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What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?

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Re: What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?

#111

Post by ibeckermayer »

jbottoms wrote: post #80

Innovation in America is essentially dead. First VC's don't know a good product when they see one, and they won't do due diligence on new products. So, they look to the tech companies that control the markets. Second, the services the tech giants are providing result in "soft GDP" dollars. We need VC's to be more community aware, and stop chasing cotton candy. WeWork is a rent seeker that has inserted another layer i…

What do you mean by “they look to the tech companies that control the markets”?

Re: What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?

#113

Post by tossAfterUsing »

NullPrefix wrote: post #78
tossAfterUsing wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if the westboro Baptists accidentally struck oil and became billionaires and tried to export that version of Christianity Lemme tell a story bout a man named Fred...

Your story is quite short.

... it's a riff on the Beverly Hillbilly's Lyrics + Fred Phelps who is the leader of the church in question.

Re: What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?

#114

Post by tossAfterUsing »

wayoutthere wrote: post #77
tossAfterUsing wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My money is on early 20th century style oligarchic capitalism I've been enjoying the historical context in this book. I'm not surprised to be liking the book, but i'm pleased to be getting a better understanding of what the early 20th century space was like. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36448501-the-bitcoin-sta...

I wholeheartedly disagree with any decentralized approach to national economics. Not because it wouldn’t work, but because it would. Money is power only because power likes it that way. But power is power, and a decentralized monetary supply does not serve the powerful. They will attack it with every weapon they have (which is basically all of them ) to ensure it doesn’t happen until they control it. In the early 20t…

> I wholeheartedly disagree with any decentralized approach to national economics.

do you then agree with only a centralized national economics?

what does that even look like?

Re: What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?

#115

Post by tasty_freeze »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #106
tasty_freeze wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please state what you think the alternative is, since you used the singular. To me, there is a range of alternatives, so it is hard to understand your objection because I don't understand what you are imagining. One alternative is a French Revolution, part 2. Another alternative is a system of wealth, income, and inheritance taxes that helps prevent concentration of power in a few families. Another is more aggressive…

The alternative is rule by non-elites. America has been an aristocratic democracy; when that aristocratic ruling culture is replaced by an anti-elitist culture, it might look worse than you think. I'd argue that the "elite" culture is less self-serving and more noble than the alternative.

You are setting up a false dichotomy: you claim the only two choices are rule by elites vs rule by non-elites. What I spelled out was a half way position -- bolstering the strength of the non-elites and weakening the grip elites have on power.

Of course it is difficult to manage precisely because most people with $1B will kick and scream if their wealth is reduced to $900M. But in theory that is what voting can help accomplish, and social movements to help people realize what they are giving up by voting into office people who despise unions and who complain that their 15% tax burden while collecting millions is too much.

Re: What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?

#116

Post by _ptgt »

jofer wrote: post #12

One thing to point out: Oil is still _huge_ when it comes to investment and sheer amount of financing available. Anything involving large-scale finance will have oil money involved in it in some way. Frankly, even at the height of the tech boom, the tech industry has never had significant capital available compared to the oil industry. I've worked in both... Folks in tech think 100 million in capital is a lot. In oil…

This is misleading though because energy projects produce returns over a much longer timescale (i.e. decades) than the typical tech project (a year or two?). In addition, the typical big tech firm is running a lot more projects than the typical large oil company (which maybe operates a count of oil fields in the hundreds). So it's very much expected that the capital investment per project will be higher in oil.

But the fact of the matter is that Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have double the market capitalization of the largest private oil companies. So yes, they're objectively better capitalized taken as a whole -- even if the typical tech project has less investment and consequently working on tech projects as a low- or mid- level employee feels smaller.

Re: What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?

#117

Post by bilbo0s »

anigbrowl wrote: post #109
dr_dshiv wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I agree and disagree. How to know when the kitchen is on fire? Most revolutions of the past 200 years have been a disaster. We live in a constitutional democracy that supports incremental improvement. The alternative is almost certainly, probabilistically, worse. Entropy and all that.

Well if you look into the kitchen and see smoke and flames then you have a fire in your kitchen...I cannot understand why you think this a difficult decision to make. Where do you get the idea that most revolutions have been a a disaster? Your concept that only incremental improvement is valid seems counterfactual and naive. You are just dismissing anything that you do not understand out of hand without even consider…

I think the point people are trying to make is that while revolutions can be good, most of the time they have been bad. Very bad. From the Reign of Terror, to the November Revolution, to Pinochet, to the Khmer Rouge, to Rwandans in central Africa, life has not been good for commoners during and after revolutions. (And I'm being kind by not listing the really bad ones.)

Add to all this the fact that they fail with alarming regularity, and America's collective lack of enthusiasm for that option is perfectly understandable. I mean, historically speaking, for the average person, revolutions either failed, and you were worse off. Or revolutions succeeded, and you were worse off.

It's so bad that, again, people are even a bit skeptical even of low risk options like tax reform and stronger unions. Right now, people seem to view anything that even appears to move away from the status quo as dangerous because of the admittedly horrid track record of revolutions, combined with the off the wall proclamations and actions of certain groups opposed to the élites. (Believe it or not, you don't allay peoples' fears of a reign of terror by shooting up churches and Walmarts for instance.)

Re: What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?

#118

Post by _ptgt »

3131s wrote: post #61
rossdavidh wrote: post #23

Comes close to an important point, and then misses it completely. The problem is not that Saudi money would get them influence at new U.S. tech companies. The problem is that Saudi money is getting pushed into "tech" companies that have unsustainable business models, and this is sucking all the oxygen (e.g. available developers) from other projects that could accomplish more. Imagine two startup ideas. One, could be…

Why are you so sure that only one of these things is a problem?

There's a lot of Saudi fear mongering in tech media and it is not undeserved in some ways (MBS is a brutal authoritarian), but I'm not sure what interests people think the Saudis have in tech firms other than getting a return on their investment.

As bad as MBS is, it's not like he has some secret plan to spread Saudi values throughout the world. In fact, he's actually a liberalizing force in SA (economically and socially at least, although not politically). And Saudi Arabia, unlike e.g. China, isn't attempting to remake the world order to revolve around itself (and its authoritarian rulers). So while I understand the sentiment "I don't want to accept money from Saudi Arabia for my start-up because of their human rights violations", I have a hard time understanding why one would fear Saudi Arabian board members would abuse their seats for geopolitical influence purely due to the fact that Saudi Arabia has little to gain in the geopolitics department from tech companies.

Re: What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?

#119

Post by imtringued »

golergka wrote: post #39
rossdavidh wrote: post #23

Comes close to an important point, and then misses it completely. The problem is not that Saudi money would get them influence at new U.S. tech companies. The problem is that Saudi money is getting pushed into "tech" companies that have unsustainable business models, and this is sucking all the oxygen (e.g. available developers) from other projects that could accomplish more. Imagine two startup ideas. One, could be…

Well that just means that a rational investor would make a killing amid this chaos, wouldn't he? So, we have to assume that for the last decade, not a single VC in the industry have been rational enough to pick up easy money everybody else is overlooking?

I don't see how that follows. Usually what happens is that those sustainable companies are copied by another company. This is perfectly fine but then that second company uses it's access to VC money to eliminate the competition. The sustainable company will have to close shop and years later the unsustainable company will close as well. Meanwhile the VCs don't care because some unicorn investment got them 20x returns.

Re: What does it mean for American innovation to be backed by oil wealth?

#120

Post by jbottoms »

ibeckermayer wrote: post #111
jbottoms wrote: post #80

Innovation in America is essentially dead. First VC's don't know a good product when they see one, and they won't do due diligence on new products. So, they look to the tech companies that control the markets. Second, the services the tech giants are providing result in "soft GDP" dollars. We need VC's to be more community aware, and stop chasing cotton candy. WeWork is a rent seeker that has inserted another layer i…

What do you mean by “they look to the tech companies that control the markets”?

VC's want to keep their risks low, they are more like investment bankers than true VC's. If someone approaches them with a seemingly good idea, they will want to unload it after a development period and realize a 10:1 return. So, they will first talk with a couple of the big companies and try to "pre-sell" the concept without giving away too much of tge secret sauce. In essence, VC's are captive by the tech giants, just as are most professors, and university curriculums.
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