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San Francisco Bubble

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221–230 of 393 posts

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#221

Post by acchow »

stvswn wrote: post #200
sholanozie wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this is a totally heartless comment. 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.

Wait, what are the problems? "Everyone rides an Uber" is great for the Uber drivers. "People spend too much on organic produce" is great for the farmers. "Even bad engineers are in high demand" is great for the mediocre engineers. Housing is a problem, but this post didn't mention it. So before we start making changes, what are the problems in your opinion? And, then, what changes are you proposing?

Can whoever downvoted this explain why they did so?

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#222

Post by dragonwriter »

api wrote: post #78
themagician wrote: post #3

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…

Tangent but: I doubt the rate raise will stick. They'll probably have to cut it again. I see a "planet Japan" scenario in which global central banks are zero-bound for decades, if not "forever". Rapid growth is over. There are no more frontiers and birth rates are stabilizing. From an ecological point of view the stabilization of birth rates is good, but it basically breaks all the economic assumptions of the past 25…

Rapid growth doesn't need more economic entities (whether natural or AI), it just needs more production. Rapid increases in productivity with a steady state population suffices to achieve that.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#223

Post by pc86 »

JackFr wrote: post #217
nawitus wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow. I agree, but this is mostly true because there's so much low-hanging fruit out there. If you look at the current successful startups like Uber and Airbnb, they're really trivial applications. That doesn't mean they can'…

Tens of thousands of man hours have gone into making them seem trivial, and the fact that they seem so to you is a testament to their design.

Well the fact that they've hammered on them for years doesn't mean they're not trivial, it just means they've spent a lot of time on them. And I think we've got to differentiate between the app being [non-]trivial and the infrastructure behind it supporting the massive load being [non-]trivial.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#224

Post by jsprogrammer »

api wrote: post #78
themagician wrote: post #3

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…

Tangent but: I doubt the rate raise will stick. They'll probably have to cut it again. I see a "planet Japan" scenario in which global central banks are zero-bound for decades, if not "forever". Rapid growth is over. There are no more frontiers and birth rates are stabilizing. From an ecological point of view the stabilization of birth rates is good, but it basically breaks all the economic assumptions of the past 25…

0/Near 0 interest is the end-game of fractional reserve banking. Consider the alternative: Rates climb back to 20%. You (and everyone else borrowing) now need to somehow collect an additional 20% (ignoring compounding and early payments) money each year. 1) that's not going to happen unless massive amounts of money are borrowed by lots of people 2) that money must move fast enough (and be continually reborrowed) to make it out to everyone who has an upcoming (very large) interest payment.

The banks are a serious drain on the system. They get to extract percentages from the economy year over year, while contributing nothing (except interest obligations).

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#225

Post by matzipan »

api wrote: post #212
pdq wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tangent but: I doubt the rate raise will stick. They'll probably have to cut it again. I see a "planet Japan" scenario in which global central banks are zero-bound for decades, if not "forever". Rapid growth is over. Agreed nominal interest rates will likely drop down again to zero to restimulate the economy, but I doubt that will stick for the next decade, as inflation should creep back in forcing the Fed's hand.…

"Zero-bound" means "at or near zero." Inflation is easy to kill in today's world: just raise interest rates a little tiny bit for a short period of time and the deflationary downdraft will snuff any little inflationary ticks upward. But they'll be forced to drop rates again quickly or we'll fall back into deflation. The instant they raise rates the debt defaults and asset price collapses will start. Earth is now Japa…

Earth is not Japan yet. We still have China and India...

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#226

Post by Domenic_S »

flatpointer23 wrote: post #141
kzhahou wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad hominem

The author complains about that behavior, labeling it a sign of how 'spoiled' engineers are. The author also engages in this behavior. Pointing this out, and labelling it hypocrisy, does not constitute an ad hominem attack. Because what the author has done is the definition of hypocrisy.

It depends on the implication of the allegation of hypocrisy. Is it intended to discredit the author or his argument? Then it's a tu quoque fallacy.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#228

Post by matzipan »

YuriNiyazov wrote: post #52
fweespeech wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly? It isn't sustainable and its not a productive use of capital. This lifestyle is going to implode when the economy stumbles.

Yea, no. JM Keynes said eons ago that with increases in efficiency we will eventually be able to get to a 15-hour work week. So, a particular industry in a particular area was able to get to an approximation of that, and the counter-argument is that this is not a productive use of capital? Besides, TFA complains that all these people are working on silly startups, which is presumably not a productive use of capital e…

Seriously, most tech startups are not bringing a bump in productivity, but are a mere pixel moving money waste for VCs, who don't really care if about the 9 failures if 1 startup pays off massively. The problem is that VC's don't even care about profitability anymore, they only care about being bought-off by next stage VCs. So all the money actually comes from 1 ad supported startup which became profitable and the losses for all the others were written off.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#229

Post by bebop »

vdnkh wrote: post #60
themagician wrote: post #3

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…

If you have an engineering degree from an accredited program, you're an engineer. If you don't you're not. The US is very lax with usage of the word but in other countries it's classed in the same way "Doctor" is.

I would even go so far as to say that you are not an engineer until you are a PE. This is coming from a "Software Engineer".

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#230

Post by yarou »

bduerst wrote: post #208
mbesto wrote: post #62

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…

What about the people who have already lived there, who aren't on engineering salaries and work service positions? I think it's fun to be flippant, but there still certain demographics that are being displaced and negatively impacted by the bubble.

Of course, but their skin tone is a few shades darker, so nobody talks or cares about them.

People would rather argue in ivory towers about abstract problems that don't exist in the real world (sexism in video games, Internet feminism, etc), rather than work on unpleasant and unsexy problems that can easily be solved.

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