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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

#701

Post by pas »

thoms_a wrote: post #656
boucher wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fed actually has more tools than the ones it currently uses, some of which have been used in the past. Robert Hockett has written a lot about productive investments via the federal reserve banks, and how that could be used to transform the economy. Here's one recent paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4023614 He wrote a short book about it as well: https://www.amazon.com/Financing-Green-New…

Indeed, and since it is a privately owned entity [1] with a figurehead appointed by a politician to give the illusion of public accountability, the Fed has very little incentive to do anything but enrich its shareholders: private banks. "Liberal Democracy" is all theatre, all the time. It is a plutocracy with an extremely advanced propaganda arm designed to fool even the most intelligent observer, as can be seen by t…

central banks all around the world, including the US Federal Reserve System are all public institutions.

completely controlled by presidential appointees. (they have the majority of the seats)

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#702

Post by cudgy »

maxerickson wrote: post #569
Thlom wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ultimate proof of ownership is a piece of paper. You can do a lot of stuff electronically in my state, transferring a title isn't one of them. Additional fun thing is that the buyer is supposed to go do that and it can cause the seller headaches if they don't.

Some states now have digital titles … no paper.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#703

Post by pas »

cwkoss wrote: post #311
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…

There would need to be some tight regs to make that work, or else large companies would buy up all the housing supply and force everyone to pay them rent. I think individual home ownership is important, and thats not where I'd want to start cutting. Credit for second homes being less cheap - totally onboard.

or credit for more sustainable, more efficient housing, credit for long term transformative city projects, and so on.

but this has to be counterbalanced with higher rate credit for other things otherwise inflation happens (assuming low unemployment).

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#704

Post by pas »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #614
rib3ye wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Central banks are not governmental organizations.

It sounds pedantic, but it very much depends on how you define 'government'.

it's just as much government as the supreme court. senate confirmed presidential appointees. they have a dual mandate (price stability and low unemployment)

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#705

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #603
kenrik wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You realize that there is a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes, right? They need to scale their systems, maintain reliability, scale their processes, build internal tools, run experiments, work with 'legacy' code and within the existing architecture, etc. It's not surprising product development has slowed down. In almost all cases it seems like the speed of product development is asymptotic.

Hiring too many people is still the number one thing that can kill your growing business. The communication costs alone eat a bunch of headcount so if you don't desperately need the people then you shouldn't hire them.

The problem generally starts when you hire a bunch of people without fixing broken processes first, these people then push back against fixing said processes, and the rot sets in.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#706

Post by sealeck »

jstarfish wrote: post #301
prohobo wrote: post #21

People said this was the "best time ever to get funding" for a startup. I disagree. In my view, it was the best time ever if you played a particular game and had the right connections. I pitched an idea to a VC, which I had a prototype for, looking for $100k. He liked it but wouldn't fund because I didn't have a solid business plan. Fair enough, I need to find a business partner. But then he told me something about h…

I hate SV culture, so not one to WK or make excuses for it, but when you have as much money to throw around as he does, you don't have time to deal with requests for pocket change. Look at your own investment portfolio. Are you investing $1 at a time in fractional shares of a million different stocks, or investing $1000 at a time on a smaller number of stocks/funds you expect to have solid returns? (You think his cry…

The former strategy is actually the better one in the long run. There are a bunch of economics papers showing that on average the vast majority of active fund managers loose out to precisely the strategy you describe (although the instrument used to hold the shares is not usually owning fractional shared personally but rather shares in a mutual fund or an ETF)

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#707

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

ericmay wrote: post #94
r0m4n0 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been around for 20 years so we can see what happened to advertising revenue during the last recession. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...

Which is definitely a piece of data to look at while making an investment decision. One thing I'd recommend is asking how was Google as a company different in say, 2008 where revenues increased despite the recession compared to now.

Google was the cheap competitor to TV last recession. That's definitely not true anymore.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#708

Post by Matl »

chii wrote: post #651
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…

> really useful ventures like large infrastructure projects give me an example of large infrastructure projects like this. The only examples i can think of are things which gov't fund via tax payer money, and don't expect to be able to reap private profit off; things like roads, rail, electrification of the grid etc.

Why would i.e. fiber infrastructure not be among these?

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#709

Post by cameronmalek »

nobody9999 wrote: post #604
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…

>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. Sounds like your state has a big problem. In my state (New York), appointments are generally available within a week and walk-ins are welcome, but those with…

[deleted]

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#710

Post by nobody9999 »

cameronmalek wrote: post #709
nobody9999 wrote: post #604

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. Sounds like your state has a big problem. In my state (New York), appointments are generally available within a week and walk-ins are welcome, but those with…

[deleted]

>An EDL is not required to fly domestically, which is good because only 5 states offer the option. An EDL includes the Real ID benefits which includes domestic travel, but also acts as a passport when traveling by land or sea with Canada/Mexico/some Caribbean nations.

Yep. Which is why I said:

   ...I wanted to trade in my license for an "Enhanced
   Driver's License"[0] (EDL) which, *among other things*,
   will be required for domestic air travel[1] in a year or 
   so.
Upon reflection, I can see how that kind of puts the cart before the horse, but it isn't really incorrect as an EDL incorporates the RealID.

I suppose I could have clarified that the EDL provides RealID and additional functionality as you describe, but I figured that "among other things" and links describing both RealID and EDL, folks could find out for themselves what "among other things" meant.

Perhaps that overestimates the reading comprehension of some folks, but I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt and not assume they're morons.

Perhaps that's a mistake, but if so, it isn't my first and won't be my last.

I thank you for clarifying and I'm sure the morons out there will thank you for your pedantry as well.

I'd further point out that this was just a real-life example of a service which must be provided in person and not online and my experience with scheduling an appointment. It could just as easily have been any of several different services which require actually going to the DMV, but that's the one that is relevant to my life at the moment.

As such, even if I'd claimed that an EDL gets me free blowjobs at Federal buildings, I still made the point I was attempting to make.

Edit: Clarified my prose.

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