We're rapidly heading towards a second Cold War (hopefully.) The weird thing about this one is that China makes all the world's manufactured goods. Not sure how we're going to reconcile this...

Should be interesting to watch. The Soviet Union was slightly behind on technology during the Cold War which gave the US the advantage in a lot of areas. Not sure how well we'll fare when we're not able to manufacture items ourselves, plus China's on a more equal footing technology-wise. The advantage they have (other than population) is total state control over a modern economy. They let the market be "free enough" and exercise control when needed.

I assume this is because Apple sees that right to repair laws have a chance of passing. Being able to tell when one of their devices was manufactured was a good clue about what part you needed without having to open the device. They seem to be taking a similar route to what Red Hat did when Oracle started rebranding RHEL as Oracle Unbreakable Linux or whatever...following the letter of the open source law but not the spirit.

I don't get Apple sometimes. They are well aware that they have most consumers hooked into their ecosystem the second they buy their first iDevice. They have a virtual money printing press skimming off the top of app store purchases. They still have a rabid fan base. Yet they're absolutely vehement about forcing their customers to turn in their iPads at the end of their lease and just selling them new ones. Car analogy...Apple is BMW or Mercedes. The products are expensive to buy but just cheap enough for the upper-middle-class Joe to lease and turn in every 2 or 3 years. Should you choose to buy and hang onto one, there are just enough single-source super expensive parts to make late-stage repair extremely expensive. And on top of that, the cars are engineered in such a way that labor to fix even simple things is way more than the average GM/Ford/Chrysler prole-box.

"Harvard is full of circle-jerking egomaniacs, Yale is full of evil liars, Princeton is full of spoiled rich kids, Cornell is full of people rejected by the other 3, etc."

Kind of. Ivy League admission has become a total arms race and is comprised of legacies combined with parents willing to do anything to get their kids in. This is because it's basically the only can't-fail express route to a wealthy life left in the US. The legacy admissions will always get in even if the parents have to donate a building or something. Among everyone else, its hundreds of thousands of students, domestic and international, competing for a couple thousand openings.

What it buys you is guaranteed employment in management consulting at the low end, and elite academic posts, investment banking and coveted law/medical school admissions at the high end. The management consulting spots alone are a good enough graduation present...you're paid six figure salaries with zero work experience and paid to fly around the world pretending you're a wise oracle for executives. Compare this to someone like me who graduated from a state university, with a marketable degree, and who had to hustle for their first job and work hard ever since. The Ivy League crowd is just handed a position when they leave.

As a result, well-off parents are grooming their kids for a 3 or 4 percent chance that their application might be picked out of the thousands that all have perfect grades, volunteer work, sports, patented inventions, crazy hardship stories, whatever. It's a desperate hail-mary pass to get kids the instant success that graduating from one of these places brings, vs. having to grind it out the rest of your life.

"Side hustles aren't a bad thing."

Totally disagree on that point. The fact that people are guilted into side hustles is a very bad thing...it's a side effect of employers not paying enough and not having enough open positions to give everybody stable employment.

We've basically killed any slack that used to exist in the system in the name of Agile, efficiency, lean, six sigma,. whatever. Employers used to have no problem hiring employees because there were positive tax consequences to investing in your business and paying workers. Now, the tax laws have changed so that corporate tax rates are low and spending your revenue on employees and reinvestment is discouraged. Raising the tax rates just a small enough amount to push companies to not spend that last billion on a stock buyback and hire workers instead would be good for everyone. We encourage practically everything else through tax policy...why not full employment?

People shouldn't have to side hustle. They should have one job that gives them enough hours and a good enough income to not justify renting your car to Uber or being a Doordash slave or whatever.

A lot of people might say retailers and the like are intentionally limiting hours for employees because of overtime and having to pay them $15 an hour. Or, that people actually love the "freedom" of the gig economy where your life is ruled by 2 or 3 employers' work schedules. Either way, it's unhealthy.

The only time my dad ever took a second job was when money was a little tight, and it was a job he actually liked doing (teaching after-hours vocational school classes.) What this wasn't was an endless cycle of employers each trying to give people as few hours as possible and having to cobble together 3 or 4 jobs just to get something close to full time. Living like that is not conducive to a stable home situation, which leads to all sorts of other problems.

I hope that a recession combined with (possibly) a more employee-minded political climate will finally convince people to get off the gig economy train and stop cheerleading for employers that are enriched by it. Life was much better, regardless of technology advances since, when people had one job with a fixed schedule that allowed them ample time to rest and do something other than work in their off hours. Unfortunately, the tech/stock bubble seems to have revived the ghosts of the 80s and late 90s where working yourself like crazy was celebrated.

I think it's just a case of the truth being boring, and a wild conspiracy theory being more interesting. Combine that with 4 years of Dear Leader telling people that they shouldn't listen to anyone but him, and a highly educated person's tendency to believe they're smarter than everyone else...it's a fertile combo. All of a sudden, they're convinced they've taken the red pill and now see what has been hidden from everyone else.

Which is more interesting, a global pandemic that killed almost half a million people in the US, or the global plot by a secret cabal led by Jeffrey Epstein from his secret submarine base in Arizona, working with Bill Gates and the telecom companies to implant tracking devices in all humans? Isolated people with a fair bit of downtime can often lead to wandering minds...

I guess I can add this to the list of things I didn't get in on before people came to their senses. I do regret not turning on a few Bitcoin miners early on...but this whole pump and dump thing isn't super sustainable.

It may feel good to wipe a few hundred million off the balance sheets of hedge funds...I'm not really sad for them given what they do to real companies with real futures. But just like daytrading in the First Dotcom Bubble, all the retail investors are going to get picked off eventually. Investment banks, hedge funds and the like have access to way more tools than the average band of Reddit posters...including just waiting everyone out, taking the loss and moving on.

The thing that kind of bugs me is that GameStop really does have no future. The latest console generations are almost at the point where they've convinced people they don't need to buy games on discs...Sony very heavily marketed the PS5 diskless version, as did Microsoft. I give it one or two more generations before there's no way to buy or trade games off PSN or XBox Live. In this case the hedge funds were right, and although they used a short to amplify their winnings, they were at least following fundamentals. When you start crossing over into casino gambling and totally ignoring reality, that's where I start getting a little upset. People forget that (at least in the US) everyone's retirement is all bound up in the stock market and these banks have created all sorts of crazy derivatives that will fall apart if there's too much market volatility, just like in 2008 when banks couldn't find any more greater fools to buy bad mortgages.

If anything, hopefully banks and hedge funds have learned that enough people rallying behind one person telling them to go all in on GameStop actually is enough to move the market and they had better not have unprotected positions like that again.

Governments and large companies are full of "apps" like this. They were built 10+ years ago by the lowest bidder Indian outsourcing firm and the company/agency policy of outsourcing everything means no one on staff can fix things anymore. I've seen this over and over again in 20+ years of systems integration work.

They'll probably hire someone to rewrite it for Silverlight (because that hasn't been blocked yet...) rather than develop the in-house expertise. This is what makes me worry about the future of dev/IT in large companies...when your policy is to outsource everything, you have no one to fall back on and save you from getting taken advantage of by vendors.

I'm really surprised they decided to go the route of a captive browser...but when you think about it objectively, your agency needs to keep collecting taxes; there's no "oh, let's spend 6 months fixing it," it's a live application that real people use. It's the best bad choice. Kind of reminds me of the 90s/early 00s where online banking was done by dedicated, bank-supplied apps you installed on machines instead of in a regular browser.

I think the amount of public backlash from giving outside-the-norm people a hugely public platform to attract more followers finally outweighed the revenue it generated. When you have a political figure who tells everyone they should only listen to his tweets and posts, and that everything else is fake news, it puts social media companies in an uncomfortable spot. They have to be seen as tolerant of free speech, but they also have to walk a line between that and being seen as tolerating extremism/conspiracy theories.

I have zero illusions that all the crazies that existed before January 20 are still out there, and they're just waiting for Trump to start Trump TV so they can get their daily dose. Combine this with older people seeing Facebook as similar in authority to TV newscasts and younger people basically getting all their news from social media, and you could have a big mess on your hands. All the RNC, political SuperPAC, NRA and MyPillow ads in the world aren't worth alienating the other half of your customer base, so it's a business decision.

"People normally get an MBA after they've reached something of a peak in their first career path."

Only some...those are the "executive MBA" programs you see state universities offering. The vast majority of MBAs are straight out of school. The paths are usually:

1. Elite college --> Elite MBA --> McKinsey/BAH/Bain/BCG --> Executive suite at a customer
2. Elite or semi-elite college --> Accenture/IBM/PwC/EY --> MBA --> Management at a customer
3. Elite college --> Elite MBA --> Management at an F500, skipping the worker phase totally
4. Elite college --> Investment bank --> Elite MBA --> Banking or management
5. Regular college --> Regular MBA --> Management at a not-as-exciting company

None of these paths involve working as an individual contributor. It's like being a commissioned officer in the military...you graduate and are put in charge right away. This is why MBAs walk around with spreadsheets sorted by salary and just pick the top five non-execs in the list to get rid of...they do not see the difference between employees' capability to produce.

If I can't expect no repercussions if I walk into the TSA screening area at an airport and say I have a bomb in my luggage, then a member of Congress shouldn't be able to get away with spreading conspiracy theories and riling up the crazies. That's not cancel culture or whatever the conservatives complain about...it' about a private company not wanting to be seen as enabling these people. Similar to bakeries not wanting to bake gay wedding cakes, right?

I'm glad the social media companies at least have some limits...but it sure took a lot to convince them that the bad publicity would offset the My Pillow, NRA and political ad revenue. It's kind of sad because instead of the vision of interconnection bringing more people together, these social media companies are just crazy collectors pushing more and more crazies together until you get critical mass.

I live in suburban NYC, and while housing prices/taxes/CoL are high here, California is another level up. Having to pay nearly $2M for a nothing-special house that is less than a 2-hour one way commute in miserable traffic is crazy to me. Throw COVID/WfH in the mix and it's even less attractive. When you can't go into the magical Google/Facebook/Apple all-inclusive workplace and spend your days, there's less of a reason to live in such an expensive region. I've visited several times and just have zero desire to live there, even though the weather is nice.

I think tech companies are realizing that they can just send most of their workers to cheaper locations, cut their pay to non-SV levels, and still be fine. Back in SV's formative years, the concentration of tech companies all in one place made sense...talent poaching, companies working with one another, etc. There was no video conferencing, rapid prototyping, cloud computing, etc. Now, it's less of an issue. Tech companies, even the money-printing ones, probably aren't happy about having to pay $300K+ for regular employees just to keep up with cost of living and keep their headquarters in a super-expensive area.

Honestly, it wouldn't be a bad idea for these companies to start expanding outside of the traditional Seattle/SV/NYC bubbles they're in. You look at a lot of products and startups now and think...this could only have come out of an environment overrun with hyper-wealthy toy-obsessed techies. It's a different kind of monoculture, but a monoculture nonetheless. In NY, we're seeing similar exoduses to North Carolina, Florida, Texas, etc. because regular companies realize that most people would be happier living in a super-huge mansion on 2 acres of property for the cost of living in NY, and derive little benefit from living in NY. All the high cost regions of the country are going to have to deal with this to some extent.

Trying not to generalize too much, there are basically three camps of Trump supporters:

1. Those who support him primarily based on party affiliation or religious adherence ("I'm a Republican, he's a Republican, therefore I need to support whatever he does to keep the evil socialist liberals at bay.")
2. Those who follow him on Twitter, love that he has no filter and sort of believe in his conspiracy theories and the like. ("I'm a Trump fan, everything he doesn't say is fake news. Here, let me like and retweet everything he says to show everyone how smart and non-sheep-like I am.")
3. The hardcore crazies who are intent on anarchy no matter who is in charge, or so far under his spell that nothing anyone says or does will stop them. ("Dear Leader has given me a sacred duty to stage a coup because he's the only one who can help defeat what QAnon is exposing and prevent Bill Gates from taking over our minds via 5G and the vaccine.")

Group 1 has mostly migrated to a "let's make life miserable for Biden now" stance, I think. Group 3 would listen to Trump's missives if he had to get on amateur radio and broadcast them using Morse code -- He's the Dear Leader and no one will convince them otherwise. The Group 2 group suddenly doesn't have a bunch of stuff to retweet, like, or follow. The no-mask-wearing Karen types we see on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram just have less of an easy way to instantly spread a message to everyone. It's easy being a keyboard warrior but there's a much higher bar to going down to DC and participating in a riot because your President insinuated you should. Group 2 represents a bigger crowd than Group 3.

I doubt "AI" will take the vast majority of IT jobs. The more likely candidate is the cloud providers all these IT leaders are jumping into bed with. Combine new entrants not learning anything about how basic compute/network/storage function outside of the cloud, with vendors pushing SaaS. PaaS and serverless. That's a recipe for becoming totally helpless without your cloud provider. I predict that most "IT departments" will end up just calling in support tickets if nobody can be bothered to learn how things operate.

As for the others:
"They predict that most organisations will have significantly reduced investment in property as remote working becomes the norm (22%)"

Not sure about this one. People have short memories, and most large companies have way more middle managers than actual employees. They will be beating the drum hard to get people back to the Agile collaboration fantasy chocolate factory. I'm guessing most companies will say, "Well, that was a nice pandemic. Back to work everyone! Innovate! Deliver at speed! Move fast and break things!" I do think cities with large commercial real estate bubbles (SF, NYC, London, etc.) are in for a major transformation. Companies will move their collaboration zones to suburbs in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, etc. because the vast majority of people don't care where they work, and city attractiveness was the last thing holding them back.

"(24%) of IT leaders polled also claimed that by 2030, data access will be tied to biometric or DNA data,"

This is just proof that "IT leaders" aren't technology people. Facial recognition, fingerprints, etc. all can be beaten by people motivated enough to do so...it just raises the bar.

"Nationwide 5G will have entirely transformed network and security infrastructure (21%),"

Wait till Verizon buys AT&T and T-Mobile. Nationwide 5G, for only $1.95/GB! The only way mobile carriers will be viable is if rates can be kept down below the cost of a dedicated network connection and service is truly universal.

"and security will be self-managing and automated using AI (15%)."

Doubtful. Security is still a human thing. Systems can put smart defaults in place, but developers still love dumping the customer database onto open cloud storage "just this once, for a test".

I'm not a big fan of social media (Facebook, Twitter and such) for the simple fact that it enables advertisers to target ads even more than most methods and provides content that draws people further and further into their little bubbles. It's what's going to make the COVID recovery in the US take longer...half the population has been convinced that the vaccine is a government mind control device planted by Bill Gates so he can rule the world.

But, the question is whether they're violating antitrust laws, and I'd say the answer to that is yes also. Same with Google -- there's zero hope of a Google competitor popping up and "disrupting" the landscape.