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How Covid brought the future back

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Re: How Covid brought the future back

#61

Post by anonisko »

Animats wrote: post #57
pm90 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right, its not the same and it will likely fail in ways we can't predict just yet. The 2008 crisis taught the US Federal Reserve how to respond to an economic crisis effectively, and they've been pretty successful at managing the current one. Note that Fed's main concerns are macroeconomic, so their assistance necessarily goes mostly to larger corporations and financial institutions, which seem to b…

You're absolutely right, its not the same and it will likely fail in ways we can't predict just yet. Yes. We haven't yet had a bubble collapse in a time of zero or negative real interest rates. When it happens, cutting interest rates will not be an option. That option has been used up.

Like a junkie chasing that first high. You keep needing more and more but never get close to the first, until suddenly you wake up and realizing your life collapsed around you and your drug doesn't work at all anymore.

Re: How Covid brought the future back

#62

Post by hakfoo »

vagrantJin wrote: post #58
achenatx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brand is incredibly strong. It wont become a footnote. At this point they will make it standalone or be purchased by another company. I dont think fading away into obscurity is in the cards.

That's fanboyism. Most places on the world dont have the infrastructure for electric cars yet. But I'll be damned if you won't find a Toyota Hilux in the most backwater village behind a mountain range. I know a vast majority of people of my friend group who aren't in tech have no idea about tesla and at best have heard the name something something electric car something something Elon Musk Compared to VW or Toyota -…

What's odd is that there's a fairly strong sentiment that EVs are the future, but some of the existing automakers seem to still be covering their ears and singing.

If Tesla starts suffering mortal market-share wounds, they will still be a compelling acquisition target for one of the existing automakers who are late to the EV party-- you get a ready-made bag of patents, supply chain, and designs. You can immediately start building a Model 3 with an Acura or Chrysler badge, and you've got something to ship to dealers in countries with punitive tax regime or ban on gas cars, and a few more years runway to fully adapt the design into a full full own-brand EV.

Re: How Covid brought the future back

#64

Post by ivanche »

anonisko wrote: post #5
Animats wrote: post #4

In fact, some economists continued to argue after 2000 that “bubble” is a meaningless category. Uh oh. "Stocks have reached a permanently high plateau" - Irving Fisher, economist, early October 1929.

There is something different this time. People en masse have started using the S&P 500 and other index funds as a long term store of value. Large amounts of money buy these stocks every pay period with zero regard to performance or current market conditions. As far as I'm aware, this has never happened before. We don't know how this experiment will change the market long term or whether it will eventually collapse.

> There is something different this time.

Do you know which are the 4 most expensive words in English? "This time it's different."

Re: How Covid brought the future back

#65

Post by repsilat »

hakfoo wrote: post #62
vagrantJin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fanboyism. Most places on the world dont have the infrastructure for electric cars yet. But I'll be damned if you won't find a Toyota Hilux in the most backwater village behind a mountain range. I know a vast majority of people of my friend group who aren't in tech have no idea about tesla and at best have heard the name something something electric car something something Elon Musk Compared to VW or Toyota -…

What's odd is that there's a fairly strong sentiment that EVs are the future, but some of the existing automakers seem to still be covering their ears and singing. If Tesla starts suffering mortal market-share wounds, they will still be a compelling acquisition target for one of the existing automakers who are late to the EV party-- you get a ready-made bag of patents, supply chain, and designs. You can immediately s…

> some of the existing automakers seem to still be covering their ears and singing

Some, but the more common story is "traditional automaker pouring billions into EV production to make up for lost time."

> If Tesla starts suffering mortal market-share wounds, they will still be a compelling acquisition target

More importantly they'd need to suffer mortal market cap wounds. At anything like current prices they're not only dreadful value, they're simply unaffordable. At the moment Tesla buying a large traditional automaker is more likely than the reverse (though maybe not likely in an absolute sense.)

Re: How Covid brought the future back

#66

Post by TomMasz »

PeterWhittaker wrote: post #36

There seem to be three main hypotheses in this article, and all seem wrong to me. The first, raised in the context of development of the transistor and how it was stalled by WW2, is some notion of “future improvement motivation”. The author suggests that the transistor came about because the people involved wanted to improve the future. I’d assert that the people involved wanted to improve switching speeds and reduce…

Post-WWII R&D was vastly different from what R&D is like now. No one is funding research that isn't directly product-related or with an unclear or long-term ROI like that anymore. There never will be a Bell Labs or PARC every again. Incremental improvements are the future now.

Re: How Covid brought the future back

#67

Post by Izkata »

etherio wrote: post #14

This article seems a bit disjointed and ambling. Can we also argue that this surge of investment is correlated to people staying at home and thus having more money to spend that would have been used on food, entertainment, etc... ? İm not sure whether or not this is correct considering the negative economic effects of covid for many people, but it might have caused a surge in investing for a certain deomographic.

Consider the situation in the US:

Unemployment spiked from 4% to 14% yes, but on the flipside, what about the 80% or so that didn't lose their jobs? We still got stimulus checks, while paying less for entertainment and transportation (if we could work from home). What else to do with that extra money? Put it in GameStop, perhaps?

Re: How Covid brought the future back

#69

Post by ianai »

TomMasz wrote: post #66
PeterWhittaker wrote: post #36

There seem to be three main hypotheses in this article, and all seem wrong to me. The first, raised in the context of development of the transistor and how it was stalled by WW2, is some notion of “future improvement motivation”. The author suggests that the transistor came about because the people involved wanted to improve the future. I’d assert that the people involved wanted to improve switching speeds and reduce…

Post-WWII R&D was vastly different from what R&D is like now. No one is funding research that isn't directly product-related or with an unclear or long-term ROI like that anymore. There never will be a Bell Labs or PARC every again. Incremental improvements are the future now.

I sometimes wonder how different human culture would have developed without fossil fuels of any kind - it would likely mean no industrial revolution, right? No coal, no gas, etc. I think fossil fuels essentially moved us so far up in a Kardeshev type energy utilization that technological breakthroughs could really snowball exponentially. And fossil fuels only exist because for a hundreds of millions of years bacteria didn’t exist to break down trees or fiber. I could see that being an evolutionary tick being answered as a result of random processes possible to happen much faster.

Anyway, without fossil fuels we may still be where we were before them - so dark ages, I think. Without fossil fuels I don’t know whether we’d ever have even the conception to seek out higher concentrations of energy. And it’s that energy concentration that still powers most of our civilization.

All of which is to say, we could be on the verge to reduce ourselves to only marginal increments on what is currently available at that sort of power concentration, or worse. Or we could realize things like nuclear power open up still more exponential power concentrations.

Re: How Covid brought the future back

#70

Post by ffggvv »

renewiltord wrote: post #9
Animats wrote: post #4

In fact, some economists continued to argue after 2000 that “bubble” is a meaningless category. Uh oh. "Stocks have reached a permanently high plateau" - Irving Fisher, economist, early October 1929.

I've been listening to people say this "uh oh" since 2009. I think literally every year. Not a single year has gone by when someone doesn't "uh oh" and post something about turkeys at Thanksgiving.

you could’ve posted this same comment in 2007, or 1999... etc...
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