xocyabencl

This is no different than saying that the street sweepers were left behind by street sweeping machines. Or that accountants got left behind by the invention of accounting software. This is what technology is all about. It's not zero-sum, because there's other work in the world waiting to be done to make people's lives better.

You may have have a bad work environment where you feel like the only goal of your work is to one-up your co-workers. But your boss is not paying you and your co-workers to compete for sport. The reason you are getting a paycheck is because you are giving someone something they value. That person would be happier if they could get it for less money by putting you out of the job. But if that happens, that doesn't mean you should be unemployed - it means you could be helping society in a different way. In a well-functioning labor market, every worker will be more prosperous if they all produce more.

More productivity allows the work to get done with fewer workers, which is generally a good thing in normal economic conditions.

Without wading into the larger debate, is it possible that low stable interest rates are expected in a successful society?

In a chaotic world where the government and property rights might not exist in five years, the time-value of money is high, because the enjoyment of that money in the future is uncertain. A house might only be worth five times the annual rent, because some warlord could steal it in five years. And a bond might pay 20% for similar reasons.

The interest rate, cap rate, or P/E ratio I'm willing to tolerate for an asset is closely related to my level of confidence in future economic stability (combined with my willingness to wait a long time to recoup my investment).

What if a low natural rate of interest is just a sign of a more advanced economy where people are thinking long-term? This lines up, I think, with the fact that super low yield bonds and 100 year mortgages are common in Europe.

Why should the owners of capital automatically double their money in just ten years? Maybe we have enough capital to go around already. It seems like the owners of capital are willing to invest with much lower returns these days because there is nothing else to do.

I'm just musing about what it means. I've considered buying a house to live in with a price-to-rent ratio of 25 years. This is a lot higher than the US average, but maybe that's not a bad thing? Even if the value stops increasing, I'm patient, and I have nothing better to do with the money other than rent a nicer place. This is a mix of FOMO (if I don't buy now, I won't be able to afford later) and anti-FOMO (if the price goes down in a correction, I could buy an even nicer house, but this one is nice enough already).

You could cut more people's hair by getting it done faster, or do a better job cutting each person's hair. The point is that jobs where productivity improvement is possible are very common. Economically, productivity and technology are equivalent, and are the basis for prosperity. Productivity is not, in general, zero-sum.

I don't think any of the jobs I listed are retail. I went out of my way to include a variety of industries, including knowledge work. "Demonstrating value to your boss" could include zero-sum bullshit or actual production. As a programmer, I've done both kinds of work.

While many industries have an element of zero-sum competition, that's not the default. Whether you're designing a car, doing a surgery, giving a haircut, cooking a hamburger, etc. you are giving something of value to your customers.

Sports is a zero-sum game. Productive labor is not. The mathematician Paul Erdos used amphetamines to make many major breakthroughs. This was a great benefit for society, regardless of whether he perhaps took a professorship that some less productive mathematician would otherwise have obtained.

I've used Eaze. You pick an item from a menu in the website or app (although the Android app doesn't work for me), then someone drives up 20 minutes later and hands the item over. In my case I've gone outside to the driver's passenger window, they didn't come to my door. Think Uber, except the driver takes longer to arrive and gives you weed.

It's like any other delivery service, but I suspect the economics work better than food delivery because users make larger orders, you don't need to pick up from restaurants, and freshness is not as important (comparing to a central kitchen for food delivery).

How can a bunch of no fee transaction attempts cause a $20 market price? It seems like the block would need to be full of transactions with high fees.

Having the stock after IPO trade at the old preferred price represents a significant increase of the actual value of the company, even though it's not usually reported as such.

Agreed that the press does go around using this $70B number as a valuation. If the company IPO'd at less than $70B it would similarly be reported as a dud. Recruiters also use the $70B when offering stock options. And I'm sure it feels like a haircut to those employees who just sold their stock at a $49B valuation.

Common stock is worth less than preferred. Most stock is not preferred. Therefore there was never $70B worth of Uber stock in existence.

If the valuation didn't change, and the common stock is fairly priced, then we should stop calling the valuation $70B. Under that model, Uber was never worth $70B.