Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

novum.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 393 posts

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#191

Post by benjaminwootton »

nosianu wrote: post #181
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife's uncles is one of the top doctors in his field in the country, and was the head of department in the country's top medical university. He makes less money than me, even though I'm 35 years younger and my "skills" include some basic coding, some marketing, and some understanding of social media. Whereas this man has spent nearly 50 years in the medical field and has treated multiple presidents. None of the st…

> Enrollment in the medical field is falling drastically because no one wants to work years to make less money than some 24 year old with two years of coding experience. Good comment overall, but I think the issues in the medical field are less about compensation and much much more about insane working conditions and a lot of disincentives. If you want a glimpse at some of it, maybe occasionally check out https://old…

Shouldn’t they be creating upwards pressure on salaries? Meanwhile, techies want another $50k if they ever have to venture outside of their home office.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#192

Post by semi-extrinsic »

raffraffraff wrote: post #162
benjaminwootton wrote: post #106

I definetly think a lot of the startup world view is just a function of low rates. Startups could run for decades with $billions in losses and only a passing focus on eventual profits. All of those losses flowed into the bank accounts of big tech (via AWS credits, Google and Facebook Ads). All of the high salaries, employee expectations and leverage in tech startups and big tech derive from that spigot of cheap money…

If cheap credit is at an end I can see a lot of small companies and hobbyists losing free-tier services. I don't know how companies like Gitlab can give away so much functionality for zero money. One startup I worked at operated for years on free tiers and spent nothing on version control, CICD, CDN, remote access, authentication, email, chat, video conferencing etc. I don't want that dream to end, of course. I make…

Well, for all of those things, what is expensive for a small company if you run it yourself is the sysadmin aspect. You could run all these services off of a pair of three-year-old servers from ebay for next to nothing in hardware cost, even if you buy cold spares for disks and fans and power supplies from the get-go. But the cost of having someone learn to install, configure and operate all this software is very significant.

But when you're at the large scale and offering this as a commercial service, you've designed your free tier such that the marginal cost of adding a free tier customer is essentially zero, and the best way to acquire new customers is to have someone in that org using your product's free tier for their personal projects.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#193

Post by IncRnd »

geysersam wrote: post #159
IncRnd wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A stock is worth the present value of future dividends. Not every stock pays dividends. A stock's worth is determined by supply and demand in a market or directly between the seller and the prospective purchaser.

> A stocks worth is determined by supply and demand That's a tautology. It's like saying the price is the price.

> That's a tautology. It's like saying the price is the price.

That's silly. Your quote was incomplete and selective.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#194

Post by Xylakant »

geysersam wrote: post #178
qaq wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can if people take individual action based on their honest believes a lot can change. If people simply virtue signal without taking basic actions that are available to them then there is 0 chance something will change.

I'm not suggesting virtue signaling. Paying your maid more than market wage is virtue signaling. Voting for a party working to increase her bargaining power is not. We need both individual action and political reform.

While it will have little effect on the system, paying your maid substantially more than market share goes way beyond virtue signaling. It has substantial effect on her life, possibly on the life’s of her partner and children as well. It may make the difference between scraping by and being able to start saving money, accumulating a bit of wealth that can possibly be passed on to the next generation.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#195

Post by spaceman_2020 »

qaq wrote: post #154
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife's uncles is one of the top doctors in his field in the country, and was the head of department in the country's top medical university. He makes less money than me, even though I'm 35 years younger and my "skills" include some basic coding, some marketing, and some understanding of social media. Whereas this man has spent nearly 50 years in the medical field and has treated multiple presidents. None of the st…

"I'll be okay with a pay cut if it means a more equitable, more fair society" hmm you could make it more equitable by raising your maids comp by your own description it would have 0 adverse effect on you.

The typical Indian maid works in multiple households.

My maid works in 7 different houses, spending approx. 1-1.5 hours in each. An individual household paying her more can only go so far - EVERYONE will have to start paying her more.

I already pay her substantially more than prevailing rate, but can everyone else afford to do the same?

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#196

Post by huijzer »

> The 2010s were a decade that “disrupted everything but resolved nothing,” as Andy Beckett wrote, and I tend to agree.

These kinds of sentiments are great for drawing attention and might be true on a macro level, but I do not agree at all. Although there is currently a lot of nonsense going around, there are also great things going on if you look carefully.

For example, I think that electric cars do have their problems about battery minerals and such, but the idea that we can use solar and wind to locally put energy in the car is mind blowing. Some car makers, such as Lightyear, Sono Motors, and Aptera, are actually putting the solar panels on the car itself. Also, cars like the BYD Seal can drive 550 km / 340 miles on one charge and go from 0-100 / 0-60 in about 5 seconds for 35 000 dollars.

Furthermore, SSDs and processors have come a long way since the start of 2010. EUV systems are producing chips below 10 nm. Partially due to this, HDDs cost less than a cent per GB nowadays while SSDs are at about 5 cents per GB according to https://diskprices.com. The Crucial 1 TB costs 53 dollars! I've looked in my order history and payed about the same for a 120 GB SSD in 2016.

Also, note that GitHub was founded in 2008. Although I'm not so optimistic about the vendor lock-in taking place, I am very optimistic about the quality of the work. For example, Rust appeared for the first time in 2010!

Finally, what also makes me optimistic about the future is what Michael Dell stated nicely in a commencement speech (https://youtu.be/sIyGA1MlbwY). He said he is optimistic about the future because he has never met such an involved younger generation who care about the world and care about changing it. I think this also holds more generally, for example, since 2010, climate change is taken much more seriously (for example, see https://news.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx).

So no, I do not agree at all with the "resolved nothing" sentiment. A lot of bad stuff happened for sure, but a lot of great stuff happened too.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#197

Post by boppo1 »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #127
jongjong wrote: post #119

I've been saying this for the last 5 years. People don't realize how powerful the 'money printer' is. All the money which exists in the system was created out of nothing and injected into the economy through a few specific channels (mostly as credit backed by debt). IMO, everything in modern society is influenced in some way by interest rates; even culture and morality. Money printing can distort the market pricing m…

I agree with your thesis that genuine value creation will become more important. I think this is a more exciting market to operate in as opposed to one where we simply need to raise and spend cash as quickly as possible.

> genuine value creation

But how do we even know what this is anymore? With more than half the wealth accumulated by the top fraction of society it seems like ultra-luxury goods are going to be the most profitable, but surely that's not actually genuine value creation.

And have we strayed too far to achieve that without austerity? How will we pay interest on the national debt?

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#198

Post by hardware2win »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #124
miguelazo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has skewed the labor market to an insane degree. So much talent went into idiotic pursuits, and away from anything that had to do with public service.

My wife's uncles is one of the top doctors in his field in the country, and was the head of department in the country's top medical university. He makes less money than me, even though I'm 35 years younger and my "skills" include some basic coding, some marketing, and some understanding of social media. Whereas this man has spent nearly 50 years in the medical field and has treated multiple presidents. None of the st…

Crazy.

Salaries by prof. tell that SEs earn around 140k avg meanwhile meds. are around 300 easily

I think youre just looking at tiny group of SEs

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#199

Post by spaceman_2020 »

qaq wrote: post #174
geysersam wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but we need broader reform if anything is to actually change. You can't fight the market forces and systemic problems with personal choices.

Sure you can if people take individual action based on their honest believes a lot can change. If people simply virtue signal without taking basic actions that are available to them then there is 0 chance something will change.

Blanket statements like that don't really help unless you understand the underlying context.

In my context, maids typically work in multiple households. While my household has seen its net worth go up disproportionately, other households around me haven't been as fortunate.

So even when I pay 3x the prevailing rate, it doesn't make any real difference since the remaining 6 households my maid goes to can't match my rate. And she has no real bargaining power because in India, there's a huge pool of similarly skilled labor willing to fill in.

Which is pretty much my point: that people in tech get paid disproportionately higher. If everyone around me had seen similar wealth increase, my maid's salary would have likely gone up far higher as well.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#200

Post by sph »

qaq wrote: post #189
geysersam wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not suggesting virtue signaling. Paying your maid more than market wage is virtue signaling. Voting for a party working to increase her bargaining power is not. We need both individual action and political reform.

No it's not. Crocodile tears about how unfair it is for her to make so little instead of paying her more is virtue signaling. Dems have being in power in CA forever voting for them is not going to change maids wage.

The problem is thinking blue or red are the answer to this problem. Their current iteration is the leading reason why we are in this situation now.
Post reply on HN