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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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This is the tech bro version of the labor theory of value. I think nobody seriously disputes that a small group of unbridled engineers can be absurdly productive in creating X; the question is more like, “who the heck needs X?”

Or, in many cases, the far more fundamental question of ‘what is x and does it have potential applications?’.

I think you may give media too much credibility in portraying what startups work on.

A company like Juicero is exceptional, but it’s also not even an a priori bad idea. The rich buy all kinds of luxury goods that seem absurd to most people.

I have a $3,000 chair that provides massages that are maybe half as good as those provided by a person. The Osaki company that makes it, as far as I know, is still in good shape.

I have a robot that does a poor job of cleaning my floors and that frequently gets lost or stuck. iRobot is still around and I’m guessing profitable.

I guess the question is how often do you use your chair and how often would you get a chair massage in real life. One could imagine a pay back period in 2 years. Then provided the chair pats for say 10 years you get 8 years of half as good massages for free. Maybe now you only go once or twice a year for the real deal. Could on net be worth it.

Same with iRobot. It isn’t a replacement to cleaning generally; but can reduce the need to clean.

I live/work in the middle of all of this with what I think is a pretty good big picture view. Almost everything these guys do lately is some combination of absurd and/or hyper niche, and at the very least incredibly overvalued.

Overvaluations were at least partially corrected last summer. Lots of startups have been unable to raise new funding rounds as a result.

Though I'd argue about the definition of "overvaluation." Is something overvalued if the market has access to practically free money and just needs to park it somewhere?

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