Mary Meeker's 28 page take on Covid-19 | Hacker News Reader

Mary Meeker's 28 page take on Covid-19

axios.com

46 pointsbradvl16 comments

There are the 'have's' and the 'have not's'.

I don't think that it is easy for the 'have's' to see how the situation affects the 'have not's'.

For those in the first world that are in managerial positions, healthy and on a pension or with inherited wealth the situation is very different to that facing those living paycheck to paycheck or without a paycheck.

Essentially this means there is some class struggle going on, between the 'have's' and 'have not's'. If you are a 'have not' then this is centre stage, if you are a 'have' this is curiously absent. I found this report was written by a 'have'.

Has anyone done an analysis of her past reports to see if she's really any good at prognostication? I feel like in the past she stuck to describing incremental changes and trends but this was much more opinionated.

I look at these reports as checkpoints of trends that are already happening. All you need is a keen observational eye and some data to back up the qualitative observations to produce something like this.

I don't view these reports are being in the business of predicting the future.

They are describing what's already obviously happening with maybe an optimistic eye towards the future.

Accurately separating what is important from what is trivial in the flow of current events is indistinguishable from predicting the near future.

That's fair. I was more commenting on her Internet Trends Report.

It works OK as a weathervane, but when I see documents full of ellipses, bullet points, truisms and Kissinger quotes I feel like I'm paying to have my confirmation biases validated.

It's not that it's bad or wrong, but there are probably 50 people here at HN who could do an equally good analysis.

They're generally a good guide to the conventional wisdom from a center-right perspective, but they seldom yield insights.

(pdf) https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6842117/Our-New-W...

Many years ago (10?) she published a PowerPoint deck that blew everyone's mind and we all learned her name. Every year since she publishes a PowerPoint deck that is full of numbers and is otherwise no more insightful than any other analyst's PowerPoint deck full of numbers. Each time she releases a new deck I open it hoping for another like the first one, and each time it's utterly disposable.

Covid looks to me like that space stone that finished dinosauruses. Basically it just accelerated/cleared path for the trends which were already well underway (feathered flying dinosauruses, mammals, online retail, cloud, etc. in while the classic dinosauruses and retail, onpremise datacenters/applications, regular commuting to the office and assigned desk, etc. out).

Is this health care's year of linux? I have been working around remote video telehealth since the late 90s. It has always been right around the corner.