Its a great compliment to The Big Short (2015). The Big Short gives you a nice explanation of what the heck is going on but mainly follows "outsider" points of view, while Margin Call gives a sense of the thoughts and concerns of the big banks at the time. Both how deluded everyone was, but also how flawed and human the systems were (as they ultimately reflect the people that built them).
I remember thinking, after watching Margin Call first and then The Big Short, that you could pretty much identify exactly where within The Big Short the (single-night) events of Margin Call would have taken place...
The context is that Jeremy Irons' character knew exactly what was going on, he wanted the risk analyst to state it to everyone else in the room, and keep him on track and focused. Right before that meeting, there is a scene as the characters walk in where they are warned by the CEO's right hand man not to try and bullshit, since he would know.
I don't disagree with anything you've said - I was trying to make a tangential point: while the CEO is ignorant of financial analysis, and the quant is ignorant to the business ramifications of said analysis, both people lack humanity: neither character gave a damn about the wider consequences of their company's actions.
Steve Jobs may not have cared much for individual people, but for all his faults, he really did seem to care about humanity (in his own way). He preferred plain language because he deeply valued shared understanding, not because he wanted to flex on his overly cerebral underlings.
My jaded opinion is that Musk may not really care about remote work, but it turns out return-to-office requirements are a useful way to get people to leave without having to fire or lay them off, and bypass stuff like the WARN act.
> “Day zero. Sharpen your blades boys," Calacanis texted Musk. "2 day a week Office requirement = 20% voluntary departures.”
I think it's both -- I do think he's against remote work (remember his remarks at Tesla "pretend to work somewhere else": https://www.forbes.com/sites/annakaplan/2022/06/01/musk-says...) but also it's a great way to cheaply get rid of a lot of employees who were told they could WFH forever.
To save money at the time he drove a van for a carpool service (he could use it for free as a result). A lot of the guys on his van were in tech.
When the first rounds of layoffs hit, guys would get on at the end of the day and they would talk about their severance. The first question in response to “I got laid off” was “What’s your severance?”
At one point deep into 2002, he remembered a change. Now guys were getting on the van with all their stuff in a box. He played the game, even though he wasn’t in tech, and asked one of the guys with a box, “What’s your severance?”
Adopt an open standard, add proprietary bits so that content worked best (or exclusively) on their own version, and force other players and competitors out.
yeah, i'm curious about this too. i've spoken to many high level folks in MSR (microsoft research) and they're all massive proponents of open-source software and unix and are as excited as i am about being able to open a 'native-ish' *nix terminal and do work.
in fact, i've got my win10 box set up for dev, and it's nearly identical to my mac! it wasn't 100% straightforward, and to get windowed emacs working from the cli took a little twiddling, but overall in less than a few hours i had everything running flawlessly. :)
And then expecting the guillotine as “justice”, it’s a downward spiral. But this is just business. Leaders make miscalculations all the time. In this case, Zuck’s business problem is replacing the growth story of a maturing product that is the Facebook app and really making social media an entire industry.
Meta and VR is a potential new industry. The only thing that will replace the SM growth is creating/owning an industry again. He liked the VR world because he could own it for a while. It would be more difficult to disrupt than what keeps happening with SM. TikTok is the latest rival but there have been many. And there’s now as ad revenue pressures. It’s a recipe for a massive layoff. Since it’s a business, that is the most appropriate action. I don’t think anyone expected how difficult and expensive it would be. I assume the layoffs will slow this down further and it’s effectively a loss or a solution without a problem.
> I don’t think anyone expected how difficult and expensive it would be
I agree with the rest of your post, but this might be more of an "anyone inside of Meta" scenario. There's plenty of skeptics around short-term VR (myself included). Getting a non-technical audience into it is going to require a set of massive technological innovations, imho, both in software and hardware.
Even then, having your vision be completely blocked to the outside world is not something casual users are going to enjoy for any extended amount of time or frequency.
If I'm writing a post and my kid or dog or friend needs my attention, I can set the phone down for a second. If I'm in VR, the best I can hope for is a button that makes the screen transparent so that my eyes can see (and be seen!) again short of reaching up to my face, taking my head gear off, then putting it back on. Even then, the immersion is completely broken.
> What I think makes ATT a tempting scapegoat is that it creates a great story. Apple enacted a change in the name of privacy and that change has adversely affected both Facebook and small businesses that relied on Facebook. That’s a dramatic, captivating storyline, with two rivals, both corporate behemoths, on opposing sides.
(The footnote on this blog is a great explanation as to why FB's adTech was considered so bananas and why its no longer as much.)
It's a good counterpoint to the equally throw away argument that "if you disagreed with x you should have shorted it".
The problem with shorting is you can't just be right about the eventual direction... You have to be pretty bang on with the timing as well.
Therefore it's absolutely possible for people to suspect or have strong belief that something is unsustainable without having the liquidity or confidence on timing to take action on it.
No it's not to say there aren't Perma bears and other I told you so people crawling out of the woodwork, but that doesn't mean that every person who didn't capitalize on this is Monday-morning quarterbacking.
