
When Everything That Counts Can’t Be Counted - animalcule
https://thereformedbroker.com/2019/06/13/when-everything-that-counts-cant-be-counted/
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zackmorris
Keep in mind that this "free" money comes from somewhere.

It comes from the people who can't get a fixed rate home loan or HELOC that
get screwed when the economy tanks and their interest rises above 7% and they
lose their home.

It comes from the people paying 30% interest on credit cards or 400+% on
payday loans.

It comes from workers in China and India that get paid pennies on the dollar
and can't get a loan over $1000 so have to work themselves to death for the
West's ambition.

To see the world's capital potential squandered on new locator/ride
share/service apps with valuations larger than the industries they're
replacing is..

OBSCENE

The only thing propping this mobile/social bubble up is that unemployment is
so low that people are too busy to realize how badly they're getting screwed
by Wall Street.

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mola
This is not cheap money, this is dumb money. When powerful people make stupid
decisions, most people will, nevertheless, copycat their wrong decision. One
way or another, reality will smack us in the face and a reckoning will come.
The sad part is that those stupid powerful people will be hit much less than
the populus they enslave.

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titzer
Yeah. Unfortunately. Imagine what we could accomplish if we just redirected
some of this dumb money into "dumb" things...like education, infrastructure,
health care, battling climate change. But nope, walls, drones, and tech
bubbles.

~~~
abakker
== Higher taxes, more research to prove not "where" to spend the money, but
"on what, specifically?".

Ever the problem with government and social science - government is dependent
on social science to conduct studies that provide that tax dollars are well
spent, and then also required to convince the electorate of the value of that
expenditure. It's a tough problem with no easy answers. Effective politicians
tend to create public sentiment and then find evidence. Effective outcomes
would dictate the order be reversed.

~~~
titzer
> Effective politicians tend to create public sentiment and then find evidence

It's really stunning when you consider that blowing a trillion dollars on a
new fighter jet needed essentially zero popular support, but funding education
is somehow so loony that it requires a solid political majority to even think
about.

~~~
abakker
Agree. Major difference between already having budget and getting budget
allocated.

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CPLX
When you get to be an old person you start to notice patterns.

Whenever people start sayin "what if [cyclical bad thing] actually never
happens again and the happy times are permanent because of [tenuous
reasoning]" loudly and in public then it's inevitable that we're about to see
the problems currently being created in secret by people who've had that
delusional point of view for awhile.

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Digory
Yes. I saw a Fed Reserve big-wig say in a closed room that they'd conquered
the business cycle ... just before the dotcom bust.

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lordnacho
Well of course the thing that's been missing is the periodic reckoning, a
recession or a bear market. Much like exploring away from the coast, if you're
guaranteed to have nice weather you have more to gain by going further out.

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elcomet
> This is why Uber is worth more than all of the auto makers and taxi
> companies that own their own fleets of cars.

I think this is bullshit. Uber may be worth more than auto makers, but this is
a bubble and will not last (unless uber manages to create an autonomous taxi
service in the next few years). They were just lucky and intelligent enough to
get around regulations, but regulations are catching them.

Uber's tech is simple and easily replicable. The moment they raise their
prices, they loose their market share. There is no network effect in this
market.

It is simply obvious that Uber provides much less added value than any
automaker.

~~~
yoz-y
> Uber's tech is simple and easily replicable. The moment they raise their
> prices, they loose their market share. There is no network effect in this
> market.

I disagree that there is no network effect. When one travels to another
country it is much easier to use Uber rather than to find what local brew of
'carpooling' service is available, create an account, put in credit card info
etc.

Their tech is easily replicable but their global presence is not.

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roenxi
That isn't so much a network effect as it is burning money on 6 continents. If
Uber isn't the most cost effective solution at home there isn't much incentive
to use it abroad either.

I've been in lots of places - pre Uber - where I didn't even speak the local
language. Even then finding a taxi was not taxing. If Uber can't make a profit
on local traffic it is going to be a mighty feat if they make money off non-
local traffic.

~~~
Scoundreller
Doesn’t really match my experience at all visiting a city without Uber
(Barcelona).

Driver took advantage of their complicated fare system to add supplement
charges that didn’t apply: charged us the baggage supplement for our backpacks
that we carried in the car, and charged us a supplement for going _to_ the
train station, which should only apply _from_ the train station.

The local taxi authority requires us to complain by post with an original
receipt.

The postage costs of sending that with tracking defeats the purpose.

Most people wouldn’t even realize they were overcharged, after all, we paid
what was on the meter. And issuing receipts is only by request.

We don’t have enough data to determine if the driver was excellently skilled
or suicidal.

Meanwhile with Uber, you get a fancy receipt emailed to you listing
route/charges, a sensible (if unregulated) complaints process, and ratings
from other riders.

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arethuza
_" If Ford Motor were a savvier marketer of their stock, which has changed
hands at more or less the same price for twenty years, they’d be calling
buyers of their cars a user base and the cars themselves would be rechristened
“physical mobility apps."_

I don't think I would ever buy a car that was described as a "physical
mobility app" as it would imply to me that the people running that company had
forgotten what it was they were actually manufacturing.

~~~
mrfredward
If you want to sell cars, then sell cars. If you want to sell shares at an
inflated valuation, sell a "physical mobility app", as the buzzwords will help
you land the sort of investors that prefer hearing a story over fundamentals.

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paulpauper
People were saying this 20 years ago during he dotcom boom, but they called it
'mind share' and 'the new economy'.

>Capital is Now Free, Have Fun

lol what. Credit card interest is higher than ever. Small business loans are
still expensive. Yeah, maybe capital is cheap if you're a multinational or the
us govt. but it's still expensive for most. Treasury bonds yields are not a
proxy of how much business lending costs. Rather, a better estimate would be
junk bond yields.

~~~
mempko
Capital is cheap for investors ;-)

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scottlocklin
I'm not familiar with this writer, but it sure reads like a giant troll and
shill for tech stocks. He's right about one big thing though: there's too much
money in circulation, and it causes asset bubbles in weird, useless shit like
Uber stock and shitcoins; whatever has the PR megaphone. When the next
collapse comes, I'm guessing before or shortly after the next US Presidential
election, I'd rather hold value stocks. Actually, I'd rather hold foreign real
estate.

Trend following is great; you have to sell at the right time though.

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danaris
There's not "too much money in circulation." There's too much money in the
hands of the wealthy who have nothing genuinely productive to do with it.

That same money in the hands of those who are currently barely scraping by—or
not even scraping by, homeless or heading that way—would make a real
difference in their lives, and would be spent on truly useful and absolutely
mundane things.

~~~
scottlocklin
All right: there's too much money going into asset bubbles instead of ordinary
people. Same difference. Economists love it, as asset bubbles don't look like
inflation, and deck shuffling counts towards GDP.

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mountainofdeath
1999 called. It wants its bubble back...

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spinchange
"This question is being answered on Wall Street every day, even if the
participants are not aware of it."

This is basically the deal with MMT too. We talk about the defacto status quo
reality like it's a hypothetical and not actually describing current unstated
practice. "What happens" is _what 's happening_ right before our eyes. The
question, as always, is for how long it will last. It's been >20 years of
saying "this isn't normal," so when is it?

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parentheses
The use of hyperbole in this article is a little bit cloying and unnecessary.

The author is asking "where is value [or asset] investing?". I think the
question begging to be asked here is " how has the definition of _value_
changed?" We should instead be engaged in an investigation of how value and
it's perception has changed.

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tolstoshev
He's describing Whuffie - [https://www.amazon.com/Down-Magic-Kingdom-Cory-
Doctorow/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Down-Magic-Kingdom-Cory-
Doctorow/dp/076530953X)

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simonebrunozzi
> "You don’t go home to Greenwich from your Park Avenue office in a good mood
> when the market makes it a point to remind you of how vestigial your skills
> have become, day after day after day."

This is poetry.

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hamilyon2
There is textbook investment strategy (turtles) and indicator that trades
exactly the strategy this article says " _no_ textbook" recommends.

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vertline3
Seems bubbly.

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5etho
wonderfull reading i'm sharing this with my friends

