I'm glad you approve of "most of the investment", unfortunately "productive companies" don't do as well as various financial instruments which operate largely on symbolic capital. Private equity, which is only accessible by "rich people", doesn't exactly worry too much about productivity vs leveraged buyouts. It's interesting that you feel so strongly about other people succeeding though. It might seem strange but other people want to succeed too (weirdly it seems all this "productivity" doesn't actually benefit those outside the privileged circles).
1. if we are talking about billionaire's wealth like Bezos, Musk etc - all their wealth is in their own company. you can decide for yourself as to whether these companies are productive or not
2. private equity is a necessary evil that tries to make something out of companies that never had a good future anyway. not a lot of billionaire wealth is in PE. in fact pension firms are one of the largest stakeholders in PE which means the common people have stake in them too. what is your take on that?
3. i want other people to succeed too - our society is built such that any rando can convince YC and get funding.
The problem isn’t necessarily the wealth itself, it’s the power feedback loop that comes with it. It’s the ability to influence the government to pass laws which maintain or amplify your existing wealth, which then increases your influence, etc.
There is nothing “free market” about this. There is no equitable or efficient destitution of resources when this kind of thing happens - and it will always happen, because it is an inevitability.
Government funding for public services does very much improve peoples lives and you cant ignore the current wealth distribution, when you want to tap into "new" sources of income/taxation.
Yes I’m aware but can you describe how redistribution can work in this case? Where does the new money come from? If poor people are spending more now then someone has to spend less. Who is it?
Okok, i am explaining it all as good as i can but i wished you did the work yourself, because you are in the best spot intellectual challenge your believes, so i am giving you one last chance.
What is money and where does it come from today?
You often see talking heads, arguing about future policies and the, usually conservative guy, argues against social spending with "where the money should come from." This implies that money must be earned before you can spend it. This take is not just blatantly false, when you look at the private sector (eg. big mergers entirely financed by credit), its even more false for states that have a special/privileged role in the economic system.
Other, usually conservative, political projects barely get publicly challenged on the financial level. I am asking you again, what happens, when a giant bill, eg. for the iraq/afghan war, has to be paid, what does a state do? How does it work? Budget bills enforce what, where?
... they force a financial gov.dept. (dont know which one in the US) to just spend that money for a project, that budget bill authorizes. To do so they manage their own assets (taxpayer money) but they are also capable of taking on debt from private lenders via bonds or from banks as credits. So, by the brush of a pencil, there can be enough money to finance anything you wish for! There really is no upper bound when your country has monetary autonomy and/or has good credit rating, but where does this debt come from?
In the case of bonds, the answer is easy, private buyers spent their existing money and hand it over to you. The case for banks is much more interesting and systemicly relevant, because banks also have a privileged position.
Private banks have the ability to *create* debt/money from nothing (so does the central bank), since there is no backing of gold anymore. Private banks are required by law to hold maybe 10% of their credit activas as own capital reserve, but once their credit is out there it might become another banks asset, that now can lend out 9x of that value again. You can repeat that process indefinitely to get an infinite money supply.
This is the current world we live in. Money is debt, created by privileged institutions, handed out to privileged lenders. (And on all of it ticks interest!) When ever i hear someone like you, bringing the "government printing press" argument, i cringe internally, because private banks have the same ecomically vital ability and with the exception of banking/market laws and profitability, totally unchecked.
The scarcity of money only applies to the unprivileged/poor. And only corrupt or clueless politicans consider their countries finances as the finances of a regular low-income household. The ever increasing private wealth is enabled by ever increasing state debt, which is not a bad thing in and off itself! Rich people are not really the problem, unless unjustly earned, the development of wealth is!
I want to challenge your zero-sum thinking, of that classical monetaristic theory, that doesnt really capture the true nature of money. Modern monetary theroy, MMT, tries to do just that.
In MMT you have money sources and sinks. Ideally, a state or central bank is in control of how much money is created as debt and how much of it is paid back and vanishes *via taxation*. This creation and annihilation of money is out of balance for decades now!
Your question
> Where does the new money come from?
focuses on the source-side, which i explained broadly above, but is pretty much irrelevant today, because we have created enough money already in the past. The sink-side is politically and societally much more pressing, because having this gigantic wealth concentration, almost totally detached from and without any proportion to the real economy, with ticking interests and outside of public control, is like a hostage sitation. We need ever more money to keep our society up, but fiscal hawks keep reminding us, that we are not in charge of it.
Traders call it a "correction", when expectations meet reality and the stocks fall and technically and in the case of the US (as other countries too), such a correction is long overdue. GDP and stock markets go up while public spending and quality of live for the many go down. All enabled by banking deregulation and public/gov. retreat out of that domain of power, so the parasites can keep their unsustainable party rolling by throwing around funny money. And all the while, right-wing internet brainlets throw up something like "governments cant be responsible with money" or "we have no money for that very-needed-thing". This bullshit reaches back to reagan/thatcher, where this imo deliberate attack on fiscal public souvereignity originated. MMT is highly controversial in economic academia because this acadmic field is an exceptional joke (see their "nobel" price or that they still have no reliant model for crashes) and because MMT flips the existing power structure upside down, simply by highlighting the dynamic nature of uncapped money and the importance of proportional sinks/taxation.
> If poor people are spending more now then someone has to spend less. Who is it?
This implies that heavy taxation on the super rich will impact their spending behavior. I dont think this will be the case but even if, it will be totally worth it to keep the social fabric alive.
My depiction is probably grossly inaccurate but i think the broad strokes are true.
Then don't make claims about facts. You sound like someone trying to say the law treats everyone equally because both Elon Musk and Crazy Joe the homeless guy, are both barred from stealing bread.
The person who killed the bystander has social/legal/financial ramifications. Google had zero.
Anyone ever ask themselves why they have a knee-jerk impulse to support a billion dollar company's attempt at centralizing transportation?I'm sorry but safety and making your life easier isn't Silicon Valley's main concern.
Waymos need to be cheap and convenient to get business (they are a service), and they need to be safer to avoid litigation and social/political problems. Their business interests are aligned with both.
So why can't we prefer robot vehicles on the basis of safety and convenience?
If you want to make it about centralization, needing to pay big money for a personal vehicle (most of which through centralized dealers), register it with the state and an insurance company, requiring a government license, paying for insurance/registration in perpetuity, having to park it in special parking zones -- that's as centralized and locked down as it gets.
Waymo’s cars are, statistically, an order of magnitude safer than human-driven cars.
It sounds like your real MO is that you think SV tech doesn’t care about safety or its customers… which is fine, I guess, but it’s muddying the point you were trying to make as your comment kind of devolved into a strange rant.
For people outside the tech bubble, having strangers constantly market a product for a company they don't even work for as if it's their own spontaneous, original premise is "strange".
if an animal runs into the road and is hit by a vehicle, as long as the driver safely stops after, i don’t think the driver is generally charged after afaik
The comment is responding to a premise made regarding a person being hit by a car--which believe it or not--has legal ramifications. And we don't have to think about it regarding the pet, civil liability is still in play for them too.
Most of their enterprise clients get bundled services so it often still retains its competitive edge. Their Power suite, Teams and the existing integrations make it cost effective even with the increases.
I want to love these, mostly because they're FOSS and Office/Google Spreadsheets seems to get more and more bloated, and subsequently slower.
But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts.
I'm waiting for some FOSS spreadsheet solution that doesn't just try to copy Office, but comes up with something better. Then it'll feel like it's worth it to learn a whole new program and its UX, rather than just suffering through it because you wanna use FOSS.
Many would say that the FOSS alternatives don't copy Office enough. Often, by going there own way with various tasks, they create a bigger jump. Case in point, the Linux distros that attract the most attention for common folk and not niche use, are the ones that are more Windows-like. Examples: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin, etc... The smaller the jump, the more you can convince people to switch over.
When there is a significant difference, it needs to be shown what the equivalent is in the alternative. The jump can be a bit mitigated by education or information, but usually by only so much, where it's still seen as attractive.
I think the main issue for most people is that the layout is slightly different, probably to help prevent microsoft from suing them.
But once you get used to those differences, (also, knowing that there are a handful of themes that can shorten the difference significantly) then it becomes a non-issue after less than 10 hours of use.
LibreOffice seems to have an optional ribbon-like interface for the people that happen to like it (View -> User Interface) (but I don't use this UI mode as I personally find ribbon-like UIs hard to work with).
> But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts.
Speak for yourself. I see that LibreOffice's default UI is still a normal WIMP UI and this is a plus for me. I hated when MS Office switched to the ribbon in Office 2007.
"So you want to insert a row in a table? Great, just click on Table > Insert > Row... Oh well. Nevermind, just show me your screen and I'll hunt the functionality in that stupid ribbon."
We don't need less, but more, Office programs that respect GUI UI conventions.
Yeah, that's the opposite of what I want, then I'll just continue using Excel... What I want is for someone to figure out a better UI and better UX, not just copy what's out there.
My hot take on a better excel: the two things excel sucks at: version control and syncing. On the backend, separate the data and the logic in the spreadsheet and put each into version control. Then use something like syncthing to share documents with colleagues. You might also need something like bitmessage for initial handshake. Now you have a spreadsheet you can collaborate on in real time over the Internet or LAN without screwing around with a server, a google account, a credit card etc.
There's two more things excel is horrible at: choice of extension language and being able to graduate your spreadsheet into a real program. You fix the extension language by using something like web assembly on the back end, and probably bundle one or more compilers to go from $lang to web assembly in order to be user friendly. Lastly you fix the last problem by virtue of doing all of the above. The second two features won't draw in new users much, so they're less important in the short run but make it a lot more sticky.
I'm not in a place in life to put much free time into that project, and ideas are cheap ...
Yes, but take OpenOffice off the list, development has slowed to a glacial pace and it’s close to abandoned in favour of LibreOffice, which is actively maintained.
Looks like there was finally a OpenOffice release recently but that was after years of people complaining of security vulnerabilities not fixed in the release version.
If most companies had to for some reason revert to Windows XP and MS Office from 1998, they would barely be impacted. There is literally no benefit to this subscription model besides paying for what you already have and what you don't want. None of this stuff needs to be on the cloud even for bigger firms. For the I need/like X in Office 365, it's not worth it from a costs perspective.
I'd disagree in terms of the cloud capabilities. When it is used properly. The cloud stuff is very useful. I currently have a document that is going through multiple versions with about 8 people, with different expertise collaborating. Some have edit privs, some only have review. The ability for everyone to work on it simultaneously, with version history and no more document-v12-copy3_FINAL_FINALv2 is most welcome.
If you heavily rely on Word and PowerPoint. I know several companies that almost never use those products except in limited situations (legal, keynote presentation etc). All "regular" discussions/presentations take place on Confluence/Notion/Quip etc. I wish my company did the same thing.
I think a surprising number of companies only survive because Microsoft Office gets around hostile internal IT departments and gives workers capabilities they can’t otherwise get on their locked down workstations.
It was only in 2007 that the row limit in Excel increased from 65k to one million and the column limit increased from 256 to 16k. There are better tools to work with data, but these companies’ IT departments aren’t letting users install them.
I listened to the acquired podcast where they interviewed Steve Ballmer for a few hours. Very nice to get that perspective.
But he commented quite a bit on how office licensing changed and how that made MS filthy rich. Around Office 97 was when they started emphasizing getting the full office suite as a licensing option. Especially for companies this was a big deal because you would just get all the office applications; whether you needed them or not.
And then later around 2011 they figured out that companies really didn't like having to deal with having to buy a lot of office licenses every few years. So it became a yearly subscription instead and at that point the revenue increased again, a lot.
It's the progressive insight that transitioned MS from being windows OEM license dependent (office came with the PC) to being more dependent on recurring SAAS revenue. Companies actually prefer this model. Even though it costs them more.
I've been free from any MS licenses since I started working for startups on a mac. I occasionally use Google docs and gmail. But I haven't really done anything with Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint etc. since 2012. You don't need any of that stuff to run a company. The rare case I deal with a customer that insists on that stuff, they can just give me access to the web version. Or send a PDF. Or one an office file that usually opens fine in drive.
Bullshit. Just from a document editing perspective, going back to a network share where only one person can edit a doc is not going to fly. I used to have to deal with this as IT/desktop support and it fucking sucked. Docs in the cloud give you better collab capabilities and remove the need to have fancy networking, VPNs, international security exclusion groups etc, domain controller bullshit, connecting all of the companies offices together. Connect to the Internet, and all your stuff is there no matter where you are. It sounds like you've never had to support the infra for office workers before. This is way better than it used to be. For a small company, sure, do whatever. But the bigger it gets, the harder all that shit becomes and requires a lot of work to keep it running.
> If most companies had to for some reason revert to Windows XP and MS Office from 1998, they would barely be impacted.
But what about the impact of increased productivity when not having to deal with the garbage that are New Teams and New Outlook? The employees would start doing more in lesser time and the companies could potentially make more profits too. Why would they want that if they could just be locked in with Microsoft month-on-month? /s
Ah yes security, the ultimate shakedown mechanic. Tony Soprano should've been in software sales. "You don't want anything happen to your nice little business do you??"
It's crazy that organizations are willing to spend millions of dollars on Microsoft Office simply because people are used to it. There are literally no features most people actually use that aren't completely duplicated in open source alternatives. Whatever amount of time it takes the user to find the button they're looking for costs less than the permanent subscription cost for something that will only get more bloated and expensive with time.
One thing that is missing that nowadays you get O365 so also management of employees access and licensing in single env.
You get backups, file synchronization, real time collaboration.
Setting and running all of that is as simple as making O365 account and clicking couple of buttons by one person.
There is no OSS solution that does that.
To replicate that with OSS you need 3 to 5 full time graybeards and it still will be annoying normal people that will not understand “why they can’t just do X as in MSFT tools”.
> You get backups, file synchronization, real time collaboration.
Shouldn't backups and file sync be handled at a higher level of abstraction? Unless every employee is only dealing with Microsoft Office documents and nothing else (doubt it), shouldn't there be a separate backup&sync strategy already in place?
There are a myriad of both FOSS and corporate backup/sync tools available.
As for the real-time collaboration - I'm not sure how important that is. Writer/Word seem like useful tools for documents that have reached their final state before being prepared for printing. I think there are lots of better formats suited to real-time collaboration. Intuitively it seems like text-first documents (markdown, etc.) should better lend themselves to tools like diff or git, or any other collaboration tool, especially a real-time edit tool. It's almost like asking for pdf to support real-time collaboration. I'm not sure about Writer, but Word and pdf documents are awful with regards to edits and git-style collaboration. They're formats for presentation, not editing. In case someone here hasn't delved into the internal structures of the files, remember how WYSIWYG HTML editors jumbled the HMTL beyond recognition? It's similar in that it doesn't seem like the format we want to collaboratively work on documents before finally converting them to Writer/Word/PDF.
*Intuitively it seems like text-first documents (markdown, etc.) should better lend themselves to tools like diff or git, or any other collaboration tool, especially a real-time edit tool.*
Well don’t explain it to me I know that stuff. Go grab 2-3 office workers and try to explain markdown to them. If you’re lucky maybe they won’t leave when you move on to explain Git.
I worked one time with a guy that wanted to convince sales department to write documents in LaTex so then it could be well printed for the customers and also put in Git … well they laughed the guy out of the room - well before he’s even started explaining formats for presentation vs formats for editing.
I see how business people we work with on documents understand I have a cursor here and I type and there is my avatar/photo on top that I am active - I see how they wouldn’t understand Git diff at all and would just move on presented with Git diff not even wanting to collaborate.
Agreed... The level of integration across MS products in business is hard to entirely quantify.
NextCloud/OwnCloud and other options can deliver some of it, but all of it is harder... Just email/calendar/contacts is hard to match... Then file collaboration and syncing... And all the corner cases in the various office formats.
Even the non mainline office app, Visio does a lot of things competing apps just don't.
I tend to prefer open source apps for myself, and for code projects, I'll focus on markdown for docs etc... but definitely understand why a corp would just pay the monthly Microsoft tax for all employees.
With the improved web versions, Linux on the desktop becomes an option even then.
Many times I've seen people state that they use Windows because they know it, but they can't do trivial things such as set up a printer or connect to WiFi.
Most user's Windows ability is to look for apps on the desktop or Start menu.
Shared contacts, calendars and coordination of meeting locations and virtual meetings.
I've yet to see FLOSS that matches that aspect of Outlook and o365/Exchange. I'm fact, IMO, it should have been one of the monetization efforts with Mozilla, which is a server companion for Thunderbird and a now comprehensive integration of calendar and contacts.
Banks hedge investments-it's pretty standard and lowers their risk-weighted assets. If their investments are big, their hedges are big. If banks have a net negative view towards their AI investments, this article fails to articulate that (regardless of how many exciting adjectives they choose to use).
I think you're filling in the blanks for a pretty detail light-broad brush-click baity article. The $5 trillion that it cites is by its own words what they're "expected to spend". Also the global bond market is trillions of dollars worth and yes it is typically hedged.
They're likely just waiting out the eventual crash and waiting to buy at the resulting fire sale. Microsoft has done a very good job of investing in the space enough to see a potentially lucrative pay out while managing the risk enough to not be sunk if it doesn't pan out.
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