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The History of the Dot Com Era

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Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#81

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

zozbot234 wrote: post #71
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. The difficult problems haven't changed much in hundreds or thousands of years. What happens when "people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems" have spent a few centuries actually doing this? Yep, ideologies. That is, sem…

We don't need to throw away everything , just the stuff that we can't reach consensus about. The rest is what we generally call Common Sense.

So, no liberalism, no marxism, no capitalism, no Keynsian economics (probably no economics), no psychotherapy, no rock music ... the list is long for the things we can't reach consensus about.

What's left tends to be not so much "common sense" as "the stuff that supports the status quo, whatever it is", because human psychology tends to have a strong pro-status quo bias.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#82

Post by aazaa »

The most enduring lesson about the Dot Com bubble was not the bubble itself, but rather how little the bursting of the bubble registered in real time. Go back to any popular press in early March 2000 and you'll find little hint that the declines were anything other than temporary. Sure, the odd contrarian would be trotted out from time to time, but mainly for sport.

Ditto the GFC. I remember being in the audience of Startup School circa 2008 and some editor from a business magazine gave a talk about how he didn't give a hoot about "Subprime." What he really cared about was productivity declines.

When you get a real bubble going, so many have attached everything to it that they just can't bring themselves to actually look at it objectively. People can actually say "new economy" or "new paradigm" or "the old rules don't apply" with a straight face.

By that metric, "the everything bubble" we currently have is nowhere close to popping. The bears are everywhere. When the last prominent bear goes into hibernation, the inevitable won't be far.

I think this phenomenon deserves more attention.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#83

Post by tluyben2 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #18
tluyben2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will burst. But probably not for a year or two. The current hyped up everything + large scale money printing by the EU + US makes me want to put actual gold bars under my bed.

I believe many people would rather buy gold bars if this wasn't regulated heavily. Today gold bars are not much different from paper money - they must have a label of a licensed foundry, can only be traded by licensed merchants and the price at which an individual can sell a random piece of gold usually is well below the market AFAIK. Cryptocurrencies are way more convenient but are themselves a bubble (which I find…

Also, in case of an economic depression, cryptocurrencies will crater. It has not tested really yet, but I would bet on them sinking to near $0 in that case. Time will tell, but I'll be in gold anyway when the bank run comes to exchange cryptos to something to buy actual bread.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#84

Post by noduerme »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #81
zozbot234 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need to throw away everything , just the stuff that we can't reach consensus about. The rest is what we generally call Common Sense.

So, no liberalism, no marxism, no capitalism, no Keynsian economics (probably no economics), no psychotherapy, no rock music ... the list is long for the things we can't reach consensus about. What's left tends to be not so much "common sense" as "the stuff that supports the status quo, whatever it is", because human psychology tends to have a strong pro-status quo bias.

Couldn't we also say that stripped of their dogmas, these are all useful lenses? They're tools we have access to. Options. We've also collected a lot of information about when they might and might not be the appropriate device, or when they might even be harmful. The idea isn't to throw out history, nor to maintain the status quo. It's to solve individual problems using the best tools for the job, without getting emotional or activistic or wearing a t-shirt or waving a flag or joining the cult that revolves around the tool.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#85

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

noduerme wrote: post #84
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, no liberalism, no marxism, no capitalism, no Keynsian economics (probably no economics), no psychotherapy, no rock music ... the list is long for the things we can't reach consensus about. What's left tends to be not so much "common sense" as "the stuff that supports the status quo, whatever it is", because human psychology tends to have a strong pro-status quo bias.

Couldn't we also say that stripped of their dogmas, these are all useful lenses? They're tools we have access to. Options. We've also collected a lot of information about when they might and might not be the appropriate device, or when they might even be harmful. The idea isn't to throw out history, nor to maintain the status quo. It's to solve individual problems using the best tools for the job, without getting emo…

> to solve individual problems

Individual problems like:

* how do you distribute a resource that isn't evenly distributed on the planet?

* what, if anything, do you do about the variation in abilities across different people?

* what, if anything do you as various people in a community start to gain (and wield) more power than others?

* how do you address free riders?

There are so many more. The answers to these questions are not "right" and "wrong". They're not even of the form "this is best compromise we could come up with". The answers someone feels are best will be highly dependent on their values, which we know vary significantly. You can't just wish away the differences between what an eco-socialist would say about these things and an anarcho-capitalist. They are real differences, representing fundamentally different ideas about the nature of humanity, the role of government, the purpose of society and much more.

And as I said above, people have thought about these questions for centuries, and their answers generally fall into distinct groups (even if they are not all identical). We call these "ideologies".

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#86

Post by watersb »

wazoox wrote: post #57

Ah, the dotcom era. I ditched a job offer from Silicon Graphics (remember this one?) to join a startup just as the bubble started to burst (late 99). The guy who's got the job I refused then went on to be one of the early employees at O[...] and then H[...] Inc., where he's now EMEA director of something (and rich, I suppose though terribly overworked). My startup had most of its founding hopes in no other company th…

Ah yes... the Taco Bell across the street from SGI. Before it tanked and became that laser-tag place.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#87

Post by qwerty456127 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #83
qwerty456127 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe many people would rather buy gold bars if this wasn't regulated heavily. Today gold bars are not much different from paper money - they must have a label of a licensed foundry, can only be traded by licensed merchants and the price at which an individual can sell a random piece of gold usually is well below the market AFAIK. Cryptocurrencies are way more convenient but are themselves a bubble (which I find…

Also, in case of an economic depression, cryptocurrencies will crater. It has not tested really yet, but I would bet on them sinking to near $0 in that case. Time will tell, but I'll be in gold anyway when the bank run comes to exchange cryptos to something to buy actual bread.

I believe there is a chance that cryptocurrencies will crater but I would not be so sure they will. Cryptocurrencies have liquidity/value backed by black and gray markets (not entirely, but in a big proportion) which will always be there (and probably even boom) when the white markets crash. Cryptocurrencies also can't be emitted in unlimited volumes at just the feds' will so are immune to inflation which tends to skyrocket for fiat currencies in events of huge crises. It may even happen that in such an event some states will address booming inflation by officially making cryptocurrencies legal tenders.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#88

Post by blippage »

cptnapalm wrote: post #63

On some stock related subreddits, people are comparing the current bull run to the dot com era. Most of the people doing that have no idea how utterly insane the dot com era was. One company, Pixelon, blew all their capital on a party featuring KISS and a reunion of the Who. One IPO announcement I recall featured a guy holding his burned copy of Red Hat with his name written on it in marker.

One commentator remarked, looking back, that the sign that the bull market is at the top is when deals happen that are outrageous even by the standards of the time.

The AOL/Time Warner merger is one example, although there would have been others. There's a general sense of euphoria, and even through the adrenaline rush, people are still in awe at the audacity of corporate actions.

In the UK, there was a short series called "Who wants to be an Internet Millionaire", an obvious word-play on the game show "Who wants to be an Millionaire". In it, start-ups pitched their internet ideas, Dragon's Den style (except the investors weren't up themselves).

I also remember Lastminute.com. The amount of media coverage that has was ridiculous, and seemed to centre around the fact that one of the founders, Martha Lane Fox, was a woman.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#89

Post by andrepd »

zozbot234 wrote: post #73
andrepd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. Why is "ideology" a bad thing? I have ideological positions that can't be rationally derived from first principles: universal human rights, belief in freedom, belief in tolerance. Why are people with strong values and beliefs mere drones, while the…

You're assuming that technologically-focused folks "accept[] the current broad system and ruling class" and have only small ambitions. Neither of these assumptions seems especially warranted.

I'm simply following the train of thought put forward by GP.
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