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WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

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Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#321

Post by PhantomGremlin »

pjc50 wrote: post #284
toddmorey wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, education in the US is very broken.

It remains unlooted so far. It needs a layer of opaque billing, routinely bankrupting its customers, and profit extraction to match the healthcare industry.

It remains unlooted so far.

On the contrary, public employee unions (including teachers) have done a masterful job of enriching themselves at public expense. E.g. Oregon:

Member accounts saw appreciable and consistent growth during this time, but underlying pension assets did not grow to cover the increased benefit guarantee. Career public employees who worked from 1970 to 2000 often were entitled to retirement income replacement rates over 130% of their pre-retirement earnings.[1]

Show me private sector pensions (if you can still find any) that come close to that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Public_Employees_Retire...

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#322

Post by PhantomGremlin »

fxfan wrote: post #308
john_moscow wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One opinion about the unrealistically high valuations of companies like WeWork, Uber, etc is that Saudis like to feel that they are buying control over Americans' lives. Pure vanity, not much long-term planning, IMO. The whole "We Company" stunt looks like a desperate attempt to highlight this property in the face of a disappointed would-be buyer.

Look I'm as far from politics as I cam but Citibank (big share by Saudis) decided Obama's foreign ambassadors. They also managed to run away after 9/11 (bush) and to get Obama to veto the bill allowing them to be sued. So they control both parties

They also managed to run away after 9/11

They're still running away, but we want their dollars so we keep allowing this behavior:

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden is asking the Trump Administration for answers about whether the Saudi government helped a Saudi national flee the U.S. after he was accused of killing an Oregon teenager.

http://time.com/5490263/ron-wyden-saudi-arabia-suspect-flee/

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#323

Post by Smithalicious »

CM30 wrote: post #237
komali2 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some systematic issue with naming that has existed at Nintendo since the 90s. Thinking: Nintendo entertainment system and super Nintendo entertainment system. Not necessarily bad, but also kinda "meh." Probably the best 90s explanation for what a "console" is, before everyone already knows what a console is. I bring it up because here begins Nintendo's critical error: failing to understand the customer in Ame…

There's also the 2DS, and the 2DS XL. Oh, and the New Nintendo 3DS XL. They all play the same games though, so yeah, good luck explaining which is which to a casual buyer. The very 2DS name sounds like it should be a weaker system than the 3DS, despite coming out later and being mostly the same bar the stereostopic 3D visuals. Names certainly haven't been their strong suit.

DS was a dumb name. 3DS was clever. 2DS was bad but I don't know what they should've called the "3DS that isn't 3D" otherwise (3D-isn't?). After that they should've just stopped, I cannot fathom why they did the New whateverDS stuff when the naming was already getting out of hand.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#324

Post by anyfoo »

komali2 wrote: post #221
bobthepanda wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the Nintendo strategy. Why anyone at Nintendo thought that the Wii U was a good name for a completely new console is beyond me.

There's some systematic issue with naming that has existed at Nintendo since the 90s. Thinking: Nintendo entertainment system and super Nintendo entertainment system. Not necessarily bad, but also kinda "meh." Probably the best 90s explanation for what a "console" is, before everyone already knows what a console is. I bring it up because here begins Nintendo's critical error: failing to understand the customer in Ame…

I don’t think it affects your main point, which I think is about the SNES and forward, but the naming of the NES and its “sober” redesign of the Japanese FamiCom for the US was very deliberate, and Part of Nintendo’s winning move after the video game crash. This video goes into great detail: https://youtu.be/B9kyey_qxNM

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#325

Post by reustle »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #257

I get these financial criticisms, I doubt they'll last long when the recession hits. We were in one recently and I remember seeing a bulletin board thing I think showing stuff from their Instagram, but it said they're opening 40+ buildings a month. And there's probably 10 in walking distance of the City now. It's pretty insane. That said, we moved from a WeWork to a Spaces (the Regus clone-ish) and it's incredible th…

Surprised at how many locations they have, if this is the correct company:

https://www.spacesworks.com/locations/

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#326

Post by sbensu »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #256
kgwgk wrote: post #93

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-08/wework... "In addition to the corporate finance weirdness: “Going forward, the company will no longer be called WeWork but rather The We Company.” (“The switch is not a legal name change,” okay.) And: “Rather than just renting desks, the company aims to encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds,” which is—and I have spent years w…

The dystopian novel "We" tells the story of a society which encompass all aspects of your life, in both physical and mental worlds. >"We is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State, an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, which assists mass surveillance. The structure of the state is Panopticon-like, and life is scientifically managed F. W. Taylor-style." https://en.wikipe…

Wow, I thought you were making that up to fit the mood... until the Wikipedia article. This is bananas.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#327

Post by setr »

p1necone wrote: post #306
bobthepanda wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not the "serious" console. But you can't cash serious at the bank. Being everybody's second or third choice has made Nintendo hand over fist the past couple years.

Yep, as a reasonably heavy gamer for the past three generations my consoles have been a Playstation or an XBox, and always a Nintendo console (and a PC) as well. Although I don't see why, in an alternate universe we couldn't have one company making the "serious, powerful" console and two companies competing on the "fun, less expensive, great first party titles (although not so much less expensive now with the switch)…

I find that its difficult to justify an xbox/ps purchase, especially when the biggest titles get shared between them, while its usually trivial to justify nintendo.

I also find it humorous that xbox/ps have gone down the road of building an “entertainment system” (which is part of the justification issue; the price is always higher for it, for things I don’t need/care, especially since I have a pc for that stuff), while nintendo stuck much closer to games specifically, despite the NES name.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#328

Post by lsc »

williamdclt wrote: post #226
lsc wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but that's pretty true of all tech offices I've been to in the last few years. Even FAANG companies where they're paying their engineers a lot. Over time, it seems like I'm getting less and less noise dampening... my last office, they had these little fabric cardboard deals they clipped to the edge of the desk... before that, I worked at smaller places, where there were a few people per office, and before that, I wor…

What I'm going to say is a very personal opinion and I understand well that it's not everybody's: You'd have to pay me a lot of money to have me work in a place with separate offices or with people that think that "accidental eye contact is just not okay". A lot of people (not arguing that it's the majority, I have no idea) are actually more productive and happy in an open space than in a box cut out from the rest of…

>You'd have to pay me a lot of money to have me work in a place with separate offices or with people that think that "accidental eye contact is just not okay".

I guarantee that you work with someone who doesn't want to accidentally make eye contact through their monitors while trying to work. You don't even need to be particularly introverted, i think, to find faces distracting when trying to code, and introverts, historically, have been attracted to the industry.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#329

Post by adrianratnapala »

bartread wrote: post #206
kgwgk wrote: post #93

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-08/wework... "In addition to the corporate finance weirdness: “Going forward, the company will no longer be called WeWork but rather The We Company.” (“The switch is not a legal name change,” okay.) And: “Rather than just renting desks, the company aims to encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds,” which is—and I have spent years w…

"The We Company": somebody didn't check what that sounds like when spoken in British English. Wait, what? A company that manufactures and or sells wee?!?? (Pee, to our American friends.) It's not as extreme as powergenitalia or expertsexchange but still something of a facepalm.

They presumably did think about what it sounded like. And they presumably also noticed that it worked for Nintendo.

Re: WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality

#330

Post by ksec »

dunpeal wrote: post #3

Crazy valuations for startups like WeWork remind me of the Dot Com bubble, when companies put up a shiny new "high tech" facade in front of entirely traditional business models, then expected to be valued at a large multiple of a normal company with that well trodden value proposition. We all know how well that ended. Companies that want the sky-high valuations of innovative high tech should be, you know, actually in…

Well, most of the Dot Com bubble companies had literally no revenue. So I think we might see a scale down in these type of valuation, but in terms of revenue generation and Technology penetration we are no where near the absurd Dot Com bubble era.
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