The need for GPUs during an unprecedented spike in demand for chip fab capacity couldn't have helped.
I think the basic model will eventually work out, though. The bandwidth is there. The compute has to be cheap enough that the biz model works by just taking the retailer's cut of the title sale + maybe a tad more. The tad more can come from one-time hardware sales and maybe better negotiated cuts of the sale from the studios. I would never ever have purchased a copy of any AAA title without Stadia and similar services. I think the same is true for almost all Stadia purchases.
But Google's failure here makes sense. It's a low margin game. google sucks at low margin games.
I had a month off between jobs and used a week of my evenings off to play through red dead.
I don't particularly care about losing the license, because I just wanted to play the game through. Haven't touched it since then.
Stadia's ideal market wasn't "real gamers" -- those folks will buy rigs. Their ideal market was people like you and me, who don't have the time or interest to justify purchasing a gaming machine but still want to play through a AAA title or two every once in a while.
Another same here. I didn't need to buy a console, a tv or even a controller. It feels like unlimited power to be able to access RDR2 on just another tab - 13 year old me would have gone crazy :)
> This sounds like post-hoc, anti-intellectual rationalization.
How is this anti-intellectual?
If you want, I can formalize as a game the problem of choosing business/product strategy in a competitive market with a continuous flow of imperfect information. I can then use ideas from controls to establish some upper bounds on what can be inferred from a continuous flow of information. I can then use that result to prove an impossibility result about the game. I can even tweak assumptions to get bounds on probability distributions which infer we'd be better off flipping a coin or whatever.
I'm not going to do the work, because intuition is almost always enough to identify these situations, but it's absolutely clear to me that results like this obviously exist and correspond to many real-world situations.
> Good judgement requires data.
It used to be that insisting on data-driven decision making was a hard pull. Now it's the opposite. Insisting on data where data cannot possibly provide enough signal to make a decision is the new form of anti-intellectualism. IMO.
I travel a lot and "having everything USB C" didn't help.
I had:
- a USB C cord that only supports power but up to 100W
- a USB C cord that supports power up to 60W and data at USB2 speeds. But didn't work with my USB C powered portable display. Because it didn't support video.
- a USB C cord that only supported power up to 60W and data and video.
I'm usually traveling with:
- My MacBook Pro 16 inch (USB C)
- Mouse/Keyboard (lightning)
- iPad Air 3rd Gen (lightning)
- iPhone 12 (lightning)
- AirPods Pro (lightning)
- Beats Flex (they hang around my neck and I don't have to worry about them falling out on the plane if I dose off) USB C
- a four in one wireless charger that I sit by my bed at the hotel. (USB C).
- a Anker battery pack (USB-C)
- portable monitor (USB C)
- Watch - weird Apple proprietary wireless charging.
But now I only travel with these cords for most of my devices:
Female USB A/USB C on one end and USB C/lightning on the other end. They support data up to 480Mbps and power up to 60W. They are $13.00. They are cheap and not too thick.
They are like $35 and are much thicker and a little unwieldy and I don't need them just for charging anything but my computer and connecting my secondary display.
Thanks for the tip on a holy grail cable. I have a few just like that but am always annoyed at their max 60W PD and USB 2.0 speeds. Still, the adapters are configured the same and it's totally worth it to be able to always connect anything to anything.
> How do you explain a non-negligible part of middle of America who voted for Obama voting for Trump?
The labor movement always had a socially reactionary underbelly. My hypothesis: it wasn't bad economic times that activated Obama-Trump voters. It was, rather, good economic times that triggered those voters to flip from labor-first to identity-first. The tension was always there. This is why the Tea Party fizzled and why Romney couldn't activate the switch -- reactionary blue collar folks knew intuitively that those movements weren't "on their side". But by 2016 a bombastic billionaire (also obviously not on their side) could be excused because the economy was good enough to at last put identity first.
I grew up in a suburb that flipped and my wife is from a mid-sized non-metro city that also flipped. Obama Trump voters are substantially all of our social circle.
A lot happened, but honestly, "youtube's algorithm and super effective conservative media" is probably the best explanation in over 1/2 of the roughly 3 dozen anecdotal cases. It's just pure identity.
Some blame Obama for outsourcing and the GFC, but that's mostly noise. First of all, the major factory that closed wasn't outsourced. It closed because the company was wildly mismanaged, and was not replaced with a foreign factory. Also, this happened five years before the GFC and Obama's election. Most of the folks in our circles remained employed throughout that GFC and all of them did very well from 2010 on-wards.
They're currently all doing very well financially; far better than the late 20s/early 30s city dwellers whose conversations I overhear in the coffee shop. Red America can afford single family homes with big yards, saves for retirement, and just generally lives a very comfortable life unimaginable in blue cities. With jobs in law enforcement, trucking, and in hospitals which don't require even an associate's degree. It's really the American dream -- graduate from high school, six weeks of training, and you're making enough to afford a house and kids and retirement within a couple years.
The resentment and utter hatred of liberals is visceral and real. Pretending it's economic is bullshit cover. Tell someone sharing a bedroom in NYC that their counterpart with less education, who works fewer hours, and lives in a SFH with a pool hates them because of the unfair economic spoils of the former.
Also, the economy was doing extremely well in 2016. Economics is now top-of-mind, but it didn't even come close to motivating them to vote for Trump in 2016. That was pure identity politics.
> I'd rather not base my picture of the entire economy around a single retailer
Or retailers in general. Retail spending is down because services spending is up -- people are going to the beach and buying plane tickets instead of buying TVs and patio furniture.
Regardless of whether we're in a recession, retailer numbers aren't a good indicator for the duration/depth/type. We spent all of 2020 hearing that demand was pulled forward. Well, it was pulled forward from somewhere, and now we are there.
> What's going on with other retailers?
Best Buy missed by a lot; sales down by over 10%; forecast was a 1% contraction.
Amazon tonight. Always complicated because of AWS, digital content, and now a substantial advertising business. If you want the retail details you have to go past the headline numbers.
Target in mid-August but expectations are similar.
My guess is that none of those companies will be hit has bad as Walmart because (1) Walmart was just particularly badly mismanaged, and (2) these other companies are just different in kind (particularly Amazon -- they could eg suffer retail losses while beating estimates on Advertising/Cloud)
>Or retailers in general. Retail spending is down because services spending is up -- people are going to the beach and buying plane tickets instead of buying TVs and patio furniture.
>Regardless of whether we're in a recession, retailer numbers aren't a good indicator for the duration/depth/type. We spent all of 2020 hearing that demand was pulled forward. Well, it was pulled forward from somewhere, and now we are there.
All fair points.
>Best Buy missed by a lot; sales down by over 10%; forecast was a 1% contraction.
>>>GDP has long been criticized for being a poor metric for the economy. But it's always been correlated enough with overall economic sentiment that it was Good Enough.
>> yes by MMT supporters that want to ignore the classic model of economics in favor of monetary manipulation for political purposes
Huh?
Discussing the utility of and then issues with GDP has been a staple of Macro courses for decades. E.g., [1], but I'm really serious: every single macro textbook for as long as macro textbooks have existed has had some version of the question "Discuss the strengths and weaknesses (i.e., problems) of using GDP data".
Fast food is reporting the same thing, McDonald's put out a report a few days ago, Yum! Brands is yet to report results for the quarter but similar results are expected. Target had a similar report to Walmart.
It is mostly discretionary spending that is down; Wal-Mart reported the largest fall in apparel iirc, but demand is demand. One would expect discretionary spending to fall first, and hopefully it stops there.
Again I apologize for not providing a direct citation due to my dumb mobile browser but these are days-old news stories and it should be easy to confirm
I know I've cut back on fast food because both product and service quality have declined dramatically, likely due to staffing shortages. Long wait times, cold food, and incorrect orders have pushed me to the point of staying away. It's a weird time, and it's hard to untangle all these additional factors. That said, I'm sure higher prices are having an impact as well.
Fast food is pricing itself out of the market. I think it's a great example of a sector that failed to innovate and is now incapable of providing a product worth buying at prices that are profitable.
McDonalds et al. probably should've been investing a lot more in automating their kitchens. The fact that a huge percent of locations -- and all drive-thrus -- still use humans for the ordering process is, similarly, inexcusable.
Unless the US massively increases its low-skilled immigration quotes, robotics firms will be the FAANG equivalents of the 2020s-2030s.
You can fit 3 generations in a single family home in an American suburb of a mid-sized city, and half the world's population would either (a) consider that a QoL improvement or at least (b) put up with it for a while to remit back home.
For all the doom and gloom in the USA, it's still an incredibly rich country.
To be clear: I'm not making a moral statement here. This is a statement of fact, not a statement of ethical preference.
Someone working low-paid hourly wage work can probably make $20K. A few siblings + their parents = 5 people = $100K. Stagger availability schedules so there's always someone home with the kids, and share vehicles.
Suburb of top-tier cities? No. Cheapest suburb of a midwestern city? Absolutely.
Again, not saying it's reasonable. Just that it's possible.
Commuting. It is possible to commute to the low wages places within major cities while living in less expensive areas. This may be difficult if public transportation makes that too expensive and a losing prospect.
Total household income. It is possible to accept a lower wage job if the rest of the family is making more. A spouse or older child can add to the family budget even if the primary breadwinner is making more.
Grants / subsidized housing of some sort. College students making a few extra dollars while living in the dorms where the major expenses are paid elsewhere.
Back to the older children and summer jobs. Getting a job to do something over the summer and get a bit of spending money of their own.
---
Yes, lower paying jobs within higher cost of living areas are going to be having trouble finding people to work there. This has been a thing for many years. Even in the before times, there were constantly places that had "help wanted" signs out and were paying minimum wage. The ones in higher cost areas of the city were more likely to close resulting in more expensive restraints that can be supported by the people who are living the higher cost of living.
> economic conditions dictate that within a few decade, there will be no restaurants in major cities.
No. Restaurants will continue to exist. Sit down in particular. In cases where you are paying for an experience; the economics will get worse, but they will continue to exist.
Fast food restaurants will even continue to exist. But the latter only with substantial automation. This has already happened at the front of the house -- kiosks and apps are the "happy path" ordering interfaces at every McD's in a major city. I'm merely projecting that the most cost-sensitive segment of the food services industry will push that automation into the kitchen, the checkout line, and a lot of the administrative work that happens at branches.
> This isn't true, major retailers have been reporting falling demand.
As OP said,
>> and services.
> Wal-Mart
WalMart's issue is that they have a massive inventory/demand mismatch. They already have the headwind of a shift from goods to services, and then on top of that they also massively mismanaged a shift in consumer preference within goods. I have a feeling that they are also feeling the squeeze from Amazon. Many households treat Prime as a fixed cost but the 20 minute drive out to Walmart is a real expense that can be substituted with Amazon purchases. Tonight's earnings will be interesting.
Compare to eg Visa [1].
I expect that the "last hoorah" spending of this summer will grind to a halt in the winter and by Q2 2023 we'll be able to see a massive decline in consumer spending during Q4 in particular.
But we aren't there yet, at least in aggregate, because consumers are spending like mad on services.
Descriptions of economic conditions are obviously politicized. This was probably always true to an extent, but it really took off during the early Obama years.
That said... my wealth manager has been and still is waffling when I ask him if we are in a recession. It's NOT just political; I don't even know my wealth manager's politics and I have absolutely no doubt he puts fiduciary responsibilities first and makes fact-based assessments.
Unemployment is low and the trend is mostly flat. Housing is doing fine. Consumer balance sheets are strong. Are we entering a recession? I think so. But there are a lot of "but"s which really do impact how smart and impartial people are thinking about where and how to deploy capital.
When I ask my wealth manager "are we in a recession?", he basically says "We might be in a recession. We might not be in a recession. Either way, we should not invest as if this is a typical recession."
The fastest-growing (and largest) category of that debt was mortgage debt, which is probably a positive economic indicator if anything, though note that that's based on Q1 data. Household debt servicing costs as a percent of disposable income are still lower than at any point between 1980 (the earliest data available) and the start of the pandemic. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP
Also keep in mind that those debt figures are in nominal USD. One positive effect of inflation is that it reduces the real cost of paying off debt.
Is this a positive effect? I think it is for lower inflation rates, but above a certain threshold the borrowing can get out of hand, people will go and get more loans, which will drive prices higher. Eventually the bubble pops and people go underwater.
Hey, remember back in 2009 or so when everyone was cheering that we were "out of" the Great Recession, but everyone not part of Wall Street was still bleeding? I feel like this might wind up being a reverse of that; and the reason for this is that most economic data are aggregates that are missing the whole picture.
GDP numbers are back up? Great - except that's just higher because the handful of companies that can really capitalize on 0% interest rates are doing so. Everyone else is still down from 2007.
Unemployment is falling? Great - except that those people are leaving the labor force or taking lower-wage jobs than they had before.
There's all sorts of ways that the headline numbers can hide the discontent of a large group of people under the rug. And likewise this can happen in the opposite direction. The economy as a whole can be screwed over in ways that happen to give small business owners or the working class more negotiating leverage or a greater share of the pie.
> Hey, remember back in 2009 or so when everyone was cheering that we were "out of" the Great Recession, but everyone not part of Wall Street was still bleeding?
I also remember the whole expansion preceding the Great Recession, during which the bottom three quintiles all did worse, the second-to-top was basically flat, and most of the gains were in a narrow segment at the top of the top quintile.
“Recession“ vs “expansion“ (multidimensional as it is) is still not, and not intended to be, the same as any individual person’s, or even the median person’s, experience of the economy.
I think the basic model will eventually work out, though. The bandwidth is there. The compute has to be cheap enough that the biz model works by just taking the retailer's cut of the title sale + maybe a tad more. The tad more can come from one-time hardware sales and maybe better negotiated cuts of the sale from the studios. I would never ever have purchased a copy of any AAA title without Stadia and similar services. I think the same is true for almost all Stadia purchases.
But Google's failure here makes sense. It's a low margin game. google sucks at low margin games.