1. There are a finite number of software engineers capable of competing with FAANG.
2. You outbid outsiders. At times, talk to your friends and tell them not to gum up intra-clique recruiting.
3. This continues for a long time, but at some point, salaries get a little too high.
4. Flush everyone all at once... resetting the baseline of what a tech salary "should be." This resets expectations for all the new talent coming in that might compete with you.
5. After the tech salary "should be" a few tens of thousands less... quietly start (2) again.
If you time it right, (2) happens when money is cheap and it's easy to found a competitor, while (4) happens when there is a "tech downturn" and VC are scared. What a tech salary "should be" is quite sticky, it takes a few years of (2) to actually change baseline expectations.
The existing cultural understanding of what tech workers "should be making" influences: what do the most promising new hires demand? how aggressive are your existing workers in asking for a raises, promos, etc? what do people take as a "given" and what do they think is a reach for them? These things operate as a sort of piggy bank. Every time you outbid a startup for promising talent, you are drawing from the piggy bank; that person tells their friends, makes a post on linkedin about it, which causes subsequent outbiddings to cost, pound for pound, ever so slightly more. When the piggy bank is empty, you refill it again by traumatizing everyone with a big, industry-wide layoff. But: you can only do this if you have a big hammer to wield.
As a bonus, if you can be a little bit discerning in your firings, you actually can shed dead weight in the process.
Tinfoil hat: the cuts have nothing to do with market fundamentals, but are rather collusion by the big players to drop tech salaries. Bytedance is outside the clique.
I didn't want to seem long winded, but the market structures you describe are common to many if not most markets we have for goods and services, at least here in the US.
For example:
Food, agriculture, energy, media (print/radio/movies/home video), most commodities, productive inputs... there is little that you can buy that is not part of what I would loosely call a "conglomerate" -- that is, a concentration of capital so large and intense that it tends to influence the markets in which it operates. In fact, markets are today less competitive than they have ever been.
Those things that are (I would argue, seem) "competitive" here, like fashion, consumer products, and the like, are frequently as or more exploitative and influence markets (specifically, labor markets) abroad, up to and including slavery. Just because we don't feel that pain doesn't mean others are free of it.
This is because we have done nearly nothing, culturally, politically, economically, or psychologically, to stop the movement of power -- just as you described -- out of the hands of the many people and into the hands of the few entities that control such markets.
The free market, where each individual has the power of their dollar, is delicate indeed. Much more delicate than we have appreciated in the last several decades.
Patagonia here is the exception, that's why we're all here talking about it!
I didn't want to give my bit of power to my health insurer, but guess what, I have to have healthcare to live and there's effectively one local hospital I can choose.
I didn't want to give my ~~~bit~~~ hefty chunk of power to the company that gatekeeps the patent on insulin, but I really didn't have much choice on that one.
I didn't want to give my bit of power to the telecom conglomerate, but did I have a choice? I need to be online to participate in today's society.
I didn't want to give my bit of power to Google, but... uhh actually I didn't give it to them, they stole it by spying on me.
The reality is that concentrations of power that are inherent to our system of free exchange inevitably congeal into something that looks a lot less free. All of these examples (and there are so many, most of our economy is like this!) don't really represent individual value functions, because when power gets concentrated enough, it becomes possible to take choice away.
In light of recent events, the only conclusion I can arrive at is that originalism as a legal theory was a decades-long project created with the express purpose of overturning the Warren-era jurisprudence. Roe is the first salvo, but there are many more regressions coming.
It was not created as a good-faith "alternate interpretation." It is not a cohesive or logical theory. It is, instead, a weapon, whose targets should be clear to everyone now. The way the weapon works is that you assume that it is being made in good faith and engage with it on its own terms. And then, again and again, get owned. Because the other guy is just making stuff up, and you, the sucker, are actually arguing.
I'm not quite in conspiracy territory yet, but I really would like to know what they are saying out loud behind closed doors at the Federalist Society HQ.
The counter-point would be the criminal legal system, which has spectacularly failed to resist the influence of injustice, and not just historically! I suppose if you have only spent time in civil proceedings (depending on the type of proceeding...) you could hold the view that it is mostly free of corruption. On the federal judiciary, I think we really ought to dispense of the idea that political influence is somehow separate from jurisprudence. Recent events ought to have made that clear.
I'm a little bothered by how sacred the courts are in public imagination. I think it's actually harmful to consider them so. We deny that the courts are a fallible institution, which at times enables and empowers bad actors, at our peril.
Think of the median income of a country that you might imagine is a "nice" place to live. I found a source that lists them all (in fictitious "international dollars", not USD). So here's a few:
* USA: $19,300
----
* France: $16,300
* Japan: $14,200
* Israel: $10,800
* UK: $14,800
* Spain: $11,800
Wow, we are so much richer than those guys. Our quality of life must be higher, right? This extra 30% money for everyone(!) must translate to a higher standard of living. Maybe we work more than people in those countries, but it translates to: less air pollution, quieter streets, less time spent commuting, more pleasant built environments, more beautiful cities, better health, more civil services, better parks and public facilities ...
Nope. All that money just goes to cars. We make an extra 30% -- and then turn around and burn it, literally, in cars, making everyone poorer, more atomized, more depressed, more unhealthy. For an unlucky hundreds of thousands of us per year, we are physically hurt; for 35,000 of us, we are killed!
I would like a Kerbal Space Program esque aircraft design + fly game.
We already have very sophisticated dynamical models for how airplanes fly (which are deftly integrated into flight simulators) but no way of designing custom airframes.
I'm thinking that you design an aircraft: choose wing cross section shape, taper, sweep, position, control surfaces, etc. You could choose materials (ok maybe no aeroelastic stuff, just weight and failure from stress).
Then you can fly it around for fun in a realistic simulator, combat with other players, or some other mission (range? transportation aircraft? etc.)
The hackers will not be far behind. You can run some of the v1 diffusion models on a local machine.
I think it's fair to say that this is the way it's always been. In 1990, you couldn't hack on an accurate fluid simulation at home, you needed to be at a university or research lab with access to a big cluster. But then, 10 years later, you could do it on a home PC. And then, 10 years after that, you could do it in a browser on the internet.
It's the same with this AI stuff.
I think if we weren't in the midst of this unique GPU supply crunch, the price of a used 1070 would be about $100 right now -- such a card would be state of the art 10 years ago!
There is a very long and plainly wrong string of Supreme Court decisions which stretches all the way back to the nation's founding. The courts are very good at precisely the opposite thing that you're describing.
I think most people kind of assume that the courts are this sort of shining beacon of enlightened liberal thought: they occasionally seem to have "duds" -- but those are intelligent and well reasoned duds. They're interpreting the constitution in a way some don't like, sure, but still upholding it nonetheless, right?
I mean, this thread here about civil asset forfeiture is a great example. If you ask any non-lawyer brained person whether it's wrong, they'll say, yeah, of course it's illegal for the government to just steal your shit. Why is this even a question?
Oh, but no, you see, the courts have wisely decided, using an argument that you might hear from a 5-year-old ("actually, this piece of property is actually a mystical ghost that we can treat as a people!"), that stealing your shit is, in fact, legal.
I really encourage anyone curious about this powerful and unaccountable institution to read some of the shittier Supreme Court decisions. They are often, simply put, stupid. Like, a regular non-lawyer person can read them and handily "eviscerate" their arguments.
I know it’s a rhetorical example, but given how stingy the copyright regime is: yes, yes they would. You maybe could manage a 20% off credit for the child’s listening rights.
Tether’s operators have said the token is backed by a basket of dollar-based assets equal to the size of the tokens outstanding, but it has not released granular details of these reserves
Trust me, dude!
Meanwhile:
Stablecoin holders could not claim deposit insurance to recoup any losses and operators were not able to access bank standing facilities
This (the losing all of your money, thing) happened in 1929 to a lot of people. Yes, it is possible to lose all your money. Yes, this can go to zero. There is a long, long way down. I just don't see how anyone in their right mind has the appetite for risk to stay in Cryptosecurities right now.
The foundation of Musk's wealth, above all else, is that he operates as a one-man marketing machine. The funding for all of his ventures depends on Musk. The magnet for ravenous, loyal, intelligent nerds (and thus, the ability to eventually deliver on his promises!) is powered by Musk. The ability for any of his ventures to cover a failure to deliver with a PR/controversy storm -- yup, it depends on Musk.
I like your comparison with Big T. He is, in some sense, a sleeker and more savvy Trump. Trump does have a similar psychic energy to Elon, but he's an older model. He came from the TV world. Now, the TV world was pretty powerful -- it got DT elected president! But Americans are not living in the TV world this century; they're living in the social media world.
This is the origin of the Twitter thing. It's not about Twitter's profit, or free speech, or anything as lofty as that. Here's what happened with Twitter:
Trump got elected based, in part, on his statements on Twitter. Around the same time, Elon was astroturfing Reddit, Twitter, etc. to build the hype machine that eventually became the $1T social media product, Tesla.
Elon, consciously or not, came to realize that simply by his statements on Twitter, could manipulate the world to his whim. He fired the entire corporate PR team at Tesla. He realizes, why do I need a PR team? I can shape the narrative just as well with my social media account!
Then, BOOM! Trump gets banned from Twitter, and immediately disappears completely from discussion. Just like that, in the blink of an eye -- erased from public imagination. Do you remember how quickly this happened? He was black holed from the public imagination in a couple days. As soon as the trending hashtag disappeared, Trump was gone.
Elon saw this happen. He made the connection between his valuations and his Twitter account. And remember, at this point, Elon's compensation is basically tied entirely to the stock price. He realizes that leaving his podium on someone else's property is a mortal risk. And... here we are.
Twitter is pretty stupid not to have banned Elon as soon as he left the slightest hint of acquisition.
Musk does not come from a scientific or technical lineage: his father wasn't a geotechnical engineer, a computer programmer, or a physicist. He was a chiropractor. A chiropractor! This is the essence of Elon. He is the greatest influencer of our time.
1. There are a finite number of software engineers capable of competing with FAANG.
2. You outbid outsiders. At times, talk to your friends and tell them not to gum up intra-clique recruiting.
3. This continues for a long time, but at some point, salaries get a little too high.
4. Flush everyone all at once... resetting the baseline of what a tech salary "should be." This resets expectations for all the new talent coming in that might compete with you.
5. After the tech salary "should be" a few tens of thousands less... quietly start (2) again.
If you time it right, (2) happens when money is cheap and it's easy to found a competitor, while (4) happens when there is a "tech downturn" and VC are scared. What a tech salary "should be" is quite sticky, it takes a few years of (2) to actually change baseline expectations.
The existing cultural understanding of what tech workers "should be making" influences: what do the most promising new hires demand? how aggressive are your existing workers in asking for a raises, promos, etc? what do people take as a "given" and what do they think is a reach for them? These things operate as a sort of piggy bank. Every time you outbid a startup for promising talent, you are drawing from the piggy bank; that person tells their friends, makes a post on linkedin about it, which causes subsequent outbiddings to cost, pound for pound, ever so slightly more. When the piggy bank is empty, you refill it again by traumatizing everyone with a big, industry-wide layoff. But: you can only do this if you have a big hammer to wield.
As a bonus, if you can be a little bit discerning in your firings, you actually can shed dead weight in the process.