111–120 of 393 posts
Hard to take any of this seriously. Lots of people regularly taxi to work in large cities and I cannot imagine how it's indicative of a bubble. Author seems too emotional about such an assertion.
Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing, less leverage, and better places to put dollars than venture. The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myse…
Interest rates aren't going to tick up. The Fed isn't going to raise rates, they're going to cut and launch a new round of QE. That's not even a debate at this point, it's blatantly obvious. Will that end at some point with another asset crash? Maybe, however it's not going to happen soon. The Fed will print your brains out first to support stocks and real-estate. They have a lot of room to abuse the dollar from wher…
Can you elaborate on why you think it's "blatantly obvious" though? I can't make any of these types of guesses with high confidence.
This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…
By saying things like "Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave" you're completely overlooking the human costs and implications.
Things don't just change overnight. It's an slow, painful, eventual decline. Things shouldn't need to be pushed to a breaking point for us to make necessary changes to alleviate these problems.
This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…
I feel like I should just make this my email/social media signature since I say it so often:
A perfect requires these things:
- Perfect market information
- No participant with market power to set prices
- Non intervention by governments
- No barriers to entry or exit
- Equal access to factors of production
- Profit maximization
- No externalities
The less you have those, the less efficient your market is. "Free markets" aren't these magical things that arise on their own in nature. They are carefully crafted and maintained artificial environments and most are far from efficient.
Market forces are not a silver bullet that will solve all problems if we just sit around and wait long enough for the invisible hand to do everything.
Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing, less leverage, and better places to put dollars than venture. The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myse…
> [...] and yet I don't even remotely consider myself an engineer. I phone screened somebody not so long ago who asked me if it was the "kind of job where you have to write a lot of code", because they "weren't that sort of software engineer". Didn't quite know what to make of that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm very hypocritical.
Yea no kidding. "AppNexus helps brands connect with consumers, empowering agencies and advertisers with a uniquely powerful approach to programmatic online advertising." Thanks for working on Ad Tech, the very thing that powers this bubble by trading attention as a commodity. Other people work on silly startups, but this shit is akin to HFT.
This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…
That's a rather nonchalant way of saying something that will likely be a very sharp, painful transition. And when a boom-town the size of San Francisco implodes it can have a huge impact on the entire country.
"They can take an arbitrary sabbatical from work, they cannot be told no or reprimanded, and they make so much money that they can just take random breaks from employment to chill." I have yet to hear a convincing argument why this is a bad thing.
Honestly? It isn't sustainable and its not a productive use of capital. This lifestyle is going to implode when the economy stumbles.
The employee certainly improves their value in terms of skills acquired during a sabbatical. The employee also gains significantly in terms of value of life experiences when they take time to travel, support kids, etc.
Certainly there are unproductive poor team players who dissapear whenever trouble happens but we shouldn't set our policies based on this minority.
I'm surprised he didn't have the $16 artisanal salad delivered to him by one of the 37 delivery services. This is pretty much the only place i know of where people are okay with paying $30+ total for a salad and think it's normal