341–350 of 540 posts
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I walked in oculus for like 10 minutes, and I puked. The technology isn't ready.
Lots of people get car sick but nobody would say that the car isn't ready yet.
And we never need Oculus for anything. That's a big difference.
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Plus we pretty much lowered rates to 0. Europe's experimentation with negative interest rates yielded... well it's debatable whether it yielded anything of substance (pun intended). So there's pretty much nowhere else to go, and if we want to have the option to lowering rates to combat future crises... well it looks like we'll have to pay for the option. Human complacency never ceases to fuck things up. Those who ser…
On the contrary. We're not complacent. The Fed is raising rates, like it should be. Its a known fact that the Fed Rate takes months, maybe years, before its effects propagate through the economy. The 2.25% raise in just a few months is the steepest increase in decades, one of the most proactive moves ever done. -------- But we as a society need to also be proactive and understand what this means. It means higher mort…
What kept inflation at 2% was a perfect historical moment in global growth/globalization that will not come again in our lifetimes. Now when we need to borrow and invest in our economies the most, the cheap money is nowhere to be found up because we spent it all.
It was a big party, and instead of having a few drinks and going home slightly buzzed we binged out, threw up in the toilet and are now waking up in a puddle of our own making with a raging hangover. And now all of a sudden we're being proactive because we've decided drinking a glass of water might be a good idea? Yeah, it was a good idea last night. It's the only idea left now.
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> centuries Centuries ? I haven't taken a close look at VR (though I'm flirting with buying a headset soon, just for kicks...) but I'd always assumed it was more like 10-25 years away. What are the hardware breakthroughs that you think would do it?
True lightfield display would be a start....
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A strategy my friend used was to get the "soft offer" and then shop around for a team for as long as it takes to find one that excited him.
That's literally just Google's hiring practices. There is a team matching phase for all engineers.
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> The economy is stabilizing. The economy is in the early phases of the biggest Fed tightening since at least the 1980s. If you know where that will end up, congrats. For the rest of us, it's very much uncharted waters.
> The economy is in the early phases of the biggest Fed tightening since at least the 1980s. But the 2010s through 2020s period is a myth, a figment of cheap money. This money was made cheap to help us get out of the 2007/2008 recession, but the cheap money clearly went on too long. Its warped all of our thinking. We should have been raising rates and paying down the Fed's balance sheet a long, long time ago. To be f…
We thought the near 0% rates had no consequences except for housing and a few other non china influenced products. It turns out the inflation was there but china's ramp up hid it. In fact, in hindsight we saw inflation everywhere except in china's manufacturing (and perhaps an oil sands boom helped too). But china manufactured so much of what we consume we didn't notice the consequences.
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That's what I'm hearing; we didn't dodge a recession it just hasn't started yet. In TX energy prices are already up a lot this year. We generate a substantial percentage of electricity from natural gas, and exports are up for obvious reasons. Winter is coming.
Thanks to the shale boom natural gas has been effectively free in the US (as a byproduct of shale oil production) for the last few years. For various reasons the boom has reverted to the mean (although shale is still very much around), and as a result natural gas in the US has gone from "free" to "not free". Prices will go up, but we'll be fine. We still literally have more gas than we know what to do with. It's the…
It certainly wasn't "free" in Feb 2021. We have about a 3% hike on our bills now to pay down the record profits gas producers received.
My bill last cycle was 20% higher than last year with near identical usage. UK has already seen incredible energy cost increases. European winter is going to drive energy prices even higher.
Yeah, "we" will be fine because computers. But lower income families are getting hit hard with this and inflation.
Even still there is the Applebee's effect; people with money are paying more attention to those commercials because a lunch for two is pushing past 50$ dollars these days! That's gonna dry up investment even more. In the UK Liz Truss comes in and immediately commits political suicide with these tax cuts. Putting aside critiques aimed at trickle down economics, the timing is TERRIBLE. Startups are laying off because investment is drying up; tax cuts on high earners are going into savings and low-risk market investments.
All this combined is, IMHO, going to lead to a massive global recession.
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China doesn't have another generation. They'll be going into a very stark population collapse that's worse than what Japan is experiencing now, where adult diapers outsell baby diapers. I expect that China's economy and influence will take the shape of an upside-down U, with the peak in the next decade. If they're going to move on Taiwan, they cannot wait forever. They came close to catching up the US, but I don't th…
>They'll be going into a very stark population collapse that's worse than what Japan is experiencing now, where adult diapers outsell baby diapers. As opposed to most of Europe ... Also, the quality of your human capital is more important than just having a large unsustainable population growth without much marketable skills or know-how on the international scale. Otherwise parts of Africa and Asia would be economic…
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Perhaps they shouldn't have bailed on making phones. Android phone arena is still very messy and they could just...have good hardware and a slick skin on Android and probably make a go of it. I know I'm armchairing the devil so to speak but I think this would have been a good long term play for them, but I imagine their expertise at the time was antithetical to hardware.
Meta/Microsoft/Amazon all did not want to plow the billions of dollars and years it takes to develop hardware that can compete with iPhone and Android. They bet that they did not need to, but unfortunately for Meta, looks like they should have.
They could all definitely manufacture Android devices and hold some Android sub-market share, but that business isn't interesting to them. They wanted to control a platform, and when it was clear that wasn't going to happen (after spending many billions), they gave up.
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Apple tightening privacy while TikTok is eating their lunch... Not to mention the Metaverse is/was a giant distraction.
Not very relevant, but an observation: I've noticed that users on HN like to use the phrase "eating their lunch" to describe the dynamic between TikTok and Facebook. It would be interesting to search HN comments from the past 12 months for "eating their lunch" and analyze what proportion of them refer to TikTok.