Covid boosted Capitalism.
How Covid brought the future back
71–78 of 78 posts
Re: How Covid brought the future back
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The first industrial revolution (which btw happened long after the dark ages and well into the early modern era) was marked by a transition to waterpower & steam (which can also be generated by burning wood) and of course windmills are even older, so it's possible to have happened without fossil fuels - it would just develop differently.
Maybe we'd have massive build out of hydroelectric dams, wind turbines, steam engines powered by wood harvested from artificial forests optimized for fast growth/hot burning trees. You could still have air travel by airships & trains will still be workable albeit slower than our trains.
Maybe Iceland would be contentious territory due to geothermal resources, like the middle eastern petrostates in the 20th/21st centuries.
Re: How Covid brought the future back
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s different every time, isn’t it? World War II was different, the oil crisis in the 70s was different, debt in the 80s, doctom bubble in the 90s, the financial crisis was really different, and now this pandemic and the sheer volumes of money. It’s different every time, but economic growth has been a constant and tied to this are ultimately the prices of securities. That’s not gonna be different. So it’s a very san…
Index funds are a good, safe set and forget option. In boring times, the performance is not much worse and even sometimes better. In times of upheaval though, the high volatility makes active trading MUCH more profitable.
Index funds are safe bet only with economy growing. This is ending now as we are entering japanization of the economy.
Re: How Covid brought the future back
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saving the world economy from a pandemic and creating the equivalent of a vaccine printer = 2x their stock price. If anything i d say investors are being pessimistic
Or they realize that the vaccine is temporary and vaccine companies aren't able to extract rent from saving the economy, due to either competition or government/social pressure.
The mRNA tech is a vaccine and future cancer cure printer, the proof of concept should be enough for people to realize the enormous potential
Re: How Covid brought the future back
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I read somewhere how the industrial revolution was a consequence of disallowing slave labour/inhumanly hard labour.
The greek had invented steam powered machines, but considered them a curiosity,or a way to push open doors 'by the gods' without human labour.
The industrial revolution, in that vision, happened when mines still needed a way to push the ore up, but humans didn't do it anymore for a price that made it worthwile.
So there was a clear need for an alternative, and that made people look around. steam power was already known, but started to make economic sense. Hence, it got perfected.
Re: How Covid brought the future back
#76For those saying value investing is dead, i think they simply don’t understand it, thinking it’s just blindly looking at P/e ratios.
it posits two things:
1. Companies have an “intrinsic value” that can be determined based on their earnings, balance sheet, dividends, and analysis.
2. Buy companies that are below this intrinsic value.
The problem with departing from the underlying value of an asset is you’re essentially doing the GME game (greater fool). You’re just relying on someone paying more than you did for something, which can go down as fast as it went up since there’s nothing tangible backing it up. Eventually there are no more greater fools
or you’re just gambling that something will happen in the future to justify the current value, which is exactly a gamble
Re: How Covid brought the future back
#77There 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.
Isn't Alphabet X somewhat similar?
Re: How Covid brought the future back
#78COVID made people appreciate the value of technology. For example, autonomous vehicles, whether automobiles or drones, take on much greater importance when much of the population is restricted to their homes and needs goods delivered, preferrably without interacting with a human. Machine learning goes from a technology that can make our lives more comfortable and improve the bottom line, to one that can end a global…
> For example, autonomous vehicles, whether automobiles or drones, take on much greater importance when much of the population is restricted to their homes and needs goods delivered, preferrably without interacting with a human.
I don't know where you live but here we're being delivered food by people on good old bicycles or cars.
> Machine learning goes from a technology that can make our lives more comfortable and improve the bottom line, to one that can end a global catastophe.
How so ?
COVID made people realise that unchecked globalisation brings Asian viruses to your doorstep in less than 24 hours. That deforestation increase risk of infectious diseases jumping from animals to humans. That most western countries have no manufacturing power when crisis hit (masks, ICU beds, alcohol gels &c.). That countries relying almost entirely on tourism are one step away from complete collapse. That a very large part of western countries are absolutely clueless at handling emergencies.
I personally dont want to live in a world in which I work from home, talk to people through zoom and I'm so scared of human contact that I rely on drones for deliveries. Some people here describe that as heaven, it's hell for me, this isn't a future I'm looking forward to
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/17/913093387/why-cant-america-ma...
https://blog.prif.org/2020/04/20/sars-cov-2-pandemic-is-an-a...
https://theconversation.com/how-deforestation-helps-deadly-v...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-020-00444-x
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/why-human-impact-environme...