I agree that cashing in quickly before the fad faded was probably the right move for Labubu. However, there’s no world where Birkins (or other designer handbags) are a “necessary accessory”.
A handbag is necessary for many people to carry their thing. Whether they choose a more or less expensive item to fulfill that function is a separate question.
A lot of designer handbags are truly awful at carrying things. In practice they are primarily used as fashion accessory rather than as a functional bag.
True, but this does not particularly apply to the Birkin, which was famously created for the actress Jane Birkin after she complained to the CEO of Hermes that she couldn’t get a bag big enough to hold both scripts and baby diapers. Sure, it’s not as good at carrying things as a backpack, but it’s not bad either.
It does delight me no end to see a whole thread on handbags on HN. I agree with one of the parent posters though, handbags are an unusual category with long-lived brand status (like cars and watches) and not really comparable to lububus.
> which was famously created for the actress Jane Birkin after she complained to the CEO of Hermes that she couldn’t get a bag big enough to hold both scripts and baby diapers. Sure, it’s not as good at carrying things as a backpack, but it’s not bad either.
I checked this out and was amused to see that wikipedia notes:
> Birkin used the bag initially but later changed her mind because she was carrying too many things in it: "What's the use of having a second one?" she said laughingly. "You only need one and that busts your arm; they're bloody heavy. I'm going to have an operation for tendonitis in the shoulder".
In my experience it's pretty common to carry stuff in backpacks. They put a lot of weight on your spine, which can take it. Jane Birkin's comment reminded me of the idea in Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need that frequent travelers are always on the lookout for luggage that can hold more than it can actually hold.
I always found the birkin interesting because of how working class it looks versus its price tag. I grew up fairly poor, and the birkin bags always remind me of the leather purses my aunts, grandmothers, and teachers would carry.
This seems to occur in high fashion a lot, an upscale rendition of something popular among the working class.
It happens in fashion going both ways for a variety of reasons, though with fast fashion it's all so intermingled.
Many rock bands with working class roots "bring up" styles (like the newsboy cap), but also lower classes try and "look" upwards which can give us the nouveau riche clichés. Celebrities trying to hid their identity in public started to wear large sunglasses and suddenly everybody would start to wear them.
It's the primary reason why brands have become so important - fabric quality can vary, but jeans are otherwise just jeans; slap Gucci or Prada on it and suddenly you're signalling conspicuous consumption.
I often imagine future school kids bored out of their mind on a field trip to visit Neil Armstrong's footsteps on a lunar museum. Their exasperated teacher trying to get them to pay attention and recognize the gravity of what they are seeing but they are too distracted playing mind-pokemon or whatever is cool in 2350 AD.
I really wish I would be around to see the day those exhibits get their first visitors. I guess there will be a gangway route to take between all these spots, eventually.
I have hope for you, humanity. Don't screw it up.
EDIT: Oh I just remembered that the fine folks behind Artificial Museum[0] have already installed their exhibits on the moon .. can't find the link just yet (maybe its in bunker mode for now), but for those interested in paying a virtual visit to the Moons' first civilian art installations, keep an eye on these guys ..
C&H was the first time that I realized how authenticity resonates with people. I think people love C&H because they recognize Calvin, Hobbes, Suzie, Biff, the parents (or even Rosalyn) in themselves. Calvin often said the things that we thought only ourselves were thinking (remember the strip where Calvin is selling swift kicks in the pants for 10c because the world clearly needs it?).
Now, I see this technique work so well for business and political leaders, comics, social commentators, etc. It is a very effective technique to capture the hearts of your audience.
If memory serves, Waterson said the later years were colored by his feelings from dealing with publishers. One of the most memorable comics for me is one where Calvin ends up in bed after resisting his parents' bedtime commands. In the final panel he bitterly declares that clearly his desires have no impact on his outcomes.
> Other than Ports, the top 7 highest-margin industries (stock/crypto exchanges, stock exchanges, banks, toll road operators, financial services and asset management) are in financialization and rent-seeking, basically acting as middlemen that use other people's money to extract wealth.
OK, I'll bite. This is a very ungenerous take. Entities that aggregate and provide capital create enormous real human value. In fact, I would argue that most of the improvement in modern life that we all take for granted is because capital markets are available and accessible at scale. Where does the biotech company working on the new gene therapy get the billions it takes to develop and bring that drug to market? Where does the aircraft leasing company get the money to pony up for aircraft at hundreds of millions a pop?
I think it is fair to argue about whether the financial services use their position fairly/wisely/etc but it is unfair to dismiss the industry as "middlement using other people's money to extract wealth".
These entities facilitate value creation yes, but they do not create much value and certainly not in proportion to the profits they extract.
I have met people who sincerely seem to believe that if an entity makes money then it must be societally useful because otherwise the market would not reward them with profits.
This seems to me like a self-help belief for people in these lucrative but ultimately not very meaningful positions.
The Mafia makes (made?) a ton of profit but are a net negative on society. The better heuristic may be to consider what would be lost if the industry did not exist. Anything beyond subsistence agriculture would probably be impossible without financialization. There's a reason you had banks even in the middle ages when the average person was poor.
>Anything beyond subsistence agriculture would probably be impossible without financialization.
This is patently not true. The USSR had no financial markets and engaged in the production high value goods. Whether it did so more efficiently than its capitalist competition is another matter, and I believe the answer is likely no, but it clearly did more than subsistence farming.
This assessment is not based in historical reality. The last famine in the Soviet Union ended in 1947, more than 40 years before its dissolution, and with World War 2 being a major contributing factor.
The broader economic situation of the USSR is a very different question to whether or not they were able to progress beyond subsistence farming. One is a relatively nuanced topic, the other is a question that can be answered trivially by someone with the most basic historical knowledge, or even knowledge of modern Russia which clearly has not developed from subsistence farming to a developed economy in the time between 1991 and today.
I agree that banks and many financial instruments are valuable and do facilitate value creation in the world.
But that is the extent of it, they facilitate others to create value but do not make any on their own. They are however very well positioned to extract the profit from other industries and that is why the financial world can be so lucrative.
Also, even if some financialization is beneficial that does not mean all of it is. Too much can be very harmful.
I get your point, I believe I acknowledged the usefulness of financial instruments.
Nevertheless it is not exactly the same. A carpenter’s apprentice is useful only when paired with his master.
He facilitates the carpenter in his value creation but lacks the skills to do anything on his own.
Unlike the apprentice however, finance never actually learns the stuff.
Again, all of this has it’s uses and all, it’s just gotten a bit out of hand in terms of gambling like behaviour and the push the financial world creates towards harmful monopolies.
Banks do not provide capital. When I buy 50 tons of steel, no bank has sold it to me. The smelters and miners have provided that capital. Banks allocate capital. It is management, not provision.
With that in mind, there are two types of productive financial work: actuarial services and accounting. Actuaries act as the managers of society's resources, ensuring that net profit is made and risk well distributed, and accountants determine what those resources are. It is clear that many of the people in finance are not qualified to provide either of these services and simply leach profit out of the rest of the economy.
Notice that neither of these rely on capital markets and speculation. Speculators have been repeatedly proven to be horrible managers, performing worse than random chance. History is clear on this: if left to their own devices, speculators will destroy the economy. Only by means of strict regulation can they be forced into doing the productive actuarial and accounting work for which they are hypothetically employed. Yet for some reason, we still allow these people to operate without oversight in many cases and to extract massive profit beyond the value of their work.
History is filled with bubbles and crashes. At this very moment, there are trillions of dollars invested into companies with no clear profit model who are openly and obviously fraudulent in their accounting practises. Do you think this allocation is driven by a rational consideration of the risks of investing in a business with massive obligations and no possible way to service them? Or take bit coins. They are fictional products with clear negative value, and yet some financial professional push to integrate this funny money into the real economy.
Compare and contrast: resource allocation in finance-heavy Western nations with the same in the finance-light China. It's abundantly obvious to me that, through suppressing their financial sector, China has reached a superior economic outcome than they otherwise might have. We have elected to make traders the managers of our economy, and I think they have done a clear bad job and that we aught to reassess treating their decisions with such primacy.
That article could be reduced to one phrase: "banks off-load mortgage risk by selling that debt to investors".
But that doesn't drive clicks or strike the fear of corporations into your soul.
Obviously the financial sector provide a lot of value, but they also extract a LOT of value and probably even worse employ a LOT of the smartest people (I recall the rebalancing of Iceland's economy after its banks failed), and couldn't we get nearly the same benefits with far less of the global economy being dedicated to financial services and trading (which neither I nor it seems the OECD categorise under "services")?
For example according to the OECD [1] 25% of Luxembourg's GDP (excluding interest and trading profits [2]) and 10% of employment is due to financial services! For comparison, for the UK and USA it's 8.8% and 8.3% of GDP.
In particular it's hard to me to see how market trading activity that provides a price for equities to the second, instead of say holding auctions every hour (which would probably greatly reduce profits for day traders and HFT), helps any drug development or aircraft leasing company to raise money. Financing deals don't happen on the market, and if market price is involved, typically something like the last month's average daily closing price is used.
We might call middlemen parasitic if they extract more value than they provide, but as you say, without finance the global economy wouldn't function. Let's instead consider the marginal utility of more of the economy being dedicated to finance. I'm convinced it's negative.
> In the national accounts, financial services output is measured as the sum of financial intermediation services indirectly measured (FISIM) and fees, for instance on account keeping, credit cards, brokerage, financial advice and asset management. ... Trading profits and other interest income, for instance on bonds and derivative products, are excluded from the national account measure of financial services output.
You imply in your argument that finance mainly makes money from HFT("it's hard to me to see how market trading activity that provides a price for equities to the second") but this is simply not true, HFT and quants make up a very small portion of financial staff or profits.
My understanding is that the majority of big finance's income is from private equity or debt deals (pairing companies who need money with investors who have money), not from trading (there's very few people who we can confidently say are net winning traders and they don't scale).
No I didn't mean to draw attention to HFTs specifically, I understand they aren't big. I said 'second' instead of 'subsecond' because humans are also capable of reacting within seconds. But you are right that all those day traders losing money even things out and I was concentrating on the wrong thing. Investing and trading on longer time scales is certainly profitable.
One (terrifying) option is we are alone. There is no real reason to believe life is abundant in the universe. Even on Earth (the one place we know for sure can support life), life has only occurred once. Life may just be so much more rare than we think is possible.
> Even on Earth (the one place we know for sure can support life), life has only occurred once.
We don't actually know that at all. It could have happened many times and one line won out, it could have been more of a diffuse process than a single event (picture how microbes share genetic material ~freely but even less structured), or there could be a ton of life out there on Earth that's from a completely different tree. We really have very little idea what's living around us.
If there is a different tree of life right here on Earth and we don't know about it, that would cast doubt on our ability to detect life in worlds light years away. Also, if life had multiple false starts here on Earth, that does also suggest that it is very difficult to take hold even on the original Goldilocks planet. The idea that multiple versions of "life" co-developed and became a single strain is quite interesting to consider. I wonder what else needs to be true to support that theory.
> If there is a different tree of life right here on Earth and we don't know about it, that would cast doubt on our ability to detect life in worlds light years away.
Hm, I don't think it does. The problem is vastly different. Here, on Earth the problem is: sift through all of life for some that's different than the rest. A _hard_ problem with how little of microscopic life we've cataloged completely and with how much of the volume of Earth we can't see.
The problem looking for life in the stars is more: find evidence of _any_ life, so radio signals or chemicals that can't reasonably come from anything else but biology. Those are hard as hell, but fundamentally different.
> Also, if life had multiple false starts here on Earth, that does also suggest that it is very difficult to take hold even on the original Goldilocks planet.
That would be interesting. I kind of guess it's less likely than some kind of winner-take-all outcompeting thing, but who knows. Life that we see is just very good at spreading, escaping and holding on tight.
Lots of billionaires live in Palo Alto. You pretty much can't walk down University Avenue or grab a coffee at Town and Country without bumping into one. Plus most of Zuckerberg's neighbors are not "regular people", at least not from a wealth standpoint. This brings to mind the famous quote from a Palo Alto city meeting where one of the residents complained about "billionaires running roughshod over us regular millionaires!"
It is about being able to think clearly about your code logic. If your code has many places where a variable can change, then it is hard to go back and understand exactly where it changed if you have unexpected behavior. If the variable can never change then the logical backtrace is much shorter.
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