Wonder if CRV is reacting to the same underlying trends causing Warren Buffet to sell stock (e.g., Cape / Shiller PE ratio is close to an all-time high)...
P/E ratios are not going to drop until some kind of socialist revolution reverses the movement of money from the budgets of people who spend it to the bank accounts of people who invest it. When control over dollars shifts from people who want goods and services to people who want capital assets, the price of a capital asset (P) must go up as demand rises even while the price of what it manufactures (E) goes down.
Ever hear "there are no alternatives to stocks?" The alternative to stocks in the past was consumption; not so when concentrations of wealth cannot be spent in a thousand lifetimes. It's the perfect storm for crazy P/E. If you believe Piketty's work, that kind of reverse shift never happens gradually, and these P/E ratios represent the "maturity" of a period of relative peace and stability.
It's worth mentioning, as an aside, that as long as inflation is positive, investors do not actually need to see earnings.
I work with Drew (the DBX CEO) on 0-1 bets at Dropbox. I'd love to chat with former founders/early employees passionate about project management, task management, calendaring, or the intersection of the above products with ML/AI. Send your LinkedIn to odio+vip@dropbox.com.
This is an special problem for the uninsured that struggle with mental health.
A close friend struggled with bipolar. She was uninsured and making close to minimum wage…calls to suicide prevention hotlines resulted in thousands of dollars in new bills from ER visits and even involuntary psychiatric care.
She was struggling to pay rent. Being discharged in effectively the same condition as before but with new debt she wouldn’t be able to pay off for years…the medical bills for involuntary psychiatric care were their own special sort of crazy.
For those that believe Brad's take on Wikipedia's content isn't adding a fair amount of value...
Presumably, if Legiblenews takes off and doesn't add value, Wikimedia is free to compete with it. Wikimedia could form a for-profit company that donates more of user revenue to the foundation and feature that company on Wikipedia. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, Wikimedia effectively retains the option to copy & crush Brad's side-project. And if Legiblenews takes off Wikimedia does nothing at all...they will still almost certainly receive more $$$ than the current state of the world.
In that way, Wikimedia is outsourcing innovation to Brad, who Wikimedia is well-positioned to copy/compete with in the future, and being paid to do so. While Brad loses money.
I'm not 100% sure who is on which side of "fair," but ultimately if it complies with Wikimedia's license I'm good with it. And if you don't like it, why not start something better?
> there's a valid reason as to why it's being done (to prioritize Americans out of work)
The "Fixed pie fallacy" [1] is probably both one of the most important tenants of modern policy-making, yet it's rarely explicitly discussed or debated.
Cyclone_, your thinking relies on this fallacy, namely that if one person is working a job, that's one less job available. [2]
In reality, there is quite a bit of empirical research that indicates when people work (especially highly skilled jobs like in tech), it does not reduce (and may even increase) the jobs available to others [3].
If globalization and automation are so good at job creation, why did the American manufacturing workforce collapse?
Economies are complex, counter-intuitive feedback machines, but the "supply and demand" model fits the last 40 years of data, while the "floats all boats" model really doesn't.
"Lump of labor is a fallacy, honest!" sure sounds like the kind of opinion I could get a good penny for if I were an enterprising economist, though.
Recent immigrants were responsible for creating tens of thousands of jobs, most of them for Americans.
Software isn't a zero-sum game even on a country level and certainly US benefits enormously because companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix etc. are global giants but employ massive amounts of highly paid people in US.
CNBC sure had to stretch that definition pretty darn far to get to "more than half," didn't they.
In any case, immigration is the least upsetting globalization policy IMO: it is exactly what it says on the tin, almost everyone agrees that too little or too much is bad, and the amount can be tuned using quotas. H1B, however, is not that. It pretends to be about scarce skillsets (which enter this calculation one way) when it's actually usually about standard skillsets (which enter the calculation in another). Further, it suppresses the bargaining ability of the people subjected to it, depressing wages for both them those they compete with. Worse still is "regulatory arbitrage" where low tariffs encourage companies to bypass environmental, safety, and labor regulation by shipping manufacturing (or what have you) overseas. I prefer immigration to both H1Bs and regulatory arbitrage, and not by a small margin.
As a more general point, exponential growth is one helluva drug and truly does create a "floats all boats" environment, but different economics apply once an economic sector plateaus. Those economics look much closer to zero-sum. Zero-growth = zero-sum. Low growth is low sum. That's why what happened to American manufacturing over the last 20 years is a good model for what happens to American software over the next 20, if we aren't careful.
We've had it good in software, but we're no longer in the phase where we can pretend the sigmoid is a neverending exponential.
Immigrants starting businesses aren't doing it on H1-B visas. Those are only for employees of existing companies and don't upgrade to permanent citizenship.
Because it was outdated technology, that’s not even what you are talking about. You’re talking about a fundamental change in technology, not production methods (automation) or market/labor expansion (globalization).
Frankly, I’m not sure what point you’re even trying to make.
Fair enough, replace a disrupted technology with census tabulators who were automated. My point stands: you can't look at job losses in the affected industry to tell the whole story. You have to look at jobs in the economy at large. Automation leads to new demands elsewhere, and so does globalization.
When I read these comments I'm left wishing we could be a more supportive community when peers try something new. I hope we can find a way to support Niko.
It saddens me that many engineers don't start projects for fear of embarrassment from forums like these.
My first startup failed for all sorts of legitimate reasons. My second startup sold to Facebook for millions. And all of them sounded like a bad idea at the start.
Let's not be a modern slashdot and miss the forest for the trees. What if Niko or someone here is successful? How will history judge the incessant critiques?
It’s a dangerous kit. There are no mounts included (zip ties don’t count) and the demo image on the website shows a panel sitting on a window ledge. Seems like a good way for a panel to fall and injure/kill somebody. Real solar panels installed on a home are bolted to structural members of the home so they can resist severe winds that happen yearly (60 mph+)
“Move fast and break things” is dumb when it comes to electricity or physical products that get mounted on the exterior of a building, and there’s nothing wrong with calling someone out for failing to take safety into account. It’s a huge oversight.
When I read these comments I'm left wishing we could be a more supportive community when peers try something new.
I've posted a critical comment to this thread, and I wish I could have been more constructive, too. But I am willing to risk ending up in the "iPod critic" bucket. We are being supportive by saying, "you better fix this shit". Because we as a community should not ignore safety issues, for instance. How supportive is it to let Niko sell this and then get the shit sued out of them because someone took their advice of sitting a rigid solar panel on a window ledge? How supportive is it to let ad copy ride that claims that weeny battery will run a fridge? How supportive is it when Niko asks, "why didn't anyone mention this?" and we all shrug our shoulders and say, "didn't want to be critical, bro."
"Constructive criticism" is a thing. I hope that my criticism was constructive. But even if it is not, I will not paint over issues with false praise.
> The prediction that participants in the sleep condition would have greater discriminability compared to participants in the wake condition was not supported. There were also no differences in reliability.
Society’s treatment of alternate hypotheses as somehow more interesting or sensational than null hypotheses leads to bad science. I think it’s interesting that sleep doesn’t seem to have an effect on eyewitness identifications.
