Comment by asdfman123
2 years ago
Increasingly I think the financialization of everything makes us less capable of understanding the world.
"Red Lobster failed because of X corporate restructuring," "Red Lobster succeeded due to Y ad campaign." People go to restaurants for reasons completely unrelated to things like that. Those things are important, but just constitute the small slice of reality that can easily be measured.
I saw a Twitter thread arguing how the video game Stardew Valley succeeded due to the way it was marketed. Marketing is important, but maybe the game succeeded because it was cute and had a soul and is fun to play. You can't measure that.
The problem is that executives will ask "what makes Stardew Valley successful?" and never make it to this answer:
A developer who genuinely cares about the quality of the game, interacts positively with the community around it, and makes decisions that demonstrate his caring for the game and the community. Specifically, decisions that often leave revenue on the table, particularly in the short term but arguably in the long term as well.
That sort of caring is largely impossible for private equity, and it's really hard to successfully fake.
I think there's an even more-overlooked factor that most people never get to: Good-old random chance in timing and markets and events.
We humans are hardwired to hate that idea, we always want an understandable story with distinct causes and effects... So much so that we will often invent one, even for things we "know" are random, like: "Okay, now the next one will almost certainly be heads, because..."
It's a failure of our internal simulatory abilities. People are usually much more confident in their counterfactual beliefs than they have any right to be. Self reinforced internal narratives ("if only this had happened then this would have happened") seem necessary in order for us to maintain confidence in our predictive abilities. I wonder if we were truly aware of the surrounding cloud of possible alternative outcomes, if it'd be paralyzing for otherwise mundane activities. How many times do we escape death by the thinnest margins everyday, without ever being the wiser.
That's because caring and liquidity/fungibility are at opposing poles. People sell cattle but not their pet cows. Something like that.
We live in a time where almost everything is getting worse. Products are getting smaller, service is getting worse, businesses are closing, quality is going down. I don't think I've ever experienced such an obvious decline in commercial society in my entire life.
Is it the financialization of everything? Is that we reached peak growth and profit increases are only possibly through extreme optimization? Is it financial inequality?
Oh man I FEEL this deeply.
I was just wondering if it's just me feeling like everything is on a highway to terrible.
- Prices in my city, just this year, have felt like they've jumped 10 or 15 percent.
- I've been working in tech for a decade now and for the first time a new company simply refused to negotiate salary.
- I feel financially worse off than 5 years ago making a third of what I make now.
- Housing prices have exploded. I worry I will never own a home.
- Denmark has started deleting public holidays to save our social welfare state.
- Health care is the worst it's ever been. You can not get basic health diagnostics for most things in Denmark without screaming.
- Europe has a literal war at our doorstep.
- Public transit prices have jumped in the last year.
- Good quality grocery stores have closed and been replaced with discount chains. The quality of the produce is terrible.
- Democracy feels increasingly shittier and hijacked by two extremist poles of very-online meme-thought.
- Gen Z is looking like the most garbage generation of the last two centuries with more mental illness than any generation in history.
- Everything has become a political lightning rod.
I feel exploited by invisible forces I can't see or touch or name. I feel as if I have no mastery over my own life. I no longer know why I continue to contribute to a society that does not give anything back to me for my labor and exploits the best years of my life for taxes that do not improve my lot in life.
Can someone tell me everything is going to get better?
> Gen Z is looking like the most garbage generation of the last two centuries with more mental illness than any generation in history.
I'm not at all Gen Z (late Gen X), but you can't put all of that on them. They've had many formative years during a lot of the points you've listed.
> Can someone tell me everything is going to get better?
That's never guaranteed. You can only control what you take in, how you cognitively frame it, and how you react to it.
>Can someone tell me everything is going to get better?
Yes but only after it will get much worse.
3 replies →
I see this all around me here in the US, and feel the same way that you do. Ironically, some Americans see this as a US-centric problem, and look at places like Denmark as an example of a country that still has its shit together, but your own comment seems to confirm that we're in the midst of a global cultural malaise that could probably give the 1970s a run for their money.
We have a total lack of competent leadership across all institutions -- political, commercial and social -- increasing extremism and authoritarianism from every political faction, and cynical short-term thinking from every economic institution. Everything is drowning in mediocrity and pessimism, and society is increasingly dysfunctional in every aspect. Extremists keep proposing authoritarian political solutions, but I see their proposals only as even worse iterations of the problem. What can we do about it, apart from admitting defeat and going off-grid in the mountains?
> Gen Z is looking like the most garbage generation of the last two centuries
Have you ever met a millennial?
t. 1992 cusper
3 replies →
You are in Denmark? WOW!! From here in the US, my impression of Denmark is a small country of really smart people with gorgeous women having really good lives!!! Your post questions that impression ....
Here in the US, there are what seem to be related issues. Opinions about what is wrong and why differ. It can seem that we don't address the issues or what is wrong, for example, it can appear that the media believes that making clear the issues and faults are too deep for the audience of the media. For example, so far I've yet to see good engineering style graphs of even the basic measures from the economy, health, education, happiness, etc. In simple terms, the birth rate is so low we are going extinct -- some graphs over time might provide some insight. To avoid going extinct should be worth some graphs of related data?
Here is one guess: Some people want more government involvement, activity, services, ..., at the national level. Involved are money and power, money collected from taxes and/or borrowed and then spent and the people spending the money getting power. Then for the money the guess is that the spending is too inefficient, that is, too often wasted. For the power, it can stop what might be solutions. So, with the waste, we are throwing away our efforts, and with the power we are blocked from better approaches.
For this view, the US has some old images, from history, the movies, some parts of education, and even from some of recent history: So, the old images are from, say, the movie The Big Sky from the 1830s of 20 or so men and one Native Indian woman leaving Saint Louis on the Mississippi River (major US river from the north east going south and dumping into the Gulf of Mexico) and the Missouri River (from the northwest of the US close to the Pacific Ocean and flowing ~2000 miles to the Mississippi) to trade with the Blackfoot tribe to give them woven blankets, guns, tools and get beaver pelts.
The whole effort was lawless, that is, no government, laws, police, political power, regulations. So there was fighting, killing. No medical care, so there was suffering. There were lots of injuries from struggles with the river. It was all highly risky with lots of struggles and losses but in the end successful.
There were more such movies about the US, people on their own, risking everything, fighting, struggling, having failures, in the end being successful. There was Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers (had a bicycle shop), etc.
To the present, there were two guys at Stanford University in a project for indexing the contents of libraries. They thought of indexing the Web sites on the Internet and were offered ~$1 million for their work and Web site. They turned down the $1 million, started a company, and had success. It was all risky. It's now worth ~$1 trillion, called Google. Other successes, risky, one or a few founders, include Microsoft, Walmart, FedEx, Facebook, Amazon, Burger King, McDonald's. One guy, sole, solo founder, used some old Dell computers, an early version of Microsoft's Windows and Web software ASP.NET, built a romantic matchmaking service, grew it, ..., and sold out for ~$550 million.
Mostly these successes are examples of significant increases in economic productivity, that is, how much utility get from each hour of work. Personal computers? Killed off the typewriters with just astounding increases in productivity; same for email; Zoom, .... In cars, using digital electronics to get fuel mixture and spark timing a lot better resulted in the engines lasting much longer -- if looked carefully into what was going on with the old carburetors and breaker point ignitions and the huge ways they were wrong (unburned gasoline diluted the engine oil and, thus, wore out the main engine parts) can understand. Tires -- progress in the synthetic rubber chemistry made the tires last much longer, maybe 5 times as long.
The theme is, as in the movie, leave individuals with a minimum of taxes and government power and let them try and take the risks. The victories can generate massive increases in productivity, wealth, and a better life.
Heck, I like music, A. Vivaldi, J. Bach, ..., S. Barber. Used to be, had to go to live performances. Then we got audio tapes, vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, and the Internet. So, now just from a few keystrokes I can get terrific performances of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, Bach's Chaconne, ... Barber's Adagio for Strings.
Those are some of the ideas that have floated around. Money and power: The idea that just these two are the main causes of all of society's problems is tough to accept. But, for the problems in Denmark, maybe these two should get some attention.
5 replies →
Sometimes it's monopoly. Not this time, though; Red Lobster was a minor player. Red Lobster was a leveraged buyout. (Most "private equity" is leveraged buyouts. The buyer seldom puts up full cash.) Plus the equity to debt conversion.
Tax law favors debt too much.
I've been thinking about this a lot too. It just feels like all ends of the spectrum, for a consumer, are crashing down. Everything is harvesting and selling data, stock at stores is low and usually favors the generic (and sometimes lesser) option over the higher quality names... Apps like facebook, twitter, IG, tiktok, reddit, and youtube are making life worse for their users. Overall, it is kind of a depressing time to observe.
It is usually from the wreckage that the next big things emerge.
Just how these things work.
In case it helps you, I find the following products / services have improved their quality and offering in the past decade:
TVs: I get a much nicer TV now for the same amount what I paid for a crappier one in 2012
Smartphones: very powerful and do a lot of things better (eg. camera, connectivity)
Entertainment: Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Prime, ... you can pick 1-2 of those, binge all you want and then rotate. Costs < 30$/mo
Travel options: Ok, even in 2014, there were very good travel options. But I see a lot more options these days (direct flights from SF, more obscure locations on the travel map etc)
Cars: I bought a new car in 2021 (previous one was 2010). New one is cheaper and has some nicer features (rear view & other cameras, various warning signals)
Sorry, I don't think that helps at all. If anything, it comes across with a "You should skip the avocado toast" energy.
The vast majority of these things are not all that important to most people, not like prices of groceries, household goods, clothing, energy, childcare costs, transport costs..etc.
I don't care that cars have nicer features now, if buying a new car is most of my annual wages pre-tax. I don't care that I can fly to more interesting destinations from SF when I can't afford to go to urgent care without having to switch to rice and beans for a week. I do on the other hand care when my grocery bills double unless I spent multiple hours a week collecting coupons and driving around to find sales. I care when I have to wake up in the morning shivering because I can't afford to keep the heat at even close to a comfortable temperature.
1 reply →
It’s what inverting the age pyramid feels like as the average age of society keeps increasing and risk mitigation becomes the meaning of life, espoused in phrases like ‘stay safe!’
We are slowly in the midst of going through a black plague of sorts when it comes to the % change in population that is occurring, except we will be left with an elderly population instead of a dynamic healthy and young population.
Corporate consolidation, some would say. IIRC, at some point in the last some decades, the US got the bright idea that antitrust isn't really worth enforcing if potentially anticompetitive business practices and mergers can also result in lower prices.
That kinda works— Until a small handful of corporations gain enough power that there is not really any meaningful competition anymore, and they can effectively engage in price-gouging with monopoly power. Which has now happened, apparently, in most industries. …Hence everything getting worse.
…I think there was an article I read some time back that explained it really well. But I can't seem to find it, so these links will have to do. The Guardian/Youtube ones might seem clickbaity, but that man was also Clinton's Secretary of Labor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/11/compan...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMZKegjJurk
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/08/biden-assault-monop...
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down
https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-...
https://news.yale.edu/2024/04/24/lax-antitrust-enforcement-l...
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/675862
Ticketmaster, Facebook, grocery prices, even the Boeing 737 mess— I suppose a lot of these problems do basically come down to a company or an oligopoly getting so powerful that nobody can hold it accountable anymore.
[dead]
Most people used to believe in Jesus Christ with values built on the Bible. That was true from lay people to Ivy League colleges to even folks in prison. His blessings with His accountability both made many good things happen and limited lots of damage we’d cause. America was prosperous as the Bible said it would be.
Over the decades, people turned away from God and those values to chase new ones: money first, pleasure first, self/ego first, atheism, subjectivism, Marxism. These by themselves, if increasing enough, guarantee massive amounts of suffering for people. Whereas, the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians only does good for people when you increase it. Society made their choice.
As in Romans 1, God handed us over to our depraved minds and sins to let us feel the full consequences of selfish, godless, subjective societies. Everything has gotten worse. The solution is to repent and turn back to what God gave that worked before. Then, gradually improve ourselves in any weak areas. Wr must bake righteous values back into our families, businesses, and government. Inward change creates positive, outward results.
>America was prosperous as the Bible said it would be.
The book of Job was written specifically to denounce the idea that morality means that you'll prosper.
1 reply →
I'm a little bit concerned about Jesus crashing the fishing industry by dumping product onto the market at prices that are too low for anybody else to compete with. It would be especially bad if it triggers some kind of broader trade war. It would be better if there was some way to quantify the risk involved.
As an American Millennial, all my life I've seen Christians who talk about love and charity on Sunday, and then work the rest of the week to lower taxes on the rich, shame women, and get as many guns into as many American hands as possible. Ultimately, they found their political apotheosis in Donald Trump, who seems to be the physical manifestation of the deadly sins. If he was created in a lab by Atheists to prove that Christians are hypocrites above all else, they could not have done a better job.
I'd suggest that if they want more Americans to live the values preached by Jesus, they should try starting with themselves. I don't know how many people they have turned into Atheists with this behavior, but I can say for sure they did for me, and I suspect they have alienated many others as well.
2 replies →
The number of wars and genocides that have resulted from arguing over whose god is the right one dwarfs all other ills.
Get that fixed and then maybe I’ll listen.
4 replies →
When and where did that really ever work? Evidence please. The bible says nothing about America. I assume that abolishing slavery was where we turned away from biblical principles.
10 replies →
Thank you GodGPT
> Over the decades, people turned away from God and those values to chase new ones:
Most people leaving the church today do so because of how hateful and toxic the modern US church has become over the recent decades. If you don't like Christians leaving the church for Marxism, you shouldn't have let Marxism be the only ideology loving thy neighbors while the church was too busy chasing the delusions of white supremacy and Christian Nationalism.
This is the reason I've always been a detractor of purely relying on "data driven decision making". Being data driven is great... if paired with intuition and common sense.
But what ends up often happening is data-driven myopia. You see some statistic that doesn't seem optimal and you end up optimizing for that instead of figuring out how it fits into the big picture.
Restaurants, at the end of the day boil down to food. You serve food. People either like the food or they don't. How many customers you get is a function of how much people like the food, how competitive the pricing on the food is, and the market you're in.
Red lobster at the end of the day suffered from people not wanting to pay what they were charging for low quality, uninspiring seafood dishes.
People nowadays are struggling more (spare me the CPI data, hedonics and other basket adjustments mean the situation for most people is quite a bit worse than it was a few years ago) and there needs to be a value prop for dining out.
> Restaurants, at the end of the day boil down to food. You serve food.
To expand on this a little, restaurants serve food in a building brought to your table by people. If the building/table/environment is dirty or just uncomfortable people don't want to be in it. If the people preparing and serving the food are doing a bad job people won't want them doing it. If a restaurant drops the quality of the food, environment, or personnel they are going to lose business.
As you say it's the value proposition. I go to a restaurant because I want to just pick a food, eat it, and leave. The "hard" parts of cooking and cleaning are someone else's job. All restaurant patrons are willing to pay some premium over the cost of the raw ingredients to save their time and effort. But as the experience gets worse that value proposition starts to erode.
For me and I imagine many people the experience doesn't need to be mind blowing. It just needs to be not shitty.
What I don't understand is the value people place on waitstaff being enthusiastic to serve you. I don't care, as long as you they take my order and check on my drinks.
5 replies →
The catch-22 is that being data-driven means being driven by what data you can measure. And that is an absolutely gobsmackingly fatal flaw.
For a 1000+ page exposition on why this is such a fatal flaw see James C. Scott's 1990s tome "Seeing Like a State" which addresses precisely this issue with receipts brought from fields ranging from agriculture, urban planning, politics, family naming systems, and more across at least 4 or 5 continents and a century.
It's an essential non-partisan read that manages to piss everyone off by being a peon to left anarchism in many ways while saying "actually yes Hayek was right about sensitivity to local conditions" and "actually the NHS and NWS are good and sometimes centralized planning isn't the worst solution".
I've not seen any direct link between them but I feel like you can draw a very firm line between it and Piketty's Capital and Ideology. You might think "wait isn't Piketty the guy who's completely data driven and publishes stupidly large amounts of xlsx files as appendices" and you'd be right except in his second book he's leaning far more heavily on sociology and just using financial data (much imputed from tax records) as support for sociological arguments that align very closely in many respects.
It's all about information. Some information can be boiled down to statistics and numbers, and that's great!
Some cannot be.
The executives who sits in their office are not going to be able to smell and taste or care about the food.
Data-driven X is a semantic trick to absolve people from owning their X and being accountable for it; decisions just happen to be the most damaging usage. Let data _inform_ you.
I call this metric fetishism
> because it was cute and had a soul and is fun to play.
I'm a full on stardew addict. I was waiting for a game to rekindle the feeling I had playing the original harvest moon on snes. natsume just made a ton of crap sequals focused on making it all 3d.
concernedape, distilled the snes version down to what made it fun and built it up fron there. it scratched the itch better than any of natsume's sequals ever could.
But a lot of games are cute and fun to play that do not succeed
Which doesn't mean they aren't necessary conditions. It just means they aren't sufficient conditions. A game needs other things too, one of which may be luck, and others of which may be incompatible with the private equity model.
Bit of a rant:
Luck. Word of mouth. Anyway, things you can't control (and can barely influence) as a developer/publisher. So, we face the notion that, perhaps, if we want people to take the risk of creating and sustaining a business for reasons other than simple profit (say, to provide a needed or pleasant service), the proposition might need to be better than, "Succeed or die (sometimes literally)." Because none of it's a sure thing, and it can't be, but sane people generally aren't going to bet their life or livelihood on a risky venture (assuming that irrational passion is a form of insanity).
I'm not convinced that is actually true. Can you think of an example? A game that has near universally good reviews but is not successful?
I understand why you think that, because when I started out making video games I thought the same thing. The reason why is that if I had heard of a video game in a review or recommendation it sold really well, but if I tried a game at random it was usually terrible. That is because there are thousands of games and most that aren't that good.
The other thing that happens is you point out a really good game and then someone will say, yeah but that's not a good game because of the art style or it's too similar to something else etc. Everyone can always come up with a quality reason why a game didn't sell. Someone has a reason not to like every game ever made. The problem with that is you can come up with the same complaints for well reviewed games. Often the review will say something like : this has been done before, or that style is a little annoying, but.. it's a great game.
Final nail in the coffin of this theory for me is having talked to many game review editors and having worked with a few, they will often tell you that they don't always expect to shape opinion as much as parrot it back. As one person used to tell me, most people read our reviews to validate their purchase or get our take on what they are playing.
And then to your challenge. Good games that didn't succeed. How about Midnight Suns, Lock's Quest, Space Marine, Company of Heroes II, Maquette.. that's just off the top of my head. If I thought about it I could make a really long list of game you've never hear of. This is probably the same for everything: music, novels, etc.
I can give you an entire studio: https://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/
They make extremely niche RPGs that routinely rate >90% in positive reviews on Steam and they've never had an actual hit. Pretty much the definition of cult classics.
I don't think you're thinking of this in the right way. Crafting media and creative products of all kinds is like playing poker. You can go all in or you can make little bets where you think you can win.
You're making the assumption that the way to win is to GO ALL IN.
When in reality whether you're making AAA games or a small indie digital artist like Darius Kazemi... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw (Went to high school with him. Amazing guy. His senior project in the electronics lab was a teddy bear that could detect seizures.)
You are just buying lottery tickets.
Arguably the best game of 2023, Alan Wake 2: https://wccftech.com/alan-wake-ii-recoup-expenses-tencent
1 reply →
That's easy dude.
System Shock 2
Psychonauts
Shenmue
Okami
Conkers bad fur day
I think Stardew filled a niche that wasn't being catered to. There were no Farm Sims that weren't a cash grab released since Farmville. Stardew caught all the people who remembered Harvest Moon fondly.
Harvest moon was actively releasing games at that time
1 reply →
Sometimes it's just timing and/or luck. Think of some TV show that was big say 10 years ago, would it do the same today? Maybe. Maybe not.
Product + Marketing + Timing + Luck = Maybe Successful
The thing is, there's no VP of Timing. There's also no VP of Luck. These factors are ignored because there's no one to champion them. Yet they are very real.
Unsuccessful Product !== Bad Product or Bad Marketing
This is what people mean when they use the term soulless capitalism. The increasing financialization of everyone leads us to optimize for the things we can measure assuming those are the things that matter, and in the end the optimizations erase everything good.
It's not the optimization per se, it's taking it too far, over-playing it to the point of removing the magic, the special sauce, etc.
> The founder of Costco told a CEO who wanted to raise the prices on Costco's hot dogs: "If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/costco-founder-kill-hotdog...
2 replies →
> I saw a Twitter thread arguing how the video game Stardew Valley succeeded due to the way it was marketed. Marketing is important, but maybe the game succeeded because it was cute and had a soul and is fun to play. You can't measure that.
Thought leaders seem to know everything except when to keep their mouth shut for once. But I digress...
If firms are being punished for poor quality, then the system is working, even with enshittification becoming more commonplace. All of the Very Important Business People can sit around and scratch their heads about why the market seems to change on them when they screw up their offering, and they can consult overpriced business fortune tellers to reassure them that it was that pesky market's fault, but that doesn't change the outcome.
I'll miss Red Lobster's cheesy biscuits, but if they've dropped the ball on quality they had this coming to them.
what about all the other cute fun to play soulful games that DONT succeed?
I think this is naive. When (for example) a private equity fund buys a casual dining chain, they will go through how the business is run in painstaking detail and try to understand exactly what makes the experience 'work' and what changes are possible or advisable.
If the olives in the salad don't taste as good or there are fewer breadsticks or the lighting makes it feel more relaxed or the greeters have more time or the menu gets shorter or the desserts arrive quicker or the pasta is less salty, that's because someone involved in that decision decided it was worth paying more for or not worth paying what they were currently paying, taking into account what factors will make people change their mind about eating there. There isn't just a random dude who sits in a room somewhere and says "let's make the food worse" based on his own whim.
If the food gets worse and it just doesn't have that same vibe anymore and you don't want to go there next time, it's because an expert in marketing or restaurant management or food design made an error in their judgement about what they could cut, what they should improve, and what they needed to keep the same. That, or the change which turned you off attracted more customers or more desirable customers who have different preferences to you.
Your restaurant changed because its corporate policy changed. But the capital structure is totally relevant in understanding why that changed.
> There isn't just a random dude who sits in a room somewhere and says "let's make the food worse" based on his own whim.
Not directly, but only 1 step removed. The dude is saying "let's charge the same or more for cheaper, lower-quality food, to make a higher margin so our PE firm makes more money".
> that's because someone involved in that decision decided it was worth paying more for or not worth paying what they were currently paying, taking into account what factors will make people change their mind about eating there.
Evidently not really taking the factors into account. Would the limited partners eat there? More than once?
2 replies →
What makes you think that PE equity owners have any different incentives to any other chain restaurant owners to cut costs and improve margins??
Why would you think that private equity owners would ever make things worse to improve margins without giving careful consideration to whether or not the changes will make people less likely to spend money at their restaurants??
6 replies →
Do you think private equity funds could have other end goals when buying a company?
Other end goals than what?
Other end goals than making people happy by serving good quality shrimps for a reasonable price? Obviously they do.
Other end goals than making money? Of course they don't. But neither did Ray Kroc, who was extremely upfront about how McDonald's is a business whose strategy is to acquire real estate, funded by burger sales. Neither do the Waltons, who aggressively cut margins on all their products and compete to drive other retailers out of business. (Neither does General Mills, who used to own Red Lobster, nor Darden Restaurants, the public spin-off that owned Olive Garden and Red Lobster, nor Starboard Value, the activist investor that pushed for Red Lobster to be sold.) None of these companies exists because of a high-minded commitment to customer service, or fair play, or delicious food.
If turning a viable restaurant chain into a chain that no one wants to go to and then selling it is an attractive business proposition for private equity, than it should be for McDonald's and Walmart too. Unless you can point to some specific causal connection between the ownership structure and the decision about whether or not a restaurant should serve stuff that people actually want to eat?
4 replies →