Found out recently (well, bay area rumour mill via former employees, but I trust the source) that they used to orchestrate DDOS attacks on lyft and other competitors. Which is more of an asshole cherry on a shit sundae than anything truly shocking, but has also got to be a prosecutorial crime, if anyone can dig up evidence.
There's a common story that during one of the big early NYC surges (I wanna say for a sports event or something) the Uber CEO was sitting in a hotel room ordering and cancelling lyft rides on multiple phones at once just to clog up their queue.
The helicopter density over my apartment is extremely high this morning, which always happens on days where the national political situation is spicy (I live near downtown Oakland).
But I haven't gone out to check if it's news crews or law enforcement sweeps.
Found out recently (well, bay area rumour mill via former employees, but I trust the source) that they used to orchestrate DDOS attacks on lyft and other competitors. Which is more of an asshole cherry on a shit sundae than anything truly shocking, but has also got to be a prosecutorial crime, if anyone can dig up evidence.
I mean, remember Greyball? How Uber would (and still does) illegally start operating in places without permission and would then use data collection to identify the devices of officials and authorities and silently blackball those from being able to hail vehicles in order to avoid crackdowns?
Oh I completely believe it, denial of service attacks are extremely mild compared to their usual shenanigans. Most of their acknowledged business plan exists somewhere between 'grey zone' and 'outright illegal'. I just don't wanna report a rumour I heard as if it's confirmed fact.
The thing I still don't get about Uber was that we've all been predicting their demise for a while now once their investment capital dries up.
Uh... when is the capital drying up?
(I know, I know, the VC's investing in Uber have more money than I could ever imagine and keeping Uber afloat is probably only 0.01% of their net worth.)
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
For big enough corporations, even quite hefty VC investment is basically gambling money. And a lot of it isn't exactly sanity driven anyway. I expect the funding pool for Uber will only fully dry up when it becomes so utterly redundant that they can't even pretend to industry analysts that they're doing new cool stuff, or the CEO clears out the accounts and absconds to the Bahamas.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Yeah basically Uber's business model is exploit drivers as hard as you can, and then get rid of them
Uber's business model started looking shaky when Silicon Valley collectively realized that creating an artificial intelligence was going to be hard.
on one hand i'm all for nerds fleecing venture capital types for as much as they're willing to shell out by talking up technology that might not actually be possible
on the other, maybe don't also destroy society in a thousand small cumulative ways while you're doing that
I mean, it is sort of what happened with the dot com bubble
The bubble was basically an outcome of the stock market. Huge amounts of speculation (for those who don't know; speculation is basically you buying shares in a company on the speculation that those share prices will go up, giving you a profit) on the value of .com companies, often very very new companies with no profit or even any revenue stream, caused a skyrocketing in the share value of the tech companies; when the companies started to run out of cash and a number of investment media analysts wrote articles saying these companies are going to crash it caused an investor scare, stocks were sold en masse as everyone dumped everything ASAP, the prices tanked and the .com companies largely folded.
The problem was twofold; one that the initial speculation into the increasing value of these tech firms were wildly inaccurate, and secondly that seeing the massive availability of venture capital and initial stock offerings, various companies were set up that were essentially marketing departments overselling a shell around nothing at all.
It's a great example of how the stock market is essentially a idiot mob. Share prices fluctuate based on the mob mentality more than they do on the actual profitability of the company a lot of the time; reactions to perceived but potentially non-material changes in the trading environment. The early 2000s recession was caused by, essentially, bets on digital figures; no material industry failed or suddenly fell apart. Always a nice thought, isn't it, that a bunch of fuckheads in suits in the City can cause an economic crisis because they chucked around a bunch of fucking stupid bets that didn't pay off, rather than any actual physical, material problem manifesting.
There is essentially no bottom to the depth of hatred and loathing I have for the stock market
I would burn stock markets to the ground and salt the ashes, I would erect a wall of pikes bound with black iron chains around those smouldering ruins, if I could
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Would there be like, a downside to getting rid of the stock market?
For ordinary people, obviously there would be a downside for rich people and people who have based their careers around it
Like, just how cool would it be if it didn't exist?
I can't actually begin to think about the complexity of extracting the stock market from the economy, is the problem. I have no idea how you would do that whatsoever.
What we realistically can do, and should do, is through political pressure enact internationally shared laws which massively limit the stock market as a vehicle for profit, while we work on the idea of how we'd get rid of it
There are a lot of things that don't interact with the stock market, but almost all of them rely at least on some goods and services that do.
I couldn't tell you, I don't know all that much about the dotcom bubble
my get says that it probably wasn't something that simple
The thing about the first dotcom bubble is that it wasn't completely irrational. It's just that the idea that huge portions of the economy would move online, especially retail delivery, was premature since attitudes and technology had not caught up the possibility. It also revolved around the idea that, much like 90s retail, the market would be based around hundreds of niche companies and not a small handful of huge monopolies serving multiple markets.
I lost my first professional job due to the dotcom busting. I worked in newspapers, and that industry was absolutely confident that it would naturally inherit the online news audience, to the point that they didn't invest much in creating usable platforms and spent most of their energy in overpricing their archives since they thought the revenue would come from people paying $5 a pop for old articles. Adding to this, the dotcom industries advertised heavily in the traditional media, and the newspaper industry used it to leverage debt to buy other newspapers instead of investing in online technology.
It was a classic case where a new market had formed but the investors trying to drive it came from a generation that did not understand it and envisioned it solely in terms familiar to them.
But no realistically as an ordinary person the stock market is basically not very useful. You are unlikely to profit in real terms when it is doing well, and when it is doing poorly, you stand a very real chance of shouldering the economic repercussions. Traders do well of it and try to avoid the repercussions as much as possible. What is aggravating is that... this is entirely obvious? Of course they do? That is of course exactly what they'd do, for the same reason that there is class solidarity amongst landlords and tax avoiders.
AFAIK the main downside to abolishing the stock market for ordinary people would be the folks who have 401ks or pensions invested in it. As long as that obligation is taken on by another entity (like have it guaranteed by the fed or something) I think the impact would be minimal otherwise
So it's an even better joke than I originally thought.
What that guy is basically saying is that more profitable than setting up a business that provides goods and/or services and displaying a revenue and a profit and so on, is creating a marketing tool to bring in huge quantities of speculative investment, essentially stealing it all, letting the company fold, and retiring to the bahamas. And in a very real sense, yes. If you can con wealthy investors into putting their money into your overblown empty shell of a nothing company idea and then just ride the gravy train, that is a good idea.
And a lot of companies in the online arena have done that, both in the dot com bubble and in the Silicon Valley tech industry today. Although it is basically a con. It's the whole basis behind that Theranos company run by Elizabeth Holmes. She managed to persuade investors to put a huge amount into basically a scam. Although she got caught and is currently I believe on trial for it all.
It also comes back around to stocks being fundamentally disconnected from the actual worth of a company.
Also, the stock market is zero-sum - any money made in it comes at the expense of someone else losing money. (The average ticking higher notwithstanding, and I'd argue that's just the wealth extraction from other parts of the world anyways)
Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
I loathe elizabeth holmes but more than her I resent everyone who thinks she is some interesting and enigmatic figure
just, no! she lied! she lied about stuff because she could, in order to make a fuckload of money! that's all! this type of person is not interesting or even particularly uncommon!
So it's an even better joke than I originally thought.
What that guy is basically saying is that more profitable than setting up a business that provides goods and/or services and displaying a revenue and a profit and so on, is creating a marketing tool to bring in huge quantities of speculative investment, essentially stealing it all, letting the company fold, and retiring to the bahamas. And in a very real sense, yes. If you can con wealthy investors into putting their money into your overblown empty shell of a nothing company idea and then just ride the gravy train, that is a good idea.
And a lot of companies in the online arena have done that, both in the dot com bubble and in the Silicon Valley tech industry today. Although it is basically a con. It's the whole basis behind that Theranos company run by Elizabeth Holmes. She managed to persuade investors to put a huge amount into basically a scam. Although she got caught and is currently I believe on trial for it all.
WeWork is a much better example, since the guy totally got away with it. For something even less high tech than "radio on the internet"
I loathe elizabeth holmes but more than her I resent everyone who thinks she is some interesting and enigmatic figure
just, no! she lied! she lied about stuff because she could, in order to make a fuckload of money! that's all! this type of person is not interesting or even particularly uncommon!
Well hey now
She was uncommon in that she only got the opportunity to lie through her teeth in the name of making huge amounts of money because her Dad was an exec at Enron (and a government agency chief) and her Mum was a congressional staff member, and she had connections like fucking Kissinger and Betsy Devos, amongst other. She went to a private school that costs something like 30K per year.
She's of the capital class, and she tried to make her money like all the other parasites; lying, cheating and exploiting others. She's a common example of her type, I'll grant you.
I couldn't tell you, I don't know all that much about the dotcom bubble
my get says that it probably wasn't something that simple
To my understanding that's actually pretty much what happened. No one fuckin understood the internet or how to handle a an internet tech company at that time. All the valuations were investor feelings and little more. Like people were throwing money at tech companies like the early record exec's in Frank Zappa's description of the decline of the music industry. "I don't know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, alright". Once the corps had to actually show they were worth something or could actually generate a profit or like have a sensical business plan their financials made no sense so they buckled. There were of course specific grifts and technological failings in there as well, and business plans that just straight up failed like any other business plans can. However for the most part the dot com bust happened because a bunch of nerds did presentations for investment firms, put up a bunch of smoke and mirrors wiggled their fingers and whispered "internet" and got paid. Then the financiers figured out they might be getting fleeced and that the shift in public behavior wasn't happening fast enough to get them the returns they were looking to have gotten, or to even support the basic business plan for long term sustainable operation in hopes of future growth so they all started pulling funding. They were folks that missed the boat on corps like Apple and Microsoft and were hoping to be investing early in the next one of those, but had little to no idea what the fuck they were actually investing in. There's even some winners that came out of that bubble, amazon and google spring immediately to mind. However there were way more losers to pick than winners. The losers still got paid super well though.
I loathe elizabeth holmes but more than her I resent everyone who thinks she is some interesting and enigmatic figure
just, no! she lied! she lied about stuff because she could, in order to make a fuckload of money! that's all! this type of person is not interesting or even particularly uncommon!
I loathe elizabeth holmes but more than her I resent everyone who thinks she is some interesting and enigmatic figure
just, no! she lied! she lied about stuff because she could, in order to make a fuckload of money! that's all! this type of person is not interesting or even particularly uncommon!
Truth Innovator
Objective reality disruptor.
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
Listen, I'm waiting for our SE++ commune to get started.
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I mean, it is sort of what happened with the dot com bubble
The bubble was basically an outcome of the stock market. Huge amounts of speculation (for those who don't know; speculation is basically you buying shares in a company on the speculation that those share prices will go up, giving you a profit) on the value of .com companies, often very very new companies with no profit or even any revenue stream, caused a skyrocketing in the share value of the tech companies; when the companies started to run out of cash and a number of investment media analysts wrote articles saying these companies are going to crash it caused an investor scare, stocks were sold en masse as everyone dumped everything ASAP, the prices tanked and the .com companies largely folded.
The problem was twofold; one that the initial speculation into the increasing value of these tech firms were wildly inaccurate, and secondly that seeing the massive availability of venture capital and initial stock offerings, various companies were set up that were essentially marketing departments overselling a shell around nothing at all.
It's a great example of how the stock market is essentially a idiot mob. Share prices fluctuate based on the mob mentality more than they do on the actual profitability of the company a lot of the time; reactions to perceived but potentially non-material changes in the trading environment. The early 2000s recession was caused by, essentially, bets on digital figures; no material industry failed or suddenly fell apart. Always a nice thought, isn't it, that a bunch of fuckheads in suits in the City can cause an economic crisis because they chucked around a bunch of fucking stupid bets that didn't pay off, rather than any actual physical, material problem manifesting.
Pretty famously, the few things that actually did have some kind of revenue stream ended up spending their cash influx from their stock options on frivolities, i.e. domain names and superbowl ads and huge California lofts for office space.
People would be paid in stock options and they'd accept it because the stock was worth gangbusters at the time.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
Hey remember that thing the other day where a bunch of high school journalism kids got a hold of a KY state police training video that used quotes from Hitler and Robert E. Lee? (you're forgiven if you don't, it's 2020 and shit has been piling up nonstop for the last epoch)
Listen, I'm waiting for our SE++ commune to get started.
I'm running the kitchen.
This is not a discussion, nor is it debatable, or negotiable.
I am highly attentive and sympathetic to dietary restrictions and personal tastes.
But I'm running the fucking kitchen.
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Posts
Uber's business model started looking shaky when Silicon Valley collectively realized that creating an artificial intelligence was going to be hard.
There's a common story that during one of the big early NYC surges (I wanna say for a sports event or something) the Uber CEO was sitting in a hotel room ordering and cancelling lyft rides on multiple phones at once just to clog up their queue.
But I haven't gone out to check if it's news crews or law enforcement sweeps.
I mean, remember Greyball? How Uber would (and still does) illegally start operating in places without permission and would then use data collection to identify the devices of officials and authorities and silently blackball those from being able to hail vehicles in order to avoid crackdowns?
Don't put anything past them
PSN: Robo_Wizard1
Uh... when is the capital drying up?
(I know, I know, the VC's investing in Uber have more money than I could ever imagine and keeping Uber afloat is probably only 0.01% of their net worth.)
I'm probably wrong but isn't that mistake also essentially what lead to the dot com bubble, which he represents?
The dot com bubble did indeed happen because companies that had zero revenue were overvalued, famously leading to the pets.com superbowl ad.
my gut says that it probably wasn't something that simple
on one hand i'm all for nerds fleecing venture capital types for as much as they're willing to shell out by talking up technology that might not actually be possible
on the other, maybe don't also destroy society in a thousand small cumulative ways while you're doing that
hitting hot metal with hammers
The bubble was basically an outcome of the stock market. Huge amounts of speculation (for those who don't know; speculation is basically you buying shares in a company on the speculation that those share prices will go up, giving you a profit) on the value of .com companies, often very very new companies with no profit or even any revenue stream, caused a skyrocketing in the share value of the tech companies; when the companies started to run out of cash and a number of investment media analysts wrote articles saying these companies are going to crash it caused an investor scare, stocks were sold en masse as everyone dumped everything ASAP, the prices tanked and the .com companies largely folded.
The problem was twofold; one that the initial speculation into the increasing value of these tech firms were wildly inaccurate, and secondly that seeing the massive availability of venture capital and initial stock offerings, various companies were set up that were essentially marketing departments overselling a shell around nothing at all.
It's a great example of how the stock market is essentially a idiot mob. Share prices fluctuate based on the mob mentality more than they do on the actual profitability of the company a lot of the time; reactions to perceived but potentially non-material changes in the trading environment. The early 2000s recession was caused by, essentially, bets on digital figures; no material industry failed or suddenly fell apart. Always a nice thought, isn't it, that a bunch of fuckheads in suits in the City can cause an economic crisis because they chucked around a bunch of fucking stupid bets that didn't pay off, rather than any actual physical, material problem manifesting.
I would burn stock markets to the ground and salt the ashes, I would erect a wall of pikes bound with black iron chains around those smouldering ruins, if I could
For ordinary people, obviously there would be a downside for rich people and people who have based their careers around it
Like, just how cool would it be if it didn't exist?
What we realistically can do, and should do, is through political pressure enact internationally shared laws which massively limit the stock market as a vehicle for profit, while we work on the idea of how we'd get rid of it
There are a lot of things that don't interact with the stock market, but almost all of them rely at least on some goods and services that do.
The thing about the first dotcom bubble is that it wasn't completely irrational. It's just that the idea that huge portions of the economy would move online, especially retail delivery, was premature since attitudes and technology had not caught up the possibility. It also revolved around the idea that, much like 90s retail, the market would be based around hundreds of niche companies and not a small handful of huge monopolies serving multiple markets.
I lost my first professional job due to the dotcom busting. I worked in newspapers, and that industry was absolutely confident that it would naturally inherit the online news audience, to the point that they didn't invest much in creating usable platforms and spent most of their energy in overpricing their archives since they thought the revenue would come from people paying $5 a pop for old articles. Adding to this, the dotcom industries advertised heavily in the traditional media, and the newspaper industry used it to leverage debt to buy other newspapers instead of investing in online technology.
It was a classic case where a new market had formed but the investors trying to drive it came from a generation that did not understand it and envisioned it solely in terms familiar to them.
What that guy is basically saying is that more profitable than setting up a business that provides goods and/or services and displaying a revenue and a profit and so on, is creating a marketing tool to bring in huge quantities of speculative investment, essentially stealing it all, letting the company fold, and retiring to the bahamas. And in a very real sense, yes. If you can con wealthy investors into putting their money into your overblown empty shell of a nothing company idea and then just ride the gravy train, that is a good idea.
And a lot of companies in the online arena have done that, both in the dot com bubble and in the Silicon Valley tech industry today. Although it is basically a con. It's the whole basis behind that Theranos company run by Elizabeth Holmes. She managed to persuade investors to put a huge amount into basically a scam. Although she got caught and is currently I believe on trial for it all.
Also, the stock market is zero-sum - any money made in it comes at the expense of someone else losing money. (The average ticking higher notwithstanding, and I'd argue that's just the wealth extraction from other parts of the world anyways)
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
just, no! she lied! she lied about stuff because she could, in order to make a fuckload of money! that's all! this type of person is not interesting or even particularly uncommon!
WeWork is a much better example, since the guy totally got away with it. For something even less high tech than "radio on the internet"
Well hey now
She was uncommon in that she only got the opportunity to lie through her teeth in the name of making huge amounts of money because her Dad was an exec at Enron (and a government agency chief) and her Mum was a congressional staff member, and she had connections like fucking Kissinger and Betsy Devos, amongst other. She went to a private school that costs something like 30K per year.
She's of the capital class, and she tried to make her money like all the other parasites; lying, cheating and exploiting others. She's a common example of her type, I'll grant you.
To my understanding that's actually pretty much what happened. No one fuckin understood the internet or how to handle a an internet tech company at that time. All the valuations were investor feelings and little more. Like people were throwing money at tech companies like the early record exec's in Frank Zappa's description of the decline of the music industry. "I don't know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, alright". Once the corps had to actually show they were worth something or could actually generate a profit or like have a sensical business plan their financials made no sense so they buckled. There were of course specific grifts and technological failings in there as well, and business plans that just straight up failed like any other business plans can. However for the most part the dot com bust happened because a bunch of nerds did presentations for investment firms, put up a bunch of smoke and mirrors wiggled their fingers and whispered "internet" and got paid. Then the financiers figured out they might be getting fleeced and that the shift in public behavior wasn't happening fast enough to get them the returns they were looking to have gotten, or to even support the basic business plan for long term sustainable operation in hopes of future growth so they all started pulling funding. They were folks that missed the boat on corps like Apple and Microsoft and were hoping to be investing early in the next one of those, but had little to no idea what the fuck they were actually investing in. There's even some winners that came out of that bubble, amazon and google spring immediately to mind. However there were way more losers to pick than winners. The losers still got paid super well though.
I just
really fucking hate capitalism
Truth Innovator
Big if true
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
enumerating the ways capitalism is bullshit isn't even strictly a derail!
hitting hot metal with hammers
Objective reality disruptor.
Pretty famously, the few things that actually did have some kind of revenue stream ended up spending their cash influx from their stock options on frivolities, i.e. domain names and superbowl ads and huge California lofts for office space.
People would be paid in stock options and they'd accept it because the stock was worth gangbusters at the time.
Well guess what?
yeah the fucker'll get to keep his pension, but that would've happened anyway. Small victories and all.
-edit: holly shit, they named their big drug sting operation Black Friday. That's not a dog whistle that's a dog air-raid siren.
Ain't no party like a communist party.
I'm running the kitchen.
This is not a discussion, nor is it debatable, or negotiable.
I am highly attentive and sympathetic to dietary restrictions and personal tastes.
But I'm running the fucking kitchen.
But what if Stale's there
Co-Kitchen Runner, equal partners.