>Primarily because web search these days is so shitty but that’s besides the point.
Obviously there are a lot of reasons for this. But I think one of the most important reasons is that there is so few organic interesting content destinations anymore.
Sure there are some neat shopify stores, news sites, and a few dedicated souls keeping up blogs. But so much of the casual browsing that the web once was has been obliterated by the move to social media.
And what hasn't moved is now a mess of AI generated fluff or link farms.
I used to think Google made search worse to increase ad revenue. And maybe it's tangentially related. But the stuff I used to search for and find and get inspiration from has moved to walled gardens. Reddit is one of the few remaining open web destinations left.
Almost all tech CEOs think we want an AI button on every window, every app, every dialog. Always there no matter what to make workers more productive or need fewer workers or whatever.
The reality is that even the most ardent supporters of AI want it only in a single web page or in their IDE and that's about it.
And all of these outages happening not long after most of them dismissed a large amount of experienced staff while moving jobs offshore to save in labor costs.
Interesting insight. High interest rates keep new startups low. Well, not counting AI startups I guess.
And the lack of new (non-AI) startups allows bloated incumbents to get by without innovating or offering new products. Quality destroying measures like offshoring and outsourcing are easier to pull off. As is allowing services and standards to slide.
Maybe we'll only know once interest rates come back down. Or once the AI-replacing-workers veil has been lifted.
I think this dynamic is an under appreciated source of the chart that shows the decoupling of the job market with the stock market [1]
Interest rates aren't high, they're manipulated by the government and they're too low. When businesses, governments, and individuals increase their borrowing, as they are now, that means that the cost of borrowing, the interest rate, is too low.
>When businesses, governments, and individuals increase their borrowing, as they are now, that means that the cost of borrowing, the interest rate, is too low.
That's not necessarily the case. Credit expansion comes with healthy growth as well.
If growth is happening with high interest rates then that means capital can remain out of the hands of the public but debt replaces it
If I’m a billionaire my goal is to own everything and have everyone in debt to me based on my personal currency I issue - like points or miles or a corporate debt vehicle for example.
Surely we aren’t seeing a increase in debt also right? /s
The Fed targets price stability and employment, not growth.
Of course that is largely correlated with stimulating growth as a derivative of that, but certainly not "only" to stimulate growth. For example, the current cutting cycle has far more to do with inflation that it does growth. The Fed's primary concern currently is growth accelerating into more inflation.
There are other reasons for cutting as well. For example, funding stress. Repo funding stress caused an interest rate pivot not too long ago (and repo funding stress is rising once again, which will be a factor in the current rate decisions.)
In the past large developments would win over local government support with promises of jobs and investment in the local economy.
Now the only promises are a strained grid, higher energy bills and loud noise. It doesn't help that AI has been falsely attributed as the reason to lay people off in the past few years by CEOs who are actually just cutting costs or moving jobs offshore.
This situation probably gets worse before it gets better for the companies deploying new data centers.
But I think the more important point is the increasing number of layoffs linked in the article [1]. These layoffs are mostly ignored here and everywhere else.
Jobs are getting offshored and outsourced in large quantities and the tech community is on the whole ambivalent about it. Unless you were directly impacted.
The path for software developers looks bleak. While people are wringing their hands over AI while something else entirely is destroying job prospects for young grads.
Every time one of Zitron's posts come up I think of bitcoin or algorithmic social media feeds. Like those things, I understand people have strong opinions on whether or not it's good or bad for society.
But what's the endgame? Is it to persuade people not to use these things? Make them illegal? Create some other technology that makes them obsolete or non-functional?
Obviously there are a lot of reasons for this. But I think one of the most important reasons is that there is so few organic interesting content destinations anymore.
Sure there are some neat shopify stores, news sites, and a few dedicated souls keeping up blogs. But so much of the casual browsing that the web once was has been obliterated by the move to social media.
And what hasn't moved is now a mess of AI generated fluff or link farms.
I used to think Google made search worse to increase ad revenue. And maybe it's tangentially related. But the stuff I used to search for and find and get inspiration from has moved to walled gardens. Reddit is one of the few remaining open web destinations left.
AI can't solve that problem.