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Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

economist.com

621–630 of 774 posts

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#621
post #470

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> We could allocate resources When you buy/sell crypto - money changes hands. That money wasn't really "allocated" to crypto, beyond miner fees, just redistributed. That cash still exists. The resources being allocated are graphics cards, human time, and electricity AFAICT. The power usage of crypto is relatively small compared to other active human endeavors. It's power usage doesn't approach other arbitrary value s…

Those other endeavors scale significantly more efficiently and are a necessity. Gold is a requirement for industrial purposes, for jewellry, for chemical processes for medication. Visa/Mastercard perform many hundred of thousand transactions per second. BTC is limited to 350k per day, and consumes the equivalent CO2 impact as Austria. It can't and won't ever scale, which leaves it open to market manipulation and cent…

>Gold is a requirement for industrial purposes, for jewellry, for chemical processes for medication.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...

That might be true but 46.64% of gold demand is for "investment", and a further 8.58% is for "central banks". In other words, most gold produced is hoarded and not used for anything productive. If you're against bitcoin because you think it's a non-productive use of energy, you should also be against investment/central bank use of gold.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#622

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Interestingly, I've heard many instances where interviewees asked startups about their revenues and the startups just wouldn't tell them, saying that it's growing, or some other vague nonsense. Even in the case of inquiring about the amount of equity one gets, many startups would not tell them the actual percentage of the company they'd get, instead opting to tell them the number of shares, without actually telling t…

Ok. They tell you their revenues. What good does that do if they don’t have a profitable business model?

Because then you can at least choose the company with 50MM ARR over one with 5M ARR if you have multiple offers

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your project? $100k seems like an odd amount of money to ask for, to me. You can't staff up very much with that, but it seems like a lot of money to pay for AWS/hosting-type bills when you're just starting out ($10-30k should be more than enough). It only makes sense (again, to me) if what you really want is access to the VC and their network. But again, I don't know shit about VC and angel investing.

It was odd, but my envisioned development window was about 3-4 months (planning for 6) and I had potentially high upkeep after launch ($500-$1000pm for production ready servers). I could have found a co-founder or two and funded them for that period as well. So it would have been just enough + a buffer. At least in my mind. I realize you need more runway than to just get to launch and survive 2-3 months now. The idea…

> I want to index and enable deep visualized search through video libraries and in videos

Sounds very interesting. I was thinking about this the other day in the context of golf. Thanks to Youtube, I can learn from watching the swing of any player in the world/history. But while a golf swing takes only 2 seconds or so, they're all "locked up" in lengthy videos. And forget about searching for one person's swing vs another.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2010s saw an unprecedented rally of tech/growth stocks, fueled by cheap capital. Correlation does not mean causation, as it's commonly said. Interest rates were high in the 80s and 90s yet tech stocks boomed. Tech stocks did so well because they make so much money. Facebook earned $40 billion in profits for 2021, 3x Walmart. Google makes even more. Also, market dominance and moat factors working to big tech's favor.

Which tech stock was valued at 100x sales in the 80s? I'm sure there are plenty of examples from 1999, though.

what were interest rates in 1998-1999?

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It shouldn't have stopped them from maintenance though; they just didn't feel like doing maintenance. If a company wants to spend money on something they can always get a loan for it and consider issuing the shares out again later if needed. The problem with a share buyback is if you do it and then the share price falls again.

>The problem with a share buyback is if you do it and then the share price falls again.

how's that a problem? I get it might seem like you're back to square one if you did a buyback early this year, and the recent market crash brought the share price to before the buyback, but you still permanently:

1. paid out money to the shareholders who sold

2. increased the ownership stake of the remaining shareholders

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#626
post #7

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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…

> Need to buy a house? bid 20% more than asking, if you don't - someone else will.. in cash. Buying in cash is being done to skirt the tightened up lending standards that followed the 2008 Crisis: https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/uflzht/the_2022...

>superstonk

I'm baffled why people would get their economic analysis from a subreddit predicated on a short sequeeze that has failed to materialize.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They set the price well under market in order to generate interest and visits. Next, in the same time interval multiple people bid, and you get a bidding war. Alternatively, price it at what you want it, and let it sit however long it takes. For hot markets, the former is what is done, in the US at least

If you think the house will sell for $1.01M, you should absolutely list it just under $1M (so it hits the screens of shoppers who are only looking at $700K-1M houses).

And you get more simultaneous bids. If one prices it high for the long term and prefers patience, there'll be sporadic bids and eventually low-balls.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sucks is that fiscal policy, ie government spending, is also often not very efficient. Even when rampant corruption doesn’t destroy efficiency, crushing bureaucracy or just plain incompetence will. (Is the DMV a model of efficiency?) So you need a smart balance. And you need competent, honest people in both business AND government. I don’t think that government necessarily is inefficient. The DMV could be a very…

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…

Thirty years ago in Massachusetts, if you had DMV business, you just walked in, waited half an hour, and conducted your business. And we complained about that.

Things have not improved, to say the least.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#629
post #607
post #92

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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…

This is mostly a central banking failure. Take a look around the world, for decades the only thing the central banks have been doing is printing money. If that is ever going to work, put swines in their seat would do their jobs perfectly. To me printing money should only be used as emergency measure just like administering of adrenaline in emergency room and must be reviewed afterwards. Unfortunately such instrument…

What does it mean when inflation happens elsewhere? Isn't that kind of a good thing (if not hostile) - because we can buy stuff from "elsewhere" for cheaper?
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