as it was, had a small political class of movers and shakers who owned most of the wealth, and to those people if given more money they'd just buy more farmland. That's it. Literally, to them, the Roman political elite, the only way to invest money was buy farms. I think in today's day and age we're in a similar conundrum. Obviously it's more nuanced and sophisticated than where the Romans were at, but most of the people who have power today can't understand or imagine the benefit of improving the world. The market isn't magically selecting for those things because they are a large part of the market.
- zakki 3y ago
  Well from the article he gets the money from A16Z. I will say both of them are in the same boat on using other people money.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  >...he is trying to build after running we work to the ground... I do not disagree with your thesis, but Adam Neumann got paid close to $1 billion to leave WeWork. Sounds like he ran it in the most personally profitable way possible. Although, still well short of his trillionaire goal.
  - praptak 3y ago
    This makes the main point stronger, not weaker. The main point was that no rational person would ever found his business.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    The overarching point is that the way market capitalism is structured today increasingly incentivizes these kinds of decisions. That is not to say that Softbank completely dropped the ball on monitoring and oversight. Under no circumstances should Neumann have been allowed to self-deal by purchasing buildings with WeWork share collateral and leasing them back to the company.
- astrange 3y ago
  > Banks can shut down and the executives can keep their millions in bonuses, while you who put your money in, should’ve known better about FDIC insurance limits. Man you just made this up. They do lose their equity and nobody lost their bank accounts.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  It helps to remember that there are apparently $120B in “stablecoins” that are used by real people to trade memecoins like SHIB. All is well with capitalism /s
  - automatic6131 3y ago
    At least, we can be confident that no one put anything like 120B into those stablecoins. Sadly, the real underlying amount is probably greater than 10% and even THAT'S a very depressing number
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  How do you propose to regulate what investors can and cannot do? That seems to be at the core of it.
- mikub 3y ago
  Oh man thank you for that. Just the other day I was thinking about this stuff, I mean you can literally make no mistakes for years, but it only takes one weak moment and your life can be ruined. For example I am currently unemployed and teaching myself programming after a few bad years I turned my life around, but last year I had a weak moment and I bought some stuff that I couldn't really afford and also don't really needed (it was a Nintendo Switch, so I could relax a little after learning all day), it was something around 1000 Euro. Was it my fault that I bought it?, of course, but man, resisting is so hard when you can buy this stuff everywhere, even when you're sitting on the toilet you can buy it, I mean that's crazy. Like I said, it only takes one weak moment.
  - lukas099 3y ago
    Did buying a Switch ruin your life??
dimgl 3y ago
I wish I had something more productive to add, but I want to say is that I love this article. It is absolutely the state of things... but I'm unsure what the solution (or solutions) are.
- EatingWithForks 3y ago
  I have a suspicion that the solutions would be incredibly radical to how we as humans are socialized to perceive justice, worthiness, and equality, such that we would immediately reject it as immoral, unethical, or otherwise unacceptable. [Consider for example that, not too long ago, many of us were socialized to oppose the idea women should vote.] I also wish that the status quo is different, but I actually have no idea if I'd be able to stomach what different looks like based on my current upbringing which is thoroughly enmeshed in the systems that enable this.
  - mordae 3y ago
    Vast majority of people who lived through revolutionary periods lived on. You'd manage.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Animats 3y ago
  We know what the solutions are. Because they were implemented in the 1930s, and removed in the 1980s and 1990s as "deregulation". - The US needs Glass-Stegall back. That's the requirement that banks and brokerages must be completely separate companies. The argument for repealing Glass-Stegall was that banks were now so smart that they didn't need such severe restrictions to prevent collapse from bad investment decisions. The banks were wrong. - Companies should only be allowed one class of voting stock. The New York Stock Exchange used to require that, back when the NYSE had real power. Allowing multiple classes of voting stock is what gives us President for Life CEOs such as Google and Facebook have. - No stock buybacks. Illegal in the US from the 1930s to 1981. The US recently banned stock buybacks for 12 months for companies which received coronavirus funding.[1] But that was a one time thing. During periods of low interest rates, companies tended to buy back their own stock with borrowed money to prop up the stock price. This mostly benefits executives with stock options. - Limits on complexity of corporate organization. This was a thing for utility companies until a decade or so ago. They were limited to a tree depth of 3 in ownership. This was to make regulation easier and reduce the risk of bankruptcy cascades. See "Enron". - Utility deregulation. Regulated utilities used to be standard. They got a monopoly in exchange for regulation. Since they were allowed a fixed rate of return on investment for rate-setting purposes, they were not hugely profitable but were very stable. The argument in the 1980s for deregulation is that utilities tended to overspend on infrastructure, building about 10% more stuff than they really needed. With deregulation, that money could go to stockholders. When Pacific Gas and Electric was deregulated, the company went bankrupt in only a few years, leaving the stockholders with nothing. And consumer prices went up in deregulated states vs regulated ones.[2] - Tax law favors debt, where interest is deductible as a business expense, over dividends, which are not deductible. This encourages taking on too much debt. - US bankruptcy law allows "secured creditors" too much security. Bankruptcy is too easy on lenders and too hard on accidental creditors. What we need is a return to conservative financial principles. [1] https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/stock-buyback-ban https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/stock-buyback-ban [2] https://ceepr.mit.edu/deregulation-market-power-and-prices-evidence-from-the-electricity-sector/ https://ceepr.mit.edu/deregulation-market-power-and-prices-e...
pixelesque 3y ago
On a semi-related point, I am interested in what alternatives there might be to the apparent "infinite" (GDP) growth target as a national/global economy, and the (Western?) assumption that companies should constantly "grow" to be successful. There are things like "Doughnut Economics", but IMHO that seems a bit too much the other way (almost communist-like), and I'm not really sure there's any practical chance of going in that direction anyway.
neerajsi 3y ago
Hot take: these are the kind of issues you'd expect if there is a significant amount of capital accumulation. There's always going to be dumb money doing things that make the news. How many failed railroads were made during the industrial revolution? How much money was squandered on tulip bulbs? Intelligent investments take more time to culminate than unintelligent ones take to fail, so things would look pretty bad in any savings rich economy.
- jfengel 3y ago
  I wonder if this has any measurable effect of reducing wealth inequality. Do the rich eventually just give their money away via stupid investments? It flows from the ignorant VC to this joker to a bunch of overpaid consultants and marketing execs to the poor schmucks who do something like actual labor? It's galling to have it work so inefficiently, and much of it just transfers from one rich yahoo to another. But maybe there's a ray of hope somewhere under all that BS?
  - kortilla 3y ago
    Yes, they lose their money and make new smart people rich. 80% of millionaires are fist generation. Wealth tends to collapse over generations in an ultra wealthy family just because the kids aren’t passionate about whatever made the original money and they squander it on half-baked businesses or “bad investments”.
    - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      That "80% of millionaires are first generation" stat is a bit misleading - most of those millionaires are older folk who have reached that status via retirement savings and the explosion in real estate. Those people are not the people being discussed here.
      - Mezzie 3y ago
        It's also questionable how much of that will be passed on at least for Americans. My dad and step-mother are in their mid to late 60s and have ~1 million net worth but a lot of that is wrapped up in their house and retirement accounts, which will probably be taken by the state when they require care in their old age. Nursing home care will eat through all of that without blinking. There's a huge difference between 'retired with a 500k paid off house and about 1 million in net worth' and a 900 million net worth even though both are 'millionaires'.
fallingfrog 3y ago
Something about all of this reminds me of Joseph Tainter’s collapse theory of diminishing returns. Have we reached the point already where returns on investment have already become negative? For at least some sectors, I’d say yes.
dools 3y ago
The only reason growth is seen as good is because our population is increasing. As such growth has been coincidentally correlated with full employment and therefore prosperity. When the population levels out everyone will realise that we don’t need growth to achieve full employment and that optimisation is the new recipe for success. It’s a temporary problem. As for private sector stupidity the antidote is stronger government and stronger institutions that can counter balance people making dumb decisions, not an attempt to regulate or shame away dumb decisions. The only problem is that the private sector has become too fetishised.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Yeah I don't think degrowth is a solution that fits with HumanOS. Humans unfortunately are wired to feel change but not levels. That is, standing still rarely feels good no matter how good the current state is. People are wired to seek a better lot in life, on average. This is hard to achieve without growth.
  - dools 3y ago
    Degrowth is totally stupid as a movement.
- kiba 3y ago
  If growth is doing more with less, then I'll welcome it.
  - astrange 3y ago
    That is what growth is. (Growing by using more resources is not mandatory at all, and is more expensive.) Degrowth is a bad idea invented by the British to make it look like they collapsed their economy on purpose instead of accidentally. Basically, you always need growth because that's what combats entropy.
  - dools 3y ago
    If the population is steady (as it will be by 2050) then you don’t need to increase production unless it’s to meet needs not already met. So the growth imperative now is mostly focused on job creation because people keep getting born. Growth in terms of absolute economic activity becomes less important if more people aren’t being added to the population however there may still be some growth necessary in order to increase equity of outcomes (although we may also just need a redistribution of existing economic activity to meet needs of the many over and above the needs of the few). What I meant by my comment initially is that in an economy where population is increasing rapidly one can just use growth in economic activity as a pretty good proxy for prosperity. Classic case of correlation!= causation though.
andsoitis 3y ago
> more Doesn't the "fault" lie within human nature? The desire for more? If that is true, then why expect an economic system to have a different goal?
- ccooffee 3y ago
  Is endlessly seeking more truly _human_ nature? I'm reminded of the "Mexican fisherman" parable[0]. [0] https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherman/ https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
  - jdaw0 3y ago
    I still hate this story. The difference is that the fisherman without a business empire is one bad week away from ruin and his entire family starving to death.
- jvb1000 3y ago
  What arguments/evidence do you have to support claim that humans by nature always desire "more"?
green_man_lives 3y ago
Maybe my feelings are a bit hyperbolic, but 2023 really feels like the year that the internet "died". That plus heatwaves, price increases, etc, it really feels like the death throes of neoliberal capitalism akin to what the 70s were for managerial capitalism. It's insane to me that with the threat of climate change looming, the US spent trillions on foreign wars. In the aftermath of 2008, when money was free we spent trillions more on what? More efficient ways to sell shit people didn't need or couldn't afford? We had two decades and trillions upon trillions of dollars to improve our system in so many ways and it was almost entirely squandered. Even the most politically and financially ignorant Americans can feel how crappy our system has been for the last two decades. The question is, what will replace it? A human-centric economy that invests money into physical and human infrastructure? Or the meme of neo-feudalism with people working in Amazon cages and paying for Domino's pizza in installments.
- titzer 3y ago
  > and it was almost entirely squandered. Oh, it went to exactly the intended place: propping up asset prices, corporate profits, and the stock market. Absolutely nothing was an accident.
- zweifuss 3y ago
  For me, the Internet was dying in 1997. Ads, scams, and Pr0n were everywhere. Let's recognize that in not-so-small parts of the world, the Internet is still on the path to becoming ubiquitous, reliable, and affordable.
  - green_man_lives 3y ago
    I was not even alive during the Eternal September, but the way I feel now feels like how Usenet old-timers describe it.
paulpauper 3y ago
When I wrote in October that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill his company, the street responded in kind, savaging Meta’s stock for burning cash building a metaverse that was never going to exist and now almost at $300 again. nuts. Yeah, so many people in 2022 got this wrong. I don't think Zuck was at much risk of killing his company. Meta stock keeps going up, and is one of the biggest performers on the Nasdaq by far, almost back to its old highs. The metaverse may have been a dud and the company was fined by the EU, but so what. Instagram and Facebook are more dominant than ever, and it's an advertising juggernaut. CPMs and CPC rates at record highs due to record advertising spending. Go ahead and try to find a company that is at the perfect intersection of profits, size, market dominance, and moat like Meta...maybe Microsoft, Alphabet. Not many. It was not just the job cuts...many companies have/had big layoffs , like during the early 2000s or 2008-2010, and did not see anywhere close to such a huge recovery that Meta saw. The markets seemed to ignore the $410 million fine that Meta received for GDPR violations, along with the fact that European users will now have to deliberately opt-in to sharing their data large occasional fines by the EU are bascially seen as a cost of doing business. see Alapbet, which has been fined many times.
- wavefunction 3y ago
  This all seems like one big sunk cost fallacy in post form.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Meta's CPC/CPM are actually down around 20% YOY according to the last 2 quarters earnings. They're just showing way more ads and growing user base a bit to make up for it.
netbioserror 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- juped 3y ago
  All the things listed would be deflationary if anything (since people would naturally rein in spending to have a buffer against uncertainty), but you're not supposed to ask about the causal mechanism.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Or not, since they didn't do that. Pandemics aren't the kind of uncertainty that makes you save, they're the kind that make you want to enjoy yourself before you died.
    - datavirtue 3y ago
      This. I live to experience joy. Anything that gets in the way of that is ignored, executed or voted down.
- nosianu 3y ago
  [flagged]
pcrh 3y ago
This kind of criticism is unfortunately not new. VCs are routinely criticized for funding enterprises on little more than hunches, and history is replete with examples of investments that made no sense, from the infamous Tulip Mania onward. It really speaks to a few things: 1) how irrational apparently intelligent people can be, 2) the importance of salemanship, and 3) that the value of capital to those who have a lot of it is much less than its value to those who have little, and so they are more willing to take bets such as those described.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  Being rich doesn’t make you smart. A great example is 2nd generation wealth — it doesn’t tend to end well.
DayDollar 3y ago
It also suspicously starts to look like planned economics, once the mono-duo-poly stage is reached. Rare goods, long queues, no choice, bad products and the leadership is off, chasing its own tail in some basebal metric detached from the world. It even features market-libertarians having to defend practices like shredding perfectly fine goods in ware houses. The moment the ussr was gone, the race horse finally could binge and become something very similar to the ussr economy, but instead of obsessing on tanks & steel, it focused on excel sheet virtual wealth wankery, disguising the slide back into the gilded age feudalism.
- abvdasker 3y ago
  I mean if you look at the astronomical levels of defense spending the US greatly resembles the USSR even in terms of the "tanks & steel". Broadly this kind of waste and stratification is characteristic of just about every fading empire.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    There are some compilations on TikTok of people showing China's public infrastructure to America's (including the ~slums many neighborhoods have become)....not a good look. If the general public had a clue any of this was going on I think they'd be livid.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    US defense research gave us DARPA, the first step towards the Internet. What are we getting via VC-led industrial policy? More jobs in selling advertising?
    - Melting_Harps 3y ago
      > What are we getting via VC-led industrial policy? Oh, its much worse than that, it exposes the hyporacy of hustle culture, and entrepreneur porn entirely if you're paying close enough attention with things FTX. The covertness of ivy leagues parents leaning on the VC heavy hitters (Sequoia et al) and making this Sam and his girlfriend to be a super genius' while operating like 2-bit clowns with almost no oversight or due diligence and bribing politicians to get favourable legislation in place for them to corner the market. I wish it were just crumby ad jobs, but it goes way deeper.
bruce511 3y ago
I'm no Alphabet fan, but their sprinkling through this article seems out of place. There are so many good examples (like Uber), that picking on Google and Microsoft, or even Facebook seems unnecessary. The bottom line us that these 3 businesses make money. Billions per quarter. It's coming in so fast they quite literally dont know what to do with it all. The market is fine with billions lost on the metaverse because its a drop in the bucket. An EU fine doesn't move the needle. Yes, Google and Facebook are ad companies, and yes they'd like to be more diverse than that, but the fact remains that ads on Google and Facebook work. People keep spending money there because it works. There's real value in efficient advertising and Google and Facebook have provided that real value. MS already has a diverse business, from OS to Office, from Azure to Xbox, from Teams to Flight Simulator. Bing can afford to be a long-play and seems to be gaining traction. I also cannot help but think that if this article was written in 2006 Amazon would have been the (legitimate) poster child for the point he's making. Billions spent, never profitable. But look at them now. Of course there are failures. Of course most of the money is wasted [1]. This is not a secret , its not even a bug, its baked into the VC model. It's been obvious since forever. The VC model is but one kind of business model, designed for a specific kind of business. And as a model it is applied to a vanishingly small number of actual businesses overall. [1] money is not "wasted" in the sense that water can be wasted by leaving a tap on. It is spent. Salaries, infrastructure, rent, cars, food, whatever - its all "trickling down" to people or actual profitable companies. Selling shovels, and jeans, is more profitable than digging for gold, and less risky, but that one gold digger who strikes it rich keeps hope up for all the others.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
  It’s still very clearly wasted though? That money could have gone to more profitable and genuinely innovative businesses that benefit society, instead of startups that were meant to tank from the very beginning. And money isn’t the only resource being wasted here but time. There are also plenty of companies that fail so hard that employees, to whom you believe the wealth trickles down to, are left with nothing to show for what they have supposedly done there, and could even cost them reputation-wise in their careers. This arrangement is hardly anything that the working class should be thankful for.
csomar 3y ago
> When I wrote in October that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill his company, the street responded in kind, savaging Meta’s stock for burning cash building a metaverse that was never going to exist. I can't help but this sentence got me triggered. Does the author honestly believe that his article affected Meta price?
- defrost 3y ago
  No. "Responded in kind" means "moved in parallel with" | "with similar actions or in an equivalent manner" | etc. The author doesn't claim the market acted because of their article, they mean that the market acted as though it also believed MZ was going to tank Meta.
  - crindy 3y ago
    I think the phrasing is confusing because on first parsing, it reads like the market is responding to the article
    - defrost 3y ago
      To my eye, as an Australian with decades of exposure to English Lit., long form essays, and technical writing (UK|Commonwealth English moreso than the central north american offshoot) it's a common idiom that describes other agents acting { in kind, in a similar manner, just as the first person voice did }. I can see the confusion if that's your absolute first parsing of an unfamilar English turn of phrase. For better of worse the language is riddled with such things and they can be very locale centric.
    - datavirtue 3y ago
      You say something in a certain way expecting people with a certain level of intellect to eat your shit and glean the meaning you want them to glean, making you more popular or sage-like to those people. Like Fox news.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    It's not the idiom, it's poor structure; the object of the clause is ambiguous and could mean "responded to my writing" or "responsed to Mark Zuckerberg". E.g. "While I wrote" or "After I wrote" would remove the implication of causation that "When" has. But really it should just say "The street responded by savaging..." with no authorial preening. That being said, it's a weird thing to get hung up on.
carom 3y ago
This was an extremely good article and captures why I feel (likely incorrectly) so uneasy investing in stocks. These massive price swings have nothing to do with how the company is performing and everything to do with macro levers the government pulls. It feels like a big game of financial engineering rather than investing in a profit making enterprise.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  I wouldn't feel weird about being deeply skeptical of the market. It's nothing more than a casino for oligarchs and wealth management funds.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
There is simply too much money in the world, and too much of it is concentrated in the hands of a small elite that’s able to place increasingly outsized bets on “number goes up”. It feels like the death throes of capitalism.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
For reference, some other titles from the author's blog: Tech's Reckoning; The Scum Economy; Elon's Tragic Kingdom Fire Mark Zuckerberg; The Uncanny Valley; Social Media Is Dying Degenerative AI; Google Should Fire Sundar Pichai Looks like man found his niche :)
nazgulnarsil 3y ago
Let's get angry at economic indicators we have little understanding of. All of them are normative and should do what I say.
politelemon 3y ago
A big point the author relies on is that Google has destroyed its search. And yet I am not seeing it, many people I ask don't see it either. I don't doubt that we all experience using the search engine differently, for me it's still working just fine. It's an unreliable anecdata to hinge your main point on that, it would only make sense if its more widely noted to the extent that its share is dropping significantly and being regularly reported in general media.
- badtension 3y ago
  You might be interested in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
noduerme 3y ago
This reads a bit like a complaint that markets are irrational. Lots of people lose money in markets by betting on bad ideas, or companies that are obfuscating their underlying weaknesses. That's part of the purpose markets serve: Moving money from things that suck value into things that add value. If the OP knows better than the market, hopefully they're shorting Facebook stock and, when that plays out, they'll invest their gains in something new that produces real value. Of course, markets can remain irrational longer than it takes to write an embittered blog post...
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
  Or you just have a hatred for criticism of modern-day capitalism. Also, the entire post is exactly about how money (specifically VC) is being thrown at things that don’t actually add value.
  - bratbag 3y ago
    I didn't pick up any hatred until I got to your post.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
      Subjective points of view hardly ever consider the whole picture.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    No, I just think markets are more complicated, fluid and flexible than critiques like this make it seem. I'm old enough to have witnessed numerous decades-long waves of hype pouring money into sclerotic companies that, at the time, everyone assumed were immortal no matter how corrupt and terrible their decision-making had become - only to watch over and over again as the giants fell. I feel like every wave is accompanied by a sense of hopelessness that things will never change, and then in seemingly an instant, they do change. I'm relatively sanguine that Google and Uber will be replaced by something better (something that's not a con game), and that the people who invest in garbage will end up losing to newer, more agile players. That's how it's always seemed to me when you look at any given 5-10 year horizon. The short term is always frothy. I almost never invest in tech companies... except if I'm looking to make a few quick bucks on some new hype (e.g. I bought Google with a 2-week horizon right after Microsoft announced Bing's AI bot, and after Google took a huge hit because the market overreacted; turned and sold it for a 10% profit). (The exception for me is medical tech which I'm willing to take several-years-long shots on). I sit on real estate and utilities and the odd manufacturer or retailer with a history of increasing dividends, and watch the wilds of the NASDAQ with a daily mixture of jealousy and schadenfreude - because I know my own risk tolerance. Markets are made of people. Companies are made of people. Poor incentives and deception do indeed lead to catastrophic losses and inefficiencies. Corrections are made. Fools and their money are parted. I don't have a hatred of criticism of any sort. I do however think there's a smell when someone walks away after losing at the table and complains about the game.
dmje 3y ago
Literally every left leaning person since the dawn of time: "the world is a closed system so we can't have unlimited growth in anything". Literally every right leaning person since the dawn of time: "MOOOOONNNNNNEEEEEEEYYY!!!!"
ggm 3y ago
When I wrote in October that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill his company, the street responded in kind, savaging Meta’s stock for burning cash building a metaverse that was never going to exist. No.. that "responded" is far too causative. you observed a state of being which others observed and acted on independently: your writing is gold but the street did not "respond" to your writing. That's chutzpah. If your meaning is "when the market saw what I saw, the market responded" that's fine. You don't define the market.
- checkyoursudo 3y ago
  I think we can take the more charitable view that you have identified. I read it as a bit of self-promotion more than hubris. Like, "I report on the market, and I saw what they were seeing, aren't I a good reporter?"
fzeroracer 3y ago
Realistically, the answer to this problem is simple. More regulations on big tech, vastly higher salaries and less emphasis on stock gambling. The rot within the economy is because someone running a small business is almost impossible nowadays. Either you get destroyed by economy of scale and monopolistic companies taking losses to destroy your marketshare, or you take in venture capital and pray to the altar of growth. If salaries kept up with inflation then there wouldn't be a need to gamble on the stock market to achieve wealth, and that wealth could be fed back into the economy in actually useful ways instead of being accumulated in the hands of wealthy billionaires.
revskill 3y ago
This is Game theory in action afterall. If you don't "grow", you die.
_siis 3y ago
I read the article, and while it touches on a common issue, I don't think it goes far enough. When looking at these problematic incentives that are mentioned, notably the author doesn't really address the incentives like for example where does the money come from. When you talk about venture capitalists, you often are referring to a bank associated with a venture capitalist. Everything in business after all, incentive wise, trickles down from the banking system. We can't change the way we do business when the incentives are fixed, and banking in general is only marginally overseen by government; most of the regulation and praxis is done by the Fed which is not government; but a private institution.
testacct22 3y ago
A weird thing with this article and others: they shit on Google and Facebook, but they never shit on Apple? Why? Is Apple just a serious company in comparison? At least, with Apple I get the impression that some of their products (e.g. mbp) are leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. I can't say the same for any Google or Facebook product
- starbugs 3y ago
  Apple makes their money from selling products and services rather than selling the user. At least that's the perception. Apple also gets their share of this kind of criticism, but it invites much less of it in this way.
  - oersted 3y ago
    Microsoft could be in the same category. They've both had some pretty bad periods, no doubt, but they have been smart and quite diversified for the last decade at least. Same generation of startups too. There might be some insight in that, what changed?
    - starbugs 3y ago
      I don't agree. Microsoft is obviously transitioning into user selling pretty quickly and apparently with great pleasure. It's on a completely different level than Apple. (To be fair, it's not looking very great there either recently.) Just one exhibit to underline my point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34886732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34886732
- account-5 3y ago
  I see this all the time. Not sure why. Personally the way this guy feels about over valuing companies I feel about the way apple over values it's products. But people still buy them though, same as the companies this article talks about the companies market share going up. There's something wrong there
  - deleted 3y ago
amelius 3y ago
The economy is like DOS 1.0. Sustainability requires an entirely new way of thinking.
TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago
I wonder if the author of the article believes his own words. >When I wrote in October that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill his company, the street responded in kind, savaging Meta’s stock. He seems a bit delusional. It picks on the likes of FB, Google,Uber, Tesla and uses that to justify a whole host of things like he's the only sane one and the rest of the market is dumb. FB, Google are money printing machines that will continue for years. >Uber has not made a profit from its businesses This is just a downright lie. Also, uber is still experiencing high revenue growth but it's costs have not been rising for years. Maybe investors can follow a trend line and understand Uber's not going anywhere? >They had a net loss of 1.21 billion last quarter, yet the street fell over itself to praise the company because “gross bookings grew 19% year-over-year” This quote seems especially dishonest. Ubers revenue grew almost 90% YoY... and he uses the 19% bookings as a reason investors liked it?? It's handpicked information to match his points, not reality. He must have searched really hard for the dumb metric.
svilen_dobrev 3y ago
growth-driven-growth - is that a thing? it's tiresome to see it so frequently. Not much difference from amount_to_steal-driven-country-"development"
rchaud 3y ago
> Neuman is seemingly attempting to reinvent the rental market — a diseased, exploitative industry in its own right — in his own image. He’s replacing one cancer with another, only even more aggressive and metastatic. Adam Neumann is the VC industry, he is just cooler and better-looking than anybody on Sand Hill Road. Every VC thinks $industry needs disrupting, for the good of the consumer. What's left unsaid is that after the Soviet-scale subsidies run out, the disruptor will inevitably become as turgid and anti-consumer as the incumbent it sought to replace.
rdlecler1 3y ago
Where some people see problems, other people will see opportunity.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
> The truth is that nothing lasts forever. Companies can (and should) die — or, at the very least, understand that there is an inevitable limit to growth, and eventually they must reconcile with being a stable, albeit plateaued, business. This point seems to negate the rest of the essay. It's true that nothing lasts forever, that includes human labour...
cannabis_sam 3y ago
I mean, what else would anyone expect after capital started siphoning off larger and larger amounts of money from labor in the 70s. Repaying labor with a relative pittance due to growth and simultaneously lowering taxes, just to hoard capital at an ever increasingly more insane rate, while of course dismantling antitrust, will obviously just concentrate capital. Exponentially concentrated capital will need to chase exponential returns… The naive folly of the efficient market hypothesis is its childishly simplified view of the world; a given in a world of economists treating their social sciences as if it were as bound to nature as physics. Although one would’ve hoped politicians weren’t so utterly and devastatingly easy to buy, but they clearly went a long with this insanity. The idiocy of crypto is but a blip compared to the scam run by capital over the last 50 years. It’s simple, just redistribute society’s gains, jfc…
- pixl97 3y ago
  Just wait till capital can pay for intelligence on a CPU and doesn't have to deal with whiny thinking labor demands any longer.
nick-of-time 3y ago
> This is the problem at the center of almost everything I’ve written. Why are bosses mad they can’t bring people back to the office? Because their alignment of business success isn’t really tied to profit or “success,” but rather the sense that they are “big” and “successful,” which requires a bustling workplace and “ideas.” This is similar to the sentiment of Bullshit Jobs as posted here yesterday. There is a strong incentive within the modern market economy to value perception over reality. This often involves hiring people to look like they're doing something without any consideration as to whether they're doing anything valuable.
ArunRaja 3y ago
Articles claims and my rebuttals: Claim 1: Just chasing the growth, for its own sake devoiding sustainability is bad. > Greed is how humans function, like it or not. Claim 2: Good businesses are left uncared, for the sake of lusturous, suicidal businesses. > Is "good business" a polished term for inefficiency. If so, inefficiency will be severely punished. Claim 3: mass layoffs are bad. > The "highly changing" large scale businesses are bound to adapt to the situations rapidly. Claim 4: Facebook investing in metaverse, crypto boom. > Certain investments payoff only after a certain inflection point. Doesn't mean those investments are worthless.

349 points by hodgesrm 3y ago

Why Adam Neumann still gets money for a startup that cannot even fully define what he is trying to build after running we work to the ground is exactly why most people in this country are angry at the current state of things. Normal people have consequences for the smallest of the mistakes they make in their lives. You can go to jail for failing to pay a parking ticket and have your life ruined if a medical bill goes to collections because your insurance wrongfully denied your claim. Meanwhile corporations and connected individuals see little to no consequences of their direct actions. Ceos and founders mess up, and workers face the consequences. Real estate companies can literally walk away from their obligations and surrender buildings to lenders, and can still operate with no consequences. Banks can shut down and the executives can keep their millions in bonuses, while you who put your money in, should’ve known better about FDIC insurance limits.

rnk 3y ago
I think it's because he seems like that God,-like man who is going to lead you to the promised land! He's like a TV preacher, he's got that charisma and you went to follow him! And give him a billion dollars.
- Keegs 3y ago
  To paraphrase Matt Levine: the fact that you lost a billion dollars means someone else trusted you with a billion dollars, and that’s reason enough for financiers to trust you with yet another billion, thinking surely you’ll get it right this time.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Yup, you see this pattern elsewhere whenever it comes to credentials. Oh they went to __ school, they must be good. Oh they worked at __ co, they must be good. Oh they worked under __ [team/manager], they must be good. Oh they launched a [fund/startup] before, they must be good. Once you get the foot in the door once, it's easier to get your foot in the next 10 doors.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - lisper 3y ago
      This is true, but it's a two-edged sword. If you don't continually open new doors it becomes, "Oh, they haven't done anything new in N years, they must be bad."
      - noisy_boy 3y ago
        That would perfectly explain why such people pursue short-term gains over everything else and once things start to look bad, take the golden parachute and start another initiative to repeat all of it again while being lauded as "serial entrepreneur".
  - darkerside 3y ago
    Reminds me of the story about not firing the programmer who just caused a million dollar bug in production. Why would I fire him? I just spent a million dollars training him.
    - throw__away7391 3y ago
      You really do learn a lot with these big mistakes though. I mean you can read all the books you want, until you’ve actually lived through a major outage on a high traffic system I think there’s certain things that are just really hard to understand.
      - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        programming dies not have the element of chance that incesting does. Its a bit like conoaring exact science and gambling
  - rchaud 3y ago
    That's the public-facing reason. The real reason is that dropping him after the first big losses would make it clear that you f'd up by backing him in the first place.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  The article says basically the same thing (though I suppose messiah is a bit of a demotion from god). > because he has the resemblance of the kind of messianic white guy that is able to take a product and sell it
  - paul_grisham 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - dmurray 3y ago
      So was the Messiah!
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Judaism is a religion so, not a ethinicity. The last time enough people thought it was the latter, it didn't end well.
      - _dain_ 3y ago
        Ashkenazi jews are a distinct ethnic group. You can easily distinguish them from other Euro and Levantine populations with whole-genome sequencing.
        hef19898 3y ago
        You can also distinguish Chinese Catholics from Caucasian ones genetically, doesn't make a religion a genetic trait. This casual form of anti-semitism displayed here, is somewhat bothering me. Edit: Out of curiosity, since you seem very knowledgable, what's the exact gene sequence identified as being "Jewish" between those groups you mentioned? Honestly, I really thought actual genetics would be the end of that stupid eugenics crap, and not be used to sell the same shitty ideas in new disguise.
        _dain_ 3y ago
        > doesn't make a religion a genetic trait Yeah and I never said the religion was a genetic trait. There are ethnic Jews who don't practice the Jewish religion, and there are practicing Jews who aren't part of the "classical" Jewish ethnic groups (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and so on). "Who is a Jew" is a big and complicated enough question that it has its own Wikipedia article. "Jewish" does not just mean religion. I don't see how knowing these basic things has anything to do with "antisemitism". > what's the exact gene sequence identified as being "Jewish" between those groups you mentioned? There's no exact gene that is dispositive. Human ethnic groups aren't genetically divergent enough for that. But there are alleles that are more or less common across groups. You might have some SNP that's 70% prevalent in group A, and 40% prevalent in group B, and 10% prevalent in group C. That SNP alone isn't enough to tell you what group someone belongs to. But there are millions of SNPs, each of which has its own frequency distribution. There is structure within all that variation. When you aggregate that information you get a pretty strong signal, enough to reliably cluster the genotypes, and those clusters correspond with identifiable ethnic groups. You can estimate how much Jewish ancestry someone has, or indeed how much ancestry from any ethnic group that we have enough data for. So, there is no "Jewish gene" (or "Chinese gene" or "Scottish gene"), but ethnic Jews are nevertheless genetically identifiable, from having higher or lower probabilities of having many different genetic variants. And this is not some academic matter, it is very important for human health. There are a few genetic disorders that, while not exclusively found in Jews, are unusually common among them. For example, Tay-Sachs disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease For decades now, there have been Tay-Sachs genetic screening programmes among Jewish communities. This reduces the probability of two recessive carriers marrying one another. It has been very successful: >Screening for Tay–Sachs carriers was one of the first great successes of the emerging field of genetic counseling and diagnosis. Proactive testing has been quite effective in eliminating Tay–Sachs occurrence among Ashkenazi Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora.[13] In 2000, Michael Kaback reported that in the United States and Canada, the incidence of TSD in the Jewish population had declined by more than 90% since the advent of genetic screening.[14] On January 18, 2005, the Israeli English language daily Haaretz reported that as a "Jewish disease" Tay–Sachs had almost been eradicated. Of the 10 babies born with Tay–Sachs in North America in 2003, none had been born to Jewish families. In Israel, only one child was born with Tay–Sachs in 2003, and preliminary results from early 2005 indicated that none were born with the disease in 2004.[15] Would you describe this as "stupid eugenics crap"?
spicyusername 3y ago
Can't agree more.
throwawayout 3y ago
[flagged]
fallingfrog 3y ago
No, no, you don’t understand, it was all those darned gays ruining everything! Sounds like a farce but Fox really did try to blame “woke banking” for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  Those grifters at Fox are geniuses. They know their audience very well and how to take an uninformed mind down any path they wish.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    I strongly dislike this kind of take. They believe what they are saying themselves. Try talking with a person you deem as a right wing nutcase.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      They absolutely don't believe what they're saying, they know it's political kayfabe. That was one of the findings during the deposition phase of the Dominion Voting Systems legal case.
      - Aerbil313 3y ago
        Okay, maybe their bullshit doesn’t make sense even to them, but I believe fully in my ideology which you’d deem the most backwards and right-wing of them all: Islam. Sorry, my mistake to generalize my experience to American conservatives. Still I’d say a great percentage of them believe in what they are saying, maybe not Fox but their audience.
        rchaud 3y ago
        What does that have to do with anything? This was a court case brought on by repeated lying from Fox News anchors about the validity of election machines and thereby the 2020 election itself. Islam is nowhere is the picture. Fox News doesn't care about other flavours of right-wing politics unless it directly helps their preferred candidates get elected.
Fomite 3y ago
Whenever I want to get really angry, I convert the funding the latest Uber But For Pets On The Blockchain Using LLMs into "R01s" - the standard $1.250 million dollar NIH grants that are considered career making in the biological sciences. You could change the world with the amount of money he's been given to...do whatever it is he can't even articulate.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Yeah, but you can change the world, and it doesn't necessarily mean you'll make a lot of money, and that's all anyone cares about, so what are you gonna do?
  - asimpletune 3y ago
    I think one of the problems is there are ludicrous amounts of money to be made changing the world, enough to make whatever's happening for 99% of most hype-fueld ventures today look like drops in an ocean. So if what I'm saying is to be believed then why doesn't the market optimize for it? Like, if there's so much money to make why doesn't it happen? I think the answer is in two parts. One, there is a political environment that is very much interested in preserving itself regardless of whatever so-called benefits could come from actually changing the world, and two the market isn't really some kind of god like oracle that always does the "right" thing. I'll give you an example to better explain what I mean to say. The Roman Empire had a lot of good things going for it. They had many of the necessary ingredients for an Industrial Revolution to take place more than a thousand years earlier. So why didn't it? Clearly there was a lot of money to be made in hindsight, but in their political environment it was never going to happen. Rome, as impressive as it was, had a small political class of movers and shakers who owned most of the wealth, and to those people if given more money they'd just buy more farmland. That's it. Literally, to them, the Roman political elite, the only way to invest money was buy farms. I think in today's day and age we're in a similar conundrum. Obviously it's more nuanced and sophisticated than where the Romans were at, but most of the people who have power today can't understand or imagine the benefit of improving the world. The market isn't magically selecting for those things because they are a large part of the market.
zakki 3y ago
Well from the article he gets the money from A16Z. I will say both of them are in the same boat on using other people money.
fbdab103 3y ago
>...he is trying to build after running we work to the ground... I do not disagree with your thesis, but Adam Neumann got paid close to $1 billion to leave WeWork. Sounds like he ran it in the most personally profitable way possible. Although, still well short of his trillionaire goal.
- praptak 3y ago
  This makes the main point stronger, not weaker. The main point was that no rational person would ever found his business.
- rchaud 3y ago
  The overarching point is that the way market capitalism is structured today increasingly incentivizes these kinds of decisions. That is not to say that Softbank completely dropped the ball on monitoring and oversight. Under no circumstances should Neumann have been allowed to self-deal by purchasing buildings with WeWork share collateral and leasing them back to the company.
astrange 3y ago
> Banks can shut down and the executives can keep their millions in bonuses, while you who put your money in, should’ve known better about FDIC insurance limits. Man you just made this up. They do lose their equity and nobody lost their bank accounts.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
It helps to remember that there are apparently $120B in “stablecoins” that are used by real people to trade memecoins like SHIB. All is well with capitalism /s
- automatic6131 3y ago
  At least, we can be confident that no one put anything like 120B into those stablecoins. Sadly, the real underlying amount is probably greater than 10% and even THAT'S a very depressing number
RandomLensman 3y ago
How do you propose to regulate what investors can and cannot do? That seems to be at the core of it.
mikub 3y ago
Oh man thank you for that. Just the other day I was thinking about this stuff, I mean you can literally make no mistakes for years, but it only takes one weak moment and your life can be ruined. For example I am currently unemployed and teaching myself programming after a few bad years I turned my life around, but last year I had a weak moment and I bought some stuff that I couldn't really afford and also don't really needed (it was a Nintendo Switch, so I could relax a little after learning all day), it was something around 1000 Euro. Was it my fault that I bought it?, of course, but man, resisting is so hard when you can buy this stuff everywhere, even when you're sitting on the toilet you can buy it, I mean that's crazy. Like I said, it only takes one weak moment.
- lukas099 3y ago
  Did buying a Switch ruin your life??

dimgl 3y ago

I wish I had something more productive to add, but I want to say is that I love this article. It is absolutely the state of things... but I'm unsure what the solution (or solutions) are.

EatingWithForks 3y ago
I have a suspicion that the solutions would be incredibly radical to how we as humans are socialized to perceive justice, worthiness, and equality, such that we would immediately reject it as immoral, unethical, or otherwise unacceptable. [Consider for example that, not too long ago, many of us were socialized to oppose the idea women should vote.] I also wish that the status quo is different, but I actually have no idea if I'd be able to stomach what different looks like based on my current upbringing which is thoroughly enmeshed in the systems that enable this.
- mordae 3y ago
  Vast majority of people who lived through revolutionary periods lived on. You'd manage.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Animats 3y ago
We know what the solutions are. Because they were implemented in the 1930s, and removed in the 1980s and 1990s as "deregulation". - The US needs Glass-Stegall back. That's the requirement that banks and brokerages must be completely separate companies. The argument for repealing Glass-Stegall was that banks were now so smart that they didn't need such severe restrictions to prevent collapse from bad investment decisions. The banks were wrong. - Companies should only be allowed one class of voting stock. The New York Stock Exchange used to require that, back when the NYSE had real power. Allowing multiple classes of voting stock is what gives us President for Life CEOs such as Google and Facebook have. - No stock buybacks. Illegal in the US from the 1930s to 1981. The US recently banned stock buybacks for 12 months for companies which received coronavirus funding.[1] But that was a one time thing. During periods of low interest rates, companies tended to buy back their own stock with borrowed money to prop up the stock price. This mostly benefits executives with stock options. - Limits on complexity of corporate organization. This was a thing for utility companies until a decade or so ago. They were limited to a tree depth of 3 in ownership. This was to make regulation easier and reduce the risk of bankruptcy cascades. See "Enron". - Utility deregulation. Regulated utilities used to be standard. They got a monopoly in exchange for regulation. Since they were allowed a fixed rate of return on investment for rate-setting purposes, they were not hugely profitable but were very stable. The argument in the 1980s for deregulation is that utilities tended to overspend on infrastructure, building about 10% more stuff than they really needed. With deregulation, that money could go to stockholders. When Pacific Gas and Electric was deregulated, the company went bankrupt in only a few years, leaving the stockholders with nothing. And consumer prices went up in deregulated states vs regulated ones.[2] - Tax law favors debt, where interest is deductible as a business expense, over dividends, which are not deductible. This encourages taking on too much debt. - US bankruptcy law allows "secured creditors" too much security. Bankruptcy is too easy on lenders and too hard on accidental creditors. What we need is a return to conservative financial principles. [1] https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/stock-buyback-ban https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/stock-buyback-ban [2] https://ceepr.mit.edu/deregulation-market-power-and-prices-evidence-from-the-electricity-sector/ https://ceepr.mit.edu/deregulation-market-power-and-prices-e...

pixelesque 3y ago

On a semi-related point, I am interested in what alternatives there might be to the apparent "infinite" (GDP) growth target as a national/global economy, and the (Western?) assumption that companies should constantly "grow" to be successful. There are things like "Doughnut Economics", but IMHO that seems a bit too much the other way (almost communist-like), and I'm not really sure there's any practical chance of going in that direction anyway.

neerajsi 3y ago

Hot take: these are the kind of issues you'd expect if there is a significant amount of capital accumulation. There's always going to be dumb money doing things that make the news. How many failed railroads were made during the industrial revolution? How much money was squandered on tulip bulbs? Intelligent investments take more time to culminate than unintelligent ones take to fail, so things would look pretty bad in any savings rich economy.

jfengel 3y ago
I wonder if this has any measurable effect of reducing wealth inequality. Do the rich eventually just give their money away via stupid investments? It flows from the ignorant VC to this joker to a bunch of overpaid consultants and marketing execs to the poor schmucks who do something like actual labor? It's galling to have it work so inefficiently, and much of it just transfers from one rich yahoo to another. But maybe there's a ray of hope somewhere under all that BS?
- kortilla 3y ago
  Yes, they lose their money and make new smart people rich. 80% of millionaires are fist generation. Wealth tends to collapse over generations in an ultra wealthy family just because the kids aren’t passionate about whatever made the original money and they squander it on half-baked businesses or “bad investments”.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    That "80% of millionaires are first generation" stat is a bit misleading - most of those millionaires are older folk who have reached that status via retirement savings and the explosion in real estate. Those people are not the people being discussed here.
    - Mezzie 3y ago
      It's also questionable how much of that will be passed on at least for Americans. My dad and step-mother are in their mid to late 60s and have ~1 million net worth but a lot of that is wrapped up in their house and retirement accounts, which will probably be taken by the state when they require care in their old age. Nursing home care will eat through all of that without blinking. There's a huge difference between 'retired with a 500k paid off house and about 1 million in net worth' and a 900 million net worth even though both are 'millionaires'.

fallingfrog 3y ago

Something about all of this reminds me of Joseph Tainter’s collapse theory of diminishing returns. Have we reached the point already where returns on investment have already become negative? For at least some sectors, I’d say yes.

dools 3y ago

The only reason growth is seen as good is because our population is increasing. As such growth has been coincidentally correlated with full employment and therefore prosperity. When the population levels out everyone will realise that we don’t need growth to achieve full employment and that optimisation is the new recipe for success. It’s a temporary problem. As for private sector stupidity the antidote is stronger government and stronger institutions that can counter balance people making dumb decisions, not an attempt to regulate or shame away dumb decisions. The only problem is that the private sector has become too fetishised.

steveBK123 3y ago
Yeah I don't think degrowth is a solution that fits with HumanOS. Humans unfortunately are wired to feel change but not levels. That is, standing still rarely feels good no matter how good the current state is. People are wired to seek a better lot in life, on average. This is hard to achieve without growth.
- dools 3y ago
  Degrowth is totally stupid as a movement.
kiba 3y ago
If growth is doing more with less, then I'll welcome it.
- astrange 3y ago
  That is what growth is. (Growing by using more resources is not mandatory at all, and is more expensive.) Degrowth is a bad idea invented by the British to make it look like they collapsed their economy on purpose instead of accidentally. Basically, you always need growth because that's what combats entropy.
- dools 3y ago
  If the population is steady (as it will be by 2050) then you don’t need to increase production unless it’s to meet needs not already met. So the growth imperative now is mostly focused on job creation because people keep getting born. Growth in terms of absolute economic activity becomes less important if more people aren’t being added to the population however there may still be some growth necessary in order to increase equity of outcomes (although we may also just need a redistribution of existing economic activity to meet needs of the many over and above the needs of the few). What I meant by my comment initially is that in an economy where population is increasing rapidly one can just use growth in economic activity as a pretty good proxy for prosperity. Classic case of correlation!= causation though.

andsoitis 3y ago

> more Doesn't the "fault" lie within human nature? The desire for more? If that is true, then why expect an economic system to have a different goal?

ccooffee 3y ago
Is endlessly seeking more truly _human_ nature? I'm reminded of the "Mexican fisherman" parable[0]. [0] https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherman/ https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
- jdaw0 3y ago
  I still hate this story. The difference is that the fisherman without a business empire is one bad week away from ruin and his entire family starving to death.
jvb1000 3y ago
What arguments/evidence do you have to support claim that humans by nature always desire "more"?

green_man_lives 3y ago

Maybe my feelings are a bit hyperbolic, but 2023 really feels like the year that the internet "died". That plus heatwaves, price increases, etc, it really feels like the death throes of neoliberal capitalism akin to what the 70s were for managerial capitalism. It's insane to me that with the threat of climate change looming, the US spent trillions on foreign wars. In the aftermath of 2008, when money was free we spent trillions more on what? More efficient ways to sell shit people didn't need or couldn't afford? We had two decades and trillions upon trillions of dollars to improve our system in so many ways and it was almost entirely squandered. Even the most politically and financially ignorant Americans can feel how crappy our system has been for the last two decades. The question is, what will replace it? A human-centric economy that invests money into physical and human infrastructure? Or the meme of neo-feudalism with people working in Amazon cages and paying for Domino's pizza in installments.

titzer 3y ago
> and it was almost entirely squandered. Oh, it went to exactly the intended place: propping up asset prices, corporate profits, and the stock market. Absolutely nothing was an accident.
zweifuss 3y ago
For me, the Internet was dying in 1997. Ads, scams, and Pr0n were everywhere. Let's recognize that in not-so-small parts of the world, the Internet is still on the path to becoming ubiquitous, reliable, and affordable.
- green_man_lives 3y ago
  I was not even alive during the Eternal September, but the way I feel now feels like how Usenet old-timers describe it.

paulpauper 3y ago

When I wrote in October that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill his company, the street responded in kind, savaging Meta’s stock for burning cash building a metaverse that was never going to exist and now almost at $300 again. nuts. Yeah, so many people in 2022 got this wrong. I don't think Zuck was at much risk of killing his company. Meta stock keeps going up, and is one of the biggest performers on the Nasdaq by far, almost back to its old highs. The metaverse may have been a dud and the company was fined by the EU, but so what. Instagram and Facebook are more dominant than ever, and it's an advertising juggernaut. CPMs and CPC rates at record highs due to record advertising spending. Go ahead and try to find a company that is at the perfect intersection of profits, size, market dominance, and moat like Meta...maybe Microsoft, Alphabet. Not many. It was not just the job cuts...many companies have/had big layoffs , like during the early 2000s or 2008-2010, and did not see anywhere close to such a huge recovery that Meta saw. The markets seemed to ignore the $410 million fine that Meta received for GDPR violations, along with the fact that European users will now have to deliberately opt-in to sharing their data large occasional fines by the EU are bascially seen as a cost of doing business. see Alapbet, which has been fined many times.

wavefunction 3y ago
This all seems like one big sunk cost fallacy in post form.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Meta's CPC/CPM are actually down around 20% YOY according to the last 2 quarters earnings. They're just showing way more ads and growing user base a bit to make up for it.

netbioserror 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago
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juped 3y ago
All the things listed would be deflationary if anything (since people would naturally rein in spending to have a buffer against uncertainty), but you're not supposed to ask about the causal mechanism.
- astrange 3y ago
  Or not, since they didn't do that. Pandemics aren't the kind of uncertainty that makes you save, they're the kind that make you want to enjoy yourself before you died.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    This. I live to experience joy. Anything that gets in the way of that is ignored, executed or voted down.
nosianu 3y ago
[flagged]

pcrh 3y ago

This kind of criticism is unfortunately not new. VCs are routinely criticized for funding enterprises on little more than hunches, and history is replete with examples of investments that made no sense, from the infamous Tulip Mania onward. It really speaks to a few things: 1) how irrational apparently intelligent people can be, 2) the importance of salemanship, and 3) that the value of capital to those who have a lot of it is much less than its value to those who have little, and so they are more willing to take bets such as those described.

Spooky23 3y ago
Being rich doesn’t make you smart. A great example is 2nd generation wealth — it doesn’t tend to end well.

DayDollar 3y ago

It also suspicously starts to look like planned economics, once the mono-duo-poly stage is reached. Rare goods, long queues, no choice, bad products and the leadership is off, chasing its own tail in some basebal metric detached from the world. It even features market-libertarians having to defend practices like shredding perfectly fine goods in ware houses. The moment the ussr was gone, the race horse finally could binge and become something very similar to the ussr economy, but instead of obsessing on tanks & steel, it focused on excel sheet virtual wealth wankery, disguising the slide back into the gilded age feudalism.

abvdasker 3y ago
I mean if you look at the astronomical levels of defense spending the US greatly resembles the USSR even in terms of the "tanks & steel". Broadly this kind of waste and stratification is characteristic of just about every fading empire.
- mistermann 3y ago
  There are some compilations on TikTok of people showing China's public infrastructure to America's (including the ~slums many neighborhoods have become)....not a good look. If the general public had a clue any of this was going on I think they'd be livid.
- rchaud 3y ago
  US defense research gave us DARPA, the first step towards the Internet. What are we getting via VC-led industrial policy? More jobs in selling advertising?
  - Melting_Harps 3y ago
    > What are we getting via VC-led industrial policy? Oh, its much worse than that, it exposes the hyporacy of hustle culture, and entrepreneur porn entirely if you're paying close enough attention with things FTX. The covertness of ivy leagues parents leaning on the VC heavy hitters (Sequoia et al) and making this Sam and his girlfriend to be a super genius' while operating like 2-bit clowns with almost no oversight or due diligence and bribing politicians to get favourable legislation in place for them to corner the market. I wish it were just crumby ad jobs, but it goes way deeper.

bruce511 3y ago

I'm no Alphabet fan, but their sprinkling through this article seems out of place. There are so many good examples (like Uber), that picking on Google and Microsoft, or even Facebook seems unnecessary. The bottom line us that these 3 businesses make money. Billions per quarter. It's coming in so fast they quite literally dont know what to do with it all. The market is fine with billions lost on the metaverse because its a drop in the bucket. An EU fine doesn't move the needle. Yes, Google and Facebook are ad companies, and yes they'd like to be more diverse than that, but the fact remains that ads on Google and Facebook work. People keep spending money there because it works. There's real value in efficient advertising and Google and Facebook have provided that real value. MS already has a diverse business, from OS to Office, from Azure to Xbox, from Teams to Flight Simulator. Bing can afford to be a long-play and seems to be gaining traction. I also cannot help but think that if this article was written in 2006 Amazon would have been the (legitimate) poster child for the point he's making. Billions spent, never profitable. But look at them now. Of course there are failures. Of course most of the money is wasted [1]. This is not a secret , its not even a bug, its baked into the VC model. It's been obvious since forever. The VC model is but one kind of business model, designed for a specific kind of business. And as a model it is applied to a vanishingly small number of actual businesses overall. [1] money is not "wasted" in the sense that water can be wasted by leaving a tap on. It is spent. Salaries, infrastructure, rent, cars, food, whatever - its all "trickling down" to people or actual profitable companies. Selling shovels, and jeans, is more profitable than digging for gold, and less risky, but that one gold digger who strikes it rich keeps hope up for all the others.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
It’s still very clearly wasted though? That money could have gone to more profitable and genuinely innovative businesses that benefit society, instead of startups that were meant to tank from the very beginning. And money isn’t the only resource being wasted here but time. There are also plenty of companies that fail so hard that employees, to whom you believe the wealth trickles down to, are left with nothing to show for what they have supposedly done there, and could even cost them reputation-wise in their careers. This arrangement is hardly anything that the working class should be thankful for.

csomar 3y ago

> When I wrote in October that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill his company, the street responded in kind, savaging Meta’s stock for burning cash building a metaverse that was never going to exist. I can't help but this sentence got me triggered. Does the author honestly believe that his article affected Meta price?

defrost 3y ago
No. "Responded in kind" means "moved in parallel with" | "with similar actions or in an equivalent manner" | etc. The author doesn't claim the market acted because of their article, they mean that the market acted as though it also believed MZ was going to tank Meta.
- crindy 3y ago
  I think the phrasing is confusing because on first parsing, it reads like the market is responding to the article
  - defrost 3y ago
    To my eye, as an Australian with decades of exposure to English Lit., long form essays, and technical writing (UK|Commonwealth English moreso than the central north american offshoot) it's a common idiom that describes other agents acting { in kind, in a similar manner, just as the first person voice did }. I can see the confusion if that's your absolute first parsing of an unfamilar English turn of phrase. For better of worse the language is riddled with such things and they can be very locale centric.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    You say something in a certain way expecting people with a certain level of intellect to eat your shit and glean the meaning you want them to glean, making you more popular or sage-like to those people. Like Fox news.
- morelisp 3y ago
  It's not the idiom, it's poor structure; the object of the clause is ambiguous and could mean "responded to my writing" or "responsed to Mark Zuckerberg". E.g. "While I wrote" or "After I wrote" would remove the implication of causation that "When" has. But really it should just say "The street responded by savaging..." with no authorial preening. That being said, it's a weird thing to get hung up on.

carom 3y ago

This was an extremely good article and captures why I feel (likely incorrectly) so uneasy investing in stocks. These massive price swings have nothing to do with how the company is performing and everything to do with macro levers the government pulls. It feels like a big game of financial engineering rather than investing in a profit making enterprise.

forgetfreeman 3y ago
I wouldn't feel weird about being deeply skeptical of the market. It's nothing more than a casino for oligarchs and wealth management funds.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

There is simply too much money in the world, and too much of it is concentrated in the hands of a small elite that’s able to place increasingly outsized bets on “number goes up”. It feels like the death throes of capitalism.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

For reference, some other titles from the author's blog: Tech's Reckoning; The Scum Economy; Elon's Tragic Kingdom Fire Mark Zuckerberg; The Uncanny Valley; Social Media Is Dying Degenerative AI; Google Should Fire Sundar Pichai Looks like man found his niche :)

nazgulnarsil 3y ago

Let's get angry at economic indicators we have little understanding of. All of them are normative and should do what I say.

politelemon 3y ago

A big point the author relies on is that Google has destroyed its search. And yet I am not seeing it, many people I ask don't see it either. I don't doubt that we all experience using the search engine differently, for me it's still working just fine. It's an unreliable anecdata to hinge your main point on that, it would only make sense if its more widely noted to the extent that its share is dropping significantly and being regularly reported in general media.

badtension 3y ago
You might be interested in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719

noduerme 3y ago

This reads a bit like a complaint that markets are irrational. Lots of people lose money in markets by betting on bad ideas, or companies that are obfuscating their underlying weaknesses. That's part of the purpose markets serve: Moving money from things that suck value into things that add value. If the OP knows better than the market, hopefully they're shorting Facebook stock and, when that plays out, they'll invest their gains in something new that produces real value. Of course, markets can remain irrational longer than it takes to write an embittered blog post...

rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
Or you just have a hatred for criticism of modern-day capitalism. Also, the entire post is exactly about how money (specifically VC) is being thrown at things that don’t actually add value.
- bratbag 3y ago
  I didn't pick up any hatred until I got to your post.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
    Subjective points of view hardly ever consider the whole picture.
- noduerme 3y ago
  No, I just think markets are more complicated, fluid and flexible than critiques like this make it seem. I'm old enough to have witnessed numerous decades-long waves of hype pouring money into sclerotic companies that, at the time, everyone assumed were immortal no matter how corrupt and terrible their decision-making had become - only to watch over and over again as the giants fell. I feel like every wave is accompanied by a sense of hopelessness that things will never change, and then in seemingly an instant, they do change. I'm relatively sanguine that Google and Uber will be replaced by something better (something that's not a con game), and that the people who invest in garbage will end up losing to newer, more agile players. That's how it's always seemed to me when you look at any given 5-10 year horizon. The short term is always frothy. I almost never invest in tech companies... except if I'm looking to make a few quick bucks on some new hype (e.g. I bought Google with a 2-week horizon right after Microsoft announced Bing's AI bot, and after Google took a huge hit because the market overreacted; turned and sold it for a 10% profit). (The exception for me is medical tech which I'm willing to take several-years-long shots on). I sit on real estate and utilities and the odd manufacturer or retailer with a history of increasing dividends, and watch the wilds of the NASDAQ with a daily mixture of jealousy and schadenfreude - because I know my own risk tolerance. Markets are made of people. Companies are made of people. Poor incentives and deception do indeed lead to catastrophic losses and inefficiencies. Corrections are made. Fools and their money are parted. I don't have a hatred of criticism of any sort. I do however think there's a smell when someone walks away after losing at the table and complains about the game.

dmje 3y ago

Literally every left leaning person since the dawn of time: "the world is a closed system so we can't have unlimited growth in anything". Literally every right leaning person since the dawn of time: "MOOOOONNNNNNEEEEEEEYYY!!!!"

ggm 3y ago

When I wrote in October that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill his company, the street responded in kind, savaging Meta’s stock for burning cash building a metaverse that was never going to exist. No.. that "responded" is far too causative. you observed a state of being which others observed and acted on independently: your writing is gold but the street did not "respond" to your writing. That's chutzpah. If your meaning is "when the market saw what I saw, the market responded" that's fine. You don't define the market.

checkyoursudo 3y ago
I think we can take the more charitable view that you have identified. I read it as a bit of self-promotion more than hubris. Like, "I report on the market, and I saw what they were seeing, aren't I a good reporter?"

fzeroracer 3y ago

Realistically, the answer to this problem is simple. More regulations on big tech, vastly higher salaries and less emphasis on stock gambling. The rot within the economy is because someone running a small business is almost impossible nowadays. Either you get destroyed by economy of scale and monopolistic companies taking losses to destroy your marketshare, or you take in venture capital and pray to the altar of growth. If salaries kept up with inflation then there wouldn't be a need to gamble on the stock market to achieve wealth, and that wealth could be fed back into the economy in actually useful ways instead of being accumulated in the hands of wealthy billionaires.

revskill 3y ago

This is Game theory in action afterall. If you don't "grow", you die.

_siis 3y ago

I read the article, and while it touches on a common issue, I don't think it goes far enough. When looking at these problematic incentives that are mentioned, notably the author doesn't really address the incentives like for example where does the money come from. When you talk about venture capitalists, you often are referring to a bank associated with a venture capitalist. Everything in business after all, incentive wise, trickles down from the banking system. We can't change the way we do business when the incentives are fixed, and banking in general is only marginally overseen by government; most of the regulation and praxis is done by the Fed which is not government; but a private institution.

testacct22 3y ago

A weird thing with this article and others: they shit on Google and Facebook, but they never shit on Apple? Why? Is Apple just a serious company in comparison? At least, with Apple I get the impression that some of their products (e.g. mbp) are leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. I can't say the same for any Google or Facebook product

starbugs 3y ago
Apple makes their money from selling products and services rather than selling the user. At least that's the perception. Apple also gets their share of this kind of criticism, but it invites much less of it in this way.
- oersted 3y ago
  Microsoft could be in the same category. They've both had some pretty bad periods, no doubt, but they have been smart and quite diversified for the last decade at least. Same generation of startups too. There might be some insight in that, what changed?
  - starbugs 3y ago
    I don't agree. Microsoft is obviously transitioning into user selling pretty quickly and apparently with great pleasure. It's on a completely different level than Apple. (To be fair, it's not looking very great there either recently.) Just one exhibit to underline my point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34886732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34886732
account-5 3y ago
I see this all the time. Not sure why. Personally the way this guy feels about over valuing companies I feel about the way apple over values it's products. But people still buy them though, same as the companies this article talks about the companies market share going up. There's something wrong there
- deleted 3y ago

amelius 3y ago

The economy is like DOS 1.0. Sustainability requires an entirely new way of thinking.

TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago

I wonder if the author of the article believes his own words. >When I wrote in October that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill his company, the street responded in kind, savaging Meta’s stock. He seems a bit delusional. It picks on the likes of FB, Google,Uber, Tesla and uses that to justify a whole host of things like he's the only sane one and the rest of the market is dumb. FB, Google are money printing machines that will continue for years. >Uber has not made a profit from its businesses This is just a downright lie. Also, uber is still experiencing high revenue growth but it's costs have not been rising for years. Maybe investors can follow a trend line and understand Uber's not going anywhere? >They had a net loss of 1.21 billion last quarter, yet the street fell over itself to praise the company because “gross bookings grew 19% year-over-year” This quote seems especially dishonest. Ubers revenue grew almost 90% YoY... and he uses the 19% bookings as a reason investors liked it?? It's handpicked information to match his points, not reality. He must have searched really hard for the dumb metric.

svilen_dobrev 3y ago

growth-driven-growth - is that a thing? it's tiresome to see it so frequently. Not much difference from amount_to_steal-driven-country-"development"

rchaud 3y ago

> Neuman is seemingly attempting to reinvent the rental market — a diseased, exploitative industry in its own right — in his own image. He’s replacing one cancer with another, only even more aggressive and metastatic. Adam Neumann is the VC industry, he is just cooler and better-looking than anybody on Sand Hill Road. Every VC thinks $industry needs disrupting, for the good of the consumer. What's left unsaid is that after the Soviet-scale subsidies run out, the disruptor will inevitably become as turgid and anti-consumer as the incumbent it sought to replace.

rdlecler1 3y ago

Where some people see problems, other people will see opportunity.

MichaelZuo 3y ago

> The truth is that nothing lasts forever. Companies can (and should) die — or, at the very least, understand that there is an inevitable limit to growth, and eventually they must reconcile with being a stable, albeit plateaued, business. This point seems to negate the rest of the essay. It's true that nothing lasts forever, that includes human labour...

cannabis_sam 3y ago

I mean, what else would anyone expect after capital started siphoning off larger and larger amounts of money from labor in the 70s. Repaying labor with a relative pittance due to growth and simultaneously lowering taxes, just to hoard capital at an ever increasingly more insane rate, while of course dismantling antitrust, will obviously just concentrate capital. Exponentially concentrated capital will need to chase exponential returns… The naive folly of the efficient market hypothesis is its childishly simplified view of the world; a given in a world of economists treating their social sciences as if it were as bound to nature as physics. Although one would’ve hoped politicians weren’t so utterly and devastatingly easy to buy, but they clearly went a long with this insanity. The idiocy of crypto is but a blip compared to the scam run by capital over the last 50 years. It’s simple, just redistribute society’s gains, jfc…

pixl97 3y ago
Just wait till capital can pay for intelligence on a CPU and doesn't have to deal with whiny thinking labor demands any longer.

nick-of-time 3y ago

> This is the problem at the center of almost everything I’ve written. Why are bosses mad they can’t bring people back to the office? Because their alignment of business success isn’t really tied to profit or “success,” but rather the sense that they are “big” and “successful,” which requires a bustling workplace and “ideas.” This is similar to the sentiment of Bullshit Jobs as posted here yesterday. There is a strong incentive within the modern market economy to value perception over reality. This often involves hiring people to look like they're doing something without any consideration as to whether they're doing anything valuable.

ArunRaja 3y ago

Articles claims and my rebuttals: Claim 1: Just chasing the growth, for its own sake devoiding sustainability is bad. > Greed is how humans function, like it or not. Claim 2: Good businesses are left uncared, for the sake of lusturous, suicidal businesses. > Is "good business" a polished term for inefficiency. If so, inefficiency will be severely punished. Claim 3: mass layoffs are bad. > The "highly changing" large scale businesses are bound to adapt to the situations rapidly. Claim 4: Facebook investing in metaverse, crypto boom. > Certain investments payoff only after a certain inflection point. Doesn't mean those investments are worthless.