I hadn't known Lime had effectively shut down in most markets, although upon reflection it's fairly obvious that would happen.
(Incidentally, while I couldn't get the archive.md link that neonate published to work, either, I could read the full article simply by disabling JavaScript and reloading the page. It's remarkable how many paywalled magazines this works with now. It's almost as if rewriting an essentially all-text web site to be a snazzy web app that pushes all the smarts to the client side has some drawbacks! Who could have predicted.)
I didn't know that Lime shut down either. I haven't been out to see but I wonder if they collected up their scooters, or if they are all just sitting with their batteries draining. If the batteries go out entirely how will they find the scooters later?
They would just collect them at their last known location? But yes, they actually collected the scooters already. Here's a news report from two weeks ago about Lime doing just that in Berlin:
> It's almost as if rewriting an essentially all-text web site to be a snazzy web app that pushes all the smarts to the client side has some drawbacks! Who could have predicted.
That's not their threat model. 99.9% of people don't think to disable javascript. However at the same time search engines get the full text making the story more discoverable. I wouldn't be surprised if you'd get the full story if your referer said you came from Google too, that at least used to be a thing.
You're right, of course, and the search engine full text is a good point. I'm not sure how many sites still give you a break if you come from Google, though -- I remember a fair number used to, but it seems the industry has gotten a lot less generous in that regard.
Anyone know if they'll be selling the scooters, or breaking them down and selling the batteries? Are the batteries good for performance items, or just mediocre energy/power density so maybe good for portable power packs?
I suspect they're going to see if they can wait this out and survive. If people start coming back to metro areas in two or three months, Lime can probably return -- I don't know what their runway is, but I presume their operating costs basically become entirely storage rental.)
Here is a puzzle for today - should we post links to articles that have significant content, but are behind a paywall? Should we post all links behind paywalls? Should we just say - it's ok, you can steal it by disabling JS? The slider has many positions here. I looked in faq, but could not find anything about it.
Personally I don't like links behind paywalls. I also respect the desire of the publisher to have a paywall, so I don't read the articles even if I can find away around the paywall. But, I can't really see a downside to posting the links. Either they will be voted up and I won't read it, or it won't be voted up and I won't read it. But if it's voted up, I guess large numbers of people want to read it. The world doesn't have to revolve around me. I think that the best thing people can do if they see an interesting topic posted is to try to find an equivalent non-paywall article and submit it. Frequently I've seen paywalled articles replaced by non-paywall articles, so I don't think there is really a problem whatever you do.
Worth adding that anyone with access to a university account should check if they can’t log in to the economist via their library service, and users of local libraries can often access magazines on tablet for free via digital lending.
It's not ideal, but better than banning every site that might ever have a paywall, which, aside from leading to the loss of a big chunk of quality content, would create confusion relating to the fact that paywalls behave differently based on regions, previous site visits, click origins etc.
The Economist is one of the few publications I consider worth my money. Its journalism is thoughtful and for the long term, rather than sensationalised click-bait.
also -- this markes the absolute lowpoint in the play and things start slowly but definitely improving from that point on. although Antigonus does end up eaten by the bear.
It's derived from one of Shakespeare's less popular plays, Winter's Tale, which contains the amusing stage direction "Exit, pursued by a bear."[1] (Apologies if you knew this, sincerity via text is hard)
Their actual headline/url seems to be "Technology startups are headed for a fall," which is less fun.
The article carefully points out VC funding receding even before the pandemic, which is simply accelerating what was already trending. Reminiscent of how 9/11 and its aftershocks sped up the dot-com bubble popping, which had already been in motion.
The examples of "fake tech", startups assuming easy entry into markets due to mass adoption of internet computing (via smartphones) and then running into fundamental problems with their business models, and the valuations based on creative accounting also sound familiar.
What little I know of history has indeed convinced me that major ordeals are quite often the logical conclusion of small or past things unaddressed, gone out of proportion. "Bubbles" are such a thing. Real "black swans" are incredibly rare; and this (CODID-19 pandemic) isn't one.
Indeed, the current dotcom situation is a bubble, and it was long due. Meanwhile, let's hope investors become better at identifying real value, real innovation, real game changers. It's often the boring stuff.
You don’t think having almost every major metropolitan area in the world under some degree of reduced economic activity for 1-3 months qualifies as a Black Swan event? What does, then?
> Hopefully, we get a CDC 'mini Army' like Korea/Taiwan have so this doesn't happen again.
The difficult part isn't getting a 'mini Army' after a crisis, it's keeping it until the next crisis, against all the beancounters that will soon swoop down and try to optimize it away.
Exactly. Like any preventative maintenance, when it's working it looks like you don't need it. People are terrible at remembering this without a shakeup every now and then.
But this time, there is a) political impetus and b) economic calculus.
The plebes will 'vote' for this now, it's something ingrained into an entire generation now.
Banks, regulators, government - they all have crystal clear economic justification.
Large financial institutions, definitely insurance, funds etc. will now integrate all of this into their calculus. So even 'big business' will be on board.
Large banks will pressure governments that don't have a Pandemic Response time.
The elite and plebes are now on board with the 'Pandemic Army' so I suggest it will exist in some, more meaningful fashion.
That's a bit of a contradiction. If something is not in the realm of possibility, then it is impossible, and thus cannot (in a strict, logical sense) happen. If we were to define a black swan event as something "not in the realm of possibility" then there would literally never be a black swan event, ever... because things that are not in the realm of possibility do not happen, full stop.
So yes, as you say, a black swan event is allowed to be something that is in the realm of possibility. But it has to be improbable. And it has to be something unforeseeable by people knowledgeable in the field. COVID-19 does not pass either of those tests; it definitely is not a black swan event.
'Some guy, somewhere predicted the 2008 crash, therefore, it should have been obvious'
People have been running 'pandemic' simulations forever, this is not a new idea.
There are multitudes of catastrophic scenarios we could face.
Pandemics that break out at this level are probably 'once in several generations' (at least pre-full globalization) which implies effective 'Black Swan'.
The next pandemic may be in 20 or 200 years, nobody knows, hence 'Black Swan'.
Ultra cherry picking? Did you even read the wiki article?
It was a study that lasted for months and involved the US Fed Gov plus 12 states. This isn't one talking head spouting their pet theories on their blog, then later turned out to be correct.
Every major calamity was predicted by someone (or group) on some level, with relevant credentials.
The US military runs China-US engagement scenarios all the time, of a variety of flavours i.e. S. China sea flare-up, Tawian invasions etc. You know we are running Europe/WW3/Russian nuclear standoff drills and simulations - all the time, right? Any one of those scenarios is very unlikely to happen, but somewhere in the world, something similar will happen.
The Fed and large banks constantly 'stress testing' and producing models for relatively unpredictable things?
Insurance companies are constantly doing fairly complex modelling built with really good data?
And academia is rife with all of those activities.
After the 2008 crises, there would have been an easy handful of individuals of credibility who were predicting much of what happened. Dot-com crash. 9/11. Saddam's Invasion of Iraq. If there's any likelihood at all of something happening, someone is talking about it in a meaningful way.
I agree with this definition. From my understanding, when the whole idea of a Black Swann was offered, people genuinely didn't believe they would exist, or it would be so improbably that they would be super surprised.
After reading a bit more about Taleb's definition, I don't really agree or disagree with you. I now think it's actually easy to argue both that COVID-19 is and is not a black swan event, given the (likely intentional) ambiguity of the definition, which is more like a heuristic than a definition.
Nuclear bombs being launched at all major US cities simultaneously was just as much a possibility as a global pandemic for quite some time. It doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t have been a black swan event.
A pandemic is virtually guaranteed to happen every so often.
And if a nuclear war broke out, that'd hardly be unexpected or random.
"Black Swan" does not mearly mean "unique and significant". The unpredictability of a black swan event is the main cause of concern, as it doesn't allow for much preparation.
In the US at least, this crisis and the administration's response takes the form of a "Grey Rhino". Something you can see coming, but you need to _act now_ to do something about it or be at its mercy.
From the website of the woman who coined the term - Michele Wucker [0]:
"""
A “gray rhino” is a highly probable, high impact yet neglected threat: kin to both the elephant in the room and the improbable and unforeseeable black swan. Gray rhinos are not random surprises, but occur after a series of warnings and visible evidence. The bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, the new digital technologies that upended the media world, the fall of the Soviet Union…all were evident well in advance.
"""
Money/debt is still very cheap but hopefully the starry eyed VC groups are finally recognizing that not everything can grow exponentially with linear costs, not even true tech companies. Everything is reliant upon everything else at varying levels of complexity and complication. If you go all in on 10 things, all 10 can still fail hard or break even long enough to bury your investment.
Though at the moment there must be some neat online only systems being stood up by devs sheltering at home.
It is and in truth I had given up on HN accepting the idea of a coming bust years ago. Any time I read a comment questioning the quantities of money being thrown around, the dubious value of some investments or asking how long this can last it was usually downvoted to oblivion or dismissed with plenty of "people have predicted a downturn for N years and it's still not happened!"
Yet here we are. I'm quite sure some who genuinely believe the coming recession is purely due to Covid-19 and not an inevitability that has been years in the making. I don't know what I would say to those people, I think they might be beyond convincing.
Anyway after a couple of painful years I'm sure we'll be able to watch the recovery and the beginnings of the next boom/bust cycle unfold right here on HN.
The slowdown started prior to covid-19, however it will be interesting to see how the overlay of the bursting of the huge post-2008 asset bubble personified by wework and a natural disaster which simply stops the global economy cold for a few months works out. One may obscure the other.
We may find markets and economies bounce back relatively quickly (within a year) because the perception of danger has passed.
All the normal rules of monetary and fiscal policy have been thrown out, and assets may well be inflated again in short order by the truly astounding levels of money pouring into the system across the globe. The US government is actually employing the helicopter money concept people used to joke about. We live in interesting times.
I think that as far as internet businesses are concerned, they're going to recover quickly and become stronger than ever. Social distancing is showing a lot of people the usefulness of the internet and I think that this is going to create a larger market in the future since more people are willing to rely on services provided online.
Isn't there some sort of limit to the Fed's endless free money printing machine? Doesn't inflation or some other negative consequence kick in eventually?
You would think so yes. Normally this might trigger a crisis of confidence and sharp inflation but a) the rest of the world is doing it too, b) the USD is the world's reserve currency, c) we may suffer deflation due to the recession and fall in demand if it is long lasting.
Unicorns are just symptomatic of the decadence of late capitalism. Companies that can only exist because of an overabundance of greater fools who create a short-term "success" from purely trading the inflated capital of a popular but failing startup - totally divorced from its actual business. The enormous prevalence of fraud and reward for failure, of front-runners, bent sell-side analysts, the wretched hive of scum and villany that is Wall St.
Coronavirus is just accelerating the market correction in startups that was already underway. In the end it may actually do some good to just pull the bandaid off fast.
This is just the next wave in the cycle and those of us that have been around a few years know what to expect. Those that haven’t been though this before or are in denial will learn the hard way.
Nobody cares about your pumped up valuation anymore. If anything pumped up valuations only hurt you in times like these. Options become worthless and early investors don’t want to take a hit at the benefit of others that come in on a severe (down 50+%) down round. What people do care about is how much cash you have and what your burn rate is. Cash is king.
Getting new cash will mean making it with old fashioned revenue and profit. If you can’t do that your days are likely numbered.
Right now is an excellent time for fully online services to make their mark like a few products I've seen promoted on this forum (specifically the IPTV centralization site in the last month or two).
I think once we get through the pandemic and begin returning to normal life we may, at least short term, see companies drop the whole develop product, get VC buy in and cash to burn, then explode staff count and product depth without the user base or revenue streams to maintain them. Companies will be more conservative short term and consider their liquidity and ability to reshuffle and adapt vs a titan of their segment buying up all the smart engineers. Some may still go for that (true unicorns, perhaps?). Maybe I'm being optimistic.
The title used for this HN submission isn't the title chosen by The Economist - but it's so much better! (And really sums up the article's content in a terse manner)
Well, it was one of their titles. Actually the submitter posted "Exit unicorns, pursued by bears - Technology startups are headed for a fall", which was perfectly legitimate. But the first part is so good, we truncated to that.
67 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
(Incidentally, while I couldn't get the archive.md link that neonate published to work, either, I could read the full article simply by disabling JavaScript and reloading the page. It's remarkable how many paywalled magazines this works with now. It's almost as if rewriting an essentially all-text web site to be a snazzy web app that pushes all the smarts to the client side has some drawbacks! Who could have predicted.)
https://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/wegen-corona-virus-e-scooter...
That's not their threat model. 99.9% of people don't think to disable javascript. However at the same time search engines get the full text making the story more discoverable. I wouldn't be surprised if you'd get the full story if your referer said you came from Google too, that at least used to be a thing.
People need to be paid for their labors under the system we currently have, so either pay up or don't click.
Someone usually posts a link to the workaround in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800580
It's not ideal, but better than banning every site that might ever have a paywall, which, aside from leading to the loss of a big chunk of quality content, would create confusion relating to the fact that paywalls behave differently based on regions, previous site visits, click origins etc.
So it's the least-worst solution.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
There goes the fourth estate.
Spoilers!
Their actual headline/url seems to be "Technology startups are headed for a fall," which is less fun.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter%27s_Tale#The_Bear
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22769301
The examples of "fake tech", startups assuming easy entry into markets due to mass adoption of internet computing (via smartphones) and then running into fundamental problems with their business models, and the valuations based on creative accounting also sound familiar.
This really is the dot-com bubble 2.0, isn't it.
Indeed, the current dotcom situation is a bubble, and it was long due. Meanwhile, let's hope investors become better at identifying real value, real innovation, real game changers. It's often the boring stuff.
COVID-19 is unequivocally a Black Swan.
Hopefully, we get a CDC 'mini Army' like Korea/Taiwan have so this doesn't happen again.
The difficult part isn't getting a 'mini Army' after a crisis, it's keeping it until the next crisis, against all the beancounters that will soon swoop down and try to optimize it away.
But this time, there is a) political impetus and b) economic calculus.
The plebes will 'vote' for this now, it's something ingrained into an entire generation now.
Banks, regulators, government - they all have crystal clear economic justification.
Large financial institutions, definitely insurance, funds etc. will now integrate all of this into their calculus. So even 'big business' will be on board.
Large banks will pressure governments that don't have a Pandemic Response time.
The elite and plebes are now on board with the 'Pandemic Army' so I suggest it will exist in some, more meaningful fashion.
It might not be 'the best' but it will exist.
So yes, as you say, a black swan event is allowed to be something that is in the realm of possibility. But it has to be improbable. And it has to be something unforeseeable by people knowledgeable in the field. COVID-19 does not pass either of those tests; it definitely is not a black swan event.
A pandemic scenario was modeled/tested just last year [1]. Some participating states appear to have learned from it, other not so much.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion
'Some guy, somewhere predicted the 2008 crash, therefore, it should have been obvious'
People have been running 'pandemic' simulations forever, this is not a new idea.
There are multitudes of catastrophic scenarios we could face.
Pandemics that break out at this level are probably 'once in several generations' (at least pre-full globalization) which implies effective 'Black Swan'.
The next pandemic may be in 20 or 200 years, nobody knows, hence 'Black Swan'.
It was a study that lasted for months and involved the US Fed Gov plus 12 states. This isn't one talking head spouting their pet theories on their blog, then later turned out to be correct.
The US military runs China-US engagement scenarios all the time, of a variety of flavours i.e. S. China sea flare-up, Tawian invasions etc. You know we are running Europe/WW3/Russian nuclear standoff drills and simulations - all the time, right? Any one of those scenarios is very unlikely to happen, but somewhere in the world, something similar will happen.
The Fed and large banks constantly 'stress testing' and producing models for relatively unpredictable things?
Insurance companies are constantly doing fairly complex modelling built with really good data?
And academia is rife with all of those activities.
After the 2008 crises, there would have been an easy handful of individuals of credibility who were predicting much of what happened. Dot-com crash. 9/11. Saddam's Invasion of Iraq. If there's any likelihood at all of something happening, someone is talking about it in a meaningful way.
No - this is not true at all.
1) All of the major economic calamities were 'predicted by someone' in the field.
2) Black Swans are 'improbable' - which COVID absolutely is.
"According to Taleb, black swans are events that emerge unpredictably, like a tornado, from a fat-tailed statistical distribution."
What we are seeing is point-blank exemplary of 'Black Swan'.
And if a nuclear war broke out, that'd hardly be unexpected or random.
"Black Swan" does not mearly mean "unique and significant". The unpredictability of a black swan event is the main cause of concern, as it doesn't allow for much preparation.
From the website of the woman who coined the term - Michele Wucker [0]:
""" A “gray rhino” is a highly probable, high impact yet neglected threat: kin to both the elephant in the room and the improbable and unforeseeable black swan. Gray rhinos are not random surprises, but occur after a series of warnings and visible evidence. The bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, the new digital technologies that upended the media world, the fall of the Soviet Union…all were evident well in advance. """
[0] https://www.wucker.com/writing/the-gray-rhino/
Though at the moment there must be some neat online only systems being stood up by devs sheltering at home.
Yet here we are. I'm quite sure some who genuinely believe the coming recession is purely due to Covid-19 and not an inevitability that has been years in the making. I don't know what I would say to those people, I think they might be beyond convincing.
Anyway after a couple of painful years I'm sure we'll be able to watch the recovery and the beginnings of the next boom/bust cycle unfold right here on HN.
We may find markets and economies bounce back relatively quickly (within a year) because the perception of danger has passed.
All the normal rules of monetary and fiscal policy have been thrown out, and assets may well be inflated again in short order by the truly astounding levels of money pouring into the system across the globe. The US government is actually employing the helicopter money concept people used to joke about. We live in interesting times.
It's hard to predict the consequences.
A better world is possible.
This is just the next wave in the cycle and those of us that have been around a few years know what to expect. Those that haven’t been though this before or are in denial will learn the hard way.
Nobody cares about your pumped up valuation anymore. If anything pumped up valuations only hurt you in times like these. Options become worthless and early investors don’t want to take a hit at the benefit of others that come in on a severe (down 50+%) down round. What people do care about is how much cash you have and what your burn rate is. Cash is king.
Getting new cash will mean making it with old fashioned revenue and profit. If you can’t do that your days are likely numbered.
I think once we get through the pandemic and begin returning to normal life we may, at least short term, see companies drop the whole develop product, get VC buy in and cash to burn, then explode staff count and product depth without the user base or revenue streams to maintain them. Companies will be more conservative short term and consider their liquidity and ability to reshuffle and adapt vs a titan of their segment buying up all the smart engineers. Some may still go for that (true unicorns, perhaps?). Maybe I'm being optimistic.