So, first, it takes a trader to use stock valuation as the numerator of a productivity equation. If we didn't live in the "everything bubble" that's been 100% financed by the fed, things would look different.
Anyone who's lived through the deindustrialization of steel or autos knows the "find other work" thing is somewhere between an optimistic fantasy and a cynical sop. The reality is, the other, equivalent work goes to an increasingly small subset of young people. If we were to look at outcomes normalized for position in society, the picture would be pretty grim.
The idea that Amazon is a great success only fits in a world where retail is an awesome outcome. So, one of the basic assumptions of the discussion is off. The same goes for advertising (Google, Twitter and FB's real business, given that they can't actually sell their products). (Don't get me started on Uber - low cost transportation based on exploiting people who can't factor the expense of running a personal car as a business into employment decisions. Microsoft, making us more "productive" for forty years based on nobody's metrics. Apple, the Hermes of smartphones. It's embarrassing, nobody does anything worthwhile or honorable.)
And, yeah, the whole thing is ripping up the American fabric, so the only problem with the good, bad, and ugly is that it's all pretty ugly. The entire article reeks of SV bubble thinking.
Covid accelerated exposure of the fractures that forty years of neoliberal "greed is good" / "core business" / "profit is the only objective function" have created. Anyone who's made money in the past ten years largely owes it to the fed mortgaging our future. The "Greenspan put" was amateur hour... child's play.
So, we are left with haves vs have nots, SV and finance vs everyone else, educated vs ignorant, science-believing vs superstitions... Nobody at the top has valued the health of our communities for more than forty years. And, everyone is armed.
Thanks neoliberals!
The very best part of the article was the fp pointer.
With our current degree of living in two different realities, the idea that we could mount an effective challenge to China's onslaught is pretty laughable. Markets decide everything and the market will tell us if we need rare earths from Africa...only way after it's already too late. (It will probably make a fascinating business school case study about how markets mostly don't work well after all, given their deep problems with local optima and lack of strategic forethought... they're just better than Stalinism implemented with 1940s communication technology -- at the hands of Republicans, that seems to be the only comparison ever made.)
Our future rides on two things: (a) our position holding the reserve currency and (b) that miracles really exist.
(Btw, this is the third version I've typed in because whatever SV does in terms of making auth and accounts work well totally sucks.)
Silicon Valley is only doing well because the Fed is printing money and then goosing them by buying their bonds. Look at all the money they're throwing at Apple and Google. I understand why they're doing it, because the SP500 has more or less become the Nifty Five, er, the FAANGs. Otherwise if it wasn't for the printed money, they would be most likely cratering because that's what everyone owns, so that's what everyone would be selling. And that would make Big Line go down and that's politically impossible to allow.
I don't know if there's much that can be done in the short term about the imbalances and lopsidedness in the economy. I would suspect that at some point Silicon Valley will be hated and that will be a trend for this decade and the next. Nobody thought that the big Wall Street banks would ever need to massive amount of bailouts they got back in 08, and yet they did. And I predict that Silicon Valley will lose the respect and admiration it has.
I think we already got our answer from Silicon Valley on how they would solve the problem and that's UBI or welfare for everybody. That and possibly Youtube superchats as everyone turns into desperate attention seekers. Which is more or less a socioeconomic version of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think there are solutions to the problems out there, but I'm pretty certain that they all conflict with the vested interests in the status quo. So I'm going to predict that things will keep declining to the point where it's all burnt down and there's no status quo left to defend or the vested interests will realize the status quo has to change and become motivated to let changes take place.
I think the points you raise are valid, but I’m curious where you think we go from here? I recognize it can be hard to stomach the optimism from people who have hardly been affected by the pandemic, but if the alternative is waking up each morning petrified by the state of affairs you laid out above, I’ll choose the former.
It seems to me that no one is really disputing the negative impact tech has had on much of America, so it seems as though a motivated majority and new presidential administration could do a lot to reign it in.
As a lawyer, it is obvious that there are tons of legal issues that can and should be addressed in Silicon Valley but the problem is that you cannot fit a round peg in a round hole. The tech industry is well aware of this and I don’t fault them for exploiting it as long as possible to make as much money as they can for as long as they can. It’s the responsibility of the legislature to figure out how to regulate them and thus far, they haven’t done so. Trying to police the multi-faceted complexities of a company like Google or Amazon with the Sherman Anti-trust act won’t work. Similarly, using the 1933 and 1934 SEC acts as the sole means of regulating blockchain is simply not sufficient. When the original drafters of a law would not have been able to even process the use of it today, that’s a sign that we probably need some new laws.
So, first, it takes a trader to use stock valuation as the numerator of a productivity equation. If we didn't live in the "everything bubble" that's been 100% financed by the fed, things would look different.
Anyone who's lived through the deindustrialization of steel or autos knows the "find other work" thing is somewhere between an optimistic fantasy and a cynical sop. The reality is, the other, equivalent work goes to an increasingly small subset of young people. If we were to look at outcomes normalized for position in society, the picture would be pretty grim.
The idea that Amazon is a great success only fits in a world where retail is an awesome outcome. So, one of the basic assumptions of the discussion is off. The same goes for advertising (Google, Twitter and FB's real business, given that they can't actually sell their products). (Don't get me started on Uber - low cost transportation based on exploiting people who can't factor the expense of running a personal car as a business into employment decisions. Microsoft, making us more "productive" for forty years based on nobody's metrics. Apple, the Hermes of smartphones. It's embarrassing, nobody does anything worthwhile or honorable.)
And, yeah, the whole thing is ripping up the American fabric, so the only problem with the good, bad, and ugly is that it's all pretty ugly. The entire article reeks of SV bubble thinking.
Covid accelerated exposure of the fractures that forty years of neoliberal "greed is good" / "core business" / "profit is the only objective function" have created. Anyone who's made money in the past ten years largely owes it to the fed mortgaging our future. The "Greenspan put" was amateur hour... child's play.
So, we are left with haves vs have nots, SV and finance vs everyone else, educated vs ignorant, science-believing vs superstitions... Nobody at the top has valued the health of our communities for more than forty years. And, everyone is armed.
Thanks neoliberals!
The very best part of the article was the fp pointer.
With our current degree of living in two different realities, the idea that we could mount an effective challenge to China's onslaught is pretty laughable. Markets decide everything and the market will tell us if we need rare earths from Africa...only way after it's already too late. (It will probably make a fascinating business school case study about how markets mostly don't work well after all, given their deep problems with local optima and lack of strategic forethought... they're just better than Stalinism implemented with 1940s communication technology -- at the hands of Republicans, that seems to be the only comparison ever made.)
Our future rides on two things: (a) our position holding the reserve currency and (b) that miracles really exist.
(Btw, this is the third version I've typed in because whatever SV does in terms of making auth and accounts work well totally sucks.)
Amazon has 876k employees. https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details/2020/Amazon.com-Announces-Second-Quarter-Results/
Silicon Valley is only doing well because the Fed is printing money and then goosing them by buying their bonds. Look at all the money they're throwing at Apple and Google. I understand why they're doing it, because the SP500 has more or less become the Nifty Five, er, the FAANGs. Otherwise if it wasn't for the printed money, they would be most likely cratering because that's what everyone owns, so that's what everyone would be selling. And that would make Big Line go down and that's politically impossible to allow.
I don't know if there's much that can be done in the short term about the imbalances and lopsidedness in the economy. I would suspect that at some point Silicon Valley will be hated and that will be a trend for this decade and the next. Nobody thought that the big Wall Street banks would ever need to massive amount of bailouts they got back in 08, and yet they did. And I predict that Silicon Valley will lose the respect and admiration it has.
I think we already got our answer from Silicon Valley on how they would solve the problem and that's UBI or welfare for everybody. That and possibly Youtube superchats as everyone turns into desperate attention seekers. Which is more or less a socioeconomic version of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think there are solutions to the problems out there, but I'm pretty certain that they all conflict with the vested interests in the status quo. So I'm going to predict that things will keep declining to the point where it's all burnt down and there's no status quo left to defend or the vested interests will realize the status quo has to change and become motivated to let changes take place.
I think the points you raise are valid, but I’m curious where you think we go from here? I recognize it can be hard to stomach the optimism from people who have hardly been affected by the pandemic, but if the alternative is waking up each morning petrified by the state of affairs you laid out above, I’ll choose the former.
It seems to me that no one is really disputing the negative impact tech has had on much of America, so it seems as though a motivated majority and new presidential administration could do a lot to reign it in.
As a lawyer, it is obvious that there are tons of legal issues that can and should be addressed in Silicon Valley but the problem is that you cannot fit a round peg in a round hole. The tech industry is well aware of this and I don’t fault them for exploiting it as long as possible to make as much money as they can for as long as they can. It’s the responsibility of the legislature to figure out how to regulate them and thus far, they haven’t done so. Trying to police the multi-faceted complexities of a company like Google or Amazon with the Sherman Anti-trust act won’t work. Similarly, using the 1933 and 1934 SEC acts as the sole means of regulating blockchain is simply not sufficient. When the original drafters of a law would not have been able to even process the use of it today, that’s a sign that we probably need some new laws.