Because what are we working on?
Amazon is running out of people willing to work in its warehouses; gig work gets old fast.
Low unemployment is unsustainable if it’s unfulfilling errand running.
There’s little net new invention going on in entrenched big tech; Bezos and co are riding high on mathematical inference by accountants; it’s a math scam being forced upon people who can’t “see” how he’s not really invented anything new; distributed computing under unified api; wow.
Capturing eyeballs is easy when the masses are oblivious; the biological quirk religion stumbled upon is being intentionally manipulated.
Except for nation state prestige, there’s little net new coming out of all these tech companies; writing apps and todo lists? Come on. Video games? 40+ years old. Better chat bots? Meh.
Story mode still rules; we’re iterating on the childhood nostalgia of 70-80s kids who also happen to be the early tech boom crowd; shock. Where is the net new? We’re getting faster with higher resolution.
Propping up the dollar in lock step with history. Which is why I believe all the pipe dreams about singularity and rockets to nowhere will never happen; kids growing up with these things will see sooner than the elders who were mesmerized by this stuff that it’s all “nuclear powered rocket cars” again.
Generational churn is what’s creating the rocky situation politically. Society will stabilize on a “new normal” as more of the 50+ crowd dies off. And the normal the 20-30s crowd wants is progressive; they’ve not lost their desire for political change as they age into their 30s like prior generations did as inequality still controls their life; prior generations lost their progressiveness as they bought houses and had families; something even 30 year olds cannot do; the elders have monopolized having a good life. The young want to be represented by like minded people and are just waiting out the resistance.
80% of last gens Fortune 500 are gone. Electoral turnovers flush corruption and open up economic gains for public: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766
Same will happen as the elders with monopoly on politics die. Chip companies aren’t going anywhere, but HN is a filter bubble; there’s little dedication to these stupid software companies among the young; see FB use tanking among teens. No one I know under 40 cares about Metas verse, but it was on Today the other day! They’re gaming the clueless. The veil is pierced and frankly software as an industry deserves it; most is copy-paste work while everyone else grows their potatoes.