samsonradu

I'm almost sure it won't work. Everything you mentioned is true but there's one even more important thing. There are plenty of people who literally don't care or dislike their jobs and would take every opportunity to work as little as possible. While this might work for Google & co. where employees are relatively happy and passionate about their work, it would fail spectacularly in other environments.

Also I don't think management can be fully blamed for dismissing remote work as it would represent a considerable cost-cutting opportunity. It's likely not worth it as the overall productivity would drop too much.

Well that’s the thing, the economy seems to fall out of balance too often. It’s either WeWork times or decimating-the-system times. Don’t we need the middle ground more, where the good companies can stand out?

Is this a political or a central-bank policy issue?

This 100 times. There’s a big fallacy in tech circles in which everyone takes their work so seriously that they’ll be working from home just as effective as they’d have from the office.

In reality though things are quite different. Having seen it first hand I can say that there are many employees I’d rather have in the office.

I’m willing to bet on a productivity drop caused by the work-from-home policies that are happening now.

And even if they do have money, the uncertainty around makes people more cautious when spending, limiting unnecessary consumption.

Not sure why you were downvoted, considering the past central bank actions and current debt/deficit levels.

Not everything depreciates over time, does it? Looking at housing in many hot markets or at collectible watches fe.

I think people would prefer to know about it and be in charge of the decision.

Unlike a car, a phone doesn’t pose a threat to my safety so I’d like to at least turn the throttling on/off according to my needs - given that Apple provides accurate information about the implications.

In retrospect throttling might look like a good idea, but back then it was outright bizarre.

Some people were already suspecting that older models don’t get along with newer software, but there was no certainty.

I remember I avoided some iOS updates without being sure it’s helping my phone - all until Whatsapp (or some other critical app) stopped working and I had to upgrade.

Like an union, it has been brought up in tech from time to time.

https://mobile.twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1172279395035...

Japanese deflation is brought up a lot. However it didn’t really strike me as a troubled economy when visiting - on the contrary, things looked quite well.

Can someone elaborate on why deflation is so bad?

You’re right, negative real returns definitely happen - but that’s not the interest rate. Interest rates apply to loans, not assets.

Unintuitively, informal speaking often skips the ne but the pas is mandatory.

Je mange pas ça - I don’t eat this.

Also the second part can add nuance to the negation, fe.

Je ne mange plus ça - I don’t eat this anymore.

*Not a native speaker so there’s definitely more to it than I know.

Can you elaborate a little on this? Investments having a negative return does not mean the market (reference) interest rate is negative.

Take the gold standard, do you think anyone was able to borrow gold and pay less back? Isn’t that the actual interest rate we are discussing here?

Liquidity has been anything but withheld in the western world. Look at the G4 balance sheets and interest rates in the past decade.

Globalization kept inflation at bay. Instead of upping prices due to increased production costs, enterprises in advanced economies moved production to China & co.

This is not necessarily a bad thing of course, as China catches up and the ‘free’ markets work efficiently. Meanwhile the middle-class in the developped countries gets hurt, thus their economies see little inflation.

Another argument for this would be that everything not outsource-able saw rather higher inflation than the CPI numbers. (Housing, education etc.)

Inflation in China though hovers around 5% - https://tradingeconomics.com/china/inflation-cpi

2%? They're issuing ~0% bonds in most of the Eurozone.

I also believe there can't really be a crash when interest rates are very low/at 0%, since the time value of money literally becomes null and debt can forever be pushed further. BUT since there is already existing debt to service - issued at higher interest rates - the debt size has to increase.

Then it works as a trap as the interest rates cannot easily go up without heavy defaults - because there is a lot of debt to service. Also, somehow low interest rates correlate with low GDP growth - max capacity, no room for growth left?

Disclaimer - not an economist, perhaps someone can debunk my theory and explain what I'm getting wrong.

I've also seen the movie and didn't take away the message that "CDOs are evil", but rather that the risk was not accurately reflected in the ratings.

The reasons for that are debatable of course, ranging from bankers greed to rating agencies misbehavior and so on.

I’m hoping for a less drastic resolution, like people voting left-wing parties whom will more or less cap rents/increase capital/estate taxes to even things out a bit. Would you not see this possible?

Without knowing the op’s condition (so take this with a grain of salt), I’d advise against running 5km each & every day as it could wear out your knees, specially running on harder terrain (as most do).

For amateur practitioners it’s good to alternate different activities so that certain muscles get to recover.

You’ve never met a doctor in his/her prime? Doctors are extremely overworked in their late 20s.

Highly recommended, Matt Levine's take on it: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/blackr...

A luxury product company becoming a safe haven pretty much speaks for itself on how distorted things are.

Sure, but you’re kind of cherry-picking, as it was $300+ in January. Tesla has always been more volatile than peer tech stocks, having crashed about 40% before this surge.

Just to provide some context, most indexes and large tech companies are at an all-time-high. It’s not just Tesla ‘doing great’.

Could also be due to the fact that Amazon might become a competitor in the future. Take the banking/finance sector, it might not expect competition from Microsoft, while Amazon could decide to enter the market, having a much more 'entrepreneurial' spirit.

There is another thread from yesterday, somewhat related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964946

Yeah, flying private is terrible.

I use Github gists. Comes along with markdown and revisions and feels good enough for tasks and notes.

While I’m supportive of working remotely, I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of making physical location irrelevant.

If/when we get there it will also imply abstracting away the physical interaction between people. This might have unwanted social implications, read people losing many important social skills.

> You can still buy a house

Read `take a 30y mortgage` with plenty of downside risk is quite a low bar for one of the best paying industries in the world.

The disconnect between salaries and the housing market in western EU is pretty much at an all-time high. If these are the expectations for tech salaries then how about the rest of the (middle-class) workforce?

I find it a bit funny that both comments say ‘invest’. Can we use that word to describe what actually looked like spending?