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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

#591

Post by brigade »

api wrote: post #430
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…

California right?

Can't be, in CA you can't return normal plates, they explicitly don't want them back. And you don't really have to return vanity plates either.

Rather, there's an online form for notifying them of a sale.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#593

Post by JaimeThompson »

astrange wrote: post #558
JaimeThompson wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>really large companies to be able to build train lines or advanced manufacturing They would use the money to buy back their own stock.

Stock buybacks aren’t spending money any more than putting it in your retirement fund is. They are value neutral.

They aren't value neutral if you are spending money on buybacks instead of growing / keeping your factories in working order.

See Abbott Labs spending 5 billion on buybacks instead of keeping their infant formula factories up to code.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#594

Post by routerl »

hintymad wrote: post #155

I remember people were talking about Coinbase doted out $750K package to engineers with less than 2 years of experience (or new grad? I can't remember exactly). I had to wonder: what can a newly minted engineer do to generate so much value to Coinbase?

We're probably talking about engineers from well regarded schools, so having these people on the payroll lends a lot of credibility.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#595

Post by throw8383833jj »

BbzzbB wrote: post #125
lumost wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, you need some level of financial creativity to justify buying into one of the many bubbles. But that's where the timeless Buffett quote[0] on Ted Williams and batting comes in, there's no called strikes in securities markets. Mr. Market doesn't force you to do anything at all, we're all free to ignore the speculation and focus on proper cash flowing businesses at reasonable valuations. The more boring the better…

Sitting in cash is not a defensive position, it's offensive and a highly risky one at that. When fiat, is losing 5-6% on average every single year, you can't afford to wait for the right moment to jump into equities. You have to be in it now, whether the valuation suits you or not. This of course exacerbates risk for everyone and forces everyone into risky positions because cash is now more risky than nearly all the other risky bubbles out there.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#596

Post by Gravyness »

pc86 wrote: post #47
Gravyness wrote: post #23

Tech? like technology? What does it mean? Because surely companies that apply scientific knowledge for practical purposes aren't 'bursting' all over the place, right? Does it refer to specifically these huge companies quoted on the article?

You know exactly what it means. There is no way that you think tech in this context means "applying scientific knowledge for practical purposes" unless you have - and I truly, deeply mean this with zero disrespect whatsoever - weapons-grade autism. When did it become the cool thing to pretend to not know anything about the context in which a particular discussion happens? It's maddening, but also completely exhaustin…

You alright?

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#597

Post by nobody9999 »

JJMcJ wrote: post #518
SauciestGNU wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep using the DMV as an example of government inefficiency, but my state has made it run so painlessly I don't think I've spent more than 15 minutes in an office over the last 5 years. I think government can be efficient if you put technocrats in charge of implementation rather than elected officials who are subject to the electoral whims of the uninformed masses. The problem with the above is it weakens demo…

Almost all DMV problems are due to understaffing, not any laziness or incompetence on the part of the people who work there. In California the DMV experience was greatly improved by having appointments, and for walk in, you get a number and at least have an idea when you'll be called, so you can sit in a waiting area, not have to stand for hours. COVID has reduced staffing so that makes appointments harder to get. Al…

>Also, imagining that corporate offices are models of efficiency is an error.

Absolutely!

I used to work for a Fortune 50 company (that shall remain nameless here) and was moving various groups (mostly marketing and research) away from mainframe batch processing (this was the mid 1990s) toward distributed (Unix) systems.

The inefficiency and waste were just unbelievable. The corporation had tried to move their customer service reps off IBM 3270[0] terminals which were locked in to a single application (with significant retraining required for different apps) with X terminals (what they used to call thin clients) that scraped database queries and stored them in a local database and had a unified UI across all apps.

The app was complete, the roll out team purchased ~USD$300,000,000 worth of systems and infrastructure, and then realized that it would cost USD$150,000,000/year to support/maintain the environment.

So the project was canceled, with hundreds of millions of dollars in Unix boxen and related hardware sitting in warehouses, now without a clear purpose.

When moving folks off of the mainframe, we always pushed them to use the hardware already purchased (a sunk cost). All a group needed to to was put the capital depreciation for whatever equipment they used on their budget lines.

The vendor (again who will remain nameless) priced out equipment (on purpose, I'm sure) so it was cheaper (on the budget line) than the depreciation on the equipment the corporation already owned. In every single case, these groups chose to spend real money buying new equipment rather than taking on the depreciation of the equipment already purchased.

What's more, when evangelizing these changes, I was strongly cautioned to never use the phrase "increased productivity," as that (apparently) made the heads of these groups concerned about losing head count.

tl;dr: The corporation was so fractured and inefficient that group heads would waste corporate dollars in the millions just to maintain their budget and headcount.

I'd love to hear about something like that happening at the DMV or other government office. But I won't, because if folks in the public sector pulled shit like that, they'd be hounded out of their departments.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270

Edit: Added the missing link.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#598

Post by medvezhenok »

paulpauper wrote: post #399
tristanperry wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be stunned if the Nasdaq above 11,800 (i.e. it's current level). There seems to be too many economic headwinds. I think today was a short term relief rally, not the turning point of one month's sell-offs.

It fell 30% because of Covid and recession in 2020. It was down as much as 30% yesterday of its peak but without either of those.

Not sure that’s the fully correct take. It only had time to fall 30 percent before the FED announced QE infinity which turned it around (FED solved liquidity issues). If that didn’t happen it would have likely fallen further.

Now we are having similar liquidity issues / dollar strength but the FED is not rushing to the rescue.

Context is important

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#599

Post by heartbreak »

fullshark wrote: post #305
seydor wrote: post #151

As always, when things crash it's the best time to read the comments

Something that's funny right now is there are a lot of bears gloating about what they think is going to happen in the market and cryptocurrencies the next 2 years without it even having happened yet. They've been waiting literally years for this moment and they think it's finally arrived and can't wait to dance.

For what it’s worth they were doing the same thing here in May 2020 warning everyone gleefully about how we hadn’t hit the bottom yet.

Maybe they’ll be wrong this time, too. I don’t know.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#600

Post by throw8383833jj »

DragonStrength wrote: post #475
shrimpx wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All-cash is basically the new norm. It’s paradoxical that all-cash became the norm in a period where mortgage rates were at all time lows…

Well, only if you ignore how we got there. Housing output took far too long to recover after 2008, and on top of that, many homeowners felt entitled to the gains they lost during the recession because that is what the American Dream promised. We could also pull on the demographic weirdness of the moment as Baby Boomers only finally cede political power, skipping a generation. What have all are priorities concerned si…

In the long term, housing should always return to the cost of building it plus the cost of land, that's the long term trend line. Now, why this trend line is increasing so fast is the real reason why housing is so expensive (something no one ever talks about), everything else is just incidental and or temporary effects.
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