If you are confident in this scenario, then rollover your 401k into an IRA, enable options trading, and buy puts or short the companies that you believe took on too much debt.
This is not a good idea because with shorts you need to time the market correctly... Irrational markets can survive for years and shorts cost premiums, especially those with a distant expiry date. If you're not a stock analyst with inside info, you will not be able to get the timing right.
If you are concerned about timing it right, or macro-economic swings, simply purchase a corresponding long position in an index fund / S&P 500. Options do cost premiums, but shorts typically do not. You can however even recover the option premium with a similar strategy by selling a matching option on the index.
You can construct a trade that will make you money assuming your assumption is correct (that that company will underperform the market).
Amazon's delivery drivers are more similar to Uber/Lyft drivers. They get minimal to no training and simply follow instructions via the app. Some of them have documented the experience on youtube and it's worth a watch. They often have to accept the route with minimal information.
I'd be interested to know how much of those costs are due to driver incentives and other costs related to expansion into new geographic regions vs. costs for established regions.
It could be that cutting costs is as simple as slowing down or pausing the expansion.
Both of your points are likely true. Slack probably could become profitable on a near-term basis, but that is not what investors are paying for. I believe Slack is trading around 30x revenue, so the market is expecting continued growth. At the same time, I believe it also has an eight year burn rate at current operating losses and cash on hand so it has a lot of time before it needs to cut expenses. I don't really like how this article fixating on quarterly operating earnings as a proxy for how the Vision Fund is performing while ignoring the investment cost basis.
I think his point is that if they could be profitable by not expanding right now, then it's plausible they could expand to takeover the world and once they have the world and no more expansion is needed they'd be profitable.
This exercise is more talking to ourselves than the future. It is a sort of design fiction[1], attempting to cope with the concept of consequences that last much longer than the initiating actors' whole civilization.
That it isn't fiction is what gives it salience, and the requisite paternalistic 'talking down' to a pre-technical future aspect provides emotional and/or moralistic flavor, if you like that sort of thing.
Eventually, it turns into bike-shedding scary apocalyptic artworks.
Also on point, if they have forgotten about the concept of nuclear radiation then discovering a nuclear waste dump will be a massive boon and cause for celebration. When we zoom out enough to see entire civilisations at once, a few people dying just isn't an issue; it is routine. We try our best to keep everyone healthy, but at the end of the day the benefits of progress outway handfuls of dead astronauts, scientists, explorers and early colonists.
We don't sit around moping that Marie Curie & co died doing research, everyone involved gets recognised for helping to usher in a new age of scientific progress.
This is HN and nuclear energy byproduct. There is no danger to worry about. Future cave men are more likely to die cutting themselves on discarded solar panels in landfills!
I've seen this as well, in my experience much of it comes from other orgs that see the engineering team come in late, or walk around the office tossing a ball into the air.
They start putting pressure on engineering managers to make sure their team is "working". Their team clearly needs more discipline and those 'slackers' need to be cut.
What they don't see is that the engineer tossing the ball figured out that the solution they were about to spend 2 weeks coding can be achieved by leveraging an existing library requiring only a couple days effort.
> What they don't see is that the engineer tossing the ball figured out that the solution they were about to spend 2 weeks coding can be achieved by leveraging an existing library requiring only a couple days effort.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but that wouldn't mean that the engineer shouldn't implement in a couple days and then work on something else. HN loves the trope of the super smart engineer who is smarter than _everyone_ and can look like they're doing nothing.
You don't have to be a "super smart engineer" for that situation to occur. It's completely normal for software features to shrink (or grow) by that much time in my experience.
This is not really true. The market overall works as a surprisingly efficient resource allocation engine. Onions aren't a great example as they are a commodity rather than a stock.
Regardless, if someone does bid up the price of onions, it will typically trigger increased production of onions as farmers can make more profit by growing onions vs. another vegetable. This increased supply will pull the price back down.
The same happens in the stock market, increased demand (roaring stock market) eventually produces new equity (IPOs). But it doesn't necessarily mean that the new equity is of identical quality (ex: 2000 boom IPOs like Pets.com, or Uber - though we still don't know if Uber is a good stock or not; check back in 5-10 years).
And in the credit market - after all the good debtors are served, and there's still demand for new credit - bad debtors start being served. This keeps on going till it bursts (like in the housing bubble).
Perhaps my argument can be simplified as follows. If everyone had the same models, they would pick the investment with the highest ROI adjusted for risk (ignoring externalities). That same investment is now not available for someone else: they now have to take the second best.
Thanks for the explanation, your argument makes sense.
I'd just look at it in a slightly different, perhaps more optimistic way. The fact that this investment has the highest ROI means that society as a whole would benefit from injecting additional capital into that investment.
In that sense, you're right that other investors have a less desirable price. However in theory at least, everyone is better off since that investment now has more capital, and is able to produce more output, positively contributing to the overall economy and increasing the size of the overall pie.
There is pretty much always someone willing to buy or sell a stock at some price. The best way to think of the exchanges are as a perpetual auction. There is a line of buyers willing to buy shares at all different prices, and similarly there is a line of sellers willing to sell at various prices. Anyone can 'join the line' by entering a limit order at some price.
Buying at market price simply means you immediately buy from the seller offering the lowest price.
It's very rare for an order book to be empty for a particular stock, but you typically do see the bid/ask spread increase as a stock loses popularity.
I would love to see an open review system like that. Comments out in the open, along with the experiments and experimental data which supports or does not support the work.
Science is all about experimentation, yet we currently measure papers by number of citations rather than by experimental support.
Sustaining the expansion is questionable but the Fed's more specific goal has been to maintain inflation at around 2%, which it has done surprisingly well over the last 20 years. Of course, we have no way of knowing if the Fed's actions were actually causal.
No need to be an accredited investor.