noad

Cutting rates doesn't have much of a stimulating effect on business spending like it used to. Large companies just funnel excess cash or issue debt for more stock buybacks + equity based compensation for the executives.

The correlation between rates and increased business spending has been weakening steadily for 20 years because of this.

The complete failure to imagine an alternative to property/sales taxes and development fees during this crisis has been one of the most disappointing failures of politicians everywhere. We keep being told we need to suffer more and more with deeper cuts while living in the wealthiest country that ever existed by a wide margin.

This is absurd. There is plenty of money, we could tax something like 5% of stock buybacks and completely rebuild our entire society from the ground up.

Instead our leaders just keep telling us to toughen up and get stronger while flying jets overhead in meaningless salutes. They seem to be very bad at their jobs.

This is so asburd it feels like a story in bad movie. We have pushed finance & capital so far into the realm of fiction that it doesn't really make sense anymore.

Artificial growth for the sake of artificial growth, just so you can get to your exit and leave someone else holding the bag. Ponzi schemes at massive scale.

How did the startup/VC world become so entangled in all this bullshit capitalism?

I have worked for government contractors very similar to SpaceX in the past and watched friends get fired for far smaller transgressions at such companies.

It's nice to be reminded every now and then that the rules don't apply to the lords, only the serfs.

This is a great question, I also want a way to search the internet but exclude all major media domains as well as any company over a certain size. So I just want to search through old blogs, SO, non-corporate social media, weird forums, etc.

There are so many cool things I remember reading on the web like 10-20 years ago that still exist that are so buried now on Google they might as well not exist. Nowadays searching any topic seems to always lead you to CNN and Microsoft and Facebook and other huge corporations. Search results are just becoming more sanitized and beige and meaningless every day.

Amazon and Facebook should be next. Break them all up with extreme prejudice and put strict new anti-trust laws around acquisitions in place for the future.

We're going to do this and open technology back up to innovation and progress, or just watch the tech giants continue to grow in power and abusiveness year after year while new startups continue to decline.

I think this would require a Democratic party that does something besides rule out possibilities.

Around here the frackers are starting to abandon wells and hollow out as much cash from the companies as possible before bankruptcy, and now those sites are active pollution and safety hazards that the taxpayer will be responsible for.

I hope all the poor brown and black kids that live around here don't hop the fences to the drill sites and get hurt somehow, but I know it's just a matter of time.

This is the third time this has happened in my specific city in the past hundred years. Two major oil busts, and now the fracking collapse.

Everyone always gets to keep their bonuses. Nobody ever goes to jail.

Yeah, we let the web become Cable TV. It's dying the same slow death as Cable TV while executives scratch their heads about why the perpetual growth stopped.

The advertising is so pervasive, so annoying, so invasive and so awful it just makes the medium unusable. The same trends are starting to creep into podcasting and video games and I just wish people would realize they are slowly destroying their own businesses with this garbage.

I stopped paying my mortgage 14 days ago for the first time in my life. I was lucky enough to get a deferral, and I now have the massive triple payment due date looming in August with no idea of how to pay it.

Best job currently seems to be delivery driver at $16/hr. There is absolutely no way I will avoid homelessness unless things change significantly, and soon.

I have an engineering degree from a good school, I played by the rules, I worked hard. Doesn't seem to matter much. The joke around here is that the $1200 check is enough money to buy a really nice shotgun to kill yourself with.

It's starting to feel like we just built the Borg from Star Trek. Everything bigger, everything more centralized, everything more efficient and streamlined and outsource everything you're not good at. Economies of scale so massive you can argue they are just monopolies. Every new venture needs to scale to billions or it's not worthwhile. Some competition and innovation, but mostly just growth throw acquisition and assimilation.

Wasn't the Borg devastated by a virus?

TNG was such a good show.

That is much, much worse. If it's a private company they can skirt FOIA and coverup abuse much more easily. The government is getting too good at this outsourcing of all risk and liability.

The only time I ever got an email from a real human at google was when I tried out google cloud for a weekend when it first came out. I had a detailed plan to benchmark different instance types and compare them to AWS for an upcoming project.

I got about two hours into this and my account was deactivated, one of the cloud engineers sent me a truly nasty email saying that bitcoin mining is not allowed on google cloud and I should stop abusing resources and being so irresponsible. I replied and asked how on earth they came to the conclusion I was a bitcoin miner and explained what I was actually doing, but never heard back from them again.

It was so bizarre, I felt like I was back in the 3rd grade getting in trouble for knowing more about the Apples than the computer teacher.

It's not journalism, it's the web. Every protocol and layer in the stack has been subverted to the will of advertisers and trackers. The whole platform is a total nightmare. The standards bodies were completely subverted by corporations, most notably the W3C.

When I try to explain to young people that I spent years browsing the web before there was any advertising at all on it they often don't believe me.

I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip.

Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped.

Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm supposed to be doing something else by now.

Make a backup plan now.

I have no idea what this means, can you get me up to speed on what this show was?

We would have to live in a democracy or some sort of representative republic for that to be an effective plan, but we live in a corporate oligarchy instead.

That's sort of the point, everyone just wants to create a model to further their own personal career instead of actually working on the fucking problem. I guess they just assume everything in the world will automagically fix itself once we have enough qubits?

It's either magical thinking or pure marketing department fiction, I cannot tell which.

The biggest problem is usually avenues (four lane roads, two in each direction) with high speed traffic. Around here that means lots of people turning left and right and cars average about 40mph, many do 60mph.

Unprotected bike lanes on these roads exist but over the past decade I've personally watched two people die on bikes from right turns and heard of dozens of collisions.

The thing about bike commuting for a couple decades is you quickly learn that about half of the streets and and bike lanes are complete no go zone death traps, and there is no good way to really build this knowledge aside from just learning where you're going to get turned into repeatedly.

My city is super progressive and bike friendly, but even then it's effectively suicide to try and use certain bike lanes and everyone just has this communal knowledge.

That was my interpretation as well. The bizarre bit in the opening paragraph about Sundar saying that quantum computing will magically solve climate change is so baffling and stupid I'd probably want to quit after realizing that was my boss too.

I once worked as a developer for a massive trillion dollar tech company, but the company was terribly dysfunctional and never did any real work, so when I quit I joked about how I was quitting to get into software development. Sounds like the same situation here.

Corporations are really leading the way here. If they can't preserve enough cash to last a month and plan to strike as their opening negotiating tactic then people should too. Why not?

I feel like I've read this article every three years or so for the past 30 years.

According to my calendar this means we're due for another wave of "the singularity is right around the corner, uh, for reals this time! again!" articles.

You're a biologist who also was in the Navy special forces and you also worked at Google for 20 years? I'm guessing you were the Google company epidemiologist on staff, right?

You're so accomplished! Is there anything you aren't a 100% certified expert on?

This is such weird phrasing. I imagine the corporate prison industry uses the same words: "She was also one of the pioneers of the fledgling private incarceration market. By creating this dynamic new industry, unlimited synergies can by unleashed within public-private partnerships".

You're forgetting the main benefit for google, which is getting humans to train all their vision models for free. At one point they were just forcing X% of clicks to fill out a captcha regardless of origin or identity just to get more data.

I for one am getting quite tired of trillion dollar corporations getting things for free out of me. Hard pass.

How about No. How about Bill Gates and his friends sell a few jets and start building free clinics in every major city?

It's been two months of contradictory advice and hypocritic pontificating from experts. I'm getting real sick of all the "torture everyone forever" advice from our dear leaders, how about all these billionaires actually do something instead?

I think "buybacks are not inherently bad" is a good point and still true in a theoretical perfect frictionless vacuum. But when we look at the entire economy and how all the money has been flowing mostly tax free from the government and workers to only (literally only) the super-duper rich via this buyback tool, then it's obvious we have a problem.

They used to teach risk management and disaster preparedness in business schools. They used to teach people that you have a duty to your company and your employees and society.

Now all they seem to teach is how to maximize the stock price for the next 90 days. Just shuffle the cells around in the spreadsheet until the number looks good, that's all we're doing. Zero long term planning, zero long term safety for anyone who isn't an executive.

After spending hundreds of billions of dollars in share buybacks over the past decade many of the major airlines now look like they are about to collapse.

Those buybacks made a handful of rich executives and shareholders, much, much more wealthy, mostly tax free. Nobody else really benefited.

Share buybacks have been the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of humanity. This was all preventable.