Monday, February 24, 2020

This is BEFORE the virus.

As the startup boom deflates, a reckoning is coming for Silicon Valley.

"SAN FRANCISCO — Over the past decade, technology startups grew so quickly that they couldn’t hire people fast enough. Now the layoffs have started coming in droves. 

Last month, robot pizza startup Zume and car-sharing company Getaround slashed more than 500 jobs. Then DNA testing company 23andMe, logistics startup Flexport, Firefox maker Mozilla and question-and-answer website Quora did their own cuts. “It feels like a reckoning is here,” said Josh Wolfe, a venture capitalist at Lux Capital in New York.

It’s a humbling shift for an industry that long saw itself as an engine of job creation and innovation, producing ride-hailing giant Uber, hospitality company Airbnb and other now well-known brands that often disrupted entrenched industries." 

The article goes on to say...

"There are now “frantic mini-moments of panic, as one thing after another happens,” said Roy Bahat, an investor at Bloomberg’s venture arm in San Francisco. “At some point, one rock after another will fall away from the cliff and we’ll realize we’re not standing on anything in many, many companies.”"

The economy was extremely weak before the holidays, but no one wants to spoil a party or complain that the party might be fake. I was skeptical it would last past the holidays. And now it is certain that it will not.

I have been complaining about these money losing companies forever. And a lot of them will not survive this.

5 comments:

  1. A friend of mine said something about the "official numbers" coming out of China as well as the two graphs being parallel, BTW ...

    "What if China doesn't really know when log10 X was at zero, and that they have been reporting their numbers with a delay of a certain number of days, maybe because they were faking them, but also maybe because they don't want to admit to the world they massively fucked up and missed this going on for that long?"

    Briefly there was a glimpse at what could have been the real numbers over at Tencent, with numbers that were ten times higher than the "official numbers" ...

    What if "patient zero" in China actually happened on November 10, and they didn't notice?

    Yeah, December 8, that's the official log10 X = 0.

    Much longer potential incubation times would be the least of it.

    You might actually need to keep up your El-Bowla regimen for at least sixty days, and you might also already be surrounded by a lot of carriers.

    I have literally bumped into more than a few myself if that's the case.

    This so-called "symptomless carrier phenomenon" ... well, isn't that like having a much longer incubation period than otherwise suspected?

    Still, isn't it odd that it's taking a pandemic (and not just a pandemic scare) to finally kill off The Tech Industry's Walking Dead(tm)?

    I will say this about China: what if it turns out that they've condemned a lot of their own people to die in contaminated isolation lock-down because Winnie the Piece-of-Poo doesn't want the PRC government to "lose face"?

    This kind of behavior could earn China its own special phrase like what Sierra Leone got with "blood diamonds".

    The PRC government media flak pushers will cry RACISS, but a lot of people outside China are not going to give a shit because deep down, people don't want to deal with homicidal maniacs ...

    Two to three percent in China alone ... what's that look against the big death tolls of history, such as that of the Nazi regime, Josef Stalin, and Pol Pot?

    Maybe we'll find out, maybe not, but in the meantime, let's keep that prison camp milk burning like in "Force 10 from Navarone", shall we?

    IF YOU DID NOT JOIN THE MOVEMENT
    TO PANIC WEEKS AGO AND AVOID THE RUSH
    YOU MUST HAVE IMPAIRED SURVIVAL INSTINCTS ...
    WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU????? :-)

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  2. Panicking causes people to make bad decisions. I live in an earthquake zone and lived through Loma Prietta. So I've always got a certain amount of earthquake water. I bumped it up in stages last week as things got crazier. I might even bump it up more. Plus, my house is an awesome zombie structure. I've got a deck and a courtyard I can seal off if I need to. I can grow some food.

    But yeah - early last week I decided there wasn't a zero percent chance we could get locked down. Especially with Mr S. being two degrees of separation from people back from Wuhan.

    "You might actually need to keep up your El-Bowla regimen for at least sixty days, and you might also already be surrounded by a lot of carriers."

    Yeah.. Been reading rumors about that. It's not unthinkable it was floating around at CES. Glad I started my elbowla system early. It usually takes me until summer until I'm completely off of it. You laugh, but it takes a lot of discipline to not touch things with your bare hands when you open them. And we have all these ridiculous touch screens. So I basically alcohol swab off after shopping. I keep a bunch of them in my camera bag.

    I'm not much into conspiracy theories, but wouldn't it be crazy if it was a bioweapon and they took themselves out accidentally?

    ReplyDelete
  3. "So I've always got a certain amount of earthquake water."

    There's always at least two hundred gallons of water here.

    It's over-chlorinated with unscented bleach and it's a bitch to move and refill every year if I haven't used it up. Almost all of it is in those blue cubes sold by some company up in Canada, and those fuckers weigh something like 62 pounds each when full.

    Refilling it takes me most of a day and I have an incredibly sore back and sore everything else after doing it, even if I move the blue cubes around on a furniture cart.

    I gave up years ago on trying to find a decent water filter that could also filter viruses, and so I over-chlorinate the water and then filter it to get safe drinkable water. Even a Pur filter or a Zero Water filter can do that, but I also have a couple of Katadyn filters that are good for a few hundred gallons each per filter cartridge.

    There's apparently a new one out from a Florida company that can do 0.02 micron at high volume, but all of mine do 0.2 micron at best, which isn't good enough for viruses.

    "So I basically alcohol swab off after shopping."

    Quaternary ammonium salts are your friend with this stuff -- they'll kill off the cold virus and all of the other coronaviruses.

    This is stuff like benzalkonium chloride and benzethonium chloride as well as tetrabutyl ammonium bromide and the alkyl dimethyl ammonium chloride salts in such things as Lysol "Pro" in the orange and blue spray bottles.

    So I have some cleaning wipes that have this stuff in them, and I use them to wipe down the phone once I've extracted it from its case. As for the case, I give it a deeper cleaning by washing it with soap that contains more of that stuff, and I let it dry overnight.

    Coronaviruses can't survive more than about a half day at most out in the open, in case you were wondering, but they could survive at least two days in a wet and dirty environment.

    "... but wouldn't it be crazy if it was a bioweapon ..."

    [REDACTED]

    Actually literally and not figuratively not a joke.

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  4. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, February 28, 2020 1:36:00 AM

    "... Firefox maker Mozilla ..."

    Why can't this asshole "charity" just die already?

    Ever since their big browser "overhaul", it's just so fucked up.

    It looks fucked up, it acts fucked up, it can't use old plug-ins and demands attention from developers for stuff that's worked for years, which is passive-aggressively fucked up.

    So literally I would like to see Mozilla FOAD. :-)

    BTW, something interesting happened: I left my browser up for a few days after that last comment, and when I returned to have a look around the Internet with that browser session, Cloudflare was doing something to block me.

    After restarting the browser and redeploying my Cloudflare workaround, their captcha stuff isn't blocking me anymore, but it was a total block where the captcha challenges kept coming yet nothing would get through.

    So since T.H.E.Y. want to play this kind of game, here's the first two clues.

    1. The trail starts in the 1920s.
    2. The trail does not start in China.

    Want to do this again Cloudflare? :-)

    ReplyDelete