puranjay

Not too hot about Meta. TikTok has been eating their lunch and they can't seem to catch up.

upper middle-class tech workers live in their own bubble.

The yield curve says otherwise.

You won't feel it until Q4 2022 or Q1 2023.

and Crypto.com laid off 5% of its workforce just yesterday

Case in point: OpenSea's monthly volume: https://dune.com/rchen8/opensea

There's no hiding on the blockchain. Monthly volume has gone down from a peak of nearly $5B in January to $372M in June so far.

As a freelancer/consultant, I find LinkedIn to be severely lacking. The focus on job titles and roles means that people like me don't get to showcase our skills and capabilities.

Imo, it feels like a solution for the world a decade ago than the world a decade from now. Would love something that focuses more on skills, projects, and capabilities than job titles.

> There will be another market cycle.

While I wouldn't bet against it, there is a high likelihood that BTC was a product of the same funny money it was meant to counter. Whether it can sustain its value in the absence of massive QE remains to be seen,

They're done. Even if they're not insolvent, the moment they enable withdrawals, everyone will cash out.

There's no new money entering this space anyway. Without customer deposits, they're toast as a business.

Honestly, no way to tell at this point. Low interest rate and QE enabled all sorts of funny money shenanigans. Like startups raising billions with no real revenue and wildly unprofitable unit economics. Crypto benefited greatlyfrom this low interest regime too. If you had to borrow money at 8% interest, you wouldn't be as callous with it.

Crypto has only existed in this funny money monetary environment. Good chance it all collapses if interest rates are too high by the time of the next BTC halvening (iirc around mid 2024) and there aren't enough bids to perpetuate the "next cycle will be bigger than the last" pattern.

But at the same time, its also true that the awful central bank management that prompted the creation of BTC is also at its peak awfulness right now.

So really, wait and watch.

had the same problem on Safari iOS. Worked only after I accepted the cookie consent form.

A future refund scenario might be asking for David Attenborough's voice and getting Glibert Gottfried's instead.

Wont the reserves seizure they pulled off with Russia also contribute to this trust deficit?

Isn’t this a self-created problem? They had no real excuse to carry on QE past 2010 when the economy had started recovering.

most of the dividends are in the native token (or the blockchain token) which, unless the price remains stable or up, constantly reduces in value

A great example is OpenSea. Their trading volume crashed at the same time ETH prices crashed. A sale of 100 ETH in January earned them $7,500 (@$3k ETH).

The same sale now will earn them $3,000 (@$1.2k ETH).

USDD is next, but Justin has a habit of degening his way out of trouble. Wouldn’t bet completely against him

In low confidence systems, 0.99 can cause a bank run and eventual death spiral.

They bought the top of a bunch of (unprofitable) Indian tech startups as well.

Reminder that the second largest pension fund in Canada invested in Celsius at a 4B valuation.

There really needs to be more oversight on what these funds invest in.

Service and shelter inflation tend to be sticky. You don’t renegotiate your lease or your salary every month.

Inflation is now moving increasingly towards these two categories, which indicates that it could be around much longer even if supply chain issues get resolved.

Uber has raised $33B to date and made $0 in operational profits.

You have to ask if that money might have better served humanity if it was spent on fusion research instead of subsidizing cheap taxis.

Still not convinced any measure can change the direction unless capitalism and the experiences and lifestyles it enables are killed completely.

No amount of incentives have managed to push fertility rate above replacement level in any country as far as I can remember.

The data from countries like India also shows that as soon as any region experiences even moderate prosperity, birth rates drop like a rock. Heck, India’s fertility rate is now below replacement level and it happened waaay ahead of schedule.

Zeihan has the same thesis, plus insurmountable geographical challenges.

Really hard to root for a country that now has a population rhomboid instead of a population pyramid. Soon to turn into an inverse pyramid aka a reverse ponzi where the old work to keep the few young alive.

The one thing common across all low growth countries is bad demographics.

Doesn’t matter whether you’re Japan or Portugal - demographics seems to doom any notion of “growth”.

amid all of this, people have completely forgotten about the South African brothers who ran away with $3.6B of investor funds from their now-defunct exchange [0].

I'm done with crypto. Scamming is so easy that its almost incentivized.

0: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/11/south-african-p...

I wonder how many comments on HN right now were generated by GPT-3

Will we even know by the time we get to GPT-4?

no way to be objective at all. Its just a "gut feel" and they are usually wrong.

I'm 34 and feel the same way. You can feel the zeitgeist change every 8-10 years. Its like the world has a collective consciousness (even though I largely think that's just based on the media you consume.)

Yes, some castes and religions don't eat onions.

Mind boggling to me that you could get a 500k mortgage at 3% interest rate in the US.

Our country’s finance minister was asked about the high price of onions - a key staple in the Indian diet - and she quipped that she doesn’t care because she doesn’t eat onions.

Our rulers are cruel, intentionally so.