What people miss from these things is that there is economic value being created.
For example, if you gift someone a $100 Amazon gift card, but they also gift you a $100 Amazon gift card. Has any gift actually been exchanged? Yes, the sentiment of giving.
Or if someone pays you $100 to eat a pile of shit, and then you use the same $100 to pay them to eat a pile of shit, you both have eaten, but the money is in the same place it started.
In the end, if you paint a big enough picture, all money flow in an economy is circular anyway.
well the point is value is not being created. the stock market is at an ATH, by all metrics productibity has increased, but ask anyone on the ground- the mood is not as optimisitic as the financial instruments say
What I wonder is what LARP stands for. something like “looped/linked annual revenue platform”? (Don’t answer with something about role playing, it’s definitely not that)
It is definitely the life-action role playing definition. As in you’re LARPing a successful company with high cash flow. I know it has nothing to do with actual role playing, it’s just the popular way of calling someone a poser on the internet at the moment.
it does still stand for Live Action Role Plating, but the meaning of the acronym on the internet has been expanded over the past few months to mean anything like "pretending" or "lying".
I took quite a few accounting courses in University. For every topic we covered, our business school ensured that we wrapped up by examining a case of fraud involving that mechanism. I am grateful that now I know what not to do, and that professional accountants are well versed in all the lates types of fraud so that they can stay away from it.
Yeah but like, most of us work in tech and sure a lot of this money is getting “wasted,” but on what and who? Often on people who spend it elsewhere, a little bit gets siphoned off every time for living costs, luxuries, and side projects of individual employees, or other benefactors thereof. I wouldn’t call this excess a “bad” thing, the excess is what allows us any reprieve in the rat race, time to spend with loved ones, time to engage or worthy pursuits. It funds professor’s salaries (and administrator’s!), its what pays artists, its why all these engineers retire early and make posts about porting Doom to a microwave. Of course it would often be better if this excess was taken elsewhere, so that we wouldn’t have people dying needlessley just because they lost out in life, but even that wouldn’t require a fraction of the wealth of our society generates on top of its basic needs. Excess is not a bad thing!
The excess money goes into assets that people need to survive/thrive. In SF/Bay Area a lot of it goes into land appreciation (housing prices). The end effect is rampant homelessness (did you know a full 1% of SF is homeless), delayed family formation, and an ever-growing state bill to subsidize landowners.
Excess isn't a problem, it's the distribution of the excess. Right now (in America) pretty much all of it goes to the top couple percent. The bottom ~40% of Americans have, by all practical measures, experienced a reduction in standard of living compared to 1980. Like, yes, they can afford more trivialities. TVs are cheap, particle-board furniture is cheap, and so on. But the actually important things like healthcare, education, and housing have moved further out of reach.
So yes, it's nice that my Anthropic friends can retire to work on, in one case, their fantasy novels. I'm very happy they can focus on something they love (and I look forward to reading their books). However, that much capital concentration leads to a hefty chunk of our (really rather rich) country struggling to service basic needs (like having a roof).
Do people actually believe that the revenue for these companies is "fake"? Do they think financial analysts don't have anything but revenue to look at to determine the substance of their growth?
That's the neat part: the money doesn't have to exist at all.
And once you go through enough hops and convince the world that this thing which your company happens to be pioneering will forever change the world and everyone will use it the money circle isn't even relevant because the entire goal was to make your stock prices skyrocket and now you're valued at ridiculous levels!
Just make sure to get out of it all before any Investor actually wants to see real profit being made.
This reminds me a lot of good old Bonneville Pacific Corps model for getting rich, which worked for years and did make them rich until they tried to merge with one of those naturally suspicious and rule following German firms
45 comments
[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadFor example, if you gift someone a $100 Amazon gift card, but they also gift you a $100 Amazon gift card. Has any gift actually been exchanged? Yes, the sentiment of giving.
Or if someone pays you $100 to eat a pile of shit, and then you use the same $100 to pay them to eat a pile of shit, you both have eaten, but the money is in the same place it started.
In the end, if you paint a big enough picture, all money flow in an economy is circular anyway.
Very well done.
Small companies buying and selling each other's services is probably the #1 thing that other ecosystems should emulate.
Getting your first 3 customer is hard, you need an open and empathetic system for that - a 'cohort' is exactly that.
I have a new business idea …
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48869910
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48852458
The joke is getting tired.
I guess that's the joke.
Heavies have been playing this "pretend internet money" game off and on for decades. In investment analysis, details matter.
Excess isn't a problem, it's the distribution of the excess. Right now (in America) pretty much all of it goes to the top couple percent. The bottom ~40% of Americans have, by all practical measures, experienced a reduction in standard of living compared to 1980. Like, yes, they can afford more trivialities. TVs are cheap, particle-board furniture is cheap, and so on. But the actually important things like healthcare, education, and housing have moved further out of reach.
So yes, it's nice that my Anthropic friends can retire to work on, in one case, their fantasy novels. I'm very happy they can focus on something they love (and I look forward to reading their books). However, that much capital concentration leads to a hefty chunk of our (really rather rich) country struggling to service basic needs (like having a roof).
> Before LARP, growth was constrained by whether customers actually paid us. That's no longer a bottleneck we think about
And once you go through enough hops and convince the world that this thing which your company happens to be pioneering will forever change the world and everyone will use it the money circle isn't even relevant because the entire goal was to make your stock prices skyrocket and now you're valued at ridiculous levels!
Just make sure to get out of it all before any Investor actually wants to see real profit being made.
https://www.utb.uscourts.gov/sites/utb/files/case_opinion/38...