Maybe not. Although I think future here implies progress and productivity gains. Increasing GDP has a very well established cause - effect relationship on making life on earth better. Less poverty, less crime, more happiness longer life expectancy etc, the list goes on.
Now sure, all externalities are not always accounted for (especially climate and environmental factors), but I think even accounting for these, the future of humanity is a better one where technology progresses faster.
That is awesome! When you say: what the price on the menu is that is what the customer pays; does it include sales tax as well? If so, def a very happy development and pretty much revolutionary for being in the US.
If not, is it something you could consider doing? I think it would be the next natural step :)
Disclaimer: I’m Swedish, all prices in Sweden everywhere is always including everything, you’ll never pay more than what you see.
I don't necessarily disagree with this. However wouldn't this imply a couple of world changing things:
- We should go for something akin to universal basic income? Given we could produce a bunch of output with very few people (I guess at that point it's more and ideological question of if these few people that get to stay + shareholders are going to get all that value rather than someone else)
- People that are talking about "productivity growth" has declined the past 20 - 40 years, are probably wrong and we have seen productivity growth, we've just filled it up with useless stuff and made up jobs?
- It also sort of implies that some of the projects that Google and Meta has taken on even though not financially sound right now haven't produced any value for humanity (and I fully understand that in a capitalist society; profits are the way we value things). I think they have and a lot do (like long tail stuff like producing knowledge, producing open source tech, driving tech that while not mature now, will explode in the future, VR + self driving comes to mind)
Another thing that comes to mind when it comes to founder driven companies doing whatever they want is all the Elon Musk companies. He has also made a bunch of crazy bets that "value"-companies would def not have made.
This argument could be made about any big SV company the past 30 years.
- Anyone of IBM, Microsoft or Yahoo could build a better (quicker and cheaper) search engine than what a bunch of new grads from Stanford can (Google)
- Anyone of the car manufacturer can build a better (quicker and cheaper) electric car than a software millionaire (Tesla)
I don't agree with the statement, I think there are numerous reason people embark on ambitious project that incumbents "could" do, but are not doing;
- An unexpected insights,
- A new research breakthrough from some other field
- Collecting a bunch of the most bright people coming up at the same time in the field (Mueller for SpaceX comes to mind for instance) etc.
But most of the time it's just that it's not really in their business to do a 100 million dollar - 1 billion bet on something that risky, they are in the business of returning like 7 - 10% a year to their shareholder, not producing 5x returns (like the VC/startup business).
Eh, I figured I would get this response but writing software e.g. your IBM, Yahoo, and Microsoft example is much easier and faster to do than building a cutting edge, physical, supersonic commercial jet. To build Google, all you needed was a computer, and a new approach/algorithm to solving web search. Software companies are much easier to disrupt than physical product companies.
As others have pointed out the Tesla isn't a great example either because building a car is still 100x easier to do than building aircraft, let alone supersonic planes.
"Unexpected Insights" and "A new research breakthrough from some other field" seems to be handy wavy. A supersonic jet breakthrough is not something that can be discovered in a dorm room. It requires millions in research and expensive materials to build and test against.
I did include SpaceX as well, and I'm not sure one can find a better example than that, but there are others as well:
- Cruise + other self driving car companies (obv also a bunch of software, maybe even software focused, but looking at Waymo, they developed all their own hardware, LIDAR tech etc.)
- Commonwealth Fusion + a bunch of other fusion startups (obv they haven't really gotten to a product yet one could argue, but a bunch of breakthroughs in high powered electro-magnets has been made)
- Heart aerospace - electric planes
- Canvas construction - robotic plastering and painting for construction.
While supersonic flight has been proven, albeit not economically viable, it's still something that has been done, and done like 40+ years ago. It's not really on the "fusion power"-levels of difficult. But sure, I guess on could argue both sides equally well :)
In regards to research breakthrough, sure they were handwavy at least as it relates to jet engines capable to support supersonic flights. I don't have any sources but I have little doubt that jet engine / material breakthroughs has been made since the 80:s.
SpaceX, yes. But I think some of these other examples work against your point. Yes, some of them have raised lots of money (or even sold for lots of money), but revenue for Cruise + Commonwealth Fusion + Heart combined (I haven't heard of Canvas) is about $0 so far. It's yet to be seen if any are viable businesses even if they have already invented cool shit. To your point above, Boeing is not in the venture capital business. Their investors most likely want dividends and stock buybacks, not capital intensive moonshot bets.
I mostly agree with you. I think Heart will manage it, doing an short range electric plane is not comparable to a supersonic jet liner. And the short range electric plane has a pretty clear market fit and very little technology risk unlike the supersonic jet.
There are a bunch of block-tools which are of the kind "block everyone that liked this tweet", "block everyone that follows this person" etc. Casting that wide of a net probably also carries some "false negatives" (which could explain the "I'm blocked but never interacted with the person).
A simple "pre-ordering"-queue seems it would decrease scalper interest as well (?) as it would be much more risky to order a bunch, hope you get early in the queue and sell to people who might get their machine just little time later.
Let people put up a small deposit as well for getting a place in the queue, and it'll be deducted whenever you buy the machine. Keep the deposit if you cancel your place in line. Would incentivize less manipulation as well.
I've been trying to get a PS5 for 2 years now, and I refuse to pay some scalper 200USD more than market price, out of principle. (But I guess that is also why I still don't have one :) )
I wrote a quick bash/jq script that would query target's redsky API to find out when an xbox series was available at my local target. I dropped this script into Rundeck and set it to notify me on success (success being an available xbox). One random Tuesday I got an alert but it was also dinner time. I saw ~230 available and thought enough time for me to eat dinner and place an order. Well 15 minutes later it was sold out. Fast forward two weeks later, i'm hanging out on a Saturday and get another alert. ~300 available this time. I spent 5 minutes trying to download the target app and then realized i had to make an account and by that time the available count dropped to ~180. I grabbed my wife's phone (she lives at target) and immediately placed a pickup order for the Xbox. I picked it up one hour later.
Don't pay scalpers, just use technology as your friend :) An old coworker did something similar but he wrote a chrome extension to do the same.
I'm sorry if someone uses this knowledge to scalp nextgen systems.
>> Let people put up a small deposit as well for getting a place in the queue
Pre-ordering with a deposit is definitely a very creative/smart accounting hack that Tesla (and Amazon) has used pretty effectively. It creates a negative cash conversion cycle (get the money upfront from your customer before you have to pay your suppliers) - which is highly profitable - especially when there is known demand.
> Assuming the scalpers are able to sell their supply, what they’re charging is the market price.
Are you trying to suggest the situation is somehow optimal? Market prices in short supply situations cause market inefficiencies, and this is one of them. The old platitude is that this inefficiency is only less bad than what would happen otherwise. Of course that thinking is rarely put forth with careful thinking about the alternatives, nor admissions of the many times in history that preventing inefficiencies actually worked.
Wouldn’t it be better if Sony received the market value themselves, and invested the money in the PS6? Wouldn’t it be better if we were not encouraging people who add negative value to the system to create artificial scarcity merely for the purposes of extracting extra dollars? The problem with your argument is that for markets to be free, customers need both choice and access to information, and supply needs to be able to meet demand. Scalpers hoarding are effectively an anti-free-market force on top of inducing inefficiency for profit. It’s a schadenfreudey bonus when scalpers get stuck with supply because they overestimated demand, but that doesn’t actually amount to a market correction, it just adds even more inefficiency, money wasted on top of money wasted.
Wouldn’t it be better if Sony received the market value themselves, and invested the money in the PS6?
Of course. The best outcome would have been for them to start with something like a cosmetically different "founders edition" that's more expensive and then to release the normal version when supply becomes available. But they decided not do to that, probably because the same people screaming about scalpers would vilify them for "price gouging" (which for nonessential products is a silly concept).
Wouldn’t it be better if we were not encouraging people who add negative value to the system to create artificial scarcity
The scarcity isn't artificial. There are more people who want to buy a PS5 at MSRP than there are PS5s. Scalpers are only adding to scarcity if they're sitting on inventory they're not selling, which there's no incentive for them to do.
The problem with your argument is that for markets to be free, customers need both choice and access to information
What choice or information do customers lack? If you want a PS5 your choices are to pay market price to a scalper, or spend a lot of time watching stores or running bots and trying to get lucky. This is all widely known.
Are you trying to suggest the situation is somehow optimal?
Obviously the optimal situation is for the shortage to be eliminated. The next best is for Sony to charge the market-clearing price. With both of those off the table, then probably the current situation is the best available. Do you have a better solution?
There has been a number of submission on HN discussing the chip shortage - and I’ve yet to see anyone discussing using second hand chips, scavenging from used electronics. Obviously as described in the post: redesign is always going to be expensive and cause delays if even possible. But I’m still curious as to why this would not be possible or at least create a much bigger immediate market for old chips?
Salvage is very expensive and risky: There's nothing like the high-speed and reliable PCB assembly process for dissasembling PCBs, only manual processes, and even with skilled workers there's some risk of damaging the chips, if they aren't already damaged when you got them. And there's definitely no economic way to test the chips to ensure they meet spec. You can do it in a pinch for very high value low volume products; for a thousand or more consumer devices, no chance.
Reliability and in general it not beimg able to scale salvaging 5 chips to salvaging 50 000 chips.
Your margins well be gone if there are any significant failures in the field.
Salvage is ok for R&D or high cost assemblies with big FPGA's.
