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How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

economist.com

71–80 of 212 posts

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#71
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Soon” is mid 2024 at the earliest. The start ups haven’t really even begun to trim fat. Big tech like amazon, meta, google will increase attrition targets in addition to actual layoffs. I could turn out to be wrong but id bet there’s many more waves of cascading pain before before things turn other way. Turning other way doesnt mean we immediately go back to excess hiring, empire building, lack of focus, free uber r…

Contrarian signal, for the sake of having a conversation: - I think we will experience a massive deflationary bust. The inflation narrative is over, it’s all about a potential recession now. - By Summer 2023 we will experience YoY deflation and the Fed will cut then, or even sooner in anticipation to that. - We may see hikes pausing as soon as February, and cuts starting in the summer as a result of rapid disinflatio…

>Russia’s war with Ukraine will end (Putin is now agreeing to potentially think about negotiations)

"Potentially think about negotiations" is a long long way from the war ending.

Also Putin's terms are absurd. He wants to keep half of Ukraine while evading persecution for the crimes against humanity the Russian army caused against civilian population.

That's not gonna fly in Kiev, who wants all their territories back including Crimea, and the guilty parties held accountable at the Hague for their crimes, plus war reparations being paid, which is not gonna fly in Moscow.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#73
Here’s a Fed analyst policy briefing on market valuations today and going forward: https://www.federalreserve.gov//econres/notes/feds-notes/the...

It’s an insight into how they’re thinking for one. For two, the conditions that led to the current economic situation are unlikely to be present in the future. In many cases those situations can’t be reproduced because they would require highly unlikely situations (another pandemic) or impossible situations like the fed going to negative interest rates or near zero tax rates.

Further, population growth is one solid, bedrock economic growth truism. Some of this could be ameliorated by the US taking a “send us your weak, your poor, etc” mindset to immigration. This is how things were pre-2010, ish.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the Internet, the cost of labor for distribution of digital goods over that is cheap as all hell when compared to the cost of labor to distribute any sort of physical good because first you have make copies of this physical good, which starts off by requiring additional raw material input. Say we've got this mp4 file that everyone wants. Let's use bittorrent for our digital distribution. So we need to: create a…

Your cost analysis totally overlooks the cost of producing the “mp4 file that everyone wants”.

It also seems to overlook the typical expectation of non-zero revenue.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#75

With all industries are converting to software and every person on the planet moving towards owning a smartphone it surprises me that there’s an ongoing narrative that tech is collapsing.

Market saturation, my friend.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#76
Alternate hypothesis: tech is still a great sector but as monetary policy has moved away from “money printer go brrr” growth equities have predictably been hit harder than most.

We were running ZIRP and some insane level of QE that’s a bit of a puzzle to even measure. Yeah, equities markets were more than a little overheated.

The notional values may have re-scaled a bit but I’ll go out on a limb and venture that Alphabet is still a great business.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#77
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrarian signal, for the sake of having a conversation: - I think we will experience a massive deflationary bust. The inflation narrative is over, it’s all about a potential recession now. - By Summer 2023 we will experience YoY deflation and the Fed will cut then, or even sooner in anticipation to that. - We may see hikes pausing as soon as February, and cuts starting in the summer as a result of rapid disinflatio…

Putin was always willing to negotiate and there have been attempts at negotiation before and during the conflict, what matters are the pre-conditions to negotiations. If the pre-conditions are too strong then in effect it blocks negotiations and it means the overtures to negotiate are simply done for political reasons. We’re being told that only now Putin is ready to negotiate so I’m assuming that means the pre-condi…

The US of course isn’t in a position to negotiate, since we aren’t actually in the conflict. We’ll just keep sending weapons to Ukraine so they have as strong a position as they can get.

Ukraine is defending so… I dunno, I guess they aren’t very motivated to make concessions. I guess the starting point for negotiations for them would be Russia leaves, and then the details of where on the spectrum from “huge” to “massive” the reparations are can be worked out.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#78
post #63
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact everything uses software doesn’t mean Slack, a generic chat platform with dozens of absolutely identical products, being acquired for 27.7 billion dollars ever made sense. That generic software company was valued higher than entire industries that supply components that all hardware depends on. Tech isn’t collapsing. But valuations were and continue to be fuckin nuts for a lot of companies and are coming dow…

Tech seems somewhat unique because you can start a new company and within a relatively short period of time (<10 years) you can threaten the eventual existence of Fortune 500 incumbents. The entire venture capital/startup ecosystem exists to identify these upstarts and help them obtain unstoppable momentum as quickly as possible. If the incumbents want to survive, they usually have to pay up, and the longer they wait…

Everyone says this narrative. But 10 years ago.

- Google was the most popular search engine. Had a dominant position in adTech and YouTube was popular

- Apple became the most valuable company in the US and the iPhone was sucking up most industry profits.

- Amazon was by far the most dominant electric retailer and AWS was taking off (disclaimer: my current employer)

- Microsoft had been the dominant operating system for 15 years and Office the dominant office suite.

- Even Facebook was the dominant social network.

Not one startup has disrupted the industry in the past decade.

AirBnB is probably the only major tech company that has created a profitable large business in ten years.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putin was always willing to negotiate and there have been attempts at negotiation before and during the conflict, what matters are the pre-conditions to negotiations. If the pre-conditions are too strong then in effect it blocks negotiations and it means the overtures to negotiate are simply done for political reasons. We’re being told that only now Putin is ready to negotiate so I’m assuming that means the pre-condi…

The US of course isn’t in a position to negotiate, since we aren’t actually in the conflict. We’ll just keep sending weapons to Ukraine so they have as strong a position as they can get. Ukraine is defending so… I dunno, I guess they aren’t very motivated to make concessions. I guess the starting point for negotiations for them would be Russia leaves, and then the details of where on the spectrum from “huge” to “mass…

The US is funding the Ukraine defense and has a enormous influence on negotiation. They are effectively a first party.

If people don’t want to negotiate that’s their prerogative. I’m more interested in the difference between what I’m told by media and reality, and more precisely if there has been a softening of Russias stance I want to see where.

Re: How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end

#80
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact everything uses software doesn’t mean Slack, a generic chat platform with dozens of absolutely identical products, being acquired for 27.7 billion dollars ever made sense. That generic software company was valued higher than entire industries that supply components that all hardware depends on. Tech isn’t collapsing. But valuations were and continue to be fuckin nuts for a lot of companies and are coming dow…

Collaboration tools are some way from being systems of record and there is substantial difference between competitors. Generic chat apps are not yet useful enough (despite years of development) for most companies - IRC failing to win is evidence of this and so is the fact that companies aren’t switching en masse to run their infrastructure on whatever is the OSS flavour of the day. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen s…

Is this a ChatGPT experiment? The comment uses a few seemingly relevant terms but almost entirely incorrectly. "System of Record" had nothing to do with being commoditized.
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