Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

* They IPOed and are still in business.

* If I had taken the offer, the stock would have been worth between 50k and 150k per year, depending on when I sold it. Their estimate of 100k per year was spot-on.

So they were being honest. Good to know! They were late enough stage when I was applying that they could do a fairly reasonable valuation. I think I would have been much more likely to take the offer if I had information like this in writing.

I still think I was right to value the equity much lower, since I had no way to know if they were being honest at the time.

It talks about the phenomenon (relevant to places that don't seem to be thriving more than to hot cities) of a new strip mall bring built next to a mostly vacant strip mall that's fairly new itself. It explains that this is a developer cashing in on the glut of money chasing returns. He talks about how any business that pretends to be legitimate gets funded, and the competition to loan money to actual functioning enterprises becomes so intense that the eventual owners/lenders/etc. end up having something that looks like a malinvestment because they were the people who predicted the lowest risk and highest returns (in the context of all the other insane things being funded.)

I listen to between 300 and 500 podcasts annually and, despite having a backlog of 175 episodes of various things right now, this one was worth the re-listen (at 1.5x speed, of course.)

I think the confusion arises when we split hairs, that timing is predicting explicit events, or on a short time scale. But I want to zoom out: making decisions based on large scale patterns and trends, including “the s&p always goes up over a long time”, or “the future tends to behave like the past”, (things that are absolutely not guaranteed to happen, and require belief and betting), is a form of timing.

On a per-project percentage basis, the parent's story wasted ~100% of the project's budget. The same number for California's unemployment fraud is less than 2% (the program totaled about $110B).

$300M was wasted in an organization that serves (completely spitballing here) maybe ~500k people among all its customer organizations? The California government serves ~40M California residents.

In any case, government waste is likely orders of magnitude more easily uncovered than even public companies' waste. And when we find out, we can lobby for change and vote for policies that adjust the process to hopefully result in less waste.

But when Coca-Cola overpays 10x for some highly-connected contracting firm to build them some shoddy CRUD software for an internal process we'll probably never heard about it due to a combination of lack of transparency and lack of reporting interest. If we do hear about it, there is no real avenue for lobbying for the change of Coca-Cola policy.

That's not even mentioning that Coca-Cola's entire existence could be (rightfully, in my mind) considered corporate waste because their products actively harm the world, which is a claim much more difficult to apply to the DMV or the California government as a whole.

My argument is that it isn't credible that buying the Mercedes is so obviously superior that is, and I quote the GP, "the no brainer" decision on account of it being "better value for money" because on every metric worthy of note the Tesla has superior statistics while lower cost except for qualities which are highly subjective. Moreover, the GP used a comparison with a vehicle that is in a different class - an SUV versus a sedan. Tesla has a sedan style vehicle - it crushes on the metrics much moreso than the SUV does while being at the same price point. Moreover, on pure value? They have comparable metrics for $80,000 less. I'm absolutely sure some people will prefer the aesthetic of Mercedes, but claiming value for money superiority let alone claiming it so much so that the purchase is a no brainer is objectively wrong whereas the accurate claim that they have a potential subjective appeal is a much lesser claim that I don't disagree with.

> Now the other manufacturers are arriving, just as the array of Androids did, with a variety of models, price points and customisability.

Yes, that is pretty much exactly what is happening. Complete with the death of the former type of phone and the threat to legacy business which that shift includes.

It is slow in happening because mass manufacture of cars isn't something that happens instantly - we don't even have the capacity in terms of minerals to meet the demand that the shift is creating, nor the volume of production at a high enough ramp to allow for the mass transition as we saw with phones. So a lot of people aren't noticing that it is like this, because the transition with phones was relatively fast. They are using the wrong mental model of transition speed. The better one is something more like the transition from horses to cars - fifty years after the ICE engine, horses finally got phased off farms, these transitions are playing out on a much larger time scale then our transition to smart phones, but they aren't actually so different.

Mercedes in this model isn't Apple, but Blackberry - great and in theory they should be able to survive, on the fundamentals of the current product, they have an advantage. Ergonomically, they execute better, but tragically they do so according to the old paradigms. The thing that a lot of people are anticipating is that the old paradigms are about to be destroyed by the smart car which in this case means the car that drives itself, not the car that runs on electricity provided by batteries. Thus, the Tesla valuations.

Ironically, auto makers like Mercedes-Benz are actually relying on BlackBerry QNX for some of the smart car war. So in a way we're seeing the BlackBerry versus Silicon Valley play out a second time. It is kind of shocking to me that they would go this route, since I figured the obvious partnerships would be with Google, not Blackberry, but I don't find their decision to be a strategic blunder. When I realized the strategic position that BlackBerry put itself in with regard to car companies, I switched to long BlackBerry. Apparently the market disagrees with me on this potential. It seems firmly convinced Tesla will win, but I suspect everyone will get to full self-driving sooner rather than later even if Tesla does get there first.

> They offer a limited set of choices and highly opinionated take-it-or-leave design with fixed high prices.

Tesla will not aim to be high priced; they'll aim to be the budget vehicle. It is a strategic imperative introduced by both climate change needing to be solved and also by the demand for vehicle telemetry to enable deep learning at a massive scale. So while this is true historically, it is a bad going forward prediction as to how Tesla will behave. You can already see this in their strategic decisions with the Model 3, which after factoring in ToC is actually a contender among budget cars, rather than the luxury segment. They don't want to be Apple; they want to be the future.