I hadn't even been aware of Apple's App Tracking Transparency until now. I'm not sure how much it's driving the overall tech bust. There's no doubt that falling ad revenues, to which ATT is something of a contributor, is a big part of the downturn. Those that lean heavily on ad-driven revenue are leading, and not in a good way.
It has been brought up in the earnings reports for most ad tech companies since it was released. It’s been a massive impact. Anyone who wants to measure the impact of their ads is now competing with big players who can afford to spray and pray. You can no longer tell if someone saw your ad yesterday and decided to come to your website to buy it today.
I think most of us generally agree but it is interesting to see the impact. I’m curious how many people tap ”Allow app to track me”. Knowing what it used for and feeling like it isn’t _that_ big of a deal, I have never once given permission. It doesn’t feel like my problem so don’t track me.
This is the opposite of "Buy Local" to those that care about that sort of thing, as Walmart can afford non-targeted ads vs. small mom-and-pop groceries.
I would like to know more about who exactly is impacted. The article mentions that Nike's revenue is way up, so I guess they weren't hurt too bad by less targeted advertisement. Is it only adtech that is damaged here, or adtech's customers?
My guess would be that most of the small margin advertisers can’t afford these traffic channels anymore. Anyone who can’t afford to attribute traffic at a wider scale.
It's both adtech and adtech's customers who are getting hurt.
Small/mid sized adtech (and eventually any not directly attached to a platform) can't do shit anymore. Small/mid sized customers therefore have to go to the bigger platforms (YouTube and Facebook, notably) to get anything decent.
They're paying more for less, and power is concentrating in the big adtech players further. The flip side is, security of personal data is on average significantly better. But overall privacy seems like a wash or marginally worse, to become significantly worse once monopoly abuses kick in.
Big players aren't "spraying and praying" by and large. This is a common misconception. They often have spend large enough to do properly controlled (long term/geo hold outs, etc) statistical experiments to determine incremental lift with MMM and such.
Is there some waste? Sure. But certainly no worse (and likely better) than small businesses who don't have the volume who are paying for clicks without proper incrementality based measurement.
And specifically, they could afford to start advertising, safe in the knowledge that they'd make the most of their tiny budget. It's pretty sad what has happened to lots of niche businesses since the ATT change.
It's going to be fascinating to watch the influencer economy really take off. Customers, such as myself, are looking to brands they trust. At first I was dismissive of the influencer economy, but now that I'm doing more of my own research I draw from their experiences and recommendations. And I ignore ads that are pushed at me.
Yes, I know they are ads. But it is the difference between push and pull. Consumer Reports is the oldest influencer style. But you go there seeking information on things you are interested in buying. But once you've completed your purchase you almost never have to look at it again. This is the opposite of what we consider ads. You start with a small interest and for months afterwards you're bombarded with similar products.
I've found it to be extremely difficult to differentiate between 'push' and 'pull' because you're almost never aware as a mark of how far the chain of influencing your really goes. It is very well possible that whatever put you on track of the influencer in the first place was already part of the campaign and it may well extend into your private life in ways that are difficult to discern.
That conversation you overheard in the elevator? That 'chance' youtube video linked to you? Some on twitter making an off hand remark? That visit to a website or a physical store with your smartphone?
I went digging on this, because I thought you were wrong.
Turns out the official book name is indeed singular, and in fact I tracked this singular usage all the way back to Athanasius 39th festal letter in AD 367, listing the accepted books of the New Testament - "the Revelation of John".
"The Revelation" is also the first word of the book in greek. (Ἀποκάλυψις or apokalypsis)
This notion of people just balling because their stimulus checks is increasingly tiresome, has always been disconnected from reality, needs to die. How far do you think those things went? You know, for normal people? I only ever see this comment from folks (mostly Republican politicians until now) with zero understanding of the subject. Boggling.
So very this. Anyone making this argument is secretly moralizing about economics. They can't stand the fact that "the government just gave away money to a bunch freeloaders."
The only people secretly moralizing about economics is this chain of comments. The article never claimed that people were "bailing" or "freeloading" because of stimulus checks. It said that they were increasing consumer spending, which is objectively true and literally the entire point of them.
This (and OP) is confusing two different things. There were individual stimulus checks, but there was also a separate boost to unemployment such that around 20% of people who ended up on unemployment were making more than they had with the job they lost.
I'm pretty sure that has stopped by now too, though.
There were plenty of posts about small businesses being unable to compete with unemployment because of this back when it was active. In past experience, this is usually what they're referring to.
Pandemic unemployment was $2400 a month plus whatever you would normally get from your state. Combined with student loan forbearance and the stimulus checks, this could add up to a lot.
It was a little bit more than that depending on circumstances. First check was $1200 per adult, $500 per kid. Second one was $600 per adult/kid. So for a family of four that's $3400+$2400 = $5800 in freebies. There's more people than you would think who see that as a pretty sizeable windfall, and start leveraging up accordingly (new car, lots of consumer goods).
>This notion of people just balling because their stimulus checks is increasingly tiresome, has always been disconnected from reality
What's mind mindbogglingly disconnected from reality not understanding that people will absolutely spend a $1k (or whatever) stimmy payment the just like they would a tax return or bonus.
That said, the stimulus bucks disbursed to individuals were absolutely not enough to matter to the macroeconomic picture. It was basically like having a year with two tax return seasons.
The PPP loans, the changes in unemployment benefits, the people using home equity to buy garbage they don't need, all had a much bigger impact.
And for some reason you don't see those same people complaining about the stock market skyrocketing and creating a much larger feeling of wealth (and actual wealth).
You hear a lot about these employees who quit and haven't been working since 2 years ago when they got $1800, but not so much about companies that are still hiring because they got millions of dollars of free money from forgiven PPP loans. Funny how that works.
It seems likely the blood and treasure squandered on those unnecessary wars held back growth by misdirecting investment money into war rather than being traditionally inflationary (as it was, say, in Viet Nam or WWII).
Now the US is spending on the order of $0 on the UKR war for an enormous IRR, and that's controversial.
Moreover those wars add to the count of people unable to work as a consequence of injuries from being sent off to war. The people in Washington don’t blink at sending the military out to fight their ideology for them.
Probably because that money wasn’t pumped directly into the US economy for the purpose of keeping the economic engine moving.
You build a bomb, you blow up the bomb, that’s money that’s just gone for good.
You give people money, along with negative interest rates so they don’t just hold on to the money, and that money spread out into the whole economy causing the price of goods to increase because of more competition for a finite amount of resources needed to produce said goods.
That being said, that 8 trillion dollars could have undoubtedly been spent in a more productive manner but that’s not the world we currently find ourselves in.
> You build a bomb, you blow up the bomb, that’s money that’s just gone for good.
The bomb is gone, the money isn't. It's still circulating, because the people working for the defense contractors who built the bomb got paid.
The money was also created by the government borrowing it (As the war was financed by deficits). In our current financial system, loans expand the money supply.
There's no significant difference in the impact on the economy between paying defense contractors money to build a bomb that you then explode, and paying them to sit around and pick their nose.
No they specifically don't say that. They say that fiscal support caused the 2.3 percentage point inflation. Fiscal support is defined by divergence in all governmental spending. The PPP program for instance is included in that, which has been widely proven to have not been used as direct employee support [0]. The PPP program was almost a trillion dollars that flowed to business owners, yet never seems to get mentioned in talk of inflation. Weird that.
The poster I was responding to used $800 billion which is the number attached to the direct EIP payment in the US that went to people on an income adjusted basis. Colloquially that is usually referred to as “stimulus checks”. In addition to that the US had a ~950 billion program for businesses, PPP. I assumed from context that the poster was describing the former.
Their link does not create a bright line, instead it commingled both programs (and any other increased governmental spending).
That's because when people refer to "stimulus checks" they're exclusively referring to the ~$1800 everyone received while actively ignoring PPP "loans".
I agree with your broader message (stimulus checks were important to a lot of people's survival and they weren't just "free money" for people to play with) but consider that the American population is huge and even a minority of stimulus check receivers could have had an influence on certain aspects of the economy if their behaviour was similar. For every person struggling (and for whom the stimulus was necessary to their survival) there's a person who was getting by just fine and thousands of dollars is a windfall that could radically change their short-term financial behaviour.
Yeah it's about 1-2 months rent for most people, at a time when many of them were laid off. That's just break-even shit. No one is flush with cash from that certainly
Maybe they put it poorly, but COVID was a huge windfall for many people. Aside from the stimulus checks (which for many people totaled more than $1800) you had people taking advantage of PPP "loans", extended and expansive unemployment benefits, eviction moratoriums, student loan forbearance, etc. I personally know people that got laid off due to COVID and made more money sitting on the couch for a year than they ever made in their day job. This glut of money takes time to cycle through the economy, and now the party is over.
the lower-middle class job loss in retail and hospitality from COVID are massive. People who depend on that kind of job, have no backup systems generally.
Hopefully most of them moved on to better sectors. All jobs that require less skill than retail and hospitality pay better and have better career opportunities.
You can lookup how much businesses received in PPP "loans." It's staggering.
This is an anecdote, but I feel like it holds true for many small businesses. I personally know a person whose business received $160k in PPP loans and after it became clear that this was not a "loan" but a "cash payout", he went out and bought two new cars and a nice new house. His business was never really at risk due to COVID, since most of his workers work solo in the field where they never have to interact with others (I used to work for him).
The whole PPP process was a shame. There was very little oversight and it's becoming clear now that it was designed up front to be a giveaway to business owners. Businesses should have been forced to pay those loans back.
As long as that person had eligible expenses to have the "loan" forgiven, it doesn't look like fraud to me. It looks like the program doesn't care that you would have spent that money on payroll anyway, so by paying part of your expenses, the money you would've spent becomes pure profit.
For reference, the documentation requirements that I see talk about demonstrating your expenses, but I don't see anything about demonstrating you actually needed that money and couldn't pay those expenses yourself. Was that a requirement?
I'm not sure you understand how PPP worked. It was a forgivable loan in exchange for keeping people on payroll. What the company did with the loaned funds was not part of the agreement, as long as they met the payroll/expense requirements.
You're correct - the legislation had fraud baked into it since it didn't have any provisions for oversight other than delegating that to a specific office (and the Sec. Treasury at the time - Trump admin appointee Steven Mnuchin - didn't do any oversight).
It was entirely a corrupt endeavor and everyone knew it. The subsequent write-offs of the loans was also predictable.
The plan was to get the money out the door as fast as possible to stem the pandemic recession, which is important for stimuluses to work right, based on history. If you add all kinds of paper-work to reduce fraud, it slows down the process.
It was a hybrid in terms of "just send out a check" and a business loan. Perhaps in the future they should just send out a check to all businesses having a threshold # of employees.
I believed the same as well but then last year when I went back to my family doctor after more than 1.5 years, I got to hear another version. My doctor belongs to a group of doctors who have 4-5 offices around San Francisco bayarea. They have been in business for 25+ years and I have been with them for 15+ years. I asked him how did they do during the covid. His response shocked me - he said they came very close to closing their practice and PPP was what saved them. Of course no one was visiting them during pandemic but even when things started opening up they had staff shortages.
I am sure similar scenario would have happened for a lot of people and at the same time some businesses would have taken undue advantage of this as well.
Similar experience on the lower end of the economic spectrum. A local restaurant I love and have frequented for years was saved by PPP. As you can imagine, their employees were among the most economically vulnerable. With PPP they were able to send their people home and keep paying them during the downtime. Without that they'd have been finished.
But as you acknowledge, I'm sure there was abuse. I'll bet there was a lot of it. Gov't needed to get the money out the door fast, and it did, at the cost of some oversight. Hopefully next time we'll do it smarter.
I'm not sure how much smarter you can get. Fighting fraud and security in general is a cat-and-mouse game with a fundamental trade-off of convenience/expeditiousness vs. preventing fraud. When you need to get large amount of money out to a nation in a very small span of time, there might just be an unavoidably high floor on the amount of fraud that will happen.
Because otherwise you get flooded with all sorts of heart-breaking stories of people who were denied money due to some bureaucratic inconvenience put in place to fight fraud.
Exactly. It was a best effort move to reduce fraud and exploitation while still providing the desired benefits. You had to wager that the loan would be forgiven and you had to be approved for the loan by an established lender.
Heart-breaking stories aside, it would have taken far more time and money to roll out a new government bureaucracy merely to duplicate a vetting service banks already provide.
You didn't make an argument. You just made an unsupported claim. You did not compare fraud rates, you did not measure costs or benefits, you did not account for the urgency of the established by the context or make any attempt to assess relative feasibility. You made no argument.
More importantly, embedded in your claim is the assumption that comparing two different states with multiple order-of-magnitude differences in size and complexity should be accepted without question. Imagine deploying a solution for a class of 32 students in two weeks. Now imagine you have to do that for an entire university community of 8,000 people including all faculty, staff, and administration. You must account for on-campus and off-campus students; part-time, full-time, and remote employees; labor-oriented staff who do never use computers at work, multiple languages, bureaucratic restrictions to account for, politicking within different departments, and so on. Here's the kicker: you still have the same two weeks you had for the classroom project.
It's an absurd comparison that should never be made without clear disclaimers, caveats and careful specificity about the point.
So is this an argument? You're not comparing any real data either, just making a hypothetical comparison. Can I do that too?
Imagine if every state issued their own digital ID that was part of a national federated system of PKE. That is, each state trusts the certificate authority in each other state, and the fed trusts the states. There's some mechanism to sign into a federal website and to transfer money to a bank account, or perhaps a mechanism involving showing up to a postal office, who knows. Compare this to dispersing funds quickly but without any verification of identity.
By doing the work up front to be able to quickly verify identities it means that the fraud prevention happens before the fact.
Do you think the $76 billion would have been better spent on digital infrastructure or written off as fraud? And what about the next time there's a need for helicopter money?
You know the DoD is fazing out CAC and there's a lot of very cheap tooling around PKE digital IDs...
Lemme share still another perspective that hasn't gotten any media time... my accountant at the time recommended we apply for EIDL instead of PPP, for various reasons. So here we sit now several years later with PPP as free money, having to start paying on our EIDL loans, all because we legit needed the money but chose the wrong option. So yeah - very, very frustrating to see the ways that so many people who clearly didn't need the money got a free government handout while those that did need the money just ended up with debt.
> The whole PPP process was a sham [...] it was designed up front to be a giveaway to business owners.
Yes. The goal was to put money into the economy to help absorb the shock caused by short-term COVID restrictions that would otherwise have caused businesses to fail permanently. The point was to allow more businesses to "weather the storm" than otherwise. You can argue about the extent to which businesses should invest in "pandemic insurance" (however you want to define that), but the government does have an interest in stability and preventing a vicious cycle leading to economic collapse.
The obvious point was to leverage the resources already available at banks to vet loan applicants and to reduce the total number of applicants in the first place. It's not perfect, but it's a reasonably good idea given the urgency. Sometimes it's reasonable to accept that some people are going to get away with cheating the system. Do the best you can and move on.
Can you imagine how much MORE it would have cost and how much more money would have gone to waste, had the government just said up-front that it was free money for businesses? How much would it have cost the government to arrange for approving applicant businesses? Was it even feasible given the desired timeline?
I can only speak for myself, but as an employee of "big tech" from 2016-2021, my own personal inflation resulted from the massive pay those companies offered. My startup was acquired in 2016. Net result of my 1% of stock was $0, but the comp package at the new company, while below average for that role, still represented a 130% pay increase. Over the next two years, stock appreciation alone added another 30% on top of that. Moving to a FAANG ended up being a lateral move, but that companies stock doubled.
The net result was that between 2016 and 2021, my compensation increased a whopping 460%. I know I'm far from alone in that as well. If anyone was ballin', it was (IMHO) far more related to the bull market than anything else.
I think it was the bull market combined with specifically a "hiring bubble" caused by aggressive, competitive hiring and acquisition practices as a risk-mitigation strategy to prevent disruptive competition
Not everyone lives on the coasts and makes SWE money.
Those stimulus checks ALONE were a TON of money for most people. For the average American just the checks were an entire extra month of net income (avg household = $71K and has two earners). Over 24 months it's $75 of additional spending per consumer per month, which when I was making $30K would have doubled my disposable income per month. Double spending. For two years.
AND stimulus checks weren't even half the of the amount that went out. AND the other half was even more disproportionately allocated to marginal consumers.
Enhanced UI, in particular, played a huge role. Combine that with stimulus checks and a lot of under the table untaxed work (done under the table to keep EUI eligibility), and people were doubling or tripling their net income for a year or more. The general asset bubble and explosion of retail investing didn't help.
It all adds up to a shitload of money in many parts of the country.
I know a good number of people in rural WV who are still living off of savings accrued during 52 or so weeks from 2021 to 2022. I'm willing to bet a much much larger number of people spent the last 2 years returning to the labor force but spending beyond their going-forward means.
> Those stimulus checks ALONE were a TON of money for most people
I don't understand how you think it's reasonable to compare "a ton", as a large amount of weight, to checks that did not cover a month of living expenses.
PPP loans were a nontrivial amount for businesses.
> a lot of under the table untaxed work (done under the table to keep EUI eligibility), and people were doubling or tripling their net income for a year or more
Which could be done before and after. Suggesting that no new conditions somehow tripled income makes no sense.
> I know a good number of people in rural WV who are still living off of savings accrued during 52 or so weeks from 2021 to 2022.
> I don't understand how you think it's reasonable to compare "a ton", as a large amount of weight, to checks that did not cover a month of living expenses.
Literally impossible.
US median individual income is $44,000, net $30K, monthly net $2.8K; stimulus checks were $3.2K. For the Average American, your assertion is mathematically impossible, which means that for a third of America your claim is outrageous.
If you're making $30K/yr, and depending on how you define "living expenses" vs "other expenses", the stimulus checks covered several months of living expenses. (eg: I now consider a car loan a "living expense" but when I made $30K the paid-off beater car was definitely a luxury expense and there were months when I left it parked and relied on a bad bus system because I couldn't afford the registration fees or an oil change.)
> PPP loans were a nontrivial amount for businesses.
Agreed. Nothing about Stimulus and EUI should detract from the massive handout that was PPP. Particularly because Stimulus and EUI at least went to people who weren't already doing very well.
> Which could be done before and after. Suggesting that no new conditions somehow tripled income makes no sense.
No. This totally misunderstands a few really important changes.
1. UI is hard to get, TEMPORARY, and not a lot of money. The additional $ and time from EUI changes the calculus pretty substantially.
2. lots of people already lost their job; picking up under-the-table work when you're already unemployed is different from making the choice to leave a job for UI and under-the-table work.
3. there was a definite social contagion effect.
4. huge parts of the economy shut down but a lot of that economic activity didn't stop. The government shutdowns created a huge black market for entertainment-related services.
>> I know a good number of people in rural WV who are still living off of savings accrued during 52 or so weeks from 2021 to 2022.
> Probably not.
EUI + continuing to work + some gambling wins = you can double your income for a year.
If you own a home and a car in good condition in rural WV, you can keep living expenses below $10K. So if you were making $50K and double that for a year, you're in a place where you can take a year or three off. Or blow a shitload of cash on Amazon or whatever.
> Those stimulus checks ALONE were a TON of money for most people
Or $0 if you're a SWE living on the coasts.
I realize we make a lot, but we pay a lot in taxes. Just send the $3,000 check to millionaires and don't worry about it. I'm getting frustrated with the government telling me I'm rich while I can't afford an upper middle class home.
> Or $0 if you're a SWE living on the coasts... I'm getting frustrated with the government telling me I'm rich while I can't afford an <strike>upper middle class</strike> home.
Its one of those cockroach ideas that is just too good of a story in some circles for it to ever die. We'll be hearing it for decades, along with the "fact" that people don't want to work due to "enhanced unemployment benefits" (which expired long ago).
Normal people didn't do stupid things with the stimulus check, but there's always a few morons who live hand-to-mouth who got them and immediately blew that money on something stupid.
> How far do you think those things went? You know, for normal people? I only ever see this comment from folks (mostly Republican politicians until now) with zero understanding of the subject
What is the answer to these questions from people who have understanding of the subject?
Without commenting on the bulk of the article, the opener is a good reminder for this audience: something like 96% of employed people are not in the high tech industry. Our personal mental context for employment is emphatically not typical.
I mainly share this observation because in my experience, us tech types (probably like all humans) have a propensity to subconsciously assume everyone experiences existence in about the same way as we do.
I know you didn't mean it this way, but my morning brain read "high tech industry" as a "high elf vs regular elf" thing and it made it sound pretty funny. I could totally see some sector of tech considering itself the "high tech industry".
Sounds good! Just one friendly piece of advice if you don't mind: do not be fooled by one's own intuition. Technomages need high charisma more than they need intelligence or wisdom.
(I wrote this joke and then realized that it's actually probably kind of true...)
That and the fact that reported "10k layoffs at tech company" doesn't mean 10k developers, sysadmins, and the like are now out of a job. It generally is a mixture of all roles at the company – many of which may not be "techy" in nature (customer service reps, etc.)
Not that anyone losing a job is ever a good thing, but I think a lot of news stories make it seem like a mass-extinction of fullstack devs, when the reality is more complex.
Now I'm distracted by the guaranteed-to-be-frustrating question of how they delineate what industry someone works in. I'm going to guess that if you do any job at a tech company, you're in the "Information" bucket. But I bet if you work at a contractor that services a company, you could suddenly be in another service bucket.
“I mainly share this observation because in my experience, us tech types (probably like all humans) have a propensity to subconsciously assume everyone experiences existence in about the same way as we do.”
I chuckled when I saw the Twitter bio for the item in the lede. Yes, reporter person, you are in an echo chamber, and it means that you're probably failing at your job (charitably assuming that Insider has higher aspirations than serving as a tech gossip rag).
>That high end did not materialize: when I covered that earnings call Amazon’s retail growth had pretty much reverted to what it was trending towards pre-pandemic; the last two quarters have been down significantly
A general theme I see is that, while a lot of businesses did accelerate digitization in various ways (much of which isn't obvious to consumers), in general, a (mostly) post-COVID world looks a lot more like a pre-COVID world than a lot of people expected. Travel's pretty much back to 2019 levels. People who weren't getting groceries delivered or picking up curbside pre-COVID, pretty much aren't today. Traffic is as bad as ever. Etc.
Is that true for WFH too? It seems to me that that's one bell that won't be completely unrung. Companies took advantage of WFH to hire outside of their metro, so even those that are forcing their employees back into the office are having trouble making it work.
In general, I think there's more flexibility in many white collar jobs than there was. But I also think tech is something of a bubble. Certainly, on the rare occasions I go into the nearest major city at rush hour, traffic seems as bad as it's ever been--though some of that may be that fewer people seem to use the commuter rail and other public transit than in the past.
I don't have any real personal visibility--and work for a tech company that has been very remote-friendly for a long time--but I can imagine that, given government salaries being generally lower than industry, it's almost forced to be remote-friendly where practical.
What I don't understand is why Thought leaders like Stratechery didn't see this coming? Did they ever write about these "4 horsemen" before these recent events?
If not, they seem to fall under the category of IYI which NNTaleb talks about.
Did you verify that he said he didn't predict this? It looks like he says he pretty much did predict most of these things in previous articles. The fourth one in particular is basically just a rehash of a previous article he wrote.
And certainly many pundits have predicted a tech recession for a long time. If anything, it's the safest thing to predict, because there will always be one coming in the future.
There was a pretty widespread belief that there was going to be a "new normal." And, while I'm not sure that's totally incorrect, it's mostly in relatively subtle ways and I'm not sure typical consumer behavior has really changed all that much.
COVID itself was not one of the horsemen, but rather governments' reaction to it. Shutdowns, mandates, school closings, etc. are what caused 95% of the problems. The vast majority the deaths and hospitalizations were older folks who were well into their retirement years. There were exceptions to this to be sure, but if you look at the data this was the case.
I don't blame the over-reaction that happened early on when the pandemic first began and people were unsure of what it really was; but it became very obvious after just a few months that young, healthy people were at minimal risk. Still, the politicians decided that it was a 'crisis that couldn't go to waste' and exploited it to the max. We are still suffering, not from COVID itself, but from the reaction to it.
No. We should have done more to protect those who were actually the most vulnerable instead of doing things like insisting that first graders wear a mask all day in class.
In case you didn't notice, the over-reaction (including shutdowns) caused the stock market to rise significantly during the first two years of the pandemic so the opposite of your comment actually happened.
>who were actually the most vulnerable instead of doing things like insisting that first graders wear a mask all day in class
Having kids wear masks in school is exactly helping part of the most vulnerable group.
You know who spreads more germs? Fucking kids. You know where large groups of people who are good at spreading germs and often times have nothing else in common outside of that place? Grade schools. A descent population of elementary school teachers are in the upper age ranges.
Grandparents (group in vulnerable range) often take kids to school/pickup and help take care of the children.
So you really need to stop and think what in the hell you are saying acting like elementary school kids should not have been wearing masks.
Swedish health officials decided throughout that the adult population isn't able to wear a mask correctly so recommended against the use. Touching it by moving it or taking it off/on will make your hands into spreaders. If adults can't do it, I'm curious how kids deal with it.
Today we have the benefit of hindsight. We have mountains of data showing that masks and other social distancing mandates did in fact significantly slow the spread of COVID-19, despite the number of idiots who wore their masks incorrectly.
We sacrificed the financial and mental health of young people for the sake of old people, many of whom turned out to be anti-vax afterwards.
Outside of institutional investors, most old people are the most invested in the markets compared to young people so they have an interest in seeing the market go up.
To boost their own political power (which includes enriching their donors), regardless of the consequences to the economy or the personal freedoms of their constituents.
You're making a great argument to throw out US culture wholesale and replace it with Swedish culture. If we just do that, it sounds like we won't need lockdowns, and all sorts of other annoying and bad things like EPOs and PPOs and metal detectors in schools and the highest incarceration rate in the world.
It's weird how the 'Sweden does it better' argument always gets meaningful traction when it comes to lockdowns, but never with healthcare, or civics, or gun culture.
Compare how they were implemented in practice[1], outside of parts of SF and LA. Nobody remotely followed the rules in the rest of the state.
Again, Sweeden didn't have a low excess death rate because they didn't do lockdowns, they had a low excess death rate because people in Sweeden acted responsibly to control the spread. Instead of harping on about lockdowns, why aren't we harping on about developing social responsibility, instead?
(The answer is obvious - it's in direct contradiction to the 'ME, ME, ME' culture we put on a pedestal here.)
[1] Even in theory, they were not meaningful. China had meaningful lockdowns, ours looked more like someone LARPing at doing a lockdown.
The per capita death rate for Covid 19 was 50% higher in Sweden than the US. That is a 4 times higher than neighbouring, comparable Denmark. It was the highest in Europe despite an advanced healthcare system, most people in Sweden living alone (you read that right) and much lower levels of chronic disease among other advantages...
The per capita death rate for Covid 19 was 50% higher in Sweden than the US. That is a 4 times higher than neighbouring, comparable Denmark. It was the highest in Europe
That article is from 2020. Today Sweden is 44th in deaths per million, behind the US, UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, etc (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/).
Yeah, because the "Swedish approach" was so obviously doing so badly Sweden abandoned it and passed new strict quarantine laws in 2021. So they started improving.
Meanwhile the US and UK couldn't be bothered to continue lockdowns, France's anti-vax issues became important as vaccines became available etc etc.
From wiki:
>On 18 December 2020, Stefan Löfven, the prime minister of Sweden, announced new and tougher restrictions and recommendations including the use of face masks in public transportation and closure of all non-essential public services.[103] In January 2021, a new pandemic law was passed that allows for the use of lockdown measures and legally limited some gatherings.[104] Further measures were introduced in July and December 2021, such as vaccine passports.
>Reception for the government's response has been mixed. An independent commission was launched to evaluate the measures taken by the government, the administrative health authorities, and regional municipalities.[105] The commission criticized the response of the government, citing among other things a failure to protect the elderly population,[105] that the Swedish response was marked by slowness, with initial measures "insufficient to stop or even substantially limit the spread of the virus in the country," and that the Swedish healthcare system would face long-term consequences due to "the price of extreme pressure on staff and of cancelled and postponed care."[106] In their final report, the commission described Sweden not introducing lockdowns as "fundamentally correct" for maintaining personal freedoms, but were critical of the decisions not to introduce "more rigorous and intrusive disease prevention and control measures" in February and March 2020.[107]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden
>We are still suffering, not from COVID itself, but from the reaction to it.
You are absolutely correct. We are suffering from the reaction of selfish people who can't even put on a god damn mask or take a vaccine to help someone else and act like children spouting out "mah freedom!" because they can't possibly imagine doing something to help others.
They are not retarded, just religious. If you think why people are not reasonable and cannot think straight. Just think it is their religion. No arguments can make them think. If they believe wearing mask can save the world, there is nothing you can do.
It is often so. But be careful of yourself. It's really easy to say "My position is self-evidently right, and the only reason they can't see it is because they're blinded by their religion", when your position is also at least partly religious, and you aren't really listening to reason either.
This is especially true with something like Covid, where there were (at least) two opposing religious views. And each side could look at the irrationality of the other side and say "See? We're right, and they're insane." They were using the irrationality of the other side as evidence to support their own (also irrational) position.
(When I say both were irrational, I do not mean that both were equally irrational. But Covid policy positions solidified mainly into two different camps, and both camps had their religious elements. And both camps used the other side's religious elements to prove to themselves their own rightness.)
My position is if you are religious to wear a mask, I am fine with that. If you are religious to not wear a mask, I am fine with that too. Just don't force any of your religion on me.
A more charitable interpretation -- and we should always favor those -- is that these people are just fine with helping others, but not with being manipulated by governments and media into doing things that aren't actually necessary and that (in the case of masks) do have a downside.
It wasn’t about who was entitled to live but to keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed and having people dying off from perfectly treatable causes.
I had to get my gallbladder removed during Covid and that wouldn’t have happened if the ER was completely overrun with old people dying. As it was they sent me home to die the first time I went in and the second time I had to argue with them to admit me because they were only taking critical cases.
Covid was spreading like wildfire anyway, whether people conformed or not. Only in China covid was contained. Government spend money on useless projects like covid hospital all the time.
I have several issues with the points made in this article
First is the Hardware cycle which the author admitted himself is a stretch. Because it is. So not sure why it is there
Second, the slower growth of AWS and Azure, how can we be sure if it's because of increased interest rates and not because of big numbers laws? AWS itself generated $21 billion in Q4 2022. How fast can you grow at that size? I am sure interest rates have some impact but it should not be the sole reason for slower growth. AWS is still growing and very profitable.
Third, claiming ATT fixed a problem that doesn't exist is not correct. Surveillance tracking without user consent is a real problem.
Last, when Jassy said advertising, did he mention mobile advertising though? Mobile advertising does not mean every type of advertising. If there is no data, how does he know ATT's impact was underestimated? Financial Times ran an article claiming that ATT's impact on FB was about $10 billion. There was no link to the research or article for that number. FB ran away with that number and made the same claim. But even if that number were true, FB still has billions of users and generates a lot of money. Plus, they already lapped the period impacted by ATT. What investors were worried about is Mark's obsession with VR and the big investments into the field. The layoff is FB's attempt to be leaner and recover investor trust. So I am not sure why ATT is even in the discussion.
> AWS itself generated $21 billion in Q4 2022. How fast can you grow at that size?
More generally there are two types of growth - market growth (new customers) and net-zero growth (taking customers from the competitor). The hyper growth generally comes from both of those being quite high, but almost by definition the net-zero growth one will eventually shrink to zero. Likewise, market growth will slow down after all the low hanging fruit for market growth are exhausted (this is generally conversion from existing older tech for efficiency gains).
> Every company that relies on performance marketing, from Snap to YouTube to Meta to Shopify has seen its revenue growth crash from the moment ATT came into force in late 2021, even as companies and products that were isolated from its effects, from Amazon to Google to Apple advertising has seen growth
"Fun" fact: (part of?) Tim Cook's incentive plan is based on the delta between Apple and the S&P 500 index.
Initial response is that most tech people, especially in the valley, live in a bubble.
But beyond that: interest rates are far and above the most responsible for the current hits. This has been the case for a long time - https://seekingalpha.com/article/4479097-the-real-reason-tha.... The other three reasons are sort of secondary to this.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadSmall/mid sized adtech (and eventually any not directly attached to a platform) can't do shit anymore. Small/mid sized customers therefore have to go to the bigger platforms (YouTube and Facebook, notably) to get anything decent.
They're paying more for less, and power is concentrating in the big adtech players further. The flip side is, security of personal data is on average significantly better. But overall privacy seems like a wash or marginally worse, to become significantly worse once monopoly abuses kick in.
Is there some waste? Sure. But certainly no worse (and likely better) than small businesses who don't have the volume who are paying for clicks without proper incrementality based measurement.
They're just a different channel.
That conversation you overheard in the elevator? That 'chance' youtube video linked to you? Some on twitter making an off hand remark? That visit to a website or a physical store with your smartphone?
All of these and more are part of paid campaigns.
I hope I'll never see it happen.
Also, I don't trust any brands. Maybe that's because I was born and live in a post-soviet country but I assume everyone wants to rip me off.
Just looking at the long-term effects, it seems like covid could be the driver for (healthcare) economy for the decade onwards
Turns out the official book name is indeed singular, and in fact I tracked this singular usage all the way back to Athanasius 39th festal letter in AD 367, listing the accepted books of the New Testament - "the Revelation of John".
"The Revelation" is also the first word of the book in greek. (Ἀποκάλυψις or apokalypsis)
So thanks for the enjoyable rabbit trail.
This notion of people just balling because their stimulus checks is increasingly tiresome, has always been disconnected from reality, needs to die. How far do you think those things went? You know, for normal people? I only ever see this comment from folks (mostly Republican politicians until now) with zero understanding of the subject. Boggling.
I kind of feel this way, but about the free money given to corporations that didn't really need it -- not individuals.
But it has.
I'm pretty sure that has stopped by now too, though.
Edit: https://www.investopedia.com/federal-pandemic-unemployment-p... - ended Sept 2021
There were plenty of posts about small businesses being unable to compete with unemployment because of this back when it was active. In past experience, this is usually what they're referring to.
What's mind mindbogglingly disconnected from reality not understanding that people will absolutely spend a $1k (or whatever) stimmy payment the just like they would a tax return or bonus.
That said, the stimulus bucks disbursed to individuals were absolutely not enough to matter to the macroeconomic picture. It was basically like having a year with two tax return seasons.
The PPP loans, the changes in unemployment benefits, the people using home equity to buy garbage they don't need, all had a much bigger impact.
The idea that pumping ~$800 billion into the economy wouldn't affect inflation and the economy in general seems unlikely.
https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
Not $800 Billion, rather $8000 Billion
What did that do to the economy/prices/inflation and why isn't that headline news every day for 20 years?
https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
It seems likely the blood and treasure squandered on those unnecessary wars held back growth by misdirecting investment money into war rather than being traditionally inflationary (as it was, say, in Viet Nam or WWII).
Now the US is spending on the order of $0 on the UKR war for an enormous IRR, and that's controversial.
You build a bomb, you blow up the bomb, that’s money that’s just gone for good.
You give people money, along with negative interest rates so they don’t just hold on to the money, and that money spread out into the whole economy causing the price of goods to increase because of more competition for a finite amount of resources needed to produce said goods.
That being said, that 8 trillion dollars could have undoubtedly been spent in a more productive manner but that’s not the world we currently find ourselves in.
The bomb is gone, the money isn't. It's still circulating, because the people working for the defense contractors who built the bomb got paid.
The money was also created by the government borrowing it (As the war was financed by deficits). In our current financial system, loans expand the money supply.
There's no significant difference in the impact on the economy between paying defense contractors money to build a bomb that you then explode, and paying them to sit around and pick their nose.
[0] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/2...
Their link does not create a bright line, instead it commingled both programs (and any other increased governmental spending).
This is an anecdote, but I feel like it holds true for many small businesses. I personally know a person whose business received $160k in PPP loans and after it became clear that this was not a "loan" but a "cash payout", he went out and bought two new cars and a nice new house. His business was never really at risk due to COVID, since most of his workers work solo in the field where they never have to interact with others (I used to work for him).
The whole PPP process was a shame. There was very little oversight and it's becoming clear now that it was designed up front to be a giveaway to business owners. Businesses should have been forced to pay those loans back.
https://sbax.sba.gov/oigcss/
For reference, the documentation requirements that I see talk about demonstrating your expenses, but I don't see anything about demonstrating you actually needed that money and couldn't pay those expenses yourself. Was that a requirement?
https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/covid-19-relief-o...
The loans should have been loans -- not payoffs. If a business took a loan and still could not pay it back, they should have declared bankruptcy.
It was entirely a corrupt endeavor and everyone knew it. The subsequent write-offs of the loans was also predictable.
The plan was to get the money out the door as fast as possible to stem the pandemic recession, which is important for stimuluses to work right, based on history. If you add all kinds of paper-work to reduce fraud, it slows down the process.
It was a hybrid in terms of "just send out a check" and a business loan. Perhaps in the future they should just send out a check to all businesses having a threshold # of employees.
There were programs aimed at individuals, though, such as ERAP for rent payment relief.
I am sure similar scenario would have happened for a lot of people and at the same time some businesses would have taken undue advantage of this as well.
But as you acknowledge, I'm sure there was abuse. I'll bet there was a lot of it. Gov't needed to get the money out the door fast, and it did, at the cost of some oversight. Hopefully next time we'll do it smarter.
I'm not sure how much smarter you can get. Fighting fraud and security in general is a cat-and-mouse game with a fundamental trade-off of convenience/expeditiousness vs. preventing fraud. When you need to get large amount of money out to a nation in a very small span of time, there might just be an unavoidably high floor on the amount of fraud that will happen.
Because otherwise you get flooded with all sorts of heart-breaking stories of people who were denied money due to some bureaucratic inconvenience put in place to fight fraud.
Heart-breaking stories aside, it would have taken far more time and money to roll out a new government bureaucracy merely to duplicate a vetting service banks already provide.
More importantly, embedded in your claim is the assumption that comparing two different states with multiple order-of-magnitude differences in size and complexity should be accepted without question. Imagine deploying a solution for a class of 32 students in two weeks. Now imagine you have to do that for an entire university community of 8,000 people including all faculty, staff, and administration. You must account for on-campus and off-campus students; part-time, full-time, and remote employees; labor-oriented staff who do never use computers at work, multiple languages, bureaucratic restrictions to account for, politicking within different departments, and so on. Here's the kicker: you still have the same two weeks you had for the classroom project.
It's an absurd comparison that should never be made without clear disclaimers, caveats and careful specificity about the point.
Imagine if every state issued their own digital ID that was part of a national federated system of PKE. That is, each state trusts the certificate authority in each other state, and the fed trusts the states. There's some mechanism to sign into a federal website and to transfer money to a bank account, or perhaps a mechanism involving showing up to a postal office, who knows. Compare this to dispersing funds quickly but without any verification of identity.
By doing the work up front to be able to quickly verify identities it means that the fraud prevention happens before the fact.
Do you think the $76 billion would have been better spent on digital infrastructure or written off as fraud? And what about the next time there's a need for helicopter money?
You know the DoD is fazing out CAC and there's a lot of very cheap tooling around PKE digital IDs...
1. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/07/trump-removes-indep...
Yes. The goal was to put money into the economy to help absorb the shock caused by short-term COVID restrictions that would otherwise have caused businesses to fail permanently. The point was to allow more businesses to "weather the storm" than otherwise. You can argue about the extent to which businesses should invest in "pandemic insurance" (however you want to define that), but the government does have an interest in stability and preventing a vicious cycle leading to economic collapse.
The obvious point was to leverage the resources already available at banks to vet loan applicants and to reduce the total number of applicants in the first place. It's not perfect, but it's a reasonably good idea given the urgency. Sometimes it's reasonable to accept that some people are going to get away with cheating the system. Do the best you can and move on.
Can you imagine how much MORE it would have cost and how much more money would have gone to waste, had the government just said up-front that it was free money for businesses? How much would it have cost the government to arrange for approving applicant businesses? Was it even feasible given the desired timeline?
The net result was that between 2016 and 2021, my compensation increased a whopping 460%. I know I'm far from alone in that as well. If anyone was ballin', it was (IMHO) far more related to the bull market than anything else.
Not everyone lives on the coasts and makes SWE money.
Those stimulus checks ALONE were a TON of money for most people. For the average American just the checks were an entire extra month of net income (avg household = $71K and has two earners). Over 24 months it's $75 of additional spending per consumer per month, which when I was making $30K would have doubled my disposable income per month. Double spending. For two years.
AND stimulus checks weren't even half the of the amount that went out. AND the other half was even more disproportionately allocated to marginal consumers.
Enhanced UI, in particular, played a huge role. Combine that with stimulus checks and a lot of under the table untaxed work (done under the table to keep EUI eligibility), and people were doubling or tripling their net income for a year or more. The general asset bubble and explosion of retail investing didn't help.
It all adds up to a shitload of money in many parts of the country.
I know a good number of people in rural WV who are still living off of savings accrued during 52 or so weeks from 2021 to 2022. I'm willing to bet a much much larger number of people spent the last 2 years returning to the labor force but spending beyond their going-forward means.
I don't understand how you think it's reasonable to compare "a ton", as a large amount of weight, to checks that did not cover a month of living expenses.
PPP loans were a nontrivial amount for businesses.
> a lot of under the table untaxed work (done under the table to keep EUI eligibility), and people were doubling or tripling their net income for a year or more
Which could be done before and after. Suggesting that no new conditions somehow tripled income makes no sense.
> I know a good number of people in rural WV who are still living off of savings accrued during 52 or so weeks from 2021 to 2022.
Probably not.
Literally impossible.
US median individual income is $44,000, net $30K, monthly net $2.8K; stimulus checks were $3.2K. For the Average American, your assertion is mathematically impossible, which means that for a third of America your claim is outrageous.
If you're making $30K/yr, and depending on how you define "living expenses" vs "other expenses", the stimulus checks covered several months of living expenses. (eg: I now consider a car loan a "living expense" but when I made $30K the paid-off beater car was definitely a luxury expense and there were months when I left it parked and relied on a bad bus system because I couldn't afford the registration fees or an oil change.)
> PPP loans were a nontrivial amount for businesses.
Agreed. Nothing about Stimulus and EUI should detract from the massive handout that was PPP. Particularly because Stimulus and EUI at least went to people who weren't already doing very well.
> Which could be done before and after. Suggesting that no new conditions somehow tripled income makes no sense.
No. This totally misunderstands a few really important changes.
1. UI is hard to get, TEMPORARY, and not a lot of money. The additional $ and time from EUI changes the calculus pretty substantially.
2. lots of people already lost their job; picking up under-the-table work when you're already unemployed is different from making the choice to leave a job for UI and under-the-table work.
3. there was a definite social contagion effect.
4. huge parts of the economy shut down but a lot of that economic activity didn't stop. The government shutdowns created a huge black market for entertainment-related services.
>> I know a good number of people in rural WV who are still living off of savings accrued during 52 or so weeks from 2021 to 2022.
> Probably not.
EUI + continuing to work + some gambling wins = you can double your income for a year.
If you own a home and a car in good condition in rural WV, you can keep living expenses below $10K. So if you were making $50K and double that for a year, you're in a place where you can take a year or three off. Or blow a shitload of cash on Amazon or whatever.
Or $0 if you're a SWE living on the coasts.
I realize we make a lot, but we pay a lot in taxes. Just send the $3,000 check to millionaires and don't worry about it. I'm getting frustrated with the government telling me I'm rich while I can't afford an upper middle class home.
I hear ya, brother :)
What is the answer to these questions from people who have understanding of the subject?
I mainly share this observation because in my experience, us tech types (probably like all humans) have a propensity to subconsciously assume everyone experiences existence in about the same way as we do.
I know you didn't mean it this way, but my morning brain read "high tech industry" as a "high elf vs regular elf" thing and it made it sound pretty funny. I could totally see some sector of tech considering itself the "high tech industry".
I mean... a good chunk of Silicon Valley does live in a fantasy world. ;)
(I wrote this joke and then realized that it's actually probably kind of true...)
Not that anyone losing a job is ever a good thing, but I think a lot of news stories make it seem like a mass-extinction of fullstack devs, when the reality is more complex.
Smartest sentence I’ve read on this site.
A general theme I see is that, while a lot of businesses did accelerate digitization in various ways (much of which isn't obvious to consumers), in general, a (mostly) post-COVID world looks a lot more like a pre-COVID world than a lot of people expected. Travel's pretty much back to 2019 levels. People who weren't getting groceries delivered or picking up curbside pre-COVID, pretty much aren't today. Traffic is as bad as ever. Etc.
If not, they seem to fall under the category of IYI which NNTaleb talks about.
And certainly many pundits have predicted a tech recession for a long time. If anything, it's the safest thing to predict, because there will always be one coming in the future.
NNTaleb: Naseem Nicholas Taleb
I don't blame the over-reaction that happened early on when the pandemic first began and people were unsure of what it really was; but it became very obvious after just a few months that young, healthy people were at minimal risk. Still, the politicians decided that it was a 'crisis that couldn't go to waste' and exploited it to the max. We are still suffering, not from COVID itself, but from the reaction to it.
In case you didn't notice, the over-reaction (including shutdowns) caused the stock market to rise significantly during the first two years of the pandemic so the opposite of your comment actually happened.
Having kids wear masks in school is exactly helping part of the most vulnerable group.
You know who spreads more germs? Fucking kids. You know where large groups of people who are good at spreading germs and often times have nothing else in common outside of that place? Grade schools. A descent population of elementary school teachers are in the upper age ranges.
Grandparents (group in vulnerable range) often take kids to school/pickup and help take care of the children.
So you really need to stop and think what in the hell you are saying acting like elementary school kids should not have been wearing masks.
Outside of institutional investors, most old people are the most invested in the markets compared to young people so they have an interest in seeing the market go up.
To do what? Crash their local economies?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
It's weird how the 'Sweden does it better' argument always gets meaningful traction when it comes to lockdowns, but never with healthcare, or civics, or gun culture.
Again, Sweeden didn't have a low excess death rate because they didn't do lockdowns, they had a low excess death rate because people in Sweeden acted responsibly to control the spread. Instead of harping on about lockdowns, why aren't we harping on about developing social responsibility, instead?
(The answer is obvious - it's in direct contradiction to the 'ME, ME, ME' culture we put on a pedestal here.)
[1] Even in theory, they were not meaningful. China had meaningful lockdowns, ours looked more like someone LARPing at doing a lockdown.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/heres-what-happened-i...
That article is from 2020. Today Sweden is 44th in deaths per million, behind the US, UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, etc (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/).
Meanwhile the US and UK couldn't be bothered to continue lockdowns, France's anti-vax issues became important as vaccines became available etc etc.
From wiki:
>On 18 December 2020, Stefan Löfven, the prime minister of Sweden, announced new and tougher restrictions and recommendations including the use of face masks in public transportation and closure of all non-essential public services.[103] In January 2021, a new pandemic law was passed that allows for the use of lockdown measures and legally limited some gatherings.[104] Further measures were introduced in July and December 2021, such as vaccine passports.
>Reception for the government's response has been mixed. An independent commission was launched to evaluate the measures taken by the government, the administrative health authorities, and regional municipalities.[105] The commission criticized the response of the government, citing among other things a failure to protect the elderly population,[105] that the Swedish response was marked by slowness, with initial measures "insufficient to stop or even substantially limit the spread of the virus in the country," and that the Swedish healthcare system would face long-term consequences due to "the price of extreme pressure on staff and of cancelled and postponed care."[106] In their final report, the commission described Sweden not introducing lockdowns as "fundamentally correct" for maintaining personal freedoms, but were critical of the decisions not to introduce "more rigorous and intrusive disease prevention and control measures" in February and March 2020.[107] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden
You are absolutely correct. We are suffering from the reaction of selfish people who can't even put on a god damn mask or take a vaccine to help someone else and act like children spouting out "mah freedom!" because they can't possibly imagine doing something to help others.
This is especially true with something like Covid, where there were (at least) two opposing religious views. And each side could look at the irrationality of the other side and say "See? We're right, and they're insane." They were using the irrationality of the other side as evidence to support their own (also irrational) position.
(When I say both were irrational, I do not mean that both were equally irrational. But Covid policy positions solidified mainly into two different camps, and both camps had their religious elements. And both camps used the other side's religious elements to prove to themselves their own rightness.)
Selfish prick.
It wasn’t about who was entitled to live but to keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed and having people dying off from perfectly treatable causes.
I had to get my gallbladder removed during Covid and that wouldn’t have happened if the ER was completely overrun with old people dying. As it was they sent me home to die the first time I went in and the second time I had to argue with them to admit me because they were only taking critical cases.
The very fact they made special hospitals is telling in itself…
First is the Hardware cycle which the author admitted himself is a stretch. Because it is. So not sure why it is there
Second, the slower growth of AWS and Azure, how can we be sure if it's because of increased interest rates and not because of big numbers laws? AWS itself generated $21 billion in Q4 2022. How fast can you grow at that size? I am sure interest rates have some impact but it should not be the sole reason for slower growth. AWS is still growing and very profitable.
Third, claiming ATT fixed a problem that doesn't exist is not correct. Surveillance tracking without user consent is a real problem.
Last, when Jassy said advertising, did he mention mobile advertising though? Mobile advertising does not mean every type of advertising. If there is no data, how does he know ATT's impact was underestimated? Financial Times ran an article claiming that ATT's impact on FB was about $10 billion. There was no link to the research or article for that number. FB ran away with that number and made the same claim. But even if that number were true, FB still has billions of users and generates a lot of money. Plus, they already lapped the period impacted by ATT. What investors were worried about is Mark's obsession with VR and the big investments into the field. The layoff is FB's attempt to be leaner and recover investor trust. So I am not sure why ATT is even in the discussion.
Feels like some of these points are forced...
More generally there are two types of growth - market growth (new customers) and net-zero growth (taking customers from the competitor). The hyper growth generally comes from both of those being quite high, but almost by definition the net-zero growth one will eventually shrink to zero. Likewise, market growth will slow down after all the low hanging fruit for market growth are exhausted (this is generally conversion from existing older tech for efficiency gains).
Jassy himself has said numerous times in public that less than 5% of all IT spend is on any cloud provider.
He also mentioned that Dell has a much higher revenue than AWS. In the grand scheme of things, AWS’s revenue is not that large.
Disclaimer: Jassy is my (skip * 7 manager). I work at AWS.
Who is harmed?
"Fun" fact: (part of?) Tim Cook's incentive plan is based on the delta between Apple and the S&P 500 index.
But beyond that: interest rates are far and above the most responsible for the current hits. This has been the case for a long time - https://seekingalpha.com/article/4479097-the-real-reason-tha.... The other three reasons are sort of secondary to this.
But if you are an expert, you notice that Ben is often very wrong in his analysis. Makes you question your trust in the rest of this views.