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Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

economist.com

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Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#531

Post by xxpor »

Thlom wrote: post #468
dangrossman wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DMV in my state requires you make an appointment 4-6 months out right now. Walk-in appointments are unavailable or only available during a few hours a few days a week, if they happen to have staff that day. Good luck if you have your drivers license stolen. I sold a car of mine to Carvana in October. I returned the license plate to the DMV immediately, which is how they're notified that you no longer own the vehi…

WTF? This must be because of willful political sabotage? The license plate should follow the car and ownership should be changed online as part of the transaction. It sounds incredibly wasteful that every time a car changes ownership the seller must hand over the plates in person to the DMV. And is there no national registry of cars or data sharing between states? Strange that a car can be registered twice. If your d…

>The license plate should follow the car and ownership should be changed online as part of the transaction. It sounds incredibly wasteful that every time a car changes ownership the seller must hand over the plates in person to the DMV.

There's too many personalized plates and other exceptions in the US to make that viable.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#532

Post by xhevahir »

Robotbeat wrote: post #418
rhizome wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is due to tax policies reducing the revenue pool. This makes it easier to judge individual divisions of the total because there are necessarily fewer outlets, and since it's a smaller pool there's more reason to fight. The idle rich who can't find anywhere worthwhile to play with their nearly-free money (until recently ZIRPish) are a bug in the system. Oh, but lets pretend we are captains of industry by saturati…

I don’t think the government being inefficient is good. It gives ammo to those who are ideologically opposed to government doing things. We should strive to improve government efficiency, especially those of us who think the government should be taking on more tasks.

I'm guessing the inefficiency-is-good formulation was chosen for rhetorical effect rather than because OP believes inefficiency is good in itself.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#533

Post by slickrick216 »

vishnugupta wrote: post #58

It's fascinating to trace the genesis of present crash to Fed's policies post 2008 crisis. The interest rates were kept artificially low to prevent another Great Depression. 2010s saw an unprecedented rally of tech/growth stocks, fuelled by cheap capital. Growth at all cost was the mantra, hoping companies will turn profitable at some point á la Amazon. Uber's CEO hit the nail on the head when he wrote "The average e…

"The average employee at Uber is barely over 30, which means you've spent your career in a long and unprecedented bull run" - quite an American experience this. Many across Europe and the rest of the world were in a recession until 2014-2015. It was difficult to find a job out of college even with masters degrees in comp sci from tier 1-2 unis.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#534

Post by chiefalchemist »

lumost wrote: post #7
avgDev wrote: post #2

I work for non-tech generating 100million+ in revenue. Cushy job, fully remote, good pay and full autonomy with flexible hours working as an IC. I recently talked to a startup, similar pay, culture would be a better fit since it was mostly techies and I'm a nerd by nature.....but things just got awkward as soon as I asked about their revenue....they were bleeding money and I was told they were being acquired by a big…

Across every investment class there has been a trend of buyers needing to become more financially irresponsible in order to participate in the market. Need to buy a house? bid 20% more than asking, if you don't - someone else will.. in cash. Need to build a ride-hailing app? prepare to pay people to ride indefinitely. Need to own a growth stock? prepare to pay upwards of 100x multiple on revenue. All around, there ha…

> All around, there have been too many dollars chasing too few assets.

You can thank the central banks for this. They seem to be too focused on propping up the wrong metrics. Meanwhile the real economy - and the real people in it - are limping like a three-legged dog.

Yet the top layer ignores the messages (e.g., in the USA, Trump being elected, and perhaps re-elected) and persists with the insanity. This cycle - and the associated level of denial - is not sustainable.

Not economically.

Not socially.

And not ecologically either for that matter.

We can't consume our way out of this madness.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#535

Post by Ekaros »

sgc wrote: post #412
legitster wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you are getting those numbers from. Ford had $37b in revenue Q4. Tesla had $16b. Tesla is an impressive company that's managed to finally be profitable. But currently their market cap is higher than all other auto manufacturers combined. > Everyone else is losing money on their EVs and can't make them in volume production, can't find the batteries for them, you do the math. That's the thing, this s…

Agreed. I for one am very happy with the wider EV push, because I will never need to buy a Tesla. I am sure many other people have similar sentiments. Obviously they are valued for their batteries and solar as well, but their business model and product offerings there are far from a fit for everybody either. It all does not add up to current value, although it is hard to see where the mad dash to buy "the future^TM"…

Solar is race to bottom, very low margin competition with Chinese manufactures. Batteries will follow as well. And if that was really going great why did SolarCity get bailed out by Tesla money? I would have expected it to be a massive company as well.

Also, I never really understood robotaxis as something magical high margin business. It is also race to bottom operating with very thing margins. And probably only after huge waste of VC capital.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#536

Post by ajsnigrutin »

piva00 wrote: post #416
martindbp wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Tesla it makes way more sense to use the annualized Q4 numbers vs Ford total 2021 because Tesla grows like crazy, that's the whole point. It doesn't matter that Tesla lost money in the past if they're printing it like there's no tomorrow now, with nothing stopping them (except lock downs). Traditional autos ICE sales have been decreasing and will continue to do so, and they're trying to replace it with EV sales t…

> with nothing stopping them (except lock downs) And maybe competition? The market is booming but other automakers are starting to have competitive lines. I want to see what Tesla could have in their sleeve to ever become as desirable as they were the past years... I'm not sure if all this hope in eternal growth of Tesla will hold.

Tesla has nothing on the market for smaller, cheaper european markets, and smaller, cheaper cars like Renault Zoe are getting more and more common sight on the streets. There is no premium pricing on those, but the numbers of cars sold is quite huge.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#537

Post by disqard »

mmaunder wrote: post #74

"Then there are rising interest rates. Besides possibly triggering a downturn, they reduce the present value of tech companies’ profits, most of which lie far in the future." This is key. If you have a 10 year horizon for your startup investments, hoping that one in 100 will become the next Amazon or Google, you're going to discount those future cashflows into todays dollars by applying an interest rate connected to…

> "... at the end of the day, creating a business that makes more money than it spends is what it's all about, and that is very difficult to do. These never-profitable businesses have been benefiting from the era of free money, and as that time ends, so will they."

Indeed. You cannot cheat the fundamentals -- you can avoid/delay them, but they'll eventually catch up with you.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#538

Post by chiefalchemist »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #357
gonzo41 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also a central banking fail in so far that there's that much liquidity in the market that can't find a productive outlet. There's a lot of money, but also not enough concentrated in one spot to do really useful ventures like large infrastructure projects. So instead the money is distorting everything. Imagine if lending was less cheap for home owners but it was still cheap for governments or really large comp…

The central bank doesn't control policies like that though. They have scant few actual knobs to turn on their own without Congressional intervention.

On the other hand, The Fed goes over the top with what they can do and Congress refuses to lean in on its supervision of The Fed.

Imagine that. You refuse to do your job and you still have a job.

Only in America.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#539

Post by mkr-hn »

slickrick216 wrote: post #533
vishnugupta wrote: post #58

It's fascinating to trace the genesis of present crash to Fed's policies post 2008 crisis. The interest rates were kept artificially low to prevent another Great Depression. 2010s saw an unprecedented rally of tech/growth stocks, fuelled by cheap capital. Growth at all cost was the mantra, hoping companies will turn profitable at some point á la Amazon. Uber's CEO hit the nail on the head when he wrote "The average e…

"The average employee at Uber is barely over 30, which means you've spent your career in a long and unprecedented bull run" - quite an American experience this. Many across Europe and the rest of the world were in a recession until 2014-2015. It was difficult to find a job out of college even with masters degrees in comp sci from tier 1-2 unis.

It's also an American experience outside tech and finance.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#540

Post by jokethrowaway »

kenrik wrote: post #472
Johnny555 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention Slack, but they had losses of $140M/year prior to IPO: Slack says it may not turn profitable; IPO filing reveals $139 million in losses, Microsoft primary competitor The Slack IPO filing shows annual revenue of $400.5 million, up 60% from the prior year, with a net loss of $138.9 million, for the 12-month period that ended Jan. 31. Slack's actual fiscal year-end date has yet to be determined.

Slack grew their workforce too quickly. Actually the Slack I remember from when it first came out is more or less the same product they have now. I'm not really sure what all of those people were doing for all of those years.

It's definitely turned into a slow behemoth. I remember it being snappy in the early days and everyone wanted to use it.
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