Comment by r_hoods_ghost
4 years ago
1. Deglobalization accelerates as the Bretton woods organisations become increasingly irrelevant and trade moves to being bloc and region based.
2. The web continues to fracture into separate Euro, Sino, Russo and Americano nets due to increasingly different views in privacy, surveillance, freedom of speech etc. SV companies are slow to pick up on this.
3. Tech layoffs in the Bay Area intensify. When hiring begins again a large number of the new hires are either remote or are in other geographical areas where labour costs are lower.
4. The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely.
5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue.
6. There is another crypto mini boom lasting at least a couple of months that sees Bitcoin double in price. This ends when it turns out that yet another exchange was being used as a personal piggy bank.
7. The UK continues its long, slow slide into economic ruin, driven by the general incompetence of its political class. (admittedly you could have made this prediction most years since 1945 and been right,but still)
> The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely.
You assume that with the new technology the total number of people needed in this sector will be reduced, but I think the industry will simply adjust, and the only visible result would be that more content will be produced by the same number of people. This is a competitive market (your success is determined by the amount of money you are willing to spend on producing content about your product), so the same people will just get their share for 1000x the work they have been doing in the past.
> the only visible result would be that more content will be produced by the same number of people
That’s not what they predicted; the “we just get more content! People won’t lose their jobs…” argument aside, the market that is willing to spend money on content seems reasonably likely to drop off.
People will continue to want content, yes.
People will continue to buy content, yes.
…however, it seems difficult to believe that as companies that can produce the content significantly cheaper and at higher volumes emerge, traditional providers of eg. stock photography, will manage to convince people to keep paying the same amount for it.
I personally predict a wave of race to the bottom startups that cheaply generate content, driving the costs to consumers down. Yay.
However, companies will accordingly reduce their spend, and move off of traditional providers onto the “super cheap” new comers, resulting in an overall collapse in the total spend on content, even as companies get more for the money they do spend.
There’s plenty of precedent for this.
If the marginal cost of producing X drop to virtually zero, people don’t just consume more of it (well, maybe a bit more), they mostly just spend less money and buy the cheapest product.
"Stock photography" covers a lot of ground. I don't see company art directors shifting to generative AI--at least not yet--for a variety of reasons, including legal concerns. However, you'll probably see a lot of use for people looking for graphics, any graphics to illustrate things. But for content like that, people today are probably mostly using Creative Commons or (more commonly) just grabbing stuff of the Internet.
That's a statement about 2023. I don't pretend to know what will be the case in five years.
A stock photo agency can exist even if the cost of acquiring a particular picture is exactly zero.
Their paid service would be / always has been curation and selection. Customers rarely need a random picture (else they just use unsplash), they need a particular picture conveying a particular idea / mood / style.
I agree with the original premise. It is a repetition of the history of graphic design: around 2000 you would need a graphic designer to create a good website, it took time and several iterations. It worked similarly for years until Twitter Bootstrap appeared and many jumped to use it as is or do small custom changes.
But, collapse completely is a bit extreme.
Yeah I think I over egged this slightly. But I imagine if you're in a team of half a dozen copywriters like a friend if mine that by the end of 2023 there's only going to be one left.
I interpret "collapse" to mean "many people doing it full-time lose their jobs and the market price of the outputs drops significantly". In which case I agree with the assertion that collapse is coming soon, although having played with the tools quite a bit I'm not convinced on 2023. Definitely by the end of 2025.
'''3. Tech layoffs in the Bay Area intensify. When hiring begins again a large number of the new hires are either remote or are in other geographical areas where labour costs are lower.'''
That is something that I believe it is already happening. I have the feeling that Senior Developers wages are going up in my country no matter what happens on Twitter or Facebook.
Depends on how they're benchmarked. If you're a non US employee doing senior dev work at a FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company then I think you are probably correct.
Which country you are in? What is the average salary for senior developer in your country?
In Spain. In the past it was quite hard to break the 40-50K euros barrier.
In the last year I have seen more and more offers on the 65-75k range. With puntal 100K.
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> When hiring begins again a large number of the new hires are either remote or are in other geographical areas where labour costs are lower.
I think this is a definite possibility too. I understand the reasons why US tech comp is higher than the rest of the world, but I don't see why it is _that_ much higher - I'm not sure it's sustainable in the new remote-work world.
I think SV will continue to pay top prices for world class talent to relocate there and work in office. Think AI PhDs, chip designers, systems programmers, graphics experts, and the like. But the days of 100k interns and 300k SWE 4's are over, and that portion of the workforce will devolve to the national average.
I pray you are wrong
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Americans work 15-20% more hours, at least compared to Europeans (<2 weeks vacation compared to 4-6, etc.), and have to pay huge amounts for healthcare.
In almost all fields, Americans make more money.
The tech 2X is that historically hiring was done for the Bay Area, where cost of living is crazy, and also just basic supply and demand. If a few dozen engineers can build $100M-1B+ of value, it makes sense to pay them a lot (of investors’ money).
I know, I know. But look at the difference in price worldwide of developers (it's so much more than 10-20%). Think of the 10s of thousands of engineers paid insane starting comp to do feature-work at the tech giants. I don't know, but I think this may well become a thing of the past in the next decade.
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If i took a random sampling of a few dozen engineers in silicon valley they could build $0 of value most likely.
Globalization will always be too tempting to ignore when some countries have labor costs that are ten times lower than others. Large companies will continue to have enough political power to veto the laws that would be required to reverse globalization.
Globalization is a bit more than just companies setting up shop where labour is cheapest. It is a rules based order that relies on institutions like the World Bank, IMF, a bunch of treaties and other institutions and a set of norms about how relations between States should be constructed. It also relies on an elite consensus that globalization is good. I think there is a sense however that this consensus is breaking down, hence the turn towards nativism in various polities. The increasing willingness of China and Russia to flex their muscles and (re)build regional power blocks means that while international trade may not decrease it may no longer be "global" in the way it is now.
Globalization then will continue along the lines of cultural and political alliances. EU is one striking example of globalization, of you take a look from a perspective of 100 or even 50 years ago. Advanced chip will still continue to be made in Korea and (hopefully) Taiwan on machines built in Europe for companies that build products in the US and in Japan.
What is going to dwindle or even cease is cooperation with not-exactly-friendly countries, like, well, China and obviously Russia, and maybe not exactly hostile but culturally remote, like Saudi Arabia.
India and Africa will remain important cultural and economical battlegrounds between the West and China. China is investing a huge lot into African countries, and I suppose the more advanced of them, like Nigeria, will become the new "tigers" with explosive economic growth in the coming 15-25 years, like Korea in 1980s.
So I'd recommend checking out Peter Zeihan but he argues globalization isn't a natural economic result but rather globalization came about as the US agreed to allow other countries to participate in the first world market on the condition that they don't ally with the Soviets. Thus arguing globalization was only ever a security not economic policy and now that the security problem it is trying to solve is no longer there globalization is failing.
I came here to say the same and I really like your description of the core idea of his last book. After reading it (and with some caveats and small disagreements such as the cost of dealing with Climate Change) it is clear how the US has been the gluing force of globalization for around 70 years as securing mechanism against the Soviets.
Zeihan is a quack who is blinded by nationalism. Capital will always chase cheap labor since shipping is cheap.
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also globalisation is about the only thing other than morals keeping us from fighting each other.
> 2. The web continues to fracture into separate Euro, Sino, Russo and Americano nets due to increasingly different views in privacy, surveillance, freedom of speech etc. SV companies are slow to pick up on this.
You forget the emergence of the creator economy, smaller communities and the move to the early, syndicated nature of the early 2000s Internet. That internet has no problems with any of those. All of the issues you list were created by establishment actors for their benefit.
Not true, unfortunately.
Early internet: As long as there was copper, you generally could exchange {protocol} (i.e. HTTP, FTP, POP3, ...) to {person} in {country}, quite freely.
Current internet: Many egress and ingress connections are banned by {government agency} of {country}.
Future internet: What parent comment was predicting: An increasing number of governments increasingly aggressively ban an increasing number of internet services (i.e. connections).
It's really not that hard to imagine, look at China or Russia or many other countries (e.g. Middle-East). Very aggresive white/blacklists of internet services.
This is the "fracturing" the parent comment is alluding to.
> It's really not that hard to imagine, look at China or Russia or many other countries (e.g. Middle-East). Very aggresive white/blacklists of internet services.
Part of the problem is people thinking that such countries are creating the fragmentation whereas it were the US companies who literally partitioned internet through algorithms, walled gardens, filters and blacklists. A national firewall can be circumvented by VPN and many do. Its much harder to circumvent whatever limitations such corporations that control large parts of the internet create.
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The division is not only in network infrastructure, but in human minds as well.
#1 and #3 are contradicting each other. If deglobalization accelerates, why would hiring be anywhere in the world where labor costs are lower ? Shouldn't it be the opposite ?
Also, I disagree with #1 and agree with #3 to some extent. I think Globalization is already here and it will only intensify. It is not a zero sum game and all sides can benefit from it considering they stop thinking of Globalization as a bad thing.
An alternative to globalization is not necessarily isolationism, which I agree is unlikely, but instead the re establishment of distinct blocs that operate largely independently of each other, according to distinct sets of rules, as during the Cold War when you had the (Sino) Soviet bloc, the "West", and a large number of countries that mostly traded with just their immediate neighbours or with former colonial powers. The current, second, period of globalized trade (the first ended in 1914) is built on a rules based international order that is beginning to break down for a variety of reasons, including China's increased economic power, the reemergence of nativism in various polities, Russia's desire to reestablish it's empire (I know that's a simplification but not by that much) and an increasing belief in the EU that the USA is no longer interested in being a guarantor of it's security. A deglobalised world is one where trade still happens, but it is much more likely to be constrained within blocs and be carried out according to different rules and norms depending on where you are.
I suppose that right now the US is doing a colossal job of showing the EU how it's interested in protecting the Europe. The amount of total US aid to Ukraine, which is standing between the newly expansionist Russia and the West, is comparable or exceeds the EU aid, and its military part is significantly larger than EU's.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303432/total-bilateral-...
There are 48 US states beyond New York and California.
Globalization is only good for GDP and only on first order thinking.
Shipping things that could easily have been made local. Second order cost -- Environmental damage.
Concentration of ecological damage (eg smog in China, clear cuts instead of selective foresting etc).
Decreasing the varietals of foods brought to market so they're stable for shipping , easier to grade / machine. Second order cost -- higher risk to crop failures, loss of heirloom / heritage kinds.
IMO much of "Globalization" is really just power and market arbitrage. Things are inherently cheaper or easier there, the people are just poorer and more desperate. As soon as they have a middle class the "advantage" disappears.
> Shipping things that could easily have been made local. Second order cost -- Environmental damage.
One thing I'd like to mention is that sea shipping is actually very efficient, and the things being shipped usually have much more CO2 associated with their production and use than the shipping itself. For shipping cars:
> A cargo ship produces 16.14 grams of CO2 per metric ton of goods shipped per kilometer.
From https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-ecol...
If we say a car weighs 2 tons and is shipped 10,000km, that emits 323kg of CO2. But in a year, the average car produces 4 tons of CO2 (in the US): https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
And for food it's similar:
> Transport typically accounts for less than 1% of beef’s GHG emissions: choosing to eat local has very minimal effects on its total footprint.
From https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
I continue to believe that eating locally sourced meat is just a way for people to feel good while continuing to damage the environment 99% as much.
And one last thing:
> As soon as they have a middle class the "advantage" disappears.
And how do these poor countries acquire a middle class without resources or trade?
This isn't to say that I disagree with your overall point that going full on globalist has hidden costs. National security concerns are often not addressed for one.
> the people are just poorer and more desperate
Precisely because of this, globalization is destined to stay. It is the ultimate wet dream of capital: an endless reserve of cheap labor.
Marx might not have got the prognosis right, but his diagnosis still holds.
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The chief beneficiary of Bretton Woods was the non-West but I think deglobalization will be seen as simply a disengagement with the non-West. There will continue to be brisk trade between Italy and South Korea. There will be less trade between China and the United States.
"The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely."
The only thing stopping this from happening is that AI still hasn't figured out how to render hands very well.
What would fuel the crypto mini boom in your view?
Wash trading by the 1% of crypto whales.
>5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue.
Who's going to fight for TikTok? Trump tried to ban it, so GOP will be onboard. If it's a serious attempt, Biden and the Dems will be too. They're almost there anyway. So who'd be for Tiktok? The youth? They don't vote anyway, and will just move on to the next fashionable social network.
I think the argument against TikTok being banned is the inability of US government to regulate tech at all, even if both sides agree in concept. Casey Newton talks about this.
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Those don't look like predictions, more like a wishful thinking of a person with close ties to russia
With top notch analysis like this, you should consider claiming a salary from the fifth directorate of the Federal Security Service. This is just the kind of stuff that'll allow them to continue building on their stellar track record of 2022!
I am sure they are also willing to pay big rubles for people sabotaging the ability of western countries to have meaningful debates and discussions. Messing with the reality finding mechanism of your opponent is as good as it gets during wartime. And that is most effective if you overdrive the narratives people already believe.
edit: Case and point, OP is flagged and no longer visible. This is how successful Russian information operations look like. There is nothing the Kremlin can publish that is going to convince any meaningful section of western society, but getting them to put on blinders is incredibly easy. And once they are on, we are screwed. When stuff becomes unthinkable it becomes incredibly easy to exploit. Not to mention that believing your own propaganda targeted at the morale of English speaking Russian soldiers is already really dangerous.
I'm not sure of your motivation either, but we all have our biases; those are powerful predictions, and it's a shame you've been hit with such a downvote attack.
I would not be surprised if people downvote this sort of comment since—no matter the predictions—it seems like an attempt to piggyback off the parent post to make more people see your own post when just posting a top-level comment would have been more appropriate. Not trying to imply intent, though.
I intentionally made predictions that could be verified after a year but would also be minority views on this site, since repeating where I agree with the majority does not add to the debate. Sure, they won't all happen, but say, a 50% chance of happening or better, and made a sufficient number of them that I expect a lot of interesting predictions will take place. With the Turkey/Syria meeting, Erdogan has already been asking for it, and at some point Assad will give in. US troops there are surrounded and having trouble resupplying. For the mutual aid treaty, this is based on some under the radar meetings already taking place. That Ukraine lost 100K was inadvertently leaked by Ursula but really everyone paying attention knew -- for example they announced they needed to do a new mobilization of 100K to replace lost men. 100K is most likely a sever under-estimate. Presence of Polish, Georgian, and other troops in Ukraine is already well known, but they haven't been focused on in the West yet. The arrivals of 1000 dead bodies to Poland is forcing the issue into public debate. Other documents have also been leaked.
But this just goes to show how strong Narrative enforcement is in the west. Downvoting is nothing, you have people denied banking services, getting fired, put on no-fly lists, fined, and in Europe even imprisoned for speech -- for questioning NATO narratives. So HN downvotes is not important, it just reveals the various narrative enforcement mechanisms at work even here, but with a lot less at stake.
If this was a Chinese message board or Russian message board, I could make opposite predictions and be met with much more interesting debate and intellectual curiosity, as their information control mechanisms aren't nearly as sophisticated, and as a society they tend to be much more pragmatic and intellectually curious. The West is unique in being so ideological in the present moment - basically it is going through something similar to the cultural revolution period in China, and of course that was not a time to go against official narratives.
But in any case -- just wait a year. I'll be happy to compare my predictions in Dec 2023 against others'. It would be funny -- and quite appropriate -- if the some of the most interesting and accurate predictions of the last year were flagged on this site. But that's up to HN management, and they most likely have limited capacity to stand up to information warfare policies in the west and the hordes of professionals with hurt feelings flagging everything they disagree with. I don't take it personally at all, it's just a sign of the times.
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With use of terms like "President Harris" I think it is clear who is the more biased person here.
> Around the same time, it's clear that there are more than 200K Ukrainian dead and all Narratives of them winning the war or even maintaining a stalemate are gone, even from western media.
I am curious as to what leads you to make this prediction?
Not him, but from current predictions to 200k isnt that big of a jump. If i recall we are likely at over 100k dead servicemen (matching Russian losses) and something around 40k dead civilians.
Not so sure about such a drastic shift myself, but its a possibility if you think of it in terms of having overdone the whole propaganda aspect and inadvertently triggering a reaction. Especially as having observed it for the better part of the last year, i suspect Russia has been goating western media/commentators/politicians into especially brazen stuff. To give an example for especially brazen instances, there is the propaganda channel "Perun" on youtube who does a great job framing itself as open source intelligence. When it came to the Ukrainian Kherson offensive he however dropped the ball and transparently crossed the line from miss- to dissinformation when he
1) Congratulated the Ukrainian government on "preserving manpower" by banning military age males from leaving the country
2) Stating that the Ukrainian military was made up solely from "volunteers", thus the great fighting spirit
3) Congratulating the Ukrainian government on its willingness to take losses in Kherson with the strategic aim of worsening the Russian supply situation
Add to stuff like this the reports that got brazenly silenced like the Amnesty International report about Ukraine having soldiers positioned in schools and hospitals. The rational being that Russia knew about all prewar military positions in case you wondered.
Its the old problem of exploiting a bogey man too brazenly and overdoing propaganda. Once you overdo it, you might be in for a rude awakening about the extend of stuff that stops working.
edit: Minute 26:06 in the Video from 17th of September (Seven months from Kyiv to Kharkiv), Minute 27:30 and 41:40 of the Kherson video from 20th November. Binge watched them so not sure where he mentioned the volunteer part, but the preserving manpower with ban to leave the country should be mentioned in the Ukrainian mobilization video. But also referenced at around min 13 in the Kyiv to Kharkiv video.
For Amnesty Report and the backlash see https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/ukraine-ukrai...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/07/amnesty-intern...
Honestly it sounds like they are sick in their soul rather than coming from a place of logic or insight.
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It's not a very optimistic picture is it? Definitely feels like we're heading in to one of those "things are going to get worse before they get better" periods
This is optimistic from OP's point of view.
As some other has pointed out this sounds way too disruptive to be true (how exactly would 200k deaths change the entire prospect of the war?).
Why would the US need to replace zelensky with a "puppet"? Ukraine wants US boots in Ukraine.
China recovery of their GDP is going to happen how? They got multiple issues systemically destroying their GDP growth (pollution, corruption, housing market collapse, over fishing, bad policies being enforced with no room for negotiation, etc. ).
Just to name a few.
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This sounds like you're reading a lot of Tom Clancy. Maybe too much.
Or as other commenter said, sympathising with everything that's against the "bad Amis".
LOL at Saudi Arabia and Iran rapprochement. It's more likely that Putin wins the peace Nobel prize.
My predictions are all contrary to yours.
So you predict the end of the dollar in 2023?
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7. Along with the USA, let's not forget that.
https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-wo...
I think you're more or less spot on, but very far with the last one on UK. The economy is more resilient than you think, especially the City. I have a feeling the war ironically helped. It prevented the finance from moving out to the continent.
While the city may be resilient ( and I'm a bit dubious about that) I think the economy outside of London is increasingly fragile as the past decade of under investment in infrastructure is really starting to bite. The levels of political instability also make the UK less attractive than it has been in the past and I can't see us getting through 2023 without at least one self inflicted constitutional crisis around either Northern Ireland or Scotland.
The UK outside of London is already a relatively decrepit place. Tourists visiting London get an incredibly distorted view of the country.
The UK government should recover after its aquisition by Samsung. The new owners promise streamlined design of all civic life features.
The economy is resilient, but steel toe cap boots can only help so much when you keep shooting yourself in the foot.
What was it about the war that prevented finance moving out to the continent?
> The economy is more resilient…
Sure, but OP said “continues to decline”, not “completely collapses.”
The inflation situation in the UK is getting out of hand. With Brexit and post Covid, companies are struggling for staff and the prices being charged for everything are eye watering.
I’m not sure how that plays out, but hyperinflation can’t be good.
I've been expecting hyperinflation since the Brexit vote.
Not sure the UK is there yet, but at some point the situation will no longer be salvageable.
London is resilient. The rest of the country will continue its long decline.
There are a few other cities that have done and are continuing to do well such as Manchester, but the North East continues to decline, Liverpool is betting that being a Freeport (again) will save it (it won't), Birmingham is just a bit rubbish, Wales is independent enough from Westminster to be ignored and not independent enough to change its own destiny, and Scotland (or the SNP) desperately wants to leave the UK, rejoin the EU, keep the oil, become a wind, wave, tech and finance powerhouse and also have a rainbow sparkle unicorn pony. It's not a great picture.