Interesting. This is in reference to a new LA Times article proposing the solution for the Zodiac Killer & Elizabeth Short murderer being the same person.
You can round it down to Milton Friedman as the ideology and Jack Welch at GE in the 80s as the implementation and figurehead, but the original seeds were in the SEC mandating quarterly reporting as part of regulation after the great depression.
We can all agree to blame Jack Welch as shorthand though, I think.
It's not real. Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth. But for some reason people love to use this as an explanation of everything wrong in our country.
I'd cite as a counterexample in recent memory Sears, GE, Boeing, and Intel. I think collectively they've destroyed close to a trillion dollars by focus on quarterly results over long term, and they're not alone.
I sometimes wonder what a Drucker or ishikawa would say of today's "vaunted American management". Speed roughly short term thinking is too strong of a force in our American thinking. Heck I've counted three recent HN posts this month pushing for speedy software development too.
Yes, and we all saw what happened. They've experienced serious financial consequences, some went out of business. This is exactly what is supposed to happen when you do dumb shortsighted things.
There's also risk in investing in very long-term things that may not pan out.
FAANG-like stock, in general, has paid little to zero dividends for long periods of time post IPO, their rational stock values being based on hypothetical future dividends only after the initial self-investment phase is over.
Don't most tech startups lose money for years before they maybe make a profit?
I mean, I agree that such companies are over-represented in thinking about small businesses if that's what you mean. Normal companies have to be profitable quickly for sure.
It feels like tons of companies get valued based on userbase or revenue or theoretical breakthrough rather than ever having to really think about breaking even, but I know that's just because those folks get all the press.
> Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth.
But much of that long term growth now is just the company growing to displace competitors in existing markets, often by subsidizing prices and dodging regulations - see: Uber, Lyft, Air BnB, etc.
We've all seen the playbook a dozen times now: move into a market, keep prices artificially low until the existing competitors are displaced, then the raise prices to return the initial investment and more. That kind of growth-by-displacement is genuinely necessary sometimes but in these cases it's more like a fungus than a plant, just metabolizing an existing system.
It's not the same thing as actually expanding a market or investing in concrete assets (steel mills, power plants, boats, railroads) or R&D that compounds future growth. When the actual investment is just spent artificially lowering prices there's no actual efficiency gains and the consumers ultimately pay the price and more when the company hits the peak of the existing market and shift to enshittification mode to really extract wealth.
I hear that a lot, but I think this is becoming very different than the crypto grift.
Crypto was just that, a pure grift where they were creating something out of nothing and rugpulling when the hype was highest.
AI is actually creating something, it's generating replacement for artists, for creatives, for musicians, for writers, for programmers. It's literally capable of generating something from _almost_ nothing. Of course, you have to factor in energy usage & etc, but the end user sees none of that. They type a request and it generates an output.
It may be easily identifable slop today, but it's getting better and better at a RAPID rate. We all need to recognize this.
I don't know what to do with the knowledge that it's coming for our jobs. Adapt or die? I don't know...
I don't disagree that there is value behind LLMs. But I was referring to the grifter style of AI evangelism (of which the strawberry man might be the epitome), who are derliberately pumping up and riding on the bubble. Probably they're profiting off of the generated social media engagement, or part of some social media influencing campaign indirectly paid by companies who do benefit from the bubble.
The common thread is that there's no nuanced discussion to be found, technical or otherwise. It's topics optimized for viral engagement.
I see what you're saying, that's a bit of a different aspect entirely. I don't know how much people are making from viral posts on Twitter (or fb?) from that kind of thing.
But, outside of those specific platforms, there's quite a bit of discussion on it on reddit and on here has had some of the best. The good tech sites like Ars, Verge, Wired, Register all have excellent realistic coverage of what's going on.
I think if you're only seeing hype I'd ask where you're looking. And on the flip side, there's the very anti-ai crowd who I'm sure might be getting that same kind of reach to their target audience preaching the evils & immortality of it.
It seems like some of it was, but for full albums of artists they just redirected it to the official artist uploads on YouTube. But, then if those links change it breaks old playlists and I lose track of it.
It was just such a convoluted mess. They promised you could upload all your music and it would be there forever, they said! Bastards...
I was just talking about this in r/piracy but I remember there was a chat function on Kazaa where you could message people you were downloading music from and ask for recommendations. Simpler times...
I used to pay for their radio service, it was a bit like Pandora. I found it when they added it to Xbox 360 as an app.
I really liked their original profile pages that had sort of a MySpace style customization & vibe. You could have your favorite musicians and tracks analyzed through their API by these 3rd party services that would create very cool graphics & charts to show off to friends and visitors what you were into.
But, then I guess they ran out of money and were really trying to get scooped up by Spotify. They turned off their music player, disabled all the profile customization, alternative services quit having built in scrobbling to it.
I remember I had to download an app that would constantly have my microphone open and it would ID the song I was listening to via some kind of Shazam service and send it to last.fm. I never considered what a security risk that was because I was more interested in keeping my last.fm music tracked.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-12-23/black-da...
reply