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WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

mattstoller.substack.com

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Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#431

Post by Kaiyou »

tracker1 wrote: post #430
Kaiyou wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need, I already have a job and eat healthy. It's not that I can't do human interaction, it's that it drains me.

My point was, the more you do it, the better you get at it... kind of like exercise or anything else. By avoiding interactions, it makes it worse over time.

A battery won't get better by providing energy to some device. It gets drained. Similarly, introverts get drained by human interaction, so they need to recharge by staying alone. Extroverts on the other hand get drained by being alone and recharge in company of other humans. Telling an extrovert to not socialize with anyone for a year to get better at it is as much nonsense as telling an introvert to go socialize more to get better at it. That's not how it works.

The more human interaction I can avoid, the better, so I'm recharged when I have to interact with people.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#432

Post by lwb »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #413
lwb wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that crypto coins in a free market tend towards increasing volatility makes them not very good as a medium of account to negotiate contracts and conduct business. Crypto volatility is not solely or even primarily because of the coins' deflationary natures. In fact some cryptos ("shitcoins") are not deflationary at all, and have their value regularly inflated by a central authority. Note that my comment sai…

Gold is very volatile (sure not as much as cryptocoins) and this is for the best as gold volatility prevents it from hurting the macro-economy. You think poor people get a better deal getting a few bucks a year of returns on the little savings that they have while being forced to indirectly fund a much larger subsidy on rich people's wealth, a subsidy that is given specifically to the those who get out of the private…

I won't be responding to follow ups to this conversation as it doesn't feel very fruitful but there's a couple things in your comment that just don't follow for me.

How is an asset that holds its value a subsidy? How are poor people indirectly funding that subsidy by holding an asset that doesn't inflate? Really seems like you're projecting qualities onto something that just aren't there.

Plus there are other factors in wealth inequality besides cash holdings -- wages (minimum or otherwise) that don't keep up with inflation being the most notable.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#433

Post by tracker1 »

Kaiyou wrote: post #431
tracker1 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was, the more you do it, the better you get at it... kind of like exercise or anything else. By avoiding interactions, it makes it worse over time.

A battery won't get better by providing energy to some device. It gets drained. Similarly, introverts get drained by human interaction, so they need to recharge by staying alone. Extroverts on the other hand get drained by being alone and recharge in company of other humans. Telling an extrovert to not socialize with anyone for a year to get better at it is as much nonsense as telling an introvert to go socialize mor…

A muscle doesn't grow stronger with atrophy... likewise, the mind doesn't grow stronger without challenge.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#434

Post by Kaiyou »

tracker1 wrote: post #433
Kaiyou wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A battery won't get better by providing energy to some device. It gets drained. Similarly, introverts get drained by human interaction, so they need to recharge by staying alone. Extroverts on the other hand get drained by being alone and recharge in company of other humans. Telling an extrovert to not socialize with anyone for a year to get better at it is as much nonsense as telling an introvert to go socialize mor…

A muscle doesn't grow stronger with atrophy... likewise, the mind doesn't grow stronger without challenge.

It's like trying to use a tool all the time expecting it to get better instead of wearing itself out. That's not how this works. No matter how good you get at human interaction it won't change the fact that it will drain you, if you're introverted.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#437

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

lwb wrote: post #432
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold is very volatile (sure not as much as cryptocoins) and this is for the best as gold volatility prevents it from hurting the macro-economy. You think poor people get a better deal getting a few bucks a year of returns on the little savings that they have while being forced to indirectly fund a much larger subsidy on rich people's wealth, a subsidy that is given specifically to the those who get out of the private…

I won't be responding to follow ups to this conversation as it doesn't feel very fruitful but there's a couple things in your comment that just don't follow for me. How is an asset that holds its value a subsidy? How are poor people indirectly funding that subsidy by holding an asset that doesn't inflate? Really seems like you're projecting qualities onto something that just aren't there. Plus there are other factors…

>How is an asset that holds its value a subsidy

If it is stabilized by a government to hold its value while marginal assets on the private markets only offers negative returns (adjusted for risk and liquidity), the government stabilized asset is effectively a forced subsidy.

It's a subsidy to those who hold the subsidized asset from those who don't hold any (though long term it's a bit unpredictable who exactly ends up footing the bill, it depends on whether it happens through inflation or taxes or price distortions etc.).

What is super destructive about this type of subsidy is that it displaces private investment. The world shifts from people owning real shit, such as factories, inventories, business infrastructure, machinery, houses, cars, etc. to collectively holding government manipulated tokens. While for an individual, holding the tokens is more advantageous, for the aggregate it's super destructive as it becomes a negative sum game.

Tokens are just IOUs. They don't have intrinsic value. When everyone wealth is in the form of a promise that everyone else owes them something, no one really has anything.

More here:https://medium.com/@b.essiambre/the-world-deserves-a-pay-rai...

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#438

Post by MaysonL »

dantheman wrote: post #347
MaysonL wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look at the history of Diapers.com, now owned by Amazon.

Diapers was purchased by Amazon -- not run out of business.

Purchased by Amazon after being nearly run out of business by predatory pricing.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#439

Post by pas »

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…

Containers, k8s (or k3s, because less bloat) and micro-SOA (but preferably in a monorepo) make development easier.

Overdoing the infra-HA-magic is bad, of course. But if you use containers, you can spin up dev envs faster, devs can just docker-compose (I still recommend Vagrant + docker, so devs can use whatever OS they like), and it helps with config management a bit too. (Much easier testing, deployment and upgrades.)

That said paying for AWS is the worst idea ever, it's so overpriced and the most used servie is EC2, which people could get anywhere else. (Sure, there are probably nice tricks that this pony can do, but there's probably a whole cottage industry trying to copy their niche offerings.)

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#440

Post by pas »

dv_dt wrote: post #321
helen___keller wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The subprime crisis is completely unrelated! And if anything it was proof that money-making assets should be scrutinized more. The subprime mortgage crisis is basically godwin's law for finance. Want to make something look awful? Compare it to CDOs or mortgage-backed securities.

That’s because it’s such a massive example of a systematic corporate private capital failure that was bailed out by equally massive public power while regular people were left on the hook. No other industry has gotten that kind of bailout that far into supposed maturity.

Huh. Many sectors are "strategically important" and are constantly subsidized. Farming. Everywhere in the world. Automotive industry. Fossil related industries (oil subsidies).

https://www.thebalance.com/government-subsidies-definition-f...

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