InefficientRed

I think the basic model will eventually work out, though. The bandwidth is there. The compute has to be cheap enough that the biz model works by just taking the retailer's cut of the title sale + maybe a tad more. The tad more can come from one-time hardware sales and maybe better negotiated cuts of the sale from the studios. I would never ever have purchased a copy of any AAA title without Stadia and similar services. I think the same is true for almost all Stadia purchases.

But Google's failure here makes sense. It's a low margin game. google sucks at low margin games.

Same.

I had a month off between jobs and used a week of my evenings off to play through red dead.

I don't particularly care about losing the license, because I just wanted to play the game through. Haven't touched it since then.

Stadia's ideal market wasn't "real gamers" -- those folks will buy rigs. Their ideal market was people like you and me, who don't have the time or interest to justify purchasing a gaming machine but still want to play through a AAA title or two every once in a while.

How is this anti-intellectual?

If you want, I can formalize as a game the problem of choosing business/product strategy in a competitive market with a continuous flow of imperfect information. I can then use ideas from controls to establish some upper bounds on what can be inferred from a continuous flow of information. I can then use that result to prove an impossibility result about the game. I can even tweak assumptions to get bounds on probability distributions which infer we'd be better off flipping a coin or whatever.

I'm not going to do the work, because intuition is almost always enough to identify these situations, but it's absolutely clear to me that results like this obviously exist and correspond to many real-world situations.

> Good judgement requires data.

It used to be that insisting on data-driven decision making was a hard pull. Now it's the opposite. Insisting on data where data cannot possibly provide enough signal to make a decision is the new form of anti-intellectualism. IMO.

Having everything USB-C just makes travel so much easier.

The labor movement always had a socially reactionary underbelly. My hypothesis: it wasn't bad economic times that activated Obama-Trump voters. It was, rather, good economic times that triggered those voters to flip from labor-first to identity-first. The tension was always there. This is why the Tea Party fizzled and why Romney couldn't activate the switch -- reactionary blue collar folks knew intuitively that those movements weren't "on their side". But by 2016 a bombastic billionaire (also obviously not on their side) could be excused because the economy was good enough to at last put identity first.

I grew up in a suburb that flipped and my wife is from a mid-sized non-metro city that also flipped. Obama Trump voters are substantially all of our social circle.

A lot happened, but honestly, "youtube's algorithm and super effective conservative media" is probably the best explanation in over 1/2 of the roughly 3 dozen anecdotal cases. It's just pure identity.

Some blame Obama for outsourcing and the GFC, but that's mostly noise. First of all, the major factory that closed wasn't outsourced. It closed because the company was wildly mismanaged, and was not replaced with a foreign factory. Also, this happened five years before the GFC and Obama's election. Most of the folks in our circles remained employed throughout that GFC and all of them did very well from 2010 on-wards.

They're currently all doing very well financially; far better than the late 20s/early 30s city dwellers whose conversations I overhear in the coffee shop. Red America can afford single family homes with big yards, saves for retirement, and just generally lives a very comfortable life unimaginable in blue cities. With jobs in law enforcement, trucking, and in hospitals which don't require even an associate's degree. It's really the American dream -- graduate from high school, six weeks of training, and you're making enough to afford a house and kids and retirement within a couple years.

The resentment and utter hatred of liberals is visceral and real. Pretending it's economic is bullshit cover. Tell someone sharing a bedroom in NYC that their counterpart with less education, who works fewer hours, and lives in a SFH with a pool hates them because of the unfair economic spoils of the former.

Also, the economy was doing extremely well in 2016. Economics is now top-of-mind, but it didn't even come close to motivating them to vote for Trump in 2016. That was pure identity politics.

No. Restaurants will continue to exist. Sit down in particular. In cases where you are paying for an experience; the economics will get worse, but they will continue to exist.

Fast food restaurants will even continue to exist. But the latter only with substantial automation. This has already happened at the front of the house -- kiosks and apps are the "happy path" ordering interfaces at every McD's in a major city. I'm merely projecting that the most cost-sensitive segment of the food services industry will push that automation into the kitchen, the checkout line, and a lot of the administrative work that happens at branches.

Suburb of top-tier cities? No. Cheapest suburb of a midwestern city? Absolutely.

Again, not saying it's reasonable. Just that it's possible.

For all the doom and gloom in the USA, it's still an incredibly rich country.

To be clear: I'm not making a moral statement here. This is a statement of fact, not a statement of ethical preference.

McDonalds et al. probably should've been investing a lot more in automating their kitchens. The fact that a huge percent of locations -- and all drive-thrus -- still use humans for the ordering process is, similarly, inexcusable.

Unless the US massively increases its low-skilled immigration quotes, robotics firms will be the FAANG equivalents of the 2020s-2030s.

Or retailers in general. Retail spending is down because services spending is up -- people are going to the beach and buying plane tickets instead of buying TVs and patio furniture.

Regardless of whether we're in a recession, retailer numbers aren't a good indicator for the duration/depth/type. We spent all of 2020 hearing that demand was pulled forward. Well, it was pulled forward from somewhere, and now we are there.

> What's going on with other retailers?

Best Buy missed by a lot; sales down by over 10%; forecast was a 1% contraction.

Amazon tonight. Always complicated because of AWS, digital content, and now a substantial advertising business. If you want the retail details you have to go past the headline numbers.

Target in mid-August but expectations are similar.

My guess is that none of those companies will be hit has bad as Walmart because (1) Walmart was just particularly badly mismanaged, and (2) these other companies are just different in kind (particularly Amazon -- they could eg suffer retail losses while beating estimates on Advertising/Cloud)

I think Walmart's story in particular is one of stupidly bad demand forecasting.