Seems to me that this a story mostly about the very long settlement process that is specific to US, and less to the rest of the civilized world.
Regarding the use of a digital currency, what Pix is missing, and what a cryptocurrency has, is the decentralization mechanism. All the ops are still controlled by a centralized entity, in this case the Brazilian Central Bank. Am I missing something?
My opinion is that private equity is the biggest scam of them all.
It’s essentially just money poured in unregulated markets, fueling unaudited businesses very often highly in debt and running on very shaky grounds, in such way that they could have never been listed publicly. The whole private equity sector is kept alive only by more money poured into system and more debt, in the end looking very similar to a pyramid scheme.
This is silly question. Very few people believed that Enron was insolvent or that MBS presented systemic risk even if the rating agencies weren’t completely corrupted.
I see people say this and just have to ask what you think you know that the investors in PE funds don’t? Asset management is an insanely competitive industry. There are loads of alternatives products available. Why would people continue to invest in a scam? Do you think there is a chance you don’t understand the industry as well as the asset allocators who study it full time?
Easy. The entire market is full of scammers. They compete on how to scam you the best. And the companies that don't scam don't survive. Tada! There's nothing else to invest in but scams.
It's kind of how even though Google is dying due to returning awful results, no other search engine eclipses it, because the results they return are just as awful.... Yes, even kagi. Because pretty much the entire internet has become awfulized.
Let me make an analogy with the pro asset managers. I surf the internet full time. But that doesn't give me freedom from an enshittified web. That just ensures that I can still make my living off of it, as a software developer who needs the web for references and problem solving.
Managers realize it's a shell game, because they're the dealers and they're playing it for revenue against the marks. They just have to be a little more careful than the final victims.
I think that the biggest problem is that Google is ashamed of what it is: an advertising company. Until they start embracing their own brand and meaning, there will be a constant stream of toxicity flowing between middle managers who don’t clear see and align with the company goals.
Enormous cognitive dissonance. Employees believing they are "organising information" or some other lofty, idealistic goal, when they are actually preparing _bait_ to lure in ad targets. The end goal is not organised info or some other benign purpose, it's surveillance, data collection and sales of advertising services, exactly what people expressly dislike. People do not pay for the organised info; the info is public, it does not belong to Google. Maybe employees think, "I am not working on advertising so I'm not contributing to the problem". If an employee at the advertising company is told by their manager to support the surveillance, data collection or advertising effort in some way, directly or indrectly, the employee does not say, "Sorry, I cannot do that because I am opposed to advertising." Today, Google literally takes money from people in return for not harassing them with ads. They call these "subscriptions". Create the problem and then sell the solution. Incredible,
Doubling down on advertising is one possible path forward, but I don't think it's the only option. Google really does has the engineering talent to pivot to something different. Or maybe split out non-advertising parts of the company into semi-independent entities like Waymo, and actually charge for services.
The Gemini fiasco shows that there's still some amazing engineering talent under Google, and that this talent is completely wasted under Pichai's leadership.
Just because Google has a couple of decent services that you're willing to pay for doesn't detract from the fact that most of their products have a worse life expectancy than a victorian child in the 1800s. https://killedbygoogle.com
They ruined every single opportunity to be more than an advertising company since Orkut. With scrapped attempts, starts and lack of intention for most of the 2010s to even during the early half of the Pixel Era, they seemingly haven't learnt to stick to something and iterate on it well.
And the fact that over 50% of their revenues come from search and by extension, advertising.
The fact' that til this day, they still haven't evolved from the "throwing shit at the wall then at the fan" strat which explains how they have fumbled so much so quickly.
Regarding the use of a digital currency, what Pix is missing, and what a cryptocurrency has, is the decentralization mechanism. All the ops are still controlled by a centralized entity, in this case the Brazilian Central Bank. Am I missing something?