I was very active trading crypto during the pandemic - like everyone else. I ended up finding out that there were times during the day where there were no buyers or sellers active in many markets. Which led me to believe that marginal traders were driving prices and that the marginal trader wasnâ(TM)t very sophisticated - just a dude with a phone. Fast forward a few years and the marginal crypto trader has been deceived by rug pulls, restrictions, margin calls, you name it - and prediction markets provide more variability and volatility to fill the gap for risk seeking. My guess is the marginal retail trader has migrated to Kalshi, and thereâ(TM)s nothing anyone can do about it - crypto is dead.

Great point on data. Part of the disconnect is that managers perceive soft value.
In my individual experience - managers thrive on soft power - being in office and navigating conflict they themselves create. Running around heads on fire, highly visible, but low output of any kind. I'm not saying this in ragey tone - C level folks don't produce anything, not even powerpoints as they have folks doing all that work for them.
The skills and status they worked very hard to attain were less valuable in a remote world where work was measured in delivery but the high level exec retained organizational power by virtue of budgets and org structure.
I will say that the current generation of C level is aging - and seems a bit less prepared for an acceleration in technology change - so while their current fight is about control, my guess is that the pendulum will stabilize and favor hybrid modes of work, as a new generation of leaders emerges over the next 3-5 years.

I have worked in games for the past 15 years. It is complicated and gaming is definitely going through a transition.
A few things that I have noticed include the fact that venture capital is long gone and moved probably to AI. Most games lose money and the winners are either live service platforms or continue to spend a lot of money on direct marketing. You will not believe the amount of games that lost money forever and no one cared to have a plan for monetization.
Second is that code bases are stable. same thing is happening in social media and why they can afford to cut a good chunk of personnel - there is no need to build net new innovation as most stuff is already built.
Lastly, a lot of teams are wary of expanding because of the threats that they perceive coming from AI. While the technology is still far from creating true blockbusters, a lot of veterans in the industry have taken on a wait and see approach. While protecting cash cows and focusing on margins - there is very very very little appetite for new risks.

Yeah I hear your point on scarcity. That said I think people forget that at one point the USD itself was pegged to gold. There are strong views on the gold standard so not wanting to get into a political debate, but this is not a new concept - maybe new to a generation but money used to be backed by gold. That same standard was rigid enough that it prevented economic growth. Also noting for the record that while the USD itself can lose value relative to goods over time, banks do pay interest, and investing in money market can be safe enough to mitigate short term risk and blunt inflation pressure.

I mean my back account has a ledger and itâ(TM)s pretty transparent. And thereâ(TM)s enough checks and balances that if someone steals money from my account I know it is insured and donâ(TM)t have to worry about the value of my money declining by 3-4% one day for the vague promise that hoarding will make money more valuable. It is true that Bitcoin is performing better than all crypto, even though lots of alts mimic its mining and scarcity. Itâ(TM)s the OG and powerful people got in it early hence its valuation - but my point is that it is not very useful in its raw form.

It is a sad realization that there is no better business strategy today than investing in a digital asset that doesnâ(TM)t have intrinsic value, is volatile, and not super efficient operationally. While Microstrategy is getting away with borrowing money at low rates and hoarding bitcoin, theyâ(TM)re getting themselves signed up for perpetual dividend payments and building a house of cards. The sheer amount of concentration in bitcoin ownership is a massive risk. If only a handful of institutions own all of bitcoin, then the rest of us will just find alternative stores of value. It is not *that* special as an asset.

I manage a very large org, and sadly I think there are a few forces at play that will make this a bigger problem over the long run. First, tech companies that are super well capitalized are now really old companies. A good chunk of their day to day ops are fixed and automatable. A good portion of their workforce is focused on maintaining the day to day and whether we like it or not, there is enough resiliency in place to do without humans in the loop for some time. In my experience, the pandemic reset work life balance expectations to such an extent that a lot of managers created redundancies within their own orgs to manage with the assumption that a lot of folks are out of the office at any given time. Second is, there is no real incentive to build consumer tech products - with the venture capital pushing money to already well capitalized ventures, the small entrepreneur has 0 incentive to start something that is most likely to fail. Thereâ(TM)s no new social media apps, games, SaSS, every corner of tech has been absorbed by mega conglomerates and that wonâ(TM)t change anytime soon. Lastly, margins. Because of continued growing valuations, companies are getting a lot of pressure to keep improving revenue margins while at the same time gambling away at AI infra which is currently priced several hundreds its inputs costs. As managers donâ(TM)t need to build product, and as they have the luxury of redundancy and smooth operations, the easiest place to cut is people. Where is this all going? The startup ecosystem is the most important avenue for disruption and growth- but with venture capital cornered by a few behemoths, itâ(TM)s going to take a while for a new wave of innovation to begin.

One thought exercise here - the recent slump in tech is not super different than the manufacturing tech slump that started in the 80s and 90s, and driven in large part by a hyper focus in efficient operations and expansion of financial margins.
Let's be honest guys, large tech have grown to the point where bureaucracy is abundant. Lots of reviews, green light, and way too many components in a tech stack. Once a product is out in the wild and builds enough of a user base, the developers and most of the supporting functions behind it are somewhat disposable, because they're busy doing busy work instead of innovating. Management advances by pitching more ritual and process and measures its own success by highlighting the expansion of revenue margins and more efficient operations measured in things like bug count, downtime, etc. - measures that are directly juxtaposed to innovation.
Market power is held in large part by regulation. Try starting a new social media platform today, and enjoy the myriad of legalities and roadblocks that your app will face. Try to publish a game and see if it'll get approved by the 2-3 dominant platforms.
Will employment in tech return? Answer is: yes, and it will be driven in large part by growth of new ways of applying AI in traditional spaces - we are *just* scratching the surface in health, manufacturing, integration with robotics, scientific discovery, you name it - but software development will continue to require a structured way of thinking, regardless of whether we end up coding long term or not.

At some point during the early 2000s MBAs were in vogue and getting one meant that you'd get 6 figures right after graduation and job opportunities were abundant. I followed this trend and it personally afforded me internships and opportunities where I actually learned how to do real work, mostly unrelated to MBA but I do use NPV/ROI concepts in real life. The classroom lessons were valuable as to understand income statements and balance sheets, and networking was awesome - so it was more of a school to learn how to play The Game. But the degree would not be valuable if the only value came from classroom teaching - this is why online schooling has decimated the value of degrees. Yes you can learn all of MBA in wikipedia - the classroom knowledge, not The Game.

I love you

My impression over the years has been that local teams use gas surcharges to boost their margins and make their individual branch look good from a KPI standpoint. Ultimately it's a game of probability. A long time ago I rented a car in WV, made sure to return it full. I thought it was a little strange that when returning it, the manager in charge asked to see my fuel receipt even though he literally saw that the fuel tank was full, as to confirm whether I'd be able to make a claim against them if they charged me. I was really young at the time and got scammed all the time as a young grad, easy prey. Ended up getting hit with an $80 charge (was a lot at the time) - which I ended up getting reversed form Amex. I'm sure this was a common practice, and if only 1/10th of folks notice, they're in the green.

My wife grew up in a middle class suburb of Vancouver BC. Both of her parents had non specialized middle class jobs, low level management. They lived a very comfortable life. But education was not a priority in that home at all, mostly because the parents grew up assuming that good middle class jobs would forever be available. My wife graduated from high school, but it was more of a rite of passage because schools had very low standards and just pushed kids through. She attended school because that's what her friends did, but there wasn't a whole lot of academic training being absorbed.

The opportunities that were available for folks 'without much' education a generation ago, are scarce today, but the attitude towards education has not evolved. It's a bizarre world - boomers are paper rich, and are bailing out their kids and grandkids, at least temporarily. We now see a general trend in that middle class suburb where kids are abandoning school all together because they don't need school to socialize - socialization is happening online and kids are roaming aimlessly around the city all day and night, literally on the edge of criminality and without any consequence.

So, I think the bigger question in my mind about the statistics being shown is whether education was actually valued or delivered to a large subset of students in the past, or whether schools were just more or less a glorified daycare in the past, and now the internet has taken that place.

Everyone knows that the true value add of a software engineer is attending meetings, filling out devops tickets, chit chatting at standup, and participating in the real politik of the workplace. Like how is this thing supposed to add value if they canâ(TM)t even provide a buffered assessment of t-shirt size or engage with a Project Manager to fill up a sprint plan with garbage work that will never see the light of day!? This thing is doomed,

As the French government expands surveillance to allow for emergency spying across the board, it begs to ask the question. Who is the one making decisions that are more akin towards a simulation in which NPCs are meant to be reigned in at all costs in order to re establish peace and order? It appears to me that the one who has been playing too much Tropico 4 is Mr. Macron.

I spent a good chunk of my professional career at DISH.

They had fairly smart people at the time who knew that Satellite TV was going to eventually disappear due to broadband and cell phones, so their strategy was to bid on vacated radio frequencies in rural and small cities where they didn't have to compete with ATT/Verizon/Tmobile and get more spectrum per dollar.

For a while, their spectrum was incredibly valuable - but this is a notably frugal company, so they neglected in actually investing in infrastructure to build a cell phone network. They kept betting on frequencies as an appreciating asset but neglected to understand that the FTC could eventually free up even more spectrum and that at some point the FTC would claw back its spectrum if it wasn't being used for its intended application.

At the time I worked there - DISH also operated a Satellite internet service (Wild Blue, and I think they bought HughesNet as well) - and unfortunately for them, I think this really biased their thinking about low orbit internet - there was what appeared to be 100% certainty that a low orbit satellite approach like the one Starlink is pursuing would be impossible because it would require way too many satellites but also that there would already be too much interference for this approach to be scalable.

One of the problems facing DISH is that they never modernized their talent pool, so they still operate with 20-30 year old assumptions of how the world works. They are highly litigious, low tech, and remarkably cheap. It was a fun group to work with, but man are they dated.