Here's a thought exercise, are these "growth" strategies really business, or are they just the result of hollowing out actual productive businesses to make financial
games work?

Part of the entire conceptual model of disaggregation and unbundling is that there's a ton of dead weight in the sales channel - the so-called "middle men" - and by eliminating this dead weight, everything will be cheaper and easier to acquire... once a few markets did this, like airline tickets through travel agents vs. buying your own on CrappyAirline.com, it looked like a golden rain of cashflow to the investment folks. They expect _every_ business to be able to find some middle-man to cut out, and thereby increase profit. They are so wedded to this idea that they keep funding endless "Web3.0" companies who's only model is to eliminate some middle-man somewhere, and expect automatic profit. Now every other business, including established old line things like cable companies and car manufacturers, are held in comparison, but are not remotely comparable. If you are an old-line business like a TV company, cable company, etc. you've _already_ eliminated most if not all middle-men, and so the _only_ way to increase profits is to gouge both your suppliers and your customers.

The result is an endless set of rotating hammers, powered by fisc, destroying trust, loyalty and quality of service. *sigh* talk about a bummer.

As a member of generation X I strongly object to being called a kid!!! We’re way to cynical a generation to think this kind of bulls*8t would work.

I think you meant millennial *snort*

Ignoring the ad-hominem attack part of this comment, it is actually interesting to question the staffing levels here, and to ask a devil's advocate question that every software project has to deal with: "can I get this project done with the staff I have on hand?" Often in my experience (even as a hiring manager) larger corporations have way more cash to spend hiring to "solve" the crisis of project pacing, with little or zero patience for the actual required work. It's entirely possible that Unity is both fully and completely attempting to maximize profit, AND blowing a ton of cash foolishly by over-staffing (here one might say "embrace the power of AND"...)

The Agile Manifesto, and every other attempt to 'solve' the problem of complex technical projects, have utterly failed to scale (c.f.: Ballmer, Costner, Ginney Romney with massive budgets), yet "asshole" mono-maniacle behavior by the likes of Musk and Jobs (perhaps Gates, Wolfram and Oppenheimer too in their earlier budget/time constrained iterations) have resulted in small teams revolutionizing the world. It's worth a ponder of the question of whether _any_ sufficiently large team run on "modern" management theory (choose any from the list) is capable of producing anything of merit.

This is not rhetorical, if we were to accept my theorem here ("no large organization can be successful at it's stated purpose") then how might we re-organize in such a way as to make actual technical progress while preserving non-shitty treatment of developers and tool-users? Might not Free/Open software be the solution we've all been looking for???

It stands to reason that within the US, tax receipts are insufficient to cover our budget (much less our outstanding debt!!) - so the political critters are looking for easy "rich" targets. The first thing they tried in the 2017 tax law is now in litigation at the supreme court because it affected a retired couple over a 14% share of a foreign corporation with no actual income to distribute. If the Supreme Court rules that this is in-fact unconstitutional (and it doesnt look good for the Feds), then some or all of the income that was used to balance the budget in the Trump-era tax act, will go POOF and you can bet your backside that a new source of income will be needed. The overall tenor is that congress (and hungry state's attorney's general) is that class warfare is now acceptable, and plenty of folks have been talking about how the rich manage to avoid paying much tax.

It's not a stretch to assume based on fact that at least one US Senator has called for this many times, and regulators are starting to pay closer and closer attention to this market, that one can expect something to change here, particularly since this is something restricted almost only to folks who are "stock-rich" and "cash-poor".

Only the very first round investors (ie the "market makers") get the IPO prospectus and the chance to ask questions. Everyone else is limited to public information and guessing. The bump that occurs on an IPO day is actually something investment banks hate, because it costs them money (that is they could have skimmed that bump profit) - but they try hard to only put their hand in the cookie jar enough to siphon off most of the first-day's profit, leaving just enough in the stock to get everyone else to buy in.

A bigger question is whether that bump can stay inflated long enough for ETFs to get in on the buying, if so it will take a very long time for the stock to go away, while ETFs are a "small" overall percentage of the market, they likely act as a prop to share prices (due to the continuing contribution effect). If any ETF or mutual fund adds Instacart to their index (I'm looking at you total-market funds) then there will be plenty of buying activity _not_ controlled by wizard level accounting experts who can discriminate between junk/garbage plays and real operating companies.

Personally I think every pure growth-strategy company is a garbage play in the long run, but institutional and individual investors can remain optimistic far longer than I can remain pessimistic and out of the market...

Completely agree, though I'd say its much worse than just "rich people gonna get richer". This kind of cram-down suggests that actual Silicon Valley type pure-growth play startups might be over for a while - few if any of the true early founders will make out as big as you suggest. Not only will there be limits on how much they can trade, but these trades are SEC regulated, so they cant just tank the stock by selling it all (unless they want to get sued or jailed). And it looks like Washington DC/IRS and maybe NY state regulators might change the tax treatment of "loans" against stock shares to make it income, so their absolute liquidity is not going to be the eye-popping kind of stuff that put Elon Musk and Peter Theil at the head of the list.

I can see the investment banks making a vig on the IPO, that is after all their entire business in a nutshell, and the VC investors probably get at least a good juice on their limited-funds from having the stock given a public/trade-able valuation (and therefore incent more limited partners to put in funds for the next round), but for the founders its unlikely to be as big a blowout of cash.

If pure growth-play startups (which have been the lions share of big investment/Unicorns for a long while) are over, what takes their place?

Is it even possible Instacart is still worth a $9B valuation? Not can they get that from the stock market, but will the long run return on investment be there? Recall that most of the unicorns (+$1 Billion dollar startup) were pure growth plays - WeWork, Uber, DropBox, even Google was a growth play back in its time. Is it even possible to ever break-even on a growth play now with interest rates at this point and the main-street level market saturated with variations of "do business, but on a computer"?

This is not a rhetorical question or a gripe about the market, fat-cats, etc. etc - I'm curious if anyone in the first 1/3 to middle of their careers (ie: those with real coding chops and architectural ability) are willing to work for one of these startups with the expectation of a big payoff, or is it all froth concentrated in finance (banking) and new-grads who havent been through a market bust?

*ah-ha-ha-ha*.... oh wait, you're serious? ... really?

When ever in the history of man has the wealthiest cohort (for argument's sake synonymous with political ruling class) ever given up their gains in the face of economic or ecological pressure? Money is fungible and tends to flow across borders, and so often (indistinguishably close to P=1.0) they simply walk with their cash, bonds, or bullion to the nearest non-cooperating entity (and there's always someone wiling to accept a cut of the wealth to stick it to someone else).

So odds are pretty solid that the wealthily won't agree to be comparably less rich even if total wealth goes down. Sure they'll have fewer champagne bottles on the yacht, but to get there everyone will have less ENERGY in total, which means less FOOD in total, and it's unlikely to be distributed in the manner which you suggest. The result for the lowest quintile or peoples is likely poverty, starvation and death.

I cannot say if the equilibrium is 8.7M/year (that is its possible that less than 8.7M/year will die from privation) but it seems pretty likely given the only reason we've had the net population growth in the last 50 or so years is due to energy intensive farming that currently depends on fossil fuels.

Incorrect! The EPA has made an official finding of endangerment and demanded leaded fuels be eliminated by 2030, the FAA has been formally working on making that happen for more than 10 years as part of the Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative (PAFI) which is part of the FAA annual funding bill. But even with the EPA direction and the FAA support its still a rather large problem. Neither technology or individual airplane operators are the biggest hurdle(s) here, you also have to solve certification (the FAA part), refining (intellectual property), distribution (trucking mostly), storage (airport tankage) AND end-user demand.

From this article today by AOPA:

Lets start with existing on-market lead free options - even the sleepiest little 2500ft long runway airstrip in the middle of the great plains sell lead free Jet-A (aka kerosene or JP-8) but this fuel can only be used by turbine engines and a few specialty diesels (there are drop-in replacement engines, but they cost way more than $1000). But going that way and throwing out the old airplanes or junking every engine assumes there isn't a suitable lead-free fuel compatible with high-compression pistons, which is also incorrect. Today there exist replacement fuels which could be used in most piston engines without making any physical changes to the aircraft.

However even if distribution was easy there's still a wrinkle:

Theres a tradeoff required however, at higher orbits the inhabitants would receive higher exposure to solar and galactic radiation because the Earth's magnetic field density follows the general rule of 1/r^3. To add some kind of radiation barrier (I wont say "shield", oh, damn) with today's technology would add more weight and likely drive costs higher.

We'll have to solve that problem for extended flight durations beyond LEO, even lunar inhabitation and exploration is expected to require creative ways to block radiation because the moon has practically no magnetic field.

I'm not at the moment hiring, but my business philosophy is to find creative smart people, and hang onto them for dear life because the distribution of technical ability is either very lumpy (think bi-modal) or heavily skewed towards the left side of the graph!

I'll grant that unequal distributions of growth exist, but you need only look at what happened between 2018 and 2020 (pre pandemic) to see that overall economic expansion CAN result in benefits for the broad population, even as a significant amount of that growth ends up in the "wrong" hands. The specific distribution, and the exact cause-and-effect mechanism is not as clear since the practical process is some kind of chaos-like interaction between regulation, law, competition, and politics.

On the other hand, if you cause the entire economic system to be nearly flat relative to other economies, you'll have a hard time making a cogent argument that it won't negatively impact the broad population. As soon as you have effected a zero-sum game then I believe it actually increases the unequal distributions because the only way to get more of the pie is to take it from someone else. ie: capitalism is the worst of all economic systems, except for all the others.

Speaking as an employer, I try to encourage my staff to use their time off, I didn't craft a benefit to go unused. I have to practically order them to take vacation. If my high-IQ technology employees, with good 401(k)s and plenty of accrued time, struggle to use their vacation benefits, it seems exceedingly unlikely that it's because they are worried about national pension plans.

On the other hand I can easily be convinced that the US culture may be quite a bit more influential on peoples use or not of vacation benefits.

Umm... it's pretty likely that the EU's passion for time off, and all the other mandatory benefits, does actually have a cost, regardless of the actual productivity of the workers - in any rational discussion of tradeoffs you might want to look at actual relative/comparative economic output between the US and EU to decide whether the US really is a hell-hole of "slavery" vs. the EU utopia of "freedom":

Europeans Are Becoming Poorer according to the WSJ the key cause is that while the EU economy has grown 8% over the last 15 years, the US economy has grown 82% in the same period. As a result private consumption (that is spending by individuals) has DECLINED 1% since 2019 in the Eurozone, while wages adjusted for inflation have fallen between 3% in Germany and a whopping 6% in Greece. This can be directly attributed