Without wading into the larger debate, is it possible that low stable interest rates are expected in a successful society?
In a chaotic world where the government and property rights might not exist in five years, the time-value of money is high, because the enjoyment of that money in the future is uncertain. A house might only be worth five times the annual rent, because some warlord could steal it in five years. And a bond might pay 20% for similar reasons.
The interest rate, cap rate, or P/E ratio I'm willing to tolerate for an asset is closely related to my level of confidence in future economic stability (combined with my willingness to wait a long time to recoup my investment).
What if a low natural rate of interest is just a sign of a more advanced economy where people are thinking long-term? This lines up, I think, with the fact that super low yield bonds and 100 year mortgages are common in Europe.
Why should the owners of capital automatically double their money in just ten years? Maybe we have enough capital to go around already. It seems like the owners of capital are willing to invest with much lower returns these days because there is nothing else to do.
I'm just musing about what it means. I've considered buying a house to live in with a price-to-rent ratio of 25 years. This is a lot higher than the US average, but maybe that's not a bad thing? Even if the value stops increasing, I'm patient, and I have nothing better to do with the money other than rent a nicer place. This is a mix of FOMO (if I don't buy now, I won't be able to afford later) and anti-FOMO (if the price goes down in a correction, I could buy an even nicer house, but this one is nice enough already).
Sports is a zero-sum game. Productive labor is not. The mathematician Paul Erdos used amphetamines to make many major breakthroughs. This was a great benefit for society, regardless of whether he perhaps took a professorship that some less productive mathematician would otherwise have obtained.
Promotions, and the salary/opportunity increases that come with them, absolutely are a zero-sum game. I’m a little baffled that anyone could think otherwise, actually.
While many industries have an element of zero-sum competition, that's not the default. Whether you're designing a car, doing a surgery, giving a haircut, cooking a hamburger, etc. you are giving something of value to your customers.
You’re describing retail jobs, where that might be true. But most white-collar workers never interact directly with customers. They have to demonstrate value to their boss, which does make it a zero-sum situation.
I don't think any of the jobs I listed are retail. I went out of my way to include a variety of industries, including knowledge work. "Demonstrating value to your boss" could include zero-sum bullshit or actual production. As a programmer, I've done both kinds of work.
Even assuming (optimistically) that an exceptionally good hair stylist could somehow... uh, I don't know, be so good that they can hire more stylists? Assuming there's space?... it's pretty rare to have, say, multiple heads of the same department.
You could cut more people's hair by getting it done faster, or do a better job cutting each person's hair. The point is that jobs where productivity improvement is possible are very common. Economically, productivity and technology are equivalent, and are the basis for prosperity. Productivity is not, in general, zero-sum.
The post uses accounting, which, well, maybe it's a different story if we're talking about complicated tax schemes that can save a lot of money, but in general I think we can say that if the workers are more productive fewer rather than more are needed.
It seems to me like this claim contradicts your previous assertion that there's "no zero-sum game." The zero-sum game is, they only need so many workers, and if all your coworkers are achieving levels of productivity only possible with chemical enhancement, then you get left behind.
This is no different than saying that the street sweepers were left behind by street sweeping machines. Or that accountants got left behind by the invention of accounting software. This is what technology is all about. It's not zero-sum, because there's other work in the world waiting to be done to make people's lives better.
You may have have a bad work environment where you feel like the only goal of your work is to one-up your co-workers. But your boss is not paying you and your co-workers to compete for sport. The reason you are getting a paycheck is because you are giving someone something they value. That person would be happier if they could get it for less money by putting you out of the job. But if that happens, that doesn't mean you should be unemployed - it means you could be helping society in a different way. In a well-functioning labor market, every worker will be more prosperous if they all produce more.
Maybe ideally on some macro level that's how it works out. In the meantime, on the micro level, many people are in competition with their coworkers and it seems kind of blind to the realities of the workplace to pretend otherwise. Everybody here has heard of stack ranking, right?
I've used Eaze. You pick an item from a menu in the website or app (although the Android app doesn't work for me), then someone drives up 20 minutes later and hands the item over. In my case I've gone outside to the driver's passenger window, they didn't come to my door. Think Uber, except the driver takes longer to arrive and gives you weed.
It's like any other delivery service, but I suspect the economics work better than food delivery because users make larger orders, you don't need to pick up from restaurants, and freshness is not as important (comparing to a central kitchen for food delivery).
By increasing the size of the backlog, you make it seem like high transaction fees will stick around longer. It also exaggerates the immediate issue of bitcoins low transaction rate.
If the valuation didn't change, and the common stock is fairly priced, then we should stop calling the valuation $70B. Under that model, Uber was never worth $70B.
No, that's not how that works. The preferred share and common share prices converge towards a liquidity event, like an IPO, when preferred shares are converted to common shares.
It's expected that common shares are worth less than preferred shares. After all, the preferred shares could be paid out at value in, e.g. in the event that the company is sold for far less than the current valuation, and the common shares would be worthless.
It's a de facto standard because markets for common stock generally don't exist for private companies. If you're comparing Uber against AirBnb it makes sense to compare valuations based on preferred stock, if you're comparing them to anything in "the real economy" or are interested in the value someone has placed on the company as a whole it's less clear which number is more useful.
Agreed that the press does go around using this $70B number as a valuation. If the company IPO'd at less than $70B it would similarly be reported as a dud. Recruiters also use the $70B when offering stock options. And I'm sure it feels like a haircut to those employees who just sold their stock at a $49B valuation.
All of the employees who sold in this tender offer have options, which have a maximum strike of less than $20 per share for common stock. Only RSUs were issued after early 2015. Uber’s valuation was $40B then.
I've only got two IPOs under my belt, but both cases the 1st trade settled above the preferred price in the last round. I think that's fairly typical, fwiw.
Having the stock after IPO trade at the old preferred price represents a significant increase of the actual value of the company, even though it's not usually reported as such.
i agree with you, but its the way that private company valuations work in the valley. If you read an article that says company X raised a round at Y valuation, its always based on the preferred price.
While Uber and Lyft raise prices in periods of high demand, they also subsidize rides in periods of low demand to keep a consistent quality of service. You'd have a hard time getting a network as reliable as Uber and Lyft without that subsidy.
It's not uncommon to see Uber retain 75% of the fee collected these days. The subsidies are much lower and less frequent than you are probably expecting. In Los Angeles, you are talking about 1.1-2.0 subsidy on base rates in the same areas with base rates for the driver being .72/mi and .11/min.
I'm sympathetic to your situation. But being locked out of selling your bitcoin for a few years might have resulted in you earning a lot of extra money! Hopefully you can regain access to Coinbase. Since they are regulation-complaint and legit, you should eventually be able to gain access to your assets. If it's enough BTC to be worth the expense, maybe you could expedite the process with a lawyer?
If lightning network includes tech that can support billions of transactions, can it be used without bitcoin? Why not use lighting with an uncongested coin?
Yes, any coin that has segwit or a comparable fix for malleability can use lightning. Litecoin is already supported. You can even have atomic swaps between both over lightning channels.
Bitcoin is the most popular with the most resources behind it, so it makes sense to leverage off it. There's nothing stopping similar networks occurring on other coins.
It's just the way the antidiscrimination law is written. I have a visceral "that should be unconstitutional or something" reaction when thinking about it, but then I remember we have age discrimination written into our constitution.
