The stock, and subsequently the stock market, is so detached from reality. For the life of me, I can’t understand why investors will literally put a 100x premium on Musk, and the things he touches. I feel like I’m living in some alternative universe.
SpaceX had this similar mystique to where owning a private share was something rich people bragged about like having a rare Lamborghini.
A lot of these modern bubble stocks are underpinned by a bunch of intangible collectibility reasons that realistically only exist because of a huge cash glut in the US stock market.
Maybe it goes on for a long time, but realistically as baby boomers start drawing down on their retirement portfolios and/or dying there's reason to believe money will start leaving the markets in the next 20ish years.
You seem to live in the real reality, and presumably people care about what you think there because it’s actually real. So why not enlighten us, help explain it to us deluded people? Or you can just be rude and vague.
The stock market is not definitionally "reality" in the sense being used. It's perfectly fine to look at the stock market and consider it "detached from reality", in the sense being said.
I live in a country (Norway) which has been a early-adopter market for EVs. In 2014 Tesla cars were endemic, you could see them everywhere. I was a big believer in Tesla cars.
But things obviously changed. We're still a lead market as far as Tesla sales go, but right now it is just another car. There's absolutely no rationale to automatically go for Tesla.
Which is why I find it incredibly difficult to see how Tesla is valued. The Tesla market cap is more than all other EV producers combined.
Musk evangelists will now yell "Self-driving cars! AI! Robotaxi!", and rationalize that the value behind Musk is potential. The potential that his products will be some fantastical thing in the future.
Money attracts those who seek money and those who seek money for the sake of money will as one would expect prioritize money above other things such as ethics as there is a natural feedback loop there.
I'm not yet dependent enough on any AI to shell out anything more than $15-$25/month.
If I lose it, it will not be the end of the world. I'll probably start digging into local models.
I suspect there are many like me. Far more than there are totally dependent users. I also suspect that the AI economy is some sort of "whale economy", where a minority is footing the bill, by paying outrageous amounts to Anthropic/Open AI/Google.
i just hooked up to local LLMs. feels much slower, more controlable and doesnt change unless i choose.
if i were in business, the idea that my employees would lose skills and be dependent on a third party that controls both price and quality with zero feedback would be insane.
A problem with the arctic, is that infrastructure becomes a problem the longer north you go. Even in western countries like Norway, the power grid is simply too small to handle any data center in the northern-most counties. Not to mention the political issue, where those living there would face higher utility bills.
It is assumed that if you want to build lots of data centers up north, you also need to invest in infrastructure. I've seen discussion about smaller modular nuclear power plants, but those things take years. Another thing could be other renewable energy sources.
More than once I've read stories about small local counties selling huge plots of lands to companies promising to build data centers, only for those companies to flip the land instantly for double or triple the price.
There seems to be no shortage of desperate rural areas that are more than willing to sign ridiculous no-strings-attached deals with companies, in the hopes that they'll geta a couple of years with economic stimuli.
I can't blame them, I'm from a small place like that, and have seem some atrocious deals go through.
I think that if you're unscrupulous enough, there's a killing to be made by those type of grifts.
Lack of network/connections. The first company that flips the land, will go into the deal with potential buyers, and lowball the crap out of the seller.
Sometime the sales (when they flip) are done via acquisition by the target company.
In all practical sense, the first buyer functions as a scout, doing research and negotiations, and make at tops a couple of million. A nice payday, but not enormous amounts of money. But for sure money that would have come handy for the county that owned the land.
Well the city could just sell the land for 2-3x the price from the get go, but Karen and the people she elects wants to pretend like their zoning and red tape policies are saving the spotted owl or keeping their retirement nest egg valuable or whatever, so inevitably they red tape themselves into a corner at which point the grift just becomes too juicy and the greedy voters hand the opportunity to an even greedier and cunning bastard on a silver plate who will package it up and sell it to a fake "data center" and the developers get their way anyway.
Social media feeds have been completely broken for many years. What social media used to be, has now moved to group chats and channels.
But, I guess, there's still room for those channels to be run through the enshittificator. Wouldn't surprise me if we in the not-so-distant future start to see random ads and paid content in group chats.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that dreams are often just that, dreams. Once they are realized, many will not live up to the expectations.
Managing your expectations plays a big part.
So at least for me, that knowledge has helped. Another discovery I made, was that some of my best experiences and decisions have been by pure chance. Things I never planned to do, or had any desire to do, but turned out to be more than I could ever imagine.
It’s ironic how some things you plan for your whole life, but never get to do, while some things you never planned for, ended up overshadowing those initial dreams.
And lastly, many things in life is like a bus stop - there’ll come another bus if you just wait.
In my professional life I chases “prestige” for the sake of prestige, and ended up hating those things.
Of course, there are things I really wanted to do, but never got the chance to, and I’m too old to do now, but that’s just something I’ll live with.
My FOMO and regrets plummeted as I started approaching 40.
It's also worth reflecting on what's underlying the dream. Your "dream" was prestige. You obtained it and it disappointed you. My hypothesis would be that underlying your desire for prestige was a fundamental desire to be loved. Then you realized that prestige only looks superficially like being loved but it's actually something very different and materialistic. If you had reflected that earlier you could have avoided wasting effort for obtaining prestige. The same mechanism is true for all dreams.
Having grown up in Norway, where soccer has always been very popular, accessibility is a factor - I'd agree with that.
The majority of soccer we played as kids wasn't even on a pitch. If you had a wall, a football, and two objects (usually jackets) to mark the goal - you could play - and that's exactly what we did.
But yeah, small neighborhood pitches were usually easy to find.
My pet theory is that it is more nurture than nature. These (VC) veterans have seen thousands of startups come and go, and become so desensitized to the ruthlessness.
Of course to people like the author, it seems borderline sociopathic to casually suggest such levels of betrayal. It is like trying to get into the most exclusive nightclubs, and when you're finally in the front, the bouncer will look at the group and say "You can get in, but not those two". It sucks, but to the bouncer it is just business as usual, and you're just another face.
Nah, he was talking about taking their stock. That’s morally theft even if by some convoluted reason it’s not legally theft.
I get the business as usual analogy but the specifics of the interaction are different. You just showing up to your club with your friends is different than having equity in a company you cofounded.
Heard one tailor say that business was suddenly booming again, as many regular and new clients would come in to have their clothes altered, after jumping on GLP-1s.
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