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

economist.com

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

#201

Post by laidoffamazon »

fullshark wrote: post #195
SantalBlush wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recession talk is delusional. Every economic metric but inflation is in good shape. These people don't know what they're talking about.

Inflation means interest rates will be up, which is bad news for silicon valley and profitless startups in particular. The economy might be ok (very debatable) but if interest rates stay high and the VCs pump and dump of unprofitable unicorns on the public markets has ended...

Yes, it's not great for lots of business models. But the dotcom boom happened when the effective federal funds rate was much higher than it is now.

I think (and perhaps I'm very wrong!) we'll settle back into a 2018, 2017 tech industry minus companies like OpenDoor rather than a early 2021 euphoria

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

#202

Post by ashwagary »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #170
screye wrote: post #86

I believe the doom-n-gloom around all of tech is rather overblown. There are sectors of tech that will absolutely struggle. Gig-economy companies won't ever meet their valuation. Negative PE ratio startups are realizing that hyper-scaling is not as infinite as they believed, and that means their earnings might never catch up to their price. Social media companies are finally facing stiff non-American competition (Tik…

From the way people talk on this forum about economic conditions in this country you'd imagine the unemployment rate is 10%, nobody is hiring, and the market is down 50%.

If they are forward looking statements they are correct to be worried. A significant correction seems to be in our near term future.

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

#203

Post by fatnoah »

ralph84 wrote: post #10
givemeethekeys wrote: post #2

When the DotCom bubble burst, and after 2009, traffic in the Bay Area cleared up. Commuting time got cut by half. Homes in many neighborhoods, apart from the very best school districts, became attainable. This has yet to happen. Unemployment is still quite low. The music is just starting.

Agreed. I was here through both of those periods and the bottom wasn't in until the prevailing mood in the Bay Area was that tech was over, or at least the Bay Area's dominance of tech was over. We're nowhere near that level of despair yet.

>We're nowhere near that level of despair yet.

Agree. Early 2000's was a nonstop litany of entire companies going under because they didn't make any money. IMHO, a fair comparison would be to look at the same companies now. Many funded, growth at all cost companies are laying people off, but we're not quite to everything (outside of crypto) going under like we were back then.

Looking at big tech as the barometer doesn't make much sense to me since the dominant companies are still making massive profits, but they're just slightly less massive and/or growing less quickly. That's not an end of the world scenario like early 2000's or 2008 felt like.

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

#204

Post by laidoffamazon »

prottog wrote: post #200
laidoffamazon wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that this Philadelphia FRED link keeps getting passed along indicates the people passing it along don't really understand it. What exactly is the unemployment rate if it's not ~3.7%?

The labor force participation rate, for one, still hasn't recovered to pre-pandemic levels, and has been dropping every single month since August.

Retirements are up. It's not a conspiracy, it's the population pyramid.

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

#205

Post by Kye »

chestervonwinch wrote: post #151
Kye wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think those of us who lived through the 90s and 00s have a hard time counterdiscombobulating all the stuff that went down. People who experienced the 60s and 70s probably have similar difficulty.

> counterdiscombobulating what a discombobulating way to say "clarifying" :)

I'm trying to summon a return to 19th century magazine per-word rates.

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

#206

Post by laidoffamazon »

ashwagary wrote: post #202
laidoffamazon wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the way people talk on this forum about economic conditions in this country you'd imagine the unemployment rate is 10%, nobody is hiring, and the market is down 50%.

If they are forward looking statements they are correct to be worried. A significant correction seems to be in our near term future.

The trend being lessening inflation over the last 6 months and a resilient labor market?

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

#207

Post by zirgs »

anm89 wrote: post #160
fallingknife wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Population growth is great for GDP growth, but not necessarily quality of life.

Crazy to me that this is downvoted. It's the core truth of our debt based economic system. Our economic system will explode violently in a default cascade without population growth or productivity growth and we haven't been able to figure out ways to consistently increase productivity, which is to say we need population growth to sustain our way of life. It's why deflation is the boogeyman. Deflation is basically a w…

The population of my country has been falling for 30 years in a row and yet its GDP is rising. How could that be?

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

#208

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

spamizbad wrote: post #185
mjr00 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What was last major innovation at Google.. chrome? 20% of company drives profits while 80% is a decorated R&D lab chock full of benefits, upset about cutbacks in their free oatmilk lattes, even though they’re not coming to office anyway. This has been a major part of the FAANG strategy: crush competition by giving people who might work for or become potential competitors an offer they can't refuse. 80% of the compa…

I wonder, once talent hoarding ends, if we’re going to see a bunch of new companies hit the scene in 5 years?

Depends on how well those laid off have saved.

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

#209

Post by TuringNYC »

danaris wrote: post #165
birdymcbird wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia isn’t Nazi Germany. > "Give me your land and I won't kill you all" isn't much of a negotiation, is it. And Russia isn’t trying to conquer Ukraine. Russia doesn’t want neighboring countries, particularly Ukraine to join NATO. They’ve been repeatedly vocal and warning about this for over a decade. NATO kept that door open and said last year Ukraine entering NATO was a certainty hence the war. Certainly, it’s eas…

This is part of the propaganda. I've read multiple analyses, very cogent and well-sourced, that concluded that what Putin wants is not just to conquer Ukraine, but to reassemble the USSR, or the Tsarist Russian Empire before it, with him at its head. He sees the fall of the Soviet Union as a stain on Russia and on him personally, and he wants to restore his/its "dignity". As part of this, he believes that Ukraine is…

Can you share references to some of these reads please?

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

#210

Post by inthepipe »

birdymcbird wrote: post #162
shubhamkrm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What was last major innovation at Google.. chrome? 20% of company drives profits while 80% is a decorated R&D lab chock full of benefits, upset about cutbacks in their free oatmilk lattes, even though they're not coming to office anyway. Transformers were invented at Google, which is the underlying tech on which GPT is built. I would say that counts as innovation. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(m…

This misses the point. Google has done interesting stuff. Ideas, research papers, R&D in AI, Glass, Stadia, leading in all kinds of niches… Google Docs with real time collab editing for example. I’m not arguing against that, and to respond on that thread is a straw man. But they can experiment all day and come up with all kinds of cool stuff but at end of day you need to monetize and make money. Not grow endless head…

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