We are well beyond material scarcity. If you need something, you can buy it on Amazon, made in China, and it will do a great job of brushing your teeth, boiling your tea, or whatever. But it will not be unique.
And so, every need met, our lives are hollow. Hollow and without objects of meaning and power - nothing that your distant offspring will inherit, that will make them think, “holy shit, my ancestors WERE INTERESTING PEOPLE!!!” No totems. Just disposable Apple ear buds with dead batteries glued forever into plastic shells. No diaries. Just tweets that were lost in the great lizard war of 2031, when the data centers were turned into lizard egg incubators.
So, people hunger for robust, interesting wares. Maybe most don’t know it, but they’ll buy those things anyway.
Based on this lizard-apocalypse thesis, I listed stuff on Etsy: custom CNC titanium pistol grips, solid metal wood keys, childproof jewel boxes milled from scrapped train knuckles, and etc. I listed all kinds of stuff I made when I wasn’t filling “normal” orders for big industry titans like Boeing. Just whatever the hell I felt like making, as long as it’s something I would be proud to own. And it all sold. Every weird thing I make eventually sells on Etsy. Etsy has featured my stuff in big advertisements, because my thesis is correct.
There is a new kind of scarcity, because of the upcoming lizard war.
I am fairly certain from context that by "we", he means "white collar professionals in the US/Canada/Europe who make a very comfortable salary and have all of their essential material needs already met by an overabundance of choice"
But I also wouldn't say that shopping for cute handmade weird custom things is essentially an activity of some extreme elite. Once people in any culture have lots of disposable income they'll do it. Here's a video from a few days ago of shopping for traditional hand made jewlery in Kabul, Afghanistan. Language is Dari. Farsi/Persian speakers should understand it OK.
If there were a sufficiently large population of Afghans with a reliable, secure online payment method, and HSPA+/HSDPA/LTE data services on their android phones, I have no doubt that those products would show up on the Dari language version of Etsy. At present probably less than 1% of people nationwide have any form of credit or debit card.
Ecommerce is exploding across Asia, across populations where not only do most people not have credit/debit cards, but they may not have bank accounts either. Various forms of electronic money and good old cash on delivery are bridging the gap quite rapidly.
I'm usually one to call out HNers for being in a sheltered bubble, but in this case I'm not sure it's far from the truth, as long as you only include those in developed countries. I grew up in one of the most deprived areas of the UK. My own parents and my friends' parents were all earning barely above minimum wage. But nobody really even struggled to own essential items like pots and pans, bedsheets, shoes etc. Most can even afford their own car if they want to. Even the poorest are well beyond material necessity. I think maybe you just set the bar between necessity and luxury a bit too high.
Seems like you haven't been to South Korea for example. I see makeup shops literally on every corner, tremendous mall culture (which is sort of dying in America) and highend stores are jam-packed with newly minted millionaires.
Not to say Americans don't love to spend, I think America has exported this culture to the rest of the world which is that every holiday is an opportunity for sale, put debt on credit card and get addicted to the dopamine rush of shopping. I don't think its unique to America anymore.
There is no need for the shopping culture to be imported anywhere, it already existed pretty much everywhere. Just check out the malls in the first world and the local markets in the less developed places
I think the difference here is that is this of "everyday people" or just high-earners, Costco only has several stores in China and remains a high-end exotic market, drones are still expensive "toys" here, new iphones often cost a month's salary or more.
The drone makers have a reason to be amused at how much Americans love their products.
The "robust" part of this is really important, and I would add "niche" to the list.
Recently I've been working on a DIY whole-home audio system, and there was nothing in the market which could meet the specs I need in terms of latency, and was sufficiently accessible at the software level. So I decided to build them myself, and in addition to getting the specs I want, I can also use high-end materials and get a design which fits in my home perfectly.
So what I'm ending up with is totally over-engineered, and quite expensive when you add up all the parts and labor, and it would make not be economically feasible for any company to produce these at scale. There are not going to be 100k people who want these, but there could potentially be a couple hundred.
I think the really cool thing about operating on that smaller scale is that the incentives really are aligned with creating the best possible user-experience from end-to-end. When the user-base you are serving is a nameless, faceless multitude, it's easier to decide to make a product which, for instance, will fall apart sooner, so the consumer has to replace it more often. But at the smaller scale, it actually is feasible to really truly prioritize making the best possible product for the user.
Very nice! It might well be possible to produce economically at scale, just by growing your sales and production, over time. Then, when you eventually retire and sell the company to some boring company that cuts costs and quality, the cycle can begin again, with a guy who realizes there's a niche...
I recently learned that Etsy actively terminates sellers based in China, seemingly indiscriminately, the message is quite clear that they just don't want to do this kind of business, unlike Amazon.
And for good reason; a big, if not THE biggest problem that Etsy has at the moment is that people's designs are blatantly getting stolen and reproduced at a fraction of the creators' price. There's a lot of pressure on Etsy to combat that. This is where copyright and (?) design patent laws come into effect as well.
People are trying to make a living by crafting things, and the free market is swooping in by undercutting them with a race to the bottom.
I feel like there could be a better version of this. Like an Etsy, but with support for creators, so that when demand reaches a certain threshold, the platform could offer support with scaling and industrializing the product, for a share of the profit. Essentially the same process, but actually rewarding the market-maker.
For us etsy filled the need for a cheaper, scarce alternative to an item for our baby that wasn't available where we live. Import fees and taxes would make price jump to ridiculous levels if sent from abroad.
Its kind of busy house made from wood, having tons of small trinkets to play with, ie switches, velcro, rubber bands, windows etc. All the stuff kids find in the house and spend so much time playing with compared to actual toys.
The stuff we found and ordered is hand-made in Lithuania, costs 50% of the 'original' montessori one (not sure if that's their idea though), looks much more solid since its made from much thicker actual wood.
Same for a ring I bought few years back for my wife - she found it, unique and appealing to her like no local could. Didn't cost much. I guess what you describe - something unique, that someone skilled' time and effort went into, compared to machined mass production.
This has a lot of value, ie carpenters are very well paid where I come from. If they are business savvy, they easily trump some software consulting in income.
It's not just Etsy's stock that's up, but also the stock of Shopify, Amazon, Overstock, Walmart, Ebay, etc. And all the tech infra companies that support these ecommerce sites.
There's a huge ecommerce bubble, and to a degree a tech bubble, being driven by all that disposable income that used to go to restaurants, travel, events, etc. instead being redirected to online shopping and online activity. Compounded by the money being printed by Fed which also doesn't have a lot of places to go.
I doubt it's sustainable to expect that this is the new normal and nobody will want to go back to the way life was before. If that's the case, I can't understand how the PE ratios that imply someday the future value of these companies will be worth 100x-1000x multiples in 10-20 years are justified. But this has lead to an incredible transfer of wealth to a lot of tech companies. I just wonder when the party will end and we'll see a correction?
You won't see a correction. What you're seeing is the world change before your eyes.
Feel free to refer back to this comment in a year or two.
E-commerce is sitting at 15-20% of all retail, it will almost certainly go to 50% this decade if not higher - it's inevitable.
Value is more than revenue or profit and P/E ratios largely don't matter and haven't for a long time. Competitive positioning, long term leverage, and other things that you can't easily price matter just as much. This is about total and utter dominance in a sector - just look at the investments Shopify is making in delivering capital to small businesses or building out a fulfillment pipeline.
Amazon's P/E ratio has been at or over 100 for the last 20 years. It was at 300 in 2012 (would you have bought then?). If you looked at that and that was the basis for not investing, you are using outdated views to invest. These companies are different and it's worth figuring out why.
Yes, P/E ratio doesn't mean much for a hyper-growth focused company but P/S ratio tells a different story. [1] Amazon's P/S ratio has bounced between ~1-4 since 06'. I'm sure before 06' too, but my reference stops at 06'. It's been fairly consistent relative to growth of the business.
[2] SHOP P/S ratio is currently at ~53. [3] ZM P/S ratio has bounced between 40 and 150. Currently at 87. These meme stocks are highly speculative and we all know where speculative investing ends up.
You will see a major correction.
Feel free to refer back to this comment in a year or two.
For the love of all that is holy I sure hope that you're not missing out on free money trying to time a correction, and are holding large hedges against a sudden crash you seem certain is eminent.
The amount of money that's been made on bubbles in the last 30 years far exceeds what's been lost. It's strange to see that trying to call the top hasn't died as a hobby after how much sheer energy has been spent being wrong about it.
Bearish bets are expensive even if you time them perfectly. Most of the time you just piss your money away on theta or borrowing costs even if the security in question doesn't even go up.
I've only ever had one grand slam bearish bet and I placed it in March of this year. I think a lot of idiots get excited by that kind of success and chase recreating it to their ruin.
Learned my lesson this year, probably only lost about $6000 while waiting for the crash that never came. Even if it does, I still have made money since.
If you time a short bet perfectly then yes you can make multimegabucks, but arguably you'd have better odds playing the powerball. Soros and Taleb are both great examples of survivor bias attributing their success to personal virtue.
Edit: What I'm trying to say is most people most of the time will be better off making long bullish bets. For example I bought some deep out of the money AAPL calls in June of this year and I'm quite pleased with how that turned out. It more than paid for the mistakes I made. The way I see it is think like a venture capitalist. Place 20 bets that pay out 100-1 and try to arrange for at least one to pay out.
Taleb didn’t use an “all-in” short strategy. I don’t know the specifics but he describes in his writings using a “barbell” strategy made up of about 90% very safe investments and about 10% high risk. For instance, 90% long treasuries and 10% in various options.
The idea is we live in a world of extremes today and something will happen but we don’t know what or when. So keep yourself liquid while sizing bets appropriately (Kelley Criterion in essence) and profit when the black swan event occurs. The additional, important benefit is you are liquid while almost everyone else is getting margin calls. This is an opportunity with many advantages such as buying low.
In essence lose a small amount often to win a large amount at some point. Similar to VC strategies or blackjack professionals when you could get away with counting.
But this time its different! <- said before every large stock market crash in the modern era
Alot of things to consider, 0% interest rates for over a year now, once the fed's spigot dries a bit expect to see huge drops in the market and especially alot of the speculative tech companies.
Alot of working professionals have seen huge gains in money since covid, ie. no travel, no commutes, no buying lunch/breakfast at the office, no dinner out with collegues/family, no daycare(if they are parents). Add that up and its a gigantic monthly savings, alot is going towards home stuff/renovation, its also going into the stock market.
People are forced online, with lockdowns and other restrictions people have literally been forced to find new ways to shop and entertain themselves, some may be more permanent than others. Once they are over expect large crowds in every possible way(theatres, malls, concerts etc) and drops across e-retailers.
> But this time its different! <- said before every large stock market crash in the modern era
The world is not as simple as that one liner suggests. Everyone who sat out of the market since 2011 loudly shouting about a bubble (I know more than a few of these types)....have a ton of regret and what's more... they're paralyzed by loss aversion, fear, and cling to P/E as justification they're doing the right thing.
If you can't draw out painfully obvious trends over the next decade and invest against those, I don't know what to tell you. Sure if I buy $AMZN at $3k today, it might drop to $2k next month. But I will bet a ton of money it will be far, far higher at the end of this decade. This is about network effects, the internet, scale, national security and the ability to achieve total dominance in a sector and leverage that into other sectors.
Obviously 2008 did see something of a drop in general so I guess they were right for the near term. But they were specifically ragging on companies that you'd have done very well with over the next decade+ even if you had bought in 2007.
> But I will bet a ton of money it will be far, far higher at the end of this decade. This is about network effects, the internet, scale, national security and the ability to achieve total dominance in a sector and leverage that into other sectors.
In other words, you're betting that regulators continue to permit Amazon to continue to consolidate monopolistic (if not outright monopoly) power. If regulators were to ever decide to break up Amazon - surely the stock price, so dependent on market dominance, would crater as a result.
I'm not saying you're wrong to make that bet / assumption, but it's important to note that Amazon's dominance is not a guaranteed destiny or inevitability. There are threats to their dominance.
> The world is not as simple as that one liner suggests. Everyone who sat out of the market since 2011 loudly shouting about a bubble.
And the world is not as simple as your rejoinder. 2011 came after a crisis unlike anything seen since the 1930's. And the 'fixes' to the economy since then have patched over rather than resolved the debt overhangs that led to the 2008 crisis. The great 'patch' was to print money. But the real economy (the physical universe that the financial universe simulates) still has constraints. Figuring out which one we trip over next is entrail-reading, but to think that constraints are no longer an issue is dangerous.
>but to think that constraints are no longer an issue is dangerous.
The fundamental problem is that we are not hitting those constraints. Lots of unemployed or underemployed people mean that inflation won't bit in the short term. Effective policies that put these people to work will cause inflation as usual. Inflation is a good thing in moderation.
This is my thesis too. If you aren't making great returns when they're printing money like crazy then you are losing money. Real world value of the stock market could be stagnant or even down despite the numbers going up.
I consider VOO or VTI to be a risk free return for a sufficiently long term horizon since I’m confident the US government will do whatever it takes to prop up those equity values. And if it can’t, then we probably are dealing with bigger problems like societal collapse.
But it was not AMZN at the top it would be like the equivalent of buying YAHOO back then, and even with inflated stocks and 0 interest rates YAHOO aint doing too well. So your analogy doesnt quite work.
You're ignoring that stocks crash because people have reasons to sell their stocks. If everyone "camped" then crashes wouldn't happen in the first place.
The number of stocks bought is always equal to the number of stocks bought - stocks crash because the price the marginal buyer is willing to pay goes down. Sometimes this is because there are too many sellers and the buyers can take their pick, but it need not be; it can also be because of a change in what buyers perceive the value of the stock to be.
The goal of central banks is to keep CONSUMER prices steadily increasing and employment high. I don't understand how anyone thinks this plan can involve lowering rates, which would crash asset prices, and trigger a wave of defaults leading to a recession (lower income, less spending, lower prices, and less jobs).
Notice that assets are conveniently not included in Central Banks' measures of inflation. Assets can inflate to infinity. It's irrelevant. The Fed's goal isn't to prevent wealth inequality. It's to keep CONSUMER prices steadily increasing and people employed. House prices, bitcoin, and meme stocks aren't in the consumer price index. It doesn't matter if they're appreciating rapidly.
Mortgage payments are included in the price indexes, though! They happen to make up a big chunk of the ratio, too. And guess what? Central Banks are making them cheaper for 90% of home owners (now ~67% of the population) by artificially manipulating rates to make their payments lower.
What does that mean? The more central banks lower rates and the higher home prices climb, the more likely "inflation will continue to be stubbornly low".
Central banks aren't normalizing rates any time soon. They're much more likely to print a ton more money because people AREN'T spending more money on airplane tickets, gasoline, bananas, and (importantly) their mortgages.
The solution to the problem is a bigger problem. When all you have is a hammer everything is a nail.
>The goal of central banks is to keep CONSUMER prices steadily increasing and employment high.
Yeah it's surprising that many people don't understand this.
>I don't understand how anyone thinks this plan can involve lowering rates, which would crash asset prices, and trigger a wave of defaults leading to a recession (lower income, less spending, lower prices, and less jobs).
It can involve lowering interest rates because the old assumption is that there is basically an endless amount of profitable work to be done in the country (or economic union) the central bank is in. It conveniently ignores that doing the endless amount of work elsewhere (developing countries) can actually be even more profitable.
>Notice that assets are conveniently not included in Central Banks' measures of inflation. Assets can inflate to infinity. It's irrelevant.
Yeah it's true, consumer prices are the real target. The irony of course is that if you keep inflating assets your economy will rot from the inside. Companies can just drink straight from the money faucet. There is no need to actually employ anyone in the country the central bank is operating in.
>Mortgage payments are included in the price indexes, though! They happen to make up a big chunk of the ratio, too. And guess what? Central Banks are making them cheaper for 90% of home owners (now ~67% of the population) by artificially manipulating rates to make their payments lower.
Payments tend to stay the same though because the housing market is competitive in a lot of locations. Housing values keep increasing instead. One could argue that real estate will indirectly employ construction workers but the fundamental problem is that many places simply are not willing to build more housing. It's almost criminally insane but that's how it is, unfortunately. In places where there is little competition it is possible to get good deals but not everyone is willing to do that. Those deals are also disappearing now that remote work is forced upon everyone.
>What does that mean? The more central banks lower rates and the higher home prices climb, the more likely "inflation will continue to be stubbornly low".
Well, yes because the money isn't reaching the right places. A lot of it is sitting in some random bank account. The money that is actually put to use is just going back to asset owners (remember we want it in the hands of consumers) because a lot of the hard labor is done abroad but the profits are collected at home. Despite the surplus of money companies are not willing to spend money on training even though it will make more profitable work available domestically. College often doesn't work because it's not actually based on what companies want. Students chase their own dreams which is fine in principle but it means the training problem is still unsolved.
>Central banks aren't normalizing rates any time soon. They're much more likely to print a ton more money because people AREN'T spending more money on airplane tickets, gasoline, bananas, and (importantly) their mortgages.
And as you said, they keep spending it on the wrong things.
>The solution to the problem is a bigger problem. When all you have is a hammer everything is a nail.
The reason for that is that the central bank does not have the power to solve all the problems it's responsible for. It's almost comical. It has to make sure the economy is not broken but it only has one lever. That lever can fix the economy with the right timing and correct usage. However, that lever can only go so low and opportunities in which it makes sense to pull the lever grow more scarce as you keep overusing it. At this point it's time to recognize that the rest of the government is failing to do it's part through fiscal policy. The central bank has already done far more than it's share of the work.
We've had low interest rates in Europe for years now, and the effects are massive. Some random thoughts, I am not an economist and have armchair knowledge of the whole thing at best so take these with a few kilos of salt:
- Europe lowered interest rates on loans by a lot, going into the negative [1]
- This allowed mortgage interest rates to be lowered by a lot as well, because competition.
- Mortgage interest rates are linked to savings account rates, so their interest went way down as well - going into 0% or negative rates here and there.
- This de-incentivized saving money; that plus low mortgage interest rates mean people are buying houses or putting their money into the stock market.
- Low mortgage interest rates + people buying houses as investment = rising housing prices. Housing prices in NL have gone up by a lot. Brexit, international companies and expats didn't help (mainly around the big cities).
- The pandemic and pressure / encouragement to work from home more has caused a lot of people who live in the big cities (in shit circumstances because of the ridiculous cost of living) to scratch their head and consider moving to the countryside, raising housing prices there as well.
Inflation. For whatever reason inflation has been very slow for some time now. If it ever starts to speed up, the fed will tighten the monetary supply quickly to keep it under control.
My taxes, land for a home purchase, out of pocket maximum and deductibles for health insurance, health insurance premiums, tuition are all increasing at quite a clip for me. I have to save an increasing proportion of income due to higher (perceived) volatility of future income, as well as the expected increasing prices in the aforementioned expenses.
This year has quite simply broken the way the CPI works.
They try not to re-weight items in the CPI year by year. Motor fuel is still 2.9% of the index. Transportation, including air travel is still 5% of the index. Demand and price for these has crashed this year. They still keep the same weighting year in year out since the items in the CPI aren't meant to be changed and re-weighted every year. (See the Oct 2019 vs Oct 2020 column)
Demand for air travel has collapsed. Prices have not, because airline have correctly figured out that the few people still flying (particularly internationally) are doing so because they have to and will pay top dollar if they need to.
Tuition, health insurance, and deductibles ARE included in CPI. Taxes largely aren't - unless you're talking about sales taxes. Land prices definitely are not. And you are literally doing the opposite of buying something when you save, so that is also (obviously) not included in CPI.
What inflation "feels like" and the CPI are completely different things. This is becoming more problematic if you're on the wrong side of the trade (i.e. saving cash instead of swimming in a mountain of mortgage debt).
I don’t save in cash, my savings are in various investments such as equity index funds or businesses and real estate.
But every year a dollar seems to buy less of what I need, and I can’t imagine how people who earn far less than me can deal with it. If you don’t keep investing, you certainly are falling further and further behind, but how can you invest if you’re just making ends meet as it is.
>I can’t imagine how people who earn far less than me can deal with it
Succinctly? [Under/un]treated mental illness due to the maladaptive coping skills needed to survive as a poor American. Poor people make sacrifices to live another day. Whether it's (healthy) food, exercise, healthcare (who can afford insulin or an epipen these days?), or their time. Some people pay the doctors to go to them, others pay for people to do the tediousstuff like cooking or cleaning or laundry or fighting the bank over a $40 overdraft fee that ate that weeks food budget.
Central banks only care about consumer inflation and if you have to save an increasing proportion of income instead of spending it on consumer goods that is by definition consumer deflation. You have less and less money remaining to spend on consumer goods which means that demand for consumer goods falls flat. The irony is that overinflated assets can allocate more money away from consumer goods to assets and thereby fuel even more consumer deflation despite expanding the money supply.
It's hard to make accurate month-to-month comparisons in our segment (retro games), because all of our products are second-hand and therefore we'll have different inventory all the time.
That said, our "regular" SKUs (cart only Super Mario 64, PS2 Consoles etc.) are generating maybe 20% more revenue compared to this time last year. Earlier in the year, this was as high as 2-3x normal revenue.
Claiming the grandparent wasn't talking about retail is just wrong.
> It's not just Etsy's stock that's up, but also the stock of Shopify, Amazon, Overstock, Walmart, Ebay, etc. And all the tech infra companies that support these ecommerce sites.
You really think they're not talking retail?
Not to mention the fact that no one claimed any of those things are moving online:
> disposable income that used to go to restaurants, travel, events, etc. instead going to... [aforementioned companies
Actually OP is right, I wasn't talking about retail per se. I was proposing the reason why ecommerce stocks are higher is due to changes in consumer discretionary spending (less spending on restaurants, travel, etc allowing more spending on online goods), but I acknowledge of course there are other pandemic-related changes in behavior that have increased the revenue of ecommerce, such as the shift away from retail. It remains to be seen whether this is a permanent change, but I'm betting it's not.
All other discussions about whether ecommerce is taking away from retail are not entirely addressing the point I was trying to make.
If evidence in China, a market which is more digitally integrated than the US, is anything to go, rebound shopping will make a huge dent on e-commerce.
There are winners and losers. People have a finite amount of disposable income and apparently most spend it all. You'll see the world change before your eyes again in 2021 when that disposable income starts shifting back towards other sectors of the service industry.. And when the rent comes due.
>These companies are different and it's worth figuring out why.
If you figure out why then you would be engaging in value investing.
>you are using outdated views to invest
Business is much older than tech. It already had enough time for all the stupid ideas to die out. If those stupid ideas come back they will just die again.
I'm curious what you have figured out for "why?" When you say "value is more than revenue or profit" you are proposing an entirely post-capitalist way of thinking about the economy. I'm genuinely curious what you feel is different about Amazon, Shopify, etc. beyond a huge amount of debt, outside funding and interest rates that have made money cheap for more than a decade.
I think you're misinterpreting "value is more than revenue or profit." I read it as value is more than historical revenue or profit. It seemed that was the intent from the rest of that comment.
I understand that. But my question is "what's the endgame?" From your response here I assume you feel there will come a point where Amazon will be wildly profitable? When and why?
> If that's the case, I can't understand how the PE ratios that imply someday the future value of these companies will be worth 100x-1000x multiples in 10-20 years are justified.
Expected future growth. Some stocks get overpriced or underpriced, corrections to share price happen when information is taken in by the market.
> There's a huge ecommerce bubble, and to a degree a tech bubble, being driven by all that disposable income that used to go to restaurants, travel, events, etc. instead being redirected to online shopping and online activity. Compounded by the money being printed by Fed which also doesn't have a lot of places to go.
This is not a bubble. There is an expectation of 0% rates for the foreseeable future. The dollar has fallen in value since the March bottom and assets are being repriced higher to account for this. We aren’t even at February highs yet if you take the dollar decline into account, here’s an SPX chart adjusted for $DXY (SPX*DXY/100): https://tradingview.com/x/lyDLUewb/
If you are waiting for a correction to buy stocks you shouldn’t be in stocks the first place. It’s because you are trying to time the market to begin with, which is one of the biggest mistake mind set of all for investing or trading
No, more that I work in the ecommerce sector, have seen how crazy it's become as of recently, and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I agree generally that trying to time the market is a bad idea for most retail investors
Can you give more examples of what you have seen from the inside that is not being reported by TV news?
(I agree with you on the crazy PE ratios and FED manipulations. Something is going to happen to bring things back to reality.)
I work with medium-size Shopify brands to assist on the development-side of things. When the pandemic started, a lot of ecommerce brands were clamping down on budgets. Shortly after the CARES act was passed, suddenly revenue for a lot of my clients started to skyrocket, especially those in the food industry (some were making what they made over the course of a year in a few months) but soon also to discretionary industries like apparel and beauty. Ever since, I've been seeing large-scale projects to agencies we work with being pushed through without hesitation and of course business has been growing at a much higher clip for my own company versus prior to CARES.
I'm grateful for it, but at the same time I know this is at the expense of many small companies in the restaurant and travel space, and all the labor they employ too, so that's pretty depressing. And I don't think it's sustainable so I expect my own luck to turn around eventually.
I don't think things will change much in the next 6 months though with another potential stimulus check on the horizon and at least until some of the state-level measures to reduce the spread of COVID are reversed (possibly with vaccines widely available?)
Why do you think people won't continue their shopping habits online? Hasn't e-commerce grown over the past decade? Coronavirus may have sped up the growth.
Usually Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) or in-season traffic is when I see the most traffic for my clients. The new normal is BFCM traffic as a baseline, with the highest traffic 2-3x that. They've done nothing more than they've done in past years to earn that traffic. This isn't the usual growth of ecommerce, especially when its across an entire industry and very sudden.
I do think the pandemic has set a new normal for ecommerce, but I very much doubt it will be at the levels we see today.
I also work in the e-commerce industry, specifically fashion. There are winners (home, lounge wear) and losers (dresses). I do not see this as a bubble.
Will buying habits correct post-COVID? Sure, but factors have already been clamping down. If anything, you may see a boost in e-commerce in certain sectors.
I hate people and crowds, but I enjoy a trip to Target/Walmart/Costco when they're not busy. Hell, I even like going to the mall every so often. It's nice to just go and see things in person, especially combining it with a nice beverage/snack/meal. I am a dedicated Amazon shopper, but I don't see myself giving up on retail anytime soon. As fast as Amazon is, it is not instant, and that gratification is important to many folks.
I think HN commenters aren't your typical shopper, so I'd be wary of believing the echo chamber. I bet the average HN commenter also doesn't fall for "luxury" brands or the related "mating displays" which seem to be so important to many people. But there are a lot of people who do like those things. They like to dress up and show off among other members of their species. Retail may shrink, but it isn't going away unless human psychology suddenly undergoes a fundamental change.
My wife just got back from target and remarked how good it felt to be in a store actually browsing. She hasn't really done that for 9 months, aside from quick targeted trips in/out while a bit stressed. She is very excited to just be out next year.
Now, how many retail businesses won't ever open again is the real question. Plenty of small businesses closed and won't re-open and there might be strong hesitation for new businesses to spring up in their place. Sure, target will be fine, but the mom and pops could potentially never come back to the same level. They were already barely making it.
It depends wildly on what the category of item is. Clothes are probably going to a big return to store once things reopen, since fits can be all over the place between or even within stores. (Yes, online experiences offer relatively hassle free returns, but I still consider waiting for a few days only to get something with poor fit or cheap and then waiting for it to be received at returns more painful than just trying on clothes in person.)
While I agree that we need to 'return to reality'(as much as the market is ever tied to reality...), the "something" that is going to happen could just be inflation, and suddenly those asset valuations might not seem so crazy. What I do not know, however, is if you should expect better than average growth during/after an inflationary period, or if it will drag down growth and reduce market performance in 'real dollars'.
Even if there is a correction, there will be a lot of people with fat bank accounts that didn’t have them before, simply because they took advantage of what they saw happening before their very eyes.
IMO anyone who isn’t investing in the stock market right now is going to be on the wrong side of inequality. The dollar will depreciate, and though we will be seeing people make massive gains in 2020 and 2021, the buying power of those gains will not be the same as the buying power they would have in say 2019. There’s just too much money being printed out now and spent. If you’ve just been sitting in cash and have missed those gains you’ll be in a world of hurt when the day comes that your cash can’t really buy what it used to, while all the stock investors are out living their life as usual comfortable with inflated prices.
You cannot afford to be sitting on the sidelines. If you’re extra paranoid, put your money where your mouth is and buy put options as insurance to protect yourself from downside risk, or if you’re happy with the gains you have now put a collar on your positions.
But do not sit around doing nothing or reposting memes about how the Fed can’t keep printing money forever or how PE ratios are insane.
It is estimated that 22% of all dollars ever created have been created this year. [1] Couple that with continued lower interest rates and another likely stimulus this number will only go up.
>But this has lead to an incredible transfer of wealth to a lot of tech companies.
How many of these tech companies are actually accumulating wealth due to high stock prices? When stocks change hands in the market, the company doesn't see any of the profit. The company revenue doesn't change unless they have treasury stock they are selling. As far as I know, very few are issuing new stock, aside from Tesla (which is genius).
> Compounded by the money being printed by Fed which also doesn't have a lot of places to go.
I generally agree with your comment about the potential for a structural change in where disposable income is going, but this statement isn't technically correct. I would check out this podcast for a great explanation of it: https://www.macrovoices.com/921-macrovoices-248-jeff-snider-...
Also the Fed set interest rates so low that you'll loose money having it in saving, causing everyone to invest their money, mostly the in the market.
Some investors are so desperate for something to buy, they're making up new fake companies called "blank check IPOs". Fake companies that promise to make money some day. It's insane.
For stuff like my 401k, I just buy into the market every month, I play a bit in the market personally, I got out of half of it a few months ago. I would love to buy TSLA, but the price is totally bonkers right now.
A very large majority of finance-savvy people I've been talking to over the course of the past few months have been willfully ignoring that: The markets are doing great now because there's barely a reason to not put your cash in equity! Dollar's devalued, stocks are pumping. Totally right with the blank-check IPOs.
It's not a bubble if its driven by revenues and not just high interest debt lol.
Also you might be interested in PE ratios alongside interest rates. You are so close to putting it together on your own, but keep detouring into permabear territory.
As you point out, there is more money in the system and less places for it to go, so not only is the consumption piling into these services, people are also willing to pay a higher ratio for the shares.
This means that PE ratios in isolation cannot tell you anything, a PE ratio to interest rate ratio will tell you everything. As long as confidence isn't shaken in the currency, more of that currency in the system will push interest rates lower. So all you are seeing is where the money goes.
Stories like this one, plus the recent IPO rush, the Tesla spike, and the frenzied day-trading of twenty-somethings on Robinhood reminds me a LOT of 1999...
The difference in 2020 is that by now everyone has decades of very strong evidence that the Fed won't allow markets to fall very far or for very long. They've created a one-way bet which they must keep supporting, because the moment that market participants believe the Fed Put is dead, there will be a major crash across all asset classes. And most importantly, the Fed will rightly get the blame and may be restructured as a result... which means the Fed will avoid this outcome at all costs.
Everyone knows this, and everyone knows the Fed knows, and the Fed knows that everyone knows that they know. Which means there can be no escape except via something externally-imposed which allows the Fed to avoid the blame. COVID was an opportunity for this but they did exactly the wrong thing and doubled down, giving people even stronger evidence that they are trapped.
What were they supposed to do during the scariest moments of a global pandemic when millions of people (mostly already in debt) lost their incomes and many industries ground to a halt? I don’t think that’s a great time to raise interest rates. How many people would be under water as their homes lost so much value? How many people would be literally on the streets without money for food without a check to get through those couple months of absolute uncertainty.
I agree with you that the Fed has dug a hole I’m not sure they can get out of without some pain. The market nearly melted down 2 years ago when interest rates went up to just barely above historic lows.
It’s hard to raise interest rates when money is being printed.
My partner has gotten involved in many handmade groups and almost every person says that etsy is no longer a place for small businesses. You have to pay out the nose to get any sort of relevant listing in search results and for many small sellers this eats most or all of their profits.
Etsy definitely does a lot of shady shit now and really takes a lot of what you make, forces you into offsite ads if you do well and then takes 12-15% including from the shipping, which is the worst when you already legit have to pay $80 to ship something and get shorted twice.
Lots of crap shops with Chinese production, which they are supposed to list as a "production partner", but they make it really hard for the customer to find.
It IS a great place to open a shop and make money though, you can pay zero dollars and start selling if you figure out their internal SEO system well enough and have the right products. Even without knowing the SEO, if you have the right niches, people will just buy your shit out of the blue, it's crazy!
We've been growing our laser cut wood art shop for over a year, got up to like 432 sales by November and now we are over 1000 sales a few weeks later, which has been insane.
My other shop I started in the summer grew slow, but is now up to like 5-6 sales a day and I think I can get it much higher as I add more and more products, it's also 100 times easier, cheaper, and faster to do than the laser cut stuff.
If we can figure out digital stuff, we'll be laughing.
My one friend pays for his monthly Tesla 3 bills with his Etsy shop.
Will you save more money if you just use Shopify and co? Yes, but you will have to market and bring your own people in, which is the tough part until you've built a huge brand, email list, social strategy and figured out ads, which you can avoid almost entirely for a long time with Etsy and still see success.
" Twee’s core values include “a healthy suspicion of adulthood”; “a steadfast focus on our essential goodness”; “the cultivation of a passion project” (T-shirt company, organic food truck); and “the utter dispensing with of ‘cool’ as it’s conventionally known, often in favor of a kind of fetishization of the nerd, the geek, the dork, the virgin.”"
To be honest that article sounds like it's stretching pretty hard to take some broad cultural trends and encompass them into a single phrase or movement. Six years later, I think we can say that there hasn't been a "Twee Revolution".
Is that really the original (English) English meaning of twee? I thought that the English used it more or less where we would use "cutesy" or some other dismissive.
But then I didn't know that there was a "twee culture".
Here's what my dictionaries say. I agree that I'd tend to use it for "cutesy".
> twee, a. (and n. 3) colloq.
> 1. Originally: `sweet', dainty, chic. Now only in depreciatory use: affectedly dainty or quaint; over-nice, over-refined, precious, mawkish.
> 1905: Punch 8 Mar. 178/1, “`I call him perfectly twee!' persisted Phyllis.”
> 1917: M. T. Hainsselin Grand Fleet Days xv. 91 “Girl: Oh, here's another little gun; isn't it a darling! Isn't it just too twee for words!”
> 1947: E. Hyams William Medium viii. 164 “`Isn't he twee!' said Mary, and pinched his cheek.”
> 1956: G. Durrell Drunken Forest x. 193 “`What twee individuals?' `Those knowledgeable sentimentalists who are forever telling me that it's cruel to lock up the poor wild creatures in little wooden boxes.'”
> 1962: Observer 25 Mar. 25/3 “She has a small and, it must be said, pretty twee cottage.”
> 1967: E. Short Embroidery & Fabric Collage iv. 102 “The best of our designers who have abandoned the rather `twee' decorative type of embroidered picture.”
> 1973: G. Robyns Wimbledon xxix. 192 “There is..a twee Arcadian outdoor studio complete with white trellis and plastic flowers.”
> 1983: Listener 21 July 33/1 “Mike Nichols's thriller-fantasy about dolphins should be as nauseatingly twee as the worst Disney—but it isn't.”
Chambers 11th (because they give an origin)
> twee
> twee /twē/ ( informal)
> adjective
> 1. Small and sweet
> 2. Affectedly or sentimentally pretty or quaint
> ORIGIN: tweet for ‘sweet’, and later tiny and wee
This is the context I know twee from - it was kind of the cutesy branch of indie pop around the same time as the shoegaze movement. Bands like Heavenly and The Softies are good examples of the twee pop genre.
It’s interesting though as it’s the complete opposite of previous generations where kids wanted to be treated as adults as soon as possible (request for responsibility), focused on improving their lot in life, and their passion project was raising a family.
“Cool” was something previous generations also dispensed with in very early adulthood and maybe replaced it with “respect” as something more useful than fetishizing a personality trope.
Not sure if the shift is good or bad but if it is bad you can’t really blame the kids.
You had me till the end. Now I feel dirty. Fetishization of the virgin, are we at the behavioral sink already? I hate it, makes me want to convert to Islam.
I don’t understand Etsy anymore. I was recently looking at an item that is sold by a shop in Texas, and after chatting with the owner I learned their stuff is just made in China in a factory. They’re just reselling the stuff at a healthy markup. Is that allowed now? I thought it was all supposed to be handmade or vintage or whatever?
Etsy used to have a much higher ratio of what I would call artisanal goods to the mass produced drop-shipped crap prevalent now.
I recently shopped Etsy for a handmade lamp. I filtered to US-only, handmade goods. I waded through pages of junk and finally found a lamp that was being billed as handmade with a design I liked, shipped from the US.
No tracking info to speak of (red flag of drop-shipping!) and when it finally arrived, it was a drop shipped special. From AMAZON. Another cheap, Chinese piece of junk being dubiously billed as "handmade". The seller just tacked on a $15 premium (I found the original product listing on Amazon) and on they went.
There are actual small producers still on Etsy, but recently more and more of my purchasing is shifting away from the Amazon/Etsy/Wayfair world back to eBay, of all places.
All Etsy listings have a flag for "I made this" vs "I designed this and someone else made it", and if the later, the seller is required to specify the production partner. This seller is almost certainly lying about who made it, and you can get them banned for this kind of activity.
My business is a dropshipper for artists that sell custom-print apparel on Etsy and Shopify. This sort of thing is allowed on Etsy, but we're careful to create the listings in a way that Etsy approves. Etsy sells a lot of tshirts.
I actually considered doing so, but frankly, upon broader review of the situation, it's clearly a lost cause. I genuinely don't think Etsy cares to solve this problem.
There's a lot to complain about with Etsy (their antique, neglected APIs are where I would start) but I've seen their enforcement department work when merchants screw up. I think they do care but they're relatively low-tech for a tech company, and are barely holding things together. Reporting can only help.
If they cared they would verify their sellers manually and on a repeated schedule instead of chasing stock market maximisation strategy. They're a lost cause and have been for years. Financialisation and running Etsy properly are opposite ends of the same spectrum.
>> I learned their stuff is just made in China in a factory.
When it first started out, I had a lot of friends in distant states that had shops on Etsy and I would find really cool, inexpensive stuff from theirs and other shops. I really like the eclectic feel of the stuff people were making and it was original and I have always gotten compliments on the stuff I was buying from their shops.
Last couple years, you really have to search to find stuff that isn't being mass produced in China or overseas. Looking back, thinking of other "eclectic" online shops, it seems to be a pattern. You get the people who set up their shops with their hand made goods, then it gets popular, then it gets overrun with China knockoffs and other people just reselling China goods for a markup.
Even with the requirements in place, I'm not sure how you eradicate it once it gets a foothold like it has now.
To be clear, I am not opposed to buying "stuff made in China" — I buy lots of things that were made in China (hello, iPhone!), and I don't have a problem with it per se. The issue for me is that this shop is trading on the handmade/vintage reputation that Etsy built (and is now eroding) by acting as a reseller.
I guess the silver lining here is that Etsy is effectively acting as a (closer) competitor to Amazon by letting people resell and drop-ship. Considering how Amazon treats sellers and the inventory commingling issues that arise, it's good to have another similar option.
> Even with the requirements in place, I'm not sure how you eradicate it once it gets a foothold like it has now.
I think the money they're earning makes it hard to stick with principled rules against the mass-produced items. It's a sad cycle for the early customers who gravitated toward Etsy and similar shops because they were looking for an escape from the cheap products found elsewhere. Not sure how to structure the business model or incentives to prevent this, other than just being small and staying small. (i.e. not taking VC money, not going public, not inviting outside pressure to grow).
That's always the catch-22 right? You want to have a big platform for small businesses and make good money doing it, but you don't it overrun with the people that kind of popularity attracts.
I think you're right though, stay small, maybe have two or three smaller platforms to generate the revenue you want, while still making it exclusive to small businesses. I think that approach might keep you under the radar for a longer stretch.
It's the same thing that happened to ebay and kickstarter and I'm sure many others. It does feel inevitable. On the other hand, if it's not inevitable I wouldn't know because that platform is staying small.
One thing I'll say is that there are a number of business that I use (both B2B and B2C) that are highly specialized but manage to be successful because they are not interested in growth. I suspect there's lots of these out there that are maintaining their own platform or using an out of the box solution, but that most of us never know about them because we don't need to interact.
It's not allowed, as far as I know. The other day I came across brand new Nintendo Switches. It seems like someone got a pile of special edition ones and then set up a flash shop where they sold them for like $120.
But yeah, overall there seems to be lots of shops reselling stuff. For example, I recently bought a little dollhouse kit, and I noticed that multiple sellers were selling it. And I've watched youtube vids on how to make money on Etsy, and while the examples I found don't explicitly say to buy stuff from aliexpress, it's clear that they weren't making and packaging those bath bombs themselves.
Me either. Any time my partner and I search for anything on Etsy it becomes very quickly evident that many (if not most) of the products are coming from factories in China. Nearly any time we've bought something, the tracking is usually strange, the shipping process takes several weeks, and sometimes reveals Chinese import/export intermediaries. Occasionally there is Chinese branding on the box or contents. Some sellers are much more careful to conceal the products origins than others.
To be fair it isn't always low quality or terrible, but it's clearly not all made by some lone artisan chiselling away in their workshop either.
Anyway Etsy appears to have a much worse problem with this than even Amazon. The cynic in me suspects that given how much revenue these factories generate for Etsy, they probably aren't too interested in cracking down on it anytime soon.
The only way to use Etsy is via the "Vintage" filter.
Which honestly works really well and is one of the most effective filters on the internet. I wish I could similarly filter eBay by "real/old/unique" items.
Or Google images by "real photos" vs. stock/professional photos.
I thought it was all supposed to be handmade or vintage or whatever?
Maybe I was late to Etsy, but it was never this while I was shopping there. There are some people selling handmade goods, for sure, but there's a low signal to noise ratio if that's what you're trying to tune into.
It's just become another avenue for drop shippers, and it seems like Etsy is happy to look the other way & continue with their false marketing, as long as they get their cut.
Same. I was looking for a fairly niche item in November (something that would likely be handmade), and everything I saw was essentially a drop-shipped mass production item.
That is not what I wanted. I wound up buying from an Amazon shop because... well :shrug:
Now, 3 years ago it was not even close to that. Maybe 10%, 20% of sellers. Today it seems like 95% of it is drop-shipped goods.
If I wanted that, I'd go to Aliexpress.
I think, tbh, Etsy will have to kick these shippers out, or rebrand. I know it used to be real rough to move goods in enough volume to have substantial success, but this is wildly different.
Chiming in, been an Etsy member for 9 years with many purchases; I'll echo the other replies - it used to be handmade niche culture things, but in the past number of years it's turned into just stuff being sold from wherever. It's basically like the pawn shops moved in and started selling everything as vintage or handmade (which might be technically true, just not them). $0.02
Every been to a quaint little arts and crafts community tourist spot? Here's a tip: most of the stuff for sale there is just made in China in a factory.
It is a lot like ebay. They both started with individual sellers (handcrafted on etsy, often collectibles on ebay), but quickly grew to anything goes.
There's a lot of money to be made in the expansion, so I expect the trend to continue. There are still a lot of handcrafted items, though, and it might still be the best marketplace for those sellers too.
Etsy is horrible for sellers. A friend started selling there and he had to wait for the money from transactions for 3 months after he started selling there.
This policy does not seem to make any statements about political slogans unless you're including within that categorization; harmful miss-information such as anti-vaccine claims and holocaust denial.
I think we can probably agree on appropriate limits to free speech.
Libel and slander are easy limitations for us to agree on. It seems pretty clear to me that we should offer protections to individuals on truthfulness of others speech.
What about package labeling? Company's are required to post truthful listings of their ingredients and labels if their products are shown to do harm. Is this an appropriate limitation of speech?
I suspect we could also agree that there are missinformation and disinformations that if distributed at a wide scales can also be seen go cause harm to individuals. Holocaust denial for instance is a fairly obvious rhetorical tool used to discredit the Jewish experience, promote anti-semitism, and recruit people into organizations seeking to do harm to Jewish people.
Anti Vaccine propaganda also does harm to members of our society as it reduces the efficacy of our public health programs and promotes the spread of deadly disease.
So my last question is only to ask what is the appropriate line for us as a society to draw? It appears Etsy has landed on "harmful falsehoods". This seems relatively sane to me, and I would expect most of the argument to lie in the word harmful rather than falsehood. I worry however that you're implying we might also be arguing about falsehoods.
All of the examples you give are slippery slope grey zones between someone's right to express their views and something that some deem harmful to society. This is a centuries-old debate and not one that can be settled quickly and easily.
As a Jew who lost some family in the Holocaust, and whose father and his parents barely got out of eastern Europe in time, I absolutely despise those who just flatly deny historical truths like the number of people tortured and killed by the Nazis. But I'm very mixed about silencing them. Sometimes silencing people has a way of amplifying their voices ever more.
But I also despise Big Tech and Big Media for obviously pushing people to vote against Trump. There's plenty of evidence of this, ranging from suppressing and distorting his speeches to literally suppressing any good news during his tenure.
And by the way, Facebook and Youtube host thousands of Muslim "scholars" who deny or belittle the Holocaust, who accuse Jews of nasty behavior, etc. They are not suppressed or silenced. However, watchdogs like MEMRI and PalWatch that expose these louts are frequently suppressed, their material removed as "hate speech", ironically. Why? Because a cancel mob is constantly trying to take them down, for being supposedly islamophobic which is a trigger word. These same mobs seem to have no problem with the widespread belief across the Muslim world that the Holocaust was a hoax, that 9/11 was perpetrated by Mossad, and similar conspiracy theories.
The same entities that suppress anti-vaxers also suppressed most information about hcq. Why? Because Trump advocated it. Even a group of medical doctors, who have treated thousands of patients with hcq and seen positive results versus covid19, were silenced and their video taken down from Youtube and other mainstream outlets.
Freedom of speech is a fragile thing, easily broken. It's too bad so few young people have studied Voltaire and others who originated the concept that "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will give my life for your right to say it."
I've read voltaire, but I've also read Rawls. And while I'm sympathetic to voultair's notion of freedom at any cost, I don't believe it holds up well to modern scrutiny.
Voultair's works predate successful democracies, large scale propaganda campaigns, and the internet. I choose these three examples because I believe these are at the heart of the current crisis.
Now I can see from your comment that you have a specific viewpoint of our current political climate. I empathise with your experience, and the feeling that the world is moving in a way that seems counter to your own understanding.
But, I worry that you are finding yourself in the position that I'm most concerned for. You are acting in a small way as a network repeater for exactly the kind of missinformation I'm worried about spreading.
And while I think a widespread doctoral conspiracy is far less likely than the possibility that HCQ is a bad drug to combat Covid-19. I'm far more concerned about the harm that we're doing to our democracy by rejecting the outcomes of what, by nearly all accounts, appears to be a successful election. One that again, for it to be a false narrative would require a huge conspiracy including members of both parties across numerous states.
And it's not even so much the faith in the election but the deep resentment afterwards that scares me. How do we repair the divide in the country when truth is being questioned as subjective. What is the shared ground we work from?
Well, the suppression of HCQ is absolutely an abuse of platform power.
Regarding "false narrative" of election fraud: the U.S. has had election fraud and general irregularities and inaccuracies almost from the beginning. It's only when the electorate is split this evenly and the stakes are this high that people begin to pay attention.
The voices that are being suppressed for example on Youtube are not fringe radical conspiracists; they're more mainstream conservatives (who are nonetheless tarred unfairly as "fringe"), people like Mark Dice, Anthony Brian Logan, Candace Owens, Tim Pool, and many others.
I suppose when a platform gets a billion views a day, it can afford to piss off some elements and the bottom line will not be affected. But it is creating ill will, calls for boycott, and eventually an echo chamber effect that does not bode well for dialogue and tolerance.
Look what Reddit did, for example: they shut down TheDonald which was the largest, or one of the largest, subreds with 800,000 participants. The participants dumped Reddit and forked their own reddit-like site, TheDonald.win which began small but has grown enormously.
Can we just focus in on a small portion of this. Since I think we'll both die before we can convince the other of our position.
I'm not a doctor, I'm not an export, but in my searches I can find no, reputable, peer reviewed studies that support HCQ.
I can't think of any reason there would be to suppress HCQ.
I think that if HCQ was a realistic cure we would have substantial reports of it's deployment in tbe rest of the world.
This seems to me to be largely a fantasy that is being used to attempt to put some pretty paint on the current administrations failures during this pandemic.
Is there something I'm missing? Why is this abuse of platform?
I don't know whether HCQ works. I've read many anecdotal reports from the field that it has had positive effects on patients. A Ford Foundation study (reputable, peer reviewed) did find positive correlations. Several other studies did not, but every one of the negative studies were flawed.
The bottom line is, if all of this discussion is suppressed, then the truth will never come out and we are in an Orwellian "1984" situation.
You have to allow expression of ideas, even when it's infuriating. "He's so obviously wrong, he is harming society with his misinformation. People could die!" It's not your place to decide this, nor is it mine. Let the ideas flow, and the good ones will eventually predominate.
Last comment I swear. Let's break down the pieces.
HCQ - Discussion on HCQ are not being suppressed broadly. We are proving that right now. The drug continues to be studied, I bet we could find recent publications. What's being suppressed is the broadcasting of health missinformation on places like youtube.
If you go on YouTube and tell people that arsenic cures headaches and people subsequently dig out their rat poison and die. We would hold you accountable for that missinformation.
HCQ does not cure Covid-19 based on numerous studies. Videos and posts saying it does poses an urgent health risk to the population in at least two ways. First it's a powerful and potentially dangerous drug that people should not be administering themselves. People who seek out the drug on their own, through the grey market, or via other pathways certainly out themselves at risk. Second, it is actively disruptive to the attempts at corralling this pandemic. People who have followed this advice after infection might reasonably believe they are cured, going on to spread covid-19.
I can't figure out 1: what is the slippery slope that's being applied here? Doctors don't need youtube to figure out real cures. Scientist arent having their work suppressed. All we have is some dangerous medic advice ... Which is exactly the kind of thing youtube can and I say should consider removing. If these folks believe they have great ideas there are many journals to publish them in. Or they could attempt to convince the NIH.
Unrestricted Freedom - Your position seems to imply all freedoms are at play but I just want to make it clear that all rights imply restrictions of freedom on behalf of others to protect those rights. If I have a right to life, we restrict someone's freedom to shoot me, etc. So hopefully we can focus on unrestricted free speech.
Within free speech we have a number of restrictions at the state and federal level. Libel, slander, giving medical advice, etc. And I'll assume this is also not the argument.
Finally we have free speech on platforms like facebook, youtube, and Etsy. These are not protected in the constitution of the united states but I believe we're discussing the ethical choices these platforms make on their own behalf.
What do you currently see as tbe risk? What is the harm being done? Who is suffering from the removal of these messages?
Because I can tell you what I see on the other side, the risks to leaving them up. I outlined the harm with HCQ, that people will believe that HCQ cures covid-19, people with no medical training of their own. That this will potentially harm them and their country people. And that by pushing these conversations to happen in other domains does no harm to their merit as ideas
But I think the much bigger risk right now is that our social platforms are enabling fringe groups to form and grow like a cult. Where the folks inside start to lose perspective and the group think empowers ideas that are dangerous to our society. There is no good evidence of wide spread voter manipulation in this presidential election, HCQ does not cure covid-19. But there is a faction of the United States today getting advice from randoms on the internet, being fed lies from pod cast.
Our new social platforms seem to be enabling a wide spread cult in a way that we don't understand. Where inside the cult there's been a domain sheer from reality. I worry that like successful propaganda campaigns used on other nations this could end up radicalizing enough of our population to cause meaningful and irepareable harm to our society.
How do we respond to the growth of cults? Through better education. Teach young people how to think for themselves, read critically, distinguish fact from opinion, and you have inoculated them from propaganda and lies.
I'm a little surprised your comment is turning gray for this. I have the same visceral reaction to that word. And it's not like I care about pink shirts or other cutesy things. It's specifically that word, used by an adult.
Some people have similar reactions to words like "moist" or "juicy". (Those would be context-dependent for me)
But "yummy" is just hard to hear for some reason. Except when it's a small child expressing their like for cookies or candy. Then it's totally fine.
Anyway, just thought you'd like to hear there are more of us out there :)
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
if you would use 9mm to open your coke bottles you'd understand /s
Why are so many people concern with how others should or shouldn't express themselves? Why would anyone care if I want to wear a pink tshirt with a flower. Or use yummy in a sentence.
Sure there are people who are eccentric for sake of being eccentric. I just dont hang with them and that's as much though I will waste on that topic.
Makes sense, considering that they're now censoring vendors from selling merchandise labeled "stop the steal" and probably other political messages to come in the future.
And so, every need met, our lives are hollow. Hollow and without objects of meaning and power - nothing that your distant offspring will inherit, that will make them think, “holy shit, my ancestors WERE INTERESTING PEOPLE!!!” No totems. Just disposable Apple ear buds with dead batteries glued forever into plastic shells. No diaries. Just tweets that were lost in the great lizard war of 2031, when the data centers were turned into lizard egg incubators.
So, people hunger for robust, interesting wares. Maybe most don’t know it, but they’ll buy those things anyway.
Based on this lizard-apocalypse thesis, I listed stuff on Etsy: custom CNC titanium pistol grips, solid metal wood keys, childproof jewel boxes milled from scrapped train knuckles, and etc. I listed all kinds of stuff I made when I wasn’t filling “normal” orders for big industry titans like Boeing. Just whatever the hell I felt like making, as long as it’s something I would be proud to own. And it all sold. Every weird thing I make eventually sells on Etsy. Etsy has featured my stuff in big advertisements, because my thesis is correct.
There is a new kind of scarcity, because of the upcoming lizard war.
https://www.etsy.com/shop/HenryVIIIdotSpace