391–400 of 690 posts
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How does this have anything to do with the claim that it was "best years for most big businesses"? Do "most big businesses" do better when that happens?
There were two quantified subjects in the quote you referenced - "biggest shock to economy" and "best years for most big businesses". My guess is he was replying about the first subject.
Is "NIFO" really the right way to do accounting? If you sell the government one aircraft carrier, the cost of producing a second one will be much lower, so NIFO doesn't seem to fit there.
I think NIFO applies only to variable costs. Fixed costs are fundamentally different. Also, low-volume items like aircraft carriers are probably a bad example. Aircraft carriers are ordered and built in small, specific quantities; I think it makes more sense to account for building a single aircraft carrier as a construction project rather than as a unit of mass production. Almost like you were building a small airpo…
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Pretty sure many in the middle class do the exact same thing. That's the whole idea behind mortgages, auto loans, etc -- to fund consumption on credit and pay the interest with income.
For the middle-class, the closest would be a home equity line of credit (HELOC). Reverse mortgages are also a variant of this. Generally though, most 'middle-class loans' have an end date.
Difference is just the volume of money and when the term is due.
Anyone who has played Factorio knows that "just in time" is far superior to actually holding reserves. If you buffer things up, you don't know where the problems in your production are. People are saying "why didn't we buffer up more" ? Well, there we go. Play Factorio. You'll see just how bad buffers are in a simulated factory.
On the other hand, sometimes, it's straight ahead bad luck. A chip we use in one of our products is made in a semiconductor fab in Malaysia. It's the only place in the world that makes the chip. That fab has been shut down for about 6 months as the nation struggles with COVID. In the meantime, the inventory in the supply chain, and even customer warehouses, has been picked clean by brokers to be re-sold for high-cost…
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Inflation generally helps big business and its owners. They get to raise prices, and they usually get to raise prices more than the average firm does because they have little competition. You're seeing this now with record-high corporate earnings. As long as the capital-owning class is holding equity (stocks, real estate) they benefit from inflation.
> Inflation generally helps big business and its owners. I'm not sure that follows in extreme cases. I don't even think it follows in baseline cases (2% inflation yoy). Raising prices leaves customers with limited resources, as wages do not follow at anywhere near the same rate. If inflation brings prices up, consumers can only spend on specific items, prioritizing necessities over entire verticals of goods. For the…
Take a look at a sampling of the top 50 or so companies by market cap. There's computing & telecom (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, NVidia, Intel, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Broadcom, Cisco), which is fundamental to obtaining products & services these days. Retail (Amazon, Walmart, Costco, Target, Home Depot, and Lowe's). Financial services, necessary for paying for things (JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America). Critical enterprise software (Oracle, Salesforce). Health care (United Health, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Abbott Labs, Merck). Oil (Exxon and Chevron).
Of the top 50, the only ones that I think would be seriously vulnerable are Tesla, Netflix, and possibly branded foodstuffs (Coke/Pepsi/McDonalds). Sure, it'll be devastating to the vast majority of companies - but it's companies like restaurants, niche hobby stores, luxury activities, etc, not the staples that make up the S&P 500.
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> Finally, the exemption isn't limited to e-commerce sites. It isn't really an exemption, anyway, it is a limitation under then-existing federal law on the power of states to impose taxes. > According to wikipedia, it includes "companies doing mail order, online shopping, and home shopping by phone". That's misleading. What it actually applied to, at the time, was companies without physical presence in the state into…
1. What changed with the internet? When amazon was started in the 90s, was the ubiquity of computer+internet access anywhere close to the ubiquity of the sears catalog? 2. I'm not really convinced that "the sales tax hack wasn't worthwhile". How expensive would it be to spin off your mail order division? Lawyers might be expensive, but 7.25% of your revenue is also a lot of money.
Someone could click a link on an ad and be on your “catalog” and able to order with very low friction, rather than seeing an ad, ordering a catalog, getting the catalog, then calling in or mailing an order.
(Also, Amazon was initially specifically in books, and got started just after a few giants like B&N and Borders had crushed local independent bookstores and replaced them with giant, discounting, but more impersonal and on average more distant from the customer big box stores, so they were hitting a market uniquely (or at least particularly) primed for a convenient to access heavily discounting remote seller; not only was the internet a sea change
Every time I read through a business discussion on HN I cringe. The lack of understanding is, at times, astounding. And yet everyone thinks they "know" what's going on and base a bunch of conclusions and opinions on exactly nothing.
Sometimes I wonder how it is that people rationalize having these opinions and reaching these conclusions when it is obvious they have not taken a single business class and they have never run a non-trivial business.
I hate to bring-up Dunning-Kruger. Yes, I know, some call it controversial. OK, I won't. I'll call it "talking out of your ass". Because, frankly, to someone with real business experience, this is almost exactly what it all sounds like. People talking about stuff they know nothing about. Not sure why some feel compelled to do that, yet, they do.
If you are a software developer, imagine someone posting a bunch of opinions on a relevant subject and you instantly knowing they have no clue what they are talking about. I don't know, scaling Django. Pick anything you really know and imagine a person "talking out of their ass". Well, that's what it looks like in these business/economics discussions most of the time. You can count the number of people who actually know what they are talking about with one or two hands most of the time. The rest is noise.
I don't know where it comes from, but it is in a range between funny, silly and sad.
He's right to point out that the obsession with RoE is a big part of the problem. He's wrong to suggest that the billionaire class and founders will solve the problem if we only trust them and let them keep their money. Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system, they just call it "disruptive innovation" by which they mean tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out p…
Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. They'll never go back to pre-ROE days because they'd have to live with less money and worse less control. While they still have personal reserves in the billions they can decide the fate of their ventures but if say 20% of their current cash was on the balance sheets of corporations with boa…
Anyone who has played Factorio knows that "just in time" is far superior to actually holding reserves. If you buffer things up, you don't know where the problems in your production are. People are saying "why didn't we buffer up more" ? Well, there we go. Play Factorio. You'll see just how bad buffers are in a simulated factory.
Just as anyone who has played Sim City 2000 knows that Los Angeles sprawl is far superior to living in a city .
I'm simply pointing out that Factorio has a factory-like system that has the "buffering" problem innate to the game mechanics. As far as I can tell, the problem of buffering in real life is closely modeled by Factorio correctly.
Sim City is on the unrealistic side. But Factorio / Hearts of Iron / OpenTTD seem to do a good job of making the "real world issues translate well into a game". I think most people would benefit if they played those games and learned from them.