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Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

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Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#211

Post by jitix »

unishark wrote: post #184
jitix wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an immigrant engineer I feel this is actually good because it shows that the market in the US is bullish on new technologies. I believe this is what has led to most of the major inventions in the past 100 years to come from the US. In my home country (India) it’d be impossible for a company to reach such valuations based only on research and prototypes, which in turn leads to low salaries for STEM people, culminat…

We already knew it was a bull market for technology. When absurd deals are happening it could mean the bubble is about to burst though.

I think the boom bust cycle is good. It trims the extra fat and runs unsustainable businesses (like Boston Dynamics, Uber, WeWork, etc) and lazy unproductive individuals to the ground.

As a side effect home prices in the US remain relatively stable.

In India it’s impossible for a single income family to own a home and it’s a struggle with dual incomes. Same with Canada where I’m planning to move (since I don’t have patience to wait 20 years to start my own company)

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#212

Post by jitix »

ajit_singh wrote: post #190
unishark wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already knew it was a bull market for technology. When absurd deals are happening it could mean the bubble is about to burst though.

This immediately follows the Slack acquisition which was sold at at price that is almost 1/10th of Pakistan's GDP. Keep in mind that Pakistan has 220 million people. One individual company with less than 2k employees is valued 1/10th of what 220 million people collectively produce in a year. How can one explain this asymmetry. No doubt it was the biggest tech acquisition in the history but tech executives in the US b…

I agree Slack is way over valued for something which could be switched without much effort. In fact my anecdotal knowledge from my network suggests that MS Teams is taking over.

However the analogy with Pakistan is incorrect. Pakistan has a lot of people who simply don’t have the skills to be productive. Same with India. And in South Asia progress and reform doesn’t happen easily.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#213

Post by itsoktocry »

stingrae wrote: post #72
dragonelite wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one thing i have seen stock market != real world economics. You had a car rental go broke and its stock got pumped 500% or so after the fact.

sure. But for Softbank, this current bump (which is think is artificial and going to pop) could allow for them to liquidate some of their positions (likely without making too much of a price disturbance) to allow for diversification.

>to allow for diversification.

I'm not sure that is or was ever in the plans for SoftBank. "Pump and dump" gets thrown around a lot, but hasn't that been their model? Get in as early your massive dollars allow, promote the hell outta the company, feed the tech/SV/VC ecosystem, cash out, repeat.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#214

Post by Gravityloss »

rmah wrote: post #28
dhruvarora013 wrote: post #14

Could someone explain why this acquisition makes sense? The core competencies between the two companies seem to have little overlap from my outsider perspective. Is this diversification or does Hyundai make more than automobiles?

Hyundai is a South Korean chaebol (sort of like a conglomerate). While it was ostensibly restructured into "independent" groups a while back, let's just say that, in practice, they're not really independent in the western sense. In addition to building cars and trucks, Hyundai does the following: * building construction (everything from homes to office and factories) * civil engineering (bridges, dams, shipyards, etc…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Steel https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/HMINEZ:KS

Steel making and mining, talk about vertical integration!

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#215

Post by itsoktocry »

marcusverus wrote: post #159
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The market is effectively a free money machine" That's clearly an absurdity and not physically possible. Whatbwe do know is that every time we have QE 90% of the money ends up in financial markets, not real economy. This is a well known problem, and Yanis Varufakis has talked about it at length

>That's clearly an absurdity and not physically possible. And yet the market has averaged a 7% annual return since 1870.

Nominal returns. Unfortunately, none of us are average. You can gain 100% many times, but lose it only once.

It's going to be fun when the "just buy an index and you'll be fine" strategy falters (in this case a cap-weighted, large US company index that buys shares at any price). The S&P500 isn't diverse like they talk about in finance textbooks. There are quite a few years in that article you linked where hedge funds beat the index (2001-2005, 2007, 2009, 2010). It's almost as if who beats whom is random...

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#216

Post by simonh »

jandrese wrote: post #178
postingpals wrote: post #174

Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.

In market based economies there will always be a general movement of capital to the top, because simply having money allow you to earn more money. It's a positive feedback loop. That's why it is important for an external force, which pretty much has to be a government, to tax the wealth at the top and move it back to the bottom. Otherwise the system gradually turns into feudalism by its very nature. A government that…

Most capital is invested in businesses, it's not piles of money in banks, but it's embodied in factories, jobs, products, research efforts. The vast majority fo the wealth of billionaires is tied up in the businesses they control, and that's fine. That money is doing useful work. We don't want to take it away from people who have proven they are effective leaders and managers and hand it over to bureaucrats. Let the people who built the businesses and created the wealth manage it. Tax them yes, that's fine, but at a proportionate level.

The feedback loop in Capitalism is to direct capital towards people who discover more efficient way to provide goods and services, or provide better goods and services, to help them scale up, or give people with a proven track record more resources to devote to new enterprises. This is exactly what we want.

There are three main issues with this picture.

The first is rent seeking behaviour, where simply having capital enables growing more capital without productive activity. This is what we need to tax punitively. Capital that is not being used productively is dead weight on the economy.

Secondly, monopolistic behaviour is closely related to rent seeking, it's using market power to extract rents or exert unfair influence.

Finally inheritance is a problem because it's un-earned wealth. There's no reason to expect that those inheriting wealth are likely to manage it effectively. Inheritance taxes should be high, without being overly punitive after all one of the main incentives to work hard and accumulate wealth is to provide for the next generation. You want to allow successful business owners and investors to benefit their families without facilitating excess waste of resources.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#217

Post by Barrin92 »

simonh wrote: post #216
jandrese wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In market based economies there will always be a general movement of capital to the top, because simply having money allow you to earn more money. It's a positive feedback loop. That's why it is important for an external force, which pretty much has to be a government, to tax the wealth at the top and move it back to the bottom. Otherwise the system gradually turns into feudalism by its very nature. A government that…

Most capital is invested in businesses, it's not piles of money in banks, but it's embodied in factories, jobs, products, research efforts. The vast majority fo the wealth of billionaires is tied up in the businesses they control, and that's fine. That money is doing useful work. We don't want to take it away from people who have proven they are effective leaders and managers and hand it over to bureaucrats. Let the…

>We don't want to take it away from people who have proven they are effective leaders and managers and hand it over to bureaucrats.

This sentence is so bizarre not even the opposite is correct. First off, 'effective leaders and managers' isn't an antonym to 'bureaucrat'. There are effective leaders and managers in bureaucracies. In fact that's kind of what bureaucracy means, effective and rational management of resources.

Furthermore, bureaucracies exist both in the private sector and public sector. Wealthy billionaires employ hundreds (if not more) of individuals doing nothing but managing their wealth in highly bureaucratic fashion. They don't run around and employ their billions in some sort of crazy act of pizza and dorm-room fuelled creative destruction, the deploy countless of institutions and non-profits and accountants and lawyers, the gates foundation looks more like the tax office or a defense department than a garage workshop.

>, or give people with a proven track record more resources to devote to new enterprises

No, the point of capitalism is to allocate capital to people who don't have any proven track record. Because that's the people who actually make new things. If you only want to distribute money to people with track records then a bureaucracy is the right address, because correctly licensing, testing, rewarding, and promoting people based on their track record is the very essence of the ideal Weberian bureaucracy. Keeping track of who does a good job is 90% of what bureaucracies are all about.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#218

Post by postingpals »

WanderPanda wrote: post #208
jandrese wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In market based economies there will always be a general movement of capital to the top, because simply having money allow you to earn more money. It's a positive feedback loop. That's why it is important for an external force, which pretty much has to be a government, to tax the wealth at the top and move it back to the bottom. Otherwise the system gradually turns into feudalism by its very nature. A government that…

Thats not at all correct. In the mid to long term money will move to the person allocating it most efficiently. This of course assuming a non corrupt government. And thats where I see the actual positive feedback loop: People like you want the government to have more power, with more power there is more room for corruption/lobbyism, people demand even more government power

Your second claim has a simple counter-argument: the government has allocated wealth so well in the past 100 years that they are responsible for some major tech innovations (nasa, CERN, every startup that began in a public college) and subsidise private industries that would die without them (Starlink, The corn industry).

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#219

Post by simonh »

Barrin92 wrote: post #217
simonh wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most capital is invested in businesses, it's not piles of money in banks, but it's embodied in factories, jobs, products, research efforts. The vast majority fo the wealth of billionaires is tied up in the businesses they control, and that's fine. That money is doing useful work. We don't want to take it away from people who have proven they are effective leaders and managers and hand it over to bureaucrats. Let the…

>We don't want to take it away from people who have proven they are effective leaders and managers and hand it over to bureaucrats. This sentence is so bizarre not even the opposite is correct. First off, 'effective leaders and managers' isn't an antonym to 'bureaucrat'. There are effective leaders and managers in bureaucracies. In fact that's kind of what bureaucracy means , effective and rational management of reso…

OK, that's fair to a point, I'm just saying taking away wealth from the people that built it in the first place and putting it under the control of people who have not demonstrated those skills (whatever skills they do have) isn't necessarily a good idea.

As long as the capital is being employed productively and managed by the most competent people to do so, we all benefit. I'm carefully trying to avoid a 'tax bad, government bad' position and the phrasing you pointed out quite reasonably might have given that impression.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#220

Post by postingpals »

jl6 wrote: post #191
postingpals wrote: post #174

Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.

Alternative take: consumer behaviour that demands complex integrated products incentivizes the formation of large corporate bodies that can marshall the many skills and resources required to make them, with the economies of scale that make them viable. Semi-facetious summary: there’s not a lot of demand for local, organic, artisan all-terrain robot packhorses.

But... I don't disagree with this. This is exactly what is happening, and it is yet still creating monopolies. Just because it is what people want does not mean it is a good thing.
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