I stand corrected. His brother is on the news saying this is fake news and he's a Sox fan.
171 karma · joined September 27, 2017
In the longer term this depresses GDP per capita as resources have to be diverted from productive industries like high-tech manufacturing into extremely unproductive industries like aged care. Again, Japan and many Western European countries provide good examples of this in practice. Finally, as the reality of the broader economic decline sets in, second order effects start to take hold like brain drain - as young workers see higher wages working in more productive economies, they decide to leave, worsening the population pyramid and depriving the government of precious tax revenue needed to pay for aged care. (Japan and many Western European countries are sadly, again, examples of this phenomenon).
The short term effects you're describing of nominal GDP rising and per capita GDP falling is only true when populations are growing through bad immigration policy, which is what we commonly see in the US for example. Growing population organically and sustainably, or through productive immigration that targets gaps in the country's labor force, should never have that effect as the new member of the population should eventually increase GDP by more than the average existing worker today.
At an individual rather than population level of course, having fewer or no children is easier, which is why people are doing it. But this describes a local optimum only, while the true optimum is population growth.
Is it the everyman's plane? Certainly not. But it essentially makes living in Tokyo/Hong Kong/Singapore/Sydney and working in SF much closer to living in New York and working in SF (which a lot of senior executives and investors do). Imagine if Australia East Coast was a 6hr flight and 5hr time difference to SF. New York is a 6hr flight and a 3hr time difference to SF. Seems a lot different all of a sudden doesn't it?
Focussing on gas is the complete wrong way of looking at this. Humans and our ideas are the ultimate resource, not gas. When we work together we solve problems, and the weapon engineer who had to relocate back to HK to raise kids near family can often be the difference between a breakthrough we all benefit from and nothing at all. Having these senior people able to work locally can enable them to seed their hometowns with thriving local offices that train new generations of talent.
Tesla won in cars and SpaceX won in rockets (both very complex industries) over very well established incumbents. Don't underestimate how much organizational dynamics can weigh on a company. Do you think the best people at Boeing are going to risk the next decade of their career working on a plane that might only do 300 orders when they could go get easy promotion working on the next 787?
Good luck to the team at Boom!!
Ride-sharing suffers from the problem of clustered networks - you can be a global player like Uber and still lose the entire city of SF to a competitor like Lyft, or feel a minnow like Juno tear into your margins in NYC.
Having bike sharing in your pocket helps you build a wider moat around these clustered networks. If I typically take a bikeshare to the subway every morning, and rarely Uber on the weekend, Uber might win 10 low-margin trips from me during the week (bikeshare to and from the subway every day), and through the use of a loyalty program incentivize me to make my 2 high-margin weekend ridesharing trips Uber trips.
So yes, it is an adjacency, and it is lower margin than ridesharing and capital intensive, but this is a difficult market and at this point in the game it might make sense.
This is actually the most prime example of an 'untrusted' relationship. If it weren't for the total imbalance of power you have to bring the full force of the government down on a drug dealer without any need for a reason, you wouldn't do business with them at all.
If, on the other hand, you had to do business with the head of one of these multinational drug syndicates, you would start to understand this power dynamic more completely, as the power balance would flip. All of a sudden, the person you are dealing with no longer fears law enforcement. They are no longer a peon - they have bought off people in the government, acquired arms, trained a small army of their own, and now have to power to kill you or your associates without fear of reprisal. Would you still describe doing business with these people as a 'trusted' transaction? Of course not. You would start showing up to all your business dealings with your own goons, weapons, and armored vehicles. There would be zero trust that each transaction wouldn't end in a firefight.
Compare this to walking into your local bank branch, where with the correct documentation a typical local branch manager can give you a loan for over $1M without having ever done business with you before. That is the definition of a trusted transaction.
You've just become so desensitized to the marvel of it all that you might not be aware of what the alternative looks like.
There's your answer - 0.2pp is totally insubstantial, which makes the title borderline clickbait. The economy doesn't uniformly grow or distribute wealth, so a change so small could just be from the distribution of college leavers in a particular year being overindexed towards sectors that aren't growing.
Further to that point, it typically takes years for people to adjust their majors towards sectors of the economy that are particularly productive, so we shouldn't expect to see such a quick change in the numbers.
Everything seems to be working pretty well for me and I noticed improvements since last using the app 1+ years ago, but obviously can't guarantee it's still being updated.
I think the strategy of decentralising the data is a good one for enterprise apps like this, where there's typically little value from the perspective of the business user, employee user, or service provider from holding the data. Lots of data is great for driving personalisation and other features in a million+ person network but not really in cases like this one.
Hopefully this is a pattern that will keep working its way into enterprise apps.