it's almost telling how Super Bowl commercials tell the mood of the country's population and economy
latest edition was A.I, prediction markets, GLP-1s -- all indicative of a "Casino" economy where you know the odds are against you but you gamble anyway so you might become one of the few winners
the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity
because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
I think this illustrates another pernicious effect of excessive inequality: where does it lure talent? The best and brightest, lured [to] speculation to ads to blockchain to AI to...
> I think this illustrates another pernicious effect of excessive inequality: where does it lure talent? The best and brightest, lured from speculation to ads to blockchain to AI to...
Basically the finance industry is pivoting away from actually investing in real businesses to more and more elaborate paper pushing schemes (that make them money, but actually weaken the economy):
> Unlike Dawes’s Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, a modern investment bank mostly earns its money in a way that not even the bravest lyricist would set to music: providing advisory services, executing complex financial engineering schemes, trading stocks and bonds, managing other people’s money, issuing credit cards and so on. Assets get bought and sold, divided and packaged, and the bank collects fees at each step.
> David Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, could not sing to young Michael about the many productive uses to which he might put the tuppence because Goldman Sachs rarely invests in anything at all. Fostering economic progress appears to be beside the point.
> Less than 10 percent of Goldman’s work in 2024, measured by revenue, was helping businesses raise capital. Loans of Goldman’s own funds to operating businesses accounted for less than 2 percent of its assets. At JPMorgan Chase the figures were 4 and 5 percent; at Morgan Stanley, 7 and 2 percent. Even the efforts at helping to raise capital are misleading, because less than a tenth of it goes toward building anything new. The rest funds debt refinancing, balance sheet restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.
> These are symptoms of financialization. That’s the term for making financial markets and transactions ends unto themselves, disconnected from — and often at the expense of — the societal benefits that support human flourishing and are capitalism’s proper purpose. Chief among those benefits are good jobs that support families, and products and services that improve people’s lives.
Why do you think large companies refinance debt? So they can invest in productive areas of the business.
If debt refinancing became illegal or widely impractical due to an interest rate spike, you’d quickly see how much of the productive economy it’s fueling!
> If debt refinancing became illegal or widely impractical due to an interest rate spike, you’d quickly see how much of the productive economy it’s fueling!
You're missing the point. Read the article.
And no one is saying "don't refinance debt." The passage you're reacting to was making the point "less than a tenth of [the capital banks raise] goes toward building anything new."
> Why do you think large companies refinance debt? So they can invest in productive areas of the business.
The article is talking about banks and the finance industry, not non-financial companies.
Also, if you think they were restructuring debt to invest in productive areas of their businesses, don't you think more than 10% of the capital banks raise would be going to building something new? If you read the article, it spends a lot of time talking about how much money goes into "mergers and acquisitions" and how it's a waste.
Sorry, what is the argument that when a company refinances debt—replacing current cash obligations with larger future cash obligations—they’re not going to use that current cash flow to build something new, or at least hire more people than they would have otherwise?
AFAIK, manufacturers refinance debt to build more/better factories all the time, for example.
Yup, it's the tragedy of the system we have set up.
There's a potentially civilization-ending disasters looming over us (the climate crisis, increasing escalation between the major powers, rising risk of insurrection due to mismanagement and inequality) and what are the smartest people of our time doing?
Making sure you click that damn ad or create technology that lets you create slop ads more easily.
Consider LLMs as the recent iteration to monetize free content, like ads do too, and you are not far from seeing the approaching AI-first enshittoscene. No matter the smart engineers altruistic goals, ROI has to be met.
Ad tech is annoying at worst, it doesn't take literally your job and most of job market with it. Without any seemingly easy way to move to fields which are booming so overall it would stay the same.
I hate ads with passion for past 20 years and (very) actively avoid them at all costs, but I'd take those over what world llms seem to be bringing in soon.
Money follows ROI. Making those speculative or detrimental industries less profitable is the answer.
Regulations on micro-targeting, data privacy, algorithm transparency, legal liability for content, etc.. all push back against the externalities of ads/social media.
Regulations on energy and land use can make eg data center build outs more expensive, pressuring back against speculative AI trash.
Taxing big tech companies, subsidizing manufacturing education, and judicious import tariffs.. would all create incentives for investing money and labor in hard capabilities
If you're asking me? Workers revolution and a complete systems change, towards something that aligns incentives with the good of humanity, not of a money-grubbing few.
I have a feeling most folks here will disagree though.
Those are two sides of the same coin. The "sky is falling" narratives and invasive advertising are both employed by the same elite to control your behavior through fear and suggestion.
Noam Chomsky is one of the loudest doomsayers and "critics" of the system (war, climate, politics) and yet simultaneously was good buddies with post-conviction Epstein. That ought to stimulate a reassessment of what you've believed about how (American) politics and society works.
That's not surprising. Post 2000 Chomsky is worthless, he couldn't defend his original thesis without ad hominems and used his fame to put pressure on universities (it didn't work every time, but enough), he pushed a decade backward part of the linguistics field (after pushing it up maybe two decade forward, but that's not an excuse).
Especially in humanities where you don't have hard data, contradiction is the only way to advance, and he forgot that. He became too full of himself and too confident.
But are you actually against inequality because not every industry is getting its fair share (whatever that might mean), or simply that you don't like the winners under the current system? In other words if the current bubble are for solar or fusion power, would you be like "darn, the inequality under the capitalist system is luring talent from enterprise SaaS (or whatever) and that makes me sad"?
"In other words if the current bubble are for solar or fusion power"
For that to be true, there would have to be a ridiculous amount of money at a massive scale for those, which would imply that consumers are being gouged for it. That's really true of almost any bubble. This is still a negative situation.
That's more of a moral question. The best and brightest are the ones running the casino. Why would someone spend 8 years in expensive schools becoming a doctor when they can work as a developer or marketer for an online sports book? Morals on the consumer supply curb demand. Morals on the provider side can help curb innovation and expanse.
Because the former is meaningful and the latter depresses you if you think too much about it, so you found strategies of not thinking about it that ultimately eat away at your soul and anything that makes a life worth living?
Yes, but the realization of this comes from experience or age. There are always new hires to fill the positions when the pay is high enough compared to the alternatives.
GLP-1s target humans who need a pharma intervention to assist in making their reward center in their brain more defensive against the system they are forced to exist in.
We don’t need ads for it, we should hand it out over the counter to anyone who wants or needs it, but I digress.
Which evil system do they live in? Veggies are the cheapest stuff I can find in supermarkets anywhere. I agree their reward systems are fried, but thats a result of decades of over-eating on the worst junk mankind ever produced, while this whole 'evil system' screams on them from all sides how stupid and suicidal this is, how sugar is same as cocaine and so on.
Its all a mental problem (and here in Switzerland this is general consensus among doctors and I have one for wife), and an attempt to solve it anywhere else down the decision line apart from the head is just (temporarily, in case of glp) fixing the consequences.
Yes, so let's just solve it. Okay, no more mental problem.
What's that? I didn't actually say a solution? Yeah, that's because I don't have one, and neither do you.
We can't just make people good people. It doesn't work, it's never worked, and it will never work. If you think otherwise, you are wrong. If you still think otherwise, you should think less because obviously it's not doing you any good.
We can sit here alllll day and tell people not to inject heroine or smoke cigarettes. But guess what? So long as the human brain is how it is, and we have those things available, people WILL continue to do them.
So while you have fake solutions you've made up in your head and can't even articulate, we have real solutions. GLP-1s. They work, as in they actually work. They actually help solve the problem.
So on one hand, you have an imaginary solution. On the other hand, you have a real solution. Hmm, which one should we gravitate towards? What a tough call!
Not every gas station, convenience store and pharmacy is stocked with aisle after aisle of cocaine. I don't know I would call it 'evil' but I agree it is a system most people are forced to exist in.
If we're appealing to authority, my mother, my father, and my sister are all highly accomplished doctors, and they believe GLP-1s will become part of a standard drug package to older adults like Statins because it's far more achievable than education we don't have and wouldn't work in the food system that exists in the US.
> Its all a mental problem (and here in Switzerland
Ah, that might explain why you'd think that healthy food is easily available and affordable everywhere. I haven't seen what stores are like in Switzerland for myself, but it sure sounds like a massive improvement and may be part of why the obesity rate there is around 10% instead of over 40% like it is here.
The last times so many tech ads made their way to the Superbowl was during the crypto craze and the dot-com bubble. These are symptoms of an overly speculative economy.
I agree. From the outside looking in the US seems to be in a very nihilistic mood, sort of "nothing I do matters anyway so I'll gamble away in the hopes of maybe hitting the only winning ticket out". People trying all sorts of moonshot ideas in crypto, day trading, live streaming, etc. The idea of slowly chipping away and climbing the social leader seems very distant from what I see.
> I agree. From the outside looking in the US seems to be in a very nihilistic mood, sort of "nothing I do matters anyway so I'll gamble away in the hopes of maybe hitting the only winning ticket out".
However bad their odds are gambling it's often the case that it's still the best chance they'll ever have to meaningfully improve their standard of living.
A lot of it is simply the rising price of housing and stagnating wages meaning that for a lot of people, the "chipping away" path their parents took toward home ownership is never going to bear fruit. Gambling and grifts of one kind or another are seen as the only alternative.
I don't think the US is lacking labor capacity, I find it far more likely that capitalists are just too greedy to manufacture in the US because it would make their dividends and bonuses and valuations drop a few points. They lose nothing by outsourcing everything, worst case scenario they are handed government money and bailouts, meanwhile their dividends and bonuses still pay out the entire time. If the company fails because of that? Like the last time GM cut pensions using the excuse of bad financials they gave all their managers and c-suite massive bonuses. If their financials are bad enough to cut legally obligated pensions, how can they afford larger bonuses? Didn't they need that money to keep the business running? Anyone in the company with the power to change any of those things is also wealthy and connected enough from all that to jump ship without a problem.
Labor costs are a minority of expenses even in labor-heavy industries and most corporations profit margins far exceed even "ridiculous" raises in wages and pay for their average worker. But there is zero incentive to benefit average employees and customers and every incentive to try and screw as many over as possible.
Why earn 5% margin on a stable growth path that will remain secure 20+ years down the line when they can earn 10% margin through exploitation and outsourcing and then jump ship and reinvest that money in other business later on.
Yes, in theory. But, there are at least three problems with that...
1. Tariffs are frequently not targeted/precise enough, so come with lots of side effects.
2. Other countries retaliate, leading to trade wars and economic disruptions in both places.
3. Lower prices are usually better for local consumers - it leaves them with more money to buy other stuff. And tariffs do the opposite, as they are rarely 100% absorbed by the manufacturer.
Yeah, tariffs can be one part of it, especially things like anti-dumping. But there is no tariff for outsourcing virtual work. The US outsources something like 300k jobs per year, and tariffs won't fix that.
GLP-1s are miracle drugs that (to my mind) seem one of the great accomplishments of medicine along side things like vaccines and antibiotics. They are a cure for all manner of metabolic conditions.
How are they a “gamble?” For patients, their efficacy rates are stunning. If you meant from an investing perspective, Eli Lilly and novo nordisk have very down to earth valuations when compared with AI companies.
I don't know what OP considers to be a gamble, but one thing that comes to mind is that from what I've read most people who succeed at significant weight loss while taking GLP-1 drugs regain most or all of the weight within a couple years if they stop taking the drugs.
I'm in the US and if my doctor had suggested such drugs before last year I'd have been reluctant because (1) they were expensive even with insurance, (2) just how expensive varied quit a bit from insurance provider to insurance provider and from plan to plan from a given provider, and (3) as I said I'm in the US, and so never knew for sure who my insurance provider would be next year and even if it was going to be the same provider I never knew what their plans would be like next year [1].
Starting a new drug that looked like it would be a "rest of your life" drug where the price could change year to year from reasonably affordable to painfully expensive would definitely feel like taking a gamble.
Now I'm old enough for Medicare, and they are something I would at least consider because Medicare seems to be less volatile. They are still expensive, if my understanding is correct, with the need to meet a deductible and with copays or coinsurance, but all that counts toward the part D annual cap of $2100 so there is at least a cap making it somewhat safer to make long term plans. (But Republicans in Congress want to eliminate or at least significantly raise that cap, so long term planning is still somewhat of a gamble).
[1] In the US around 80-85% of people under 65 who have health insurance that is not provided through the government get their health insurance via their employer's benefits package. Most of the rest get it through the ACA marketplace. Employers often renegotiate plans with their provider or switch providers when the old plans/provider prices go up. The ACA market is even more volatile.
> most people who succeed at significant weight loss while taking GLP-1 drugs regain most or all of the weight within a couple years if they stop taking the drugs.
Anecdata: I've gone from 260lb down to a minimum of 198ish, up to maybe 230, back down to 193, long slow climb up to 270 and now on a GLP-1 I'm under 230 and definitely look fat, but in the right light you can see my quad separation. The only people I know who've lost the kind of weight I've lost and kept it off (like a 5' man going from 250lb down to 145) went from logging every bite in My Fitness Pal (or similar) to keeping the log running in their head of what they're eating all day every day. Diabetics sometimes say they're making their prefrontal cortex do the work of their pancreas. That feels relatable.
So IDK if there's a weight loss solution that works that you don't have to do in perpetuity. "Eat less" yeah sure, but how? Magic Danish Gila monster potion that makes you want to eat less, or recording everything you eat and using that to tell yourself you're more full than you feel?
I agree that their large scale rollout will be very beneficial on the whole. The US is absurdly overweight and obese.
But these are powerful medications that affect very highly conserved areas of tetrapod biology. We discovered GLPs in the mouths of gila monsters, after all. So you then can infer that that the mechanism is at least 300 million years old (our last common ancestor with lizards).
Actually, I tried looking this up, and glucagon is likely 5-600 million years old, back to all chordates, the Cambrian explosion essentially, though likely even before that. So, incredibly conserved. Like, if you are a multicellular animal, odds are you have some glucagon-like thing for digestion regulation.[0]
We're strongly messing with a system that is just tremendously old. Biology and evolution are ruthless about this stuff, it edits it out as fast as it possibly can. That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully.
Like, clearly, other countries do not have these issues with weight. Yes, they are developing them, I know. But even the US didn't have these issues near as bad just two generations ago, a blink in biological terms. You and I both know that the solution is not a pill, but the root cause of the obesity epidemic itself. These injections and pill are just band-aids for a much deeper and more pernicious problem.
But then again, you and I both know that we're not going to get at the root cause anytime soon either.
[0] This is biology so you'll find exceptions everywhere though
The weight gain in the us compared to the rest of world is undoubtedly related to the callous disregard corporations posess for life in general, let alone the subtle things like microbiomes and fungi that shape our ecosystem
> Biology and evolution are ruthless about this stuff, it edits it out as fast as it possibly can. That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully.
As long as you have descendants, biology and evolution don't care, once that's done it's game over for them.
> That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully.
It's been tested for over 20 years, the weight loss bit is the recent one.
> other countries do not have these issues with weight.
It's part of the solution, is how you help existing people with the issue.
Doing a restrictive diet is not easy (I know, I've been dieting since october, lost 15 pounds, but I can go on autopilot for this, which is not the case for others), it requires a lot of discipline that most people don't have, and our bodies are optimized to store calories, as well as being very efficient in consuming them, because for most of history famines were common, last ~100 years being the exception to the rule for most of the world population.
Future generations can be helped by better food culture and education, and that's the other part of the solution, long term.
I would say the consolidation of small banks into the big banks has fostered this more the people want to admit.
Since banks like Wells Fargo bought up local ones, the equality distribution changes dramatically. Wells Fargo wants the big players while that little bank wanted local players. This causes the market to lack marbling in competition while creating a massive group think economic bubble.
I don't gamble to become a winner, I gamble to keep myself break even desperately trying to hold to some asset that isn't inflated into oblivion by misinformed economic and fiscal policy.
How are AI and GLP medications in the same category as Kalshi or sports betting? One is (economically at any rate) a tool to produce code and the other is a weight loss drug that actually works. Neither are a “casino” in any meaningful sense.
>the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity
> because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
Adam Smith had a bit of a Marxist view (though, he did come up with it first) on the land value of real property, considering deriving rent from it as "unearned" without labor, which looks a little too close to comfort to appealing to what we would call today the "labor theory of value" which we now know is a largely useless device for creating or observing markets intended to provide voluntary ~free exchange of the fruits of capital and labor.
Most modern capitalist views do not subscribe to labor theory of value or "earned" value. Though views on landlordism do originate more with Smith than with Marx, it's not wrong to also attribute many of those thoughts to Marx.
Every business leader who makes money is a Marxian! Capturing the surplus value of the labor of others is how a business makes money and that is a value neutral statement.
Honest question — why don't managers like this get fired? My team wants us to ship fast. If I don't ship for a month I'm probably gonna lose my job, and rightly so.
If a whole team is spinning its wheels at the behest of its manager I feel like the manager should get axed.
Because if that's what they were told to do. The organization is likely very dysfunctional, or has messed up priorities, which is probably about 80%+ of the startups out there and companies in tech in general.
Seriously. There's not many healthy engineering organizations out there. So if you fire one manager you end up with either another bad one or one who performs poorly due to the organization.
Paramount here is culture. It's important to remove toxicity. I remove toxic managers (and team members) because even if they were smart or productive, they ultimately drag down the entire org and the net of it is negative productivity. I don't care if they were the most skilled programmer on the team. Doesn't matter. They could be unproductive or could be making others unproductive and unhappy. They're out. They're out before they burn or push someone else out.
So you may also find that is the reason. If the manager is generally a positive influence on morale or culture, but is perhaps just a little too reckless, they may still have value. Remember that the reckless pressure may even being coming from top down. A lot of people still subscribe to (and misunderstood) the whole "move fast and break things" mantra.
It's easy to hide in those positions. Many people don't know how to measure performance there and they get to point fingers.
My advice to anyone in this boat is to talk to the team underneath them every now and then. Get a pulse check. See where they get stuck and then set the managers goals based on that. At least one of their goals. It can be a small thing. It need not derail any roadmap or anything else. Explain why it's important for their team, explain where the team is having trouble.
See if they do it. If they do, they care about their team. If it's a small task/goal, it proves they can also be productive. Often times we have people taking on enormous goals that are vague or difficult to measure or complete in a timely manner. So a little mini goal (or a few, test a few over time) is very important here. Now, if they can't meet this goal or are unwilling to - you know you have a manager that doesn't care about the team they are managing. They can't manage that team or they can't be at the org. You can of course always try a different team or role for them.
In my experience a lot of managers (especially middle managers) kinda like to sit up there in a tower shouting orders at people, but never want to get their hands dirty or never want to support their team. They sometimes don't even realize the orders they are shouting are incorrect or impossible tasks to complete. This is where you get the "you now need 95% test coverage." That very often doesn't come from a C-suite level or customer demand because they don't care what the % is, they just want it to work.
cto is a very wide title and in a global enterprise with hundreds of thousands of employees it's impossible to have a flat organization. There's probably 15 vp of engineering reporting to the cto. Each vp is going to have 10-20 directors reporting to them and beneath directors the fanout gets even wider. It does incentivize busy work and in a large org you can hide in the corner and be a potted plant for your whole career if you're smart enough to find it. But that is the nature of a large cooperation, I can't remember who said it but something like 80% of impact and progress to keep a business going is made by 20% of employees whether it's a big company or not. The rest are just sort of there playing along.
Depends on size of org. Many orgs end up too top heavy too quickly and don't have things in place to support that. That's where you get the "busy work." It's because they have too much time on their hands.
Hey, I'm now measuring PR open time ... Only because there's been open PRs for months. It is of course possible that broad directional metrics are useful.
Its crazy how management has gone from productivity to a kind of policing, crowd control and abstract number management that has no sense.
One of things that's being discussed now is AI won't really help people ship products faster, because no one was serious about building them at the first place. In most large corps the managerial layers simply care about preserving their own jobs and comp.
Also similar things an be said about Product management too. Only a few months they would says developers are busy with other things, now that we can ship quite fast, whats your world changing idea? None
I like my manager but I think what many people don't seem to understand is that the manager tends to be the bottleneck. We were moving as fast as he was able to give requirements even without AI, and now we're being told to use as much AI as makes sense and now we just more product roadblocks faster. We may be shipping faster but amortized over all the roadblocks I'd say our velocity is like 10% faster.
& the counter-argument is those SAAS apps being killed by A.I are growing revenue 20%+ YOY
people who write this BS - one never don't understand SAAS fundamentals, they only see what's on the screen and forget the complexity that lives on the backend - forget the costs of running such a SAAS
before it was low-code will kill SAAS, then Visual UI builders, now its A.I
just like it was before that crypto will kill Trad-Fi
people who say these things - have tied their identity into it so they whole-heartedly believe the bullshit they say even though reality doesn't match
to anyone curious read the 10k (Annual Report) of any public SAAS - Salesforce | Workday etc - people should admire these companies for the machines / ecosystem they built - and also learn the good & mistakes to avoid i.e the bad
those annual reports tell you how the revenue generation machine works, how much revenue is expected 2+ / 3+ years from now - their weaknesses | headwinds and also tailwinds - how those companies grow and continue to grow etc
latest edition was A.I, prediction markets, GLP-1s -- all indicative of a "Casino" economy where you know the odds are against you but you gamble anyway so you might become one of the few winners
the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity
because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
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