Industrialization relied heavily upon raw materials generated cheaply with slavery - cotton picked in the American South was exported and was a necessity to fuel the industrialization of textile production in England, for example. There is a reason that industrializing and industrialized countries that relied on slavery and other exploitative economic relationships have achieved greater wealth than more newly industrializing countries have. America's wealth is largely supported by cheap labor and raw materials in other countries, opened up for the use of international corporations by state-sponsored violence - see America's history of interfering in South American politics or Chiquita's recent guilty verdict for sponsoring paramilitary forces in Colombia.
It is not true that "cotton . . . was a necessity to fuel the industrialization of textile production in England".
England produced so much wool that it exported most of it (to other European countries). Flax was also very common.
Factories full of steam-powered machines were going to replace the existing arrangement in which most households on farms and in villages manually spun their own yarn and wove their own cloth with or without access to cheap cotton.
I would be surprised if Suno is very disruptive to the music industry.
It has extremely impressive output for a music generator, and it is very fun to play with - but people will always want to hear something new, and something real.
I don't think that music fans are going to connect with completely AI-generated music without a real personality and story behind it - and good, original music will always be more impressive to people and likely more successful than an AI-generated amalgamation of what already exists.
I spent the past two and a half years building prototype features for a large internal application. One month ago, the CFO decided that as a part of organizational restructuring, the company will no longer invest in the application. New development on it is ending, and the entire application may potentially be deprecated at some point in the future in favor of cheap dashboards.
I am being moved to the team that builds the cheap dashboards (I'm not happy about it). Among all the prototype work I did, only one significant project has made it into production - the others were continually iterated on for a couple of years, and though some of them have a highly engaged and appreciative beta userbase within the company, I am not allowed to do much more development on them, and they will be taken out of my hands at some point and passed off to other teams.
I've tried to explain prototypes, draft/paper versions. People just nod and wonder why they can't use it yet. They live in their bubble and you live in yours
To be honest if you made 10 prototypes it just looks like you can't finish anything. Not that you're a genius problem solver.
Make something that barely works and then hand it over to them and don't look back. Ship it.
You're right! The company is very openly continuing layoffs for the next 2 years, so I don't have much faith in the team I was moved to sticking around for much longer. I fixed up my resume and started applying elsewhere the week after everyone I work with was laid off. The job search is going well, fortunately.
It seems like Starbucks and a lot of other fast food chains are chasing short-term profits at the expense of long-term viability. A quick check shows Starbucks' gross profit has gone up 12% each year in the past 2 years - that's pretty significant for a stable business that isn't really changing much, and it doesn't seem sustainable. The profit of McDonald's is up 10%, 5%, and then 29% year-over-year, respectively, over the past 3 full years.
My question is - why? Isn't raising fast food prices so much to increase short-term profits an incredibly poor business decision? A major part of the appeal of fast food is low cost. If people fall out of the habit of going to McDonald's, Starbucks, etc. - which they will when they realize they can get higher-quality food/coffee/whatever at a local business for a lower cost - then I think it would be extremely difficult for these chains to win back their business.
Anecdotally, my family has significantly cut back on going out. We used to have a weekly habit of going out to eat with a family of four. We rarely go out now, and usually just as a couple. It's just too expensive.
In the long term, it might be a good thing. Part of the obesity epidemic in the US could be attributed to the fact of how cheap it was to get a meal at a fast food joint compared to just eating in. That differential has significantly increased, probably by at least a factor of 2x in the past few years.
Of course they always say places like McDonald's are really a real estate business disguised as a fast food joint. We'll see how well that holds up in this age of crumbling CRE values.
We're more and more doing this exact thing and you know what - that's a good thing. Happy to see you and your family has gone this way - very smart thing.
surely people who were stuffing their face at MCD are not going to switch to fresh cilantro and belpeppers and cooking every day. More like TV dinners and frozen hash browns. At any rate, slime mold had tons of links to how people are actually eating healthier and exercising more for many years now, but obesity is still trending up and even accelerating.
Gross Profit doesn't matter - it's Net that matters. There's more to a business like Starbucks than just COGS.
Their Net[1] doesn't paint as rosy of a picture as you described. While still a growing organization, the annual YoY growth isn't outrageous.
A smart business will also plan for upcoming expenses - like wage growth, downturn in markets (to sustain hard times), volatile goods cost, ever increasing rent/CRE, upcoming legislation, and more. That's along with all your normal business planning, such as expansion, new marketing endeavors, etc.
This theme... of trying to angle increased prices as pure corporate greed is very misguided.
> Their Net[1] doesn't paint as rosy of a picture as you described.
Your "not a rosy picture" feels like a weird take on a steady 25% YOY (where not higher, see 2020's 300%) increase in profits (net, not gross). The one outlier was 2021, and ties in directly with the pandemic.
That's ridiculously solid growth that would make any accountant dance in joy, especially in the food service industry.
How do you think they can sustain growth in bad/volatile/uncertain economies? Raise prices...
Starbucks' NET is down from just two years ago (~2%). If we examine headcount over the past 5 years, you can also see incredible growth there (read: increased costs).
So, we pick a particularly unstellar year for Starbucks then lambast them for doing better the following year. We'd have to dig into their financials deeper to understand why 2022 was so poor in relation to 2021 and 2023... but the cited YoY Net Growth is not unreasonable for a company that has locations in nearly every nation, and access to enormous working capital.
...This isn't a bad economy. Nor volatile. Nor uncertain.
This is, for businesses, the best economy we've had for years. Why are they being forced to raise their prices again?
As for 25% not being unreasonable, it's about 10% higher than I'd expect to see in the food industry. 25%, especially for a company that basically requires physical locations, equipment, employees, managers, and food supplies (which expires and has a certain percentage of loss automatically) is absolutely phenomenal.
EDIT:
> Starbucks' NET is down from just two years ago (~2%)
$4.125B in 2023 Net Income, $4.199B 2021 Net Income. Reread the linked source.
Additionally, you're playing fast and loose with the "growth" by comparing it to a previously down year. Again, we'd have to dig further to find out why Net Income was down so much in 2022, but essentially 2023 returned to just below 2021 levels. I would not call that spectacular growth by any means, especially when we consider the runaway inflation that has occurred in the meantime.
Raising prices while everyone is might avoid any negative press. Plus you get to test how inelastic your demand / how price sensitive your consumers really are. Since most people buy coffee out of a habit to get their daily caffeine (and sugar) dosage I would reckon demand is pretty inelastic and management wanted to test that. You can always suddenly lower prices again for consumables like coffee - doesn't hurt your image long term. It's not like a luxury brand starting to lower their prices - which would be detrimental for their brand.
Habits have momentum, and people aren't paying close attention to prices. They may not actually realize that the cost of fast food (FF) is now the cost of a sit down meal (SDM) at a full-service restaurant. So for a while FF feels cheaper than SDM even when it isn't, and FF chains can reap considerable benefits. They may retain the feeling of being affordable for many years after becoming not so. The same thing has happened with supermarket food prices: the cost of a steak at the supermarket now rivals the cost of an SDM, and all the trimmings and service. The price of an ordinary loaf of bread at places like Whole Foods is $8. But Trader Joe's prices and Costco prices have remained more-or-less constant.
The problem is there is no punishment for the people who do it. The board and higher ups get their short term profits that wall street love and when they eventually see that people stop coming the CEO will get a multi-million exit package and go and destroy his/her next business. In fact, they get rewarded for it.
Maximizing profit is the point of a business. If you want to have non-profit goals, you can advocate for socialization, I suppose, but government-run fast food restaurants seems like a tough sell in These Here United States.
Maximising profit over the well-being of a sustainable business long-term is a mindset from the late 80s/early 90s in business world, not a law. It doesn't need to be that way, it is because of an ideology instituted by Welch and his followers spread it amongst all businesses, another ideology will take over when this one inevitably crumbles enough business to be considered harmful.
I hope Boeing's downfall continues spiraling to have a nice poster child of what this fucked up behaviour creates.
I guess it's because an inflationary environment is the best time to increase profit margins, because the average customer won't be able to tell the real increase when everything else gets more expensive as well. It is relatively harder to justify price changes when inflation is near zero.
I've been starting to get suspicious that we might see some real movement because of this. People will start being able to compete at these prices.
What can a local coffee shop give you for $8-20. Probably a better cup of coffee, or a full meal with coffee on the higher end. Better quality food made to order.
If I remember rightly, Starbucks' profits two years ago were down fairly substantially compared to their pre-pandemic levels and their long term goal seems to be to try and return the business to that same stable level of profit.
You could also start exploring other healthier options such as making a sandwich or salad from home if you care what you put into your body. Mcd is emergency food for me, last time maybe 5 years ago on a highway.
However I shook off the habit of buying Starbucks coffee every morning, I just have one at home in the morning and just have some tea at work if I still want something…
I’m assuming your username doesn’t imply a McD in NYC, because in my metro area “value” meals are all over $10 in the app. I’m fairly certain as late as 2021 I could get a sausage biscuit, hash brown, and coffee for $3, that’s now $7.
Do yourself a favor and don't buy any books by Cal Newport. They're glorified blog posts with a bunch of overblown common sense rebranded with marketable terminology. Read Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi if you want something similar that has more substance.
This is the book every productivity self-help book published in the last 20+ years reference. Including the one I self-published many moons ago.
Mihaly is the only person who has done actual research and experiments on the subject. He basically worked on this his entire career from the mid 1960's onwards. Everything else is derivative.
While you're there, do yourself another favor and read up on Fogg's Behavior Model. That's the other academic research that all the famous productivity books base their suggestions upon.
The derivative pre-chewed content is fine, but get the underlying steak. It's worth it. The returns will compound your whole life/career.
> In his acknowledgments, he thanks his wife for “putting up with all the sacrifices involved in having a partner with a troubling addiction to writing books,”
You'd think there'd be fewer sacrifices involved, given that he's mostly just writing one book, multiple times. /s
My support is first-hand experience and major disappointment buying and reading his most popular book - Deep Work. It was a borderline insulting read in its lukewarm repackaging of common sense wisdom and other people's original research.
Definitely similar in a lot of ways (going against the current, similar design language), but there are a couple of key differences to the point I wouldn't say Tesla is the Apple of cars -
Apple typically productizes mature technology and ensures that its products are designed well. Tesla is an early adopter and productizes immature technology which it overhypes and overpromises on (e.g. self-driving).
Apple's manufacturing quality control and attention to detail is also generally pretty impressive. Tesla products looks impressive on the outside but feel cheap on the inside, and there are a lot of issues with the quality of manufacturing. Apple uses nice materials and Tesla uses cheap materials.
Apple making a car always struck me as weird, though.
I would argue BMW or Mercedes are much closer to being the Apple of cars - they aren't early adopters of new technology, and their products are immaculately designed (though using a much different design language than Apple does) and are and feel expensive, unlike Tesla's cars, which look nice but feel like toys.
An impressive technical achievement, yes - but the presentation/marketing of this is absurd.
The generated videos are aesthetically horrendous. I don't know what kind of mental gymnastics are going on that they can confidently describe something where the body shapes are nonsensically in flux with every change of frame (look at the eagle's talons, or the dog's leg movements as it runs) as "high-quality video".
Is generative AI hype blinding them to how hideous these videos are, or do they know and they just pretend like it's something it isn't?
I don't like them; aesthetically they don't appeal and technically they fall short as you describe. But just about a year ago this was the State of the Art ('Age of Illusion' by Die Antwoord) with visual coherence maintainable for <10 frames or less.
They set out without any ability to do what they claimed to do and lied about it to investors,
customers, and the press. A 3D model outsourcing shop isn't going to raise a lot of investment money compared to an "AI" startup.
Some are happy for now because they largely aren't accounting for the deferred costs that are being pushed down the road - once you account for wear & tear on the car and associated maintenance and eventual new car purchases, their earnings are much less than what it seems in the short-term. Uber relies on drivers not running all the numbers before signing up.
This argument is demeaning to the drivers. They are grown adults who do their taxes. A reasonable prior would be that people who do something for a living tend to know more about the job than people who don’t. You can surely find examples of unprofitable Uber drivers who are driving in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong car, but that doesn’t make it the norm.
There’s a lot of discussion among the driver community about how to operate to optimize earnings. People are leasing or buying cars specifically to use them to drive for Uber and depreciation, maintenance, and fuel economy are all part of the calculation.
I dont think it's demeaning. Uber (and others) are not very upfront about the longterm costs and risks, causing (often) desparate people to make serious decisions without critical information. This mostly affects people who drive for these companies as their full time job.
They make it seem like it's a job you can do at your own convenience, but you can't actually do it like that and expect to make consistent money. All of them start penalizing you (by giving you fewer jobs in the future) if you turn down jobs for any reason, driving down their profitibility. It also looks like youre making more money than you are because you have to do all your own taxes (which is mostly just a hassle, but did blindside my poor friend who didnt know anything about taxes and had to go into debt to pay his taxes since he was living paycheck to paycheck).
And its very easy to not make the connection that driving all day for Uber et al increases chances of getting in a car accident, which will increase monthly insurance costs, not to mention car repairs and car maintainance from driving 8-12 hours a day most days of the week. And if your car ever needs to go into the mechanic for repairs (a famously slow process often times) thats lost wages every day youre without your car. It's like being a truck driver; Uber et al just move all the costs of fleet maintainance to the drivers, which really eats into what looks like a decent wage on the surface level.
Of course, there are going to be some people who do all the research and are ok with these risks, or game the system someone. But most people who do these driving jobs full time do it because they dont have a lot of other options, and dont bother to do all the in-depth research because "it looks easy" and they didnt have another readily available choice anyway. This isnt Uber's fault per se, but they benefit from it and do nothing to inform drivers of these risks.
(cite: have a friend who worked for all the delivery and ride share apps before losing his car and being too poor to buy a new one.)
As someone who tried the music-or-nothing approach for several years after college and two years in ended up with semi-regular panic attacks, persistent existential dread, and crippling anxiety over finances, I can't recommend getting a day job enough. It saddens me to think of all the creative work I could be doing and all the artistic growth I could be seeing instead of developing marketing software, but at least I'm able to pay my bills, maintain a relationship, and generally live a life that consists of more than just obsessing over music. Less existential dread, too, which helps with focus when I do work on art after work and on the weekends.
It's true that in our limited lifespans we will always have to choose trade-offs, but the current choice between crushing poverty vs crushing workload is not a natural one; it's contrived. most of us should be working fewer hours in the modern economy and have more leisure/creativity time.
personally, I've made it my goal as a SWE to get a 4-day work week and/or shorter work days. even if it means a pay tradeoff. maybe I'd even get back to coding fun things.
> crushing poverty vs crushing workload is not a natural one; it's contrived
I wish more people realized this. But then again, my goal 20 years ago was to have a lifestyle that could be enabled by a job in a coffee shop. Now I look back and wonder what happened :-)
> personally, I've made it my goal as a SWE to get a 4-day work week and/or shorter work days. even if it means a pay tradeoff.
Part time work week + fully remote is the dream for me
I don't want to spend my whole life working to make more money than I realistically am ever going to spend just to save enough to retire just to die a month into my retirement.
Had the same attitude as you, and achieved this (20h wk, remote, 6fig). Was still miserable.
Maybe for you it's only the shape of life that is the difference. But personally it was the quality of the things that filled that shape. Those tradeoffs weren't obvious at the beginning (ex: the kind of coding gigs that let me work 20h wks were boring as shit and dead ends).
Best of luck. There's a balance out there for everyone.
You may be right, that it would make me miserable too.
Personally I haven't ever worked anywhere the problems were super stimulating or interesting and mostly have worked in fairly dead end places. My advancement has been almost 100% from changing companies, which is kind of a tedious grind.
I think I would prefer to find somewhere that pays enough to support my home and needs, and have more free time.
I also suspect you were earning more with those 20 hours than I am now, since I'm low 6figs (in CAD no less) and 40+ hours a week.
But you are definitely right, it could be the grass is greener.
Yea that is a grind. I am a bit of a victim of privilege here. Had a career-defining job and was paid well. Getting ~60% of my time back to earn my cost of living + decent buffer was AMAZING.. for a while, but it ran out because the good parts of my previous job (people, learning, challenge, opportunity) were no longer there by default of my showing up.
Part time gigs are self-employment gigs.
I hope you find it. Some folks are a good match for what I had. A best friend just got there and is an infinitely better fit (doesn't really care about work, has lots of hobbies, enjoys moving around, has community)
I definitely still feel sadness and anxiety over the feeling that I'm wasting my life on something I don't care about, but it feels more manageable for me than the earth-shattering feeling of having nothing but one thing and that one thing isn't working out the way I thought it would.
Thanks for writing this and your previous statement re: panic attacks. It resonates and helps me attribute these feelings.
I once went on hiatus from full-time work to "make it on my own" and after the manic honeymoon period, I found myself stuck between just a similar but shittier local maxima and despair. I've tried to understand this experience but it might just come down to this - that sufficient certainty in some level of security can't be overruled by attitude for too long.
> having nothing but one thing and that one thing isn't working out
After my experience I started to think about my life like a house supported by many pillars. It can withstand one pillar completely breaking, or a few in state of disrepair. But if there's only one or two to begin with (or if most are in disrepair), then when the next one breaks it all comes tumbling. And I might incorrectly attribute my problems to that pillar, when really it's the lack of others.
I tried living off my music for 10 years when I was young. I was on the verge of homelessness at the end. The existential dread was good for my art, but not my mental health. I was very creative, but also on the verge of not wanting to exist. After that, I sold all my gear and focused on a career in software development. I live a comfortable life now and slowly building back up my home studio and making music again. It doesn't feel the same and I have to really think about how to be creative, whereas before it was more intuitive. It's a trade-off. It feels different.
