WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism • Hacker News Board

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#351

Post by braindead_in » Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 4:41 AM UTC

IanDrake wrote: post #15

braindead_in wrote: post #6

Counterfeit capitalism is a nice term. I think neoliberalism will be labeled as such by historians in the future. The collapse of Bretton Woods and the subsequent neoliberal laissez faire economics set off a chain reaction which led to the 2008 sub prime crisis and the current climate crisis. The world will eventually move away from that. Friedman was wrong. Society is not built on greed.

Can you connect the collapse of Bretton Woods and laissez faire economics for me? It seemed like you were implying a connection, but I don't see it.

Bretton Woods system collapsed due the stagflation crisis of the 70's. Economists started re-thinking Keynesian economics and the gold standard was abandoned. That precipitated the collapse. [1]

The Chicago School economists were successful in pushing through the neoliberal agenda. They were so successful that both democrats and republicans adopted it en masse. Even Singapore adopted neoliberalism. There is direct correlation between increase in income inequality with the switch to neoliberal policies. [2]

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/about/histend.htm

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-t...

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#352

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 5:18 AM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #158

cs702 wrote: post #149

Despite a bit of exaggeration and unnecessarily salty language, I found the OP to be a though-provoking piece, well worth the read. This passage, in particular, struck a chord with me -- it criticizes all the money-burning unicorns selling products and services below cost: "What predatory pricing does is to enable competition purely based on access to capital. Someone like Neumann, and Son’s entire model with his Vis…

Everyone in this thread is nodding sagely along with this while not thinking about how this insanity drives up their own tech salaries to insane levels which will collapse soon after the vision fund collapses.

You know, I'd stomach a helluva pay cut if it meant I didn't have to choose between:

- tinker with cool tech all day

- do something meaningful

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#353

Post by hef19898 » Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 5:23 AM UTC

streetcat1 wrote: post #187

hef19898 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with the last pint, people completely tend to ignore the effort and attention to detail Amazon puts into executive and planning. That plus a very sound strategy. Also Amazon was profitable, even if just barely, for the most time while growing appr. 20% constantly. Not comparable to, say, WeWork from what I know. But it shows how powerful that narrative can be.

The only difference between wework and amazon is the way they finance their money-losing ventures. Wework does that via the private market, hence the game is up when it needs access to the public markets. Amazon does that via AWS. AWS is the money that fuels the eCommerce side. The game will be up when: 1) Kubernetes will move AWS customers back to on-prem, or at least turn clouds into a commodity. Amazon knows that…

So tue. AWS is generating the biggest part of overall profits while contributing 10% of revenue (from top of my head, so numbers might be wrong). Only logic that one day Amazon would be split up. Might also partially explain the high valuation.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#354

Post by AceJohnny2 » Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 5:59 AM UTC

skinnymuch wrote: post #310

Hongwei wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, no one in SV ever believed in WeWork except Softbank. I couldn't find anyone to take the Bull case on WeWork, whereas at least some people could argue Uber had a real business model that depended on self driving cars. WeWork, and Theranos before it, are not really the norm in SV. But SV and the tech ecosystem in general has a culture of "money talks," so when Softbank and Kissinger start backing these ri…

Softbank didn’t start investing in WeWork until others had gotten it to a $16B valuation 3-4 years ago. A lot of the investors weren’t SV but some were in its history.

> others had gotten it to a $16B valuation

Which just shows how much "valuation" is bullshit. I would've thought that was clear ever since 37Signals were (sarcastically) valued at $100B in 2009:

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-...

(They repeated the joke at least in 2011 and 2015. Maybe 2009 wasn't the first time either)

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#355

Post by chx » Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 6:03 AM UTC

streetcat1 wrote: post #187

hef19898 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with the last pint, people completely tend to ignore the effort and attention to detail Amazon puts into executive and planning. That plus a very sound strategy. Also Amazon was profitable, even if just barely, for the most time while growing appr. 20% constantly. Not comparable to, say, WeWork from what I know. But it shows how powerful that narrative can be.

The only difference between wework and amazon is the way they finance their money-losing ventures. Wework does that via the private market, hence the game is up when it needs access to the public markets. Amazon does that via AWS. AWS is the money that fuels the eCommerce side. The game will be up when: 1) Kubernetes will move AWS customers back to on-prem, or at least turn clouds into a commodity. Amazon knows that…

Kubernetes is only a threat in that it is a buzzword much as cloud is a buzzword. The cloud and Kubernetes both are used to sell a triple fallacy: You need to care about scaling from day one, there is an easy way to scale, this way is the cloud/Kubernetes.

For almost all startups their app would run comfortably on a single dedicated server. This has been true for many, many years but only the YAGNI greybeards would go with it. Maybe two HA but even HA is overhyped, it's cheaper to be down. Down is part of this industry, you will be down in many circumstances anyways so perhaps don't chase a unicorn? Of course, above a certain size, two servers make sense but ... don't overdo it even then. You don't need microservices, you don't need containers. All of this is unnecessary hype. (And yes, both of you who works at a large enough company where being down is enough of a problem that it worths engineering about: good for you. I have architected a Top 100 website myself and we still didn't use more than a dozen servers and that included the staging infra.)

Gary Bernhardt of WAT fame from 2015 https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/600783770925420546?...

> Consulting service: you bring your big data problems to me, I say "your data set fits in RAM", you pay me $10,000 for saving you $500,000.

Very strongly related: a terabyte of RAM in just 16 modules so it fits most server boards is now under $5000 https://memory.net/product/p00926-b21-hp-1x-64gb-ddr4-2933-l...

Final shot, codinghorror of StackOverflow fame: https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/347070841059692545

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#356

Post by nordsieck » Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 6:40 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #299

WalterBright wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I buy a lot more books from Amazon than I did before Amazon existed. The reasons are simple: 1. I can get pretty much any book ever printed, not just newly printed books. 2. Prices are usually better. 3. The friction to buying them is very low. If I want to buy books by the lot, such as every book in a series, I usually go to ebay.

1. True for mainstream books, absolutely not true for academic special interest titles. Many books simply aren't available - including some still-in-print titles from academic publishers. 2. Ditto. Pricing algos and greed can do insane things to prices. When I needed one out-of-print academic title recently the copies on Amazon were going for four figures. Luckily the author had uploaded a PDF to his web site. For ot…

> True for mainstream books, absolutely not true for academic special interest titles. Many books simply aren't available - including some still-in-print titles from academic publishers.

Sure. But you wouldn't find those at B&N either. Amazon isn't in danger of putting university bookstores out of business.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#357

Post by rexarex » Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 7:23 AM UTC

chx wrote: post #355

streetcat1 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only difference between wework and amazon is the way they finance their money-losing ventures. Wework does that via the private market, hence the game is up when it needs access to the public markets. Amazon does that via AWS. AWS is the money that fuels the eCommerce side. The game will be up when: 1) Kubernetes will move AWS customers back to on-prem, or at least turn clouds into a commodity. Amazon knows that…

Kubernetes is only a threat in that it is a buzzword much as cloud is a buzzword. The cloud and Kubernetes both are used to sell a triple fallacy: You need to care about scaling from day one, there is an easy way to scale, this way is the cloud/Kubernetes. For almost all startups their app would run comfortably on a single dedicated server. This has been true for many, many years but only the YAGNI greybeards would g…

Cheaper to be down? I guess if you don’t have users sure.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#358

Post by pts_ » Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 7:32 AM UTC

> Son is a powerful and connected political operator

Yeah no shit. Most money is built on satisfying egos than actual work. It's a house of cards which will face its greatest challenge with the climate crisis.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#359

Post by throwaway744678 » Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 7:43 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #156

throwaway744678 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, but Ponzi would be an even better candidate, though.

People usually know what Ponzi is about so comparing unrelated things to it is going to be obviously wrong. But most people have very murky idea beyond "something in capitalism went bad" when talking about the subprime crisis, so any time anybody wants to criticize anything going bad in capitalism, they are free to grab this example with low(er) risk of being called out.

I was thinking of a Godwin equivalent for finance, which is narrower than capitalism as a whole.

What I had in mind is that once you take several rounds of investments (especially from private individuals) and are not profitable, bad faith critics may try to picture you as some kind of Ponzi scheme (trying to repay early investors with late ones, etc.)

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#360

Post by chx » Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 7:52 AM UTC

rexarex wrote: post #357

chx wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubernetes is only a threat in that it is a buzzword much as cloud is a buzzword. The cloud and Kubernetes both are used to sell a triple fallacy: You need to care about scaling from day one, there is an easy way to scale, this way is the cloud/Kubernetes. For almost all startups their app would run comfortably on a single dedicated server. This has been true for many, many years but only the YAGNI greybeards would g…

Cheaper to be down? I guess if you don’t have users sure.

Having a hot spare, a database slave and a mirror of your assets so you can manually fail over? Probably a good idea. Architecting a very HA infra? Now wait and look hard at all the possible downtime causes (you have a DDoS provider for sure, Voxility or Cloudflare probably, what if they go down and so forth) and so and then look at what you are protecting against: a hardware failure which is exceedingly rare and again you can manually failover. The costs vs benefits will not come out in your favor up to a very large company size where even the smallest amount of downtime is so costly it doesn't matter how many engineering hours go into avoiding it.