10.28.22
Gemini version available ♊︎Facebook is Dying as the Tech Bubble Bursts
Reprinted with permission from Ryan
acebook is collapsing right in front of us.
All you have to do is look at their stock price.
It’s “worth” less than 25% of what it was 13 months ago, even before you adjust for the fact that the money lost another 30% this year under Biden and (locally worse) Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.
Where you have to pay for three dozen eggs at 2020 prices to get only a dozen and you have to pay for two pounds of butter to get a pound, and you have to pay for 1.2 months worth of rent to get a month.
This is Illinois and this is America under the Democrat Party.
Phoronix is talking about Facebook’s code contributions to the BtrFS file system for Linux, which I admit I use personally.
Since it’s all under the GNU GPL, it will survive the collapse of the Second Tech Bubble, when Facebook is long gone. As did much Free and Open Source Software the last time, much of which is still developed and in use today.
But what will be gone when Facebook itself collapses?
Cat pictures?
Terror content that they don’t see anything wrong with (because there’s no human moderators and they try to cover it up with software that detects words)?
Anti-vaxxers? People denying that we had an election and they lost?
They don’t care what kind of an open sewer they’re running as long as people engage with advertising, but in Biden/Pritzker’s economy, ad revenue is worth very little right now and many of the ad firms themselves are shutting down and having 100% layoffs.
Meanwhile, the company is mostly being mocked for spending down all of their assets on something that looks like characters in a Nintendo 64 game where nobody has any legs, on a $600 VR headset.
Facebook truly is burning while Zuckerberg fiddles. This is priceless. I shall watch with great amusement and then laugh in “I still use IRC and lost pretty much nothing.”
There’s nothing particularly unique about what’s happening to Facebook (“Fakebook”) in the economy of the Bay Area. Layoffs Tracker shows mostly what’s unfolding in failed blue cities and states.
Yesterday, a “self-driving” car company based in Pennsylvania called Argo AI went under, and 2,000 people lost their jobs, as their clients took possession of the company’s “intellectual property”.
Self-driving cars are a pipe dream. Tesla is now under CRIMINAL investigation by the feds for advertising that their cars are “self-driving”. (NewsWaffle proxy. Original.)
I mean, it’s technically true that “self-driving” cars can mostly manage to stay in a lane, but you can’t trust them not to run people over and say they were a shopping bag or slam into the back of a parked police car in Florida, so you still, legally, have to be paying attention to the road and ready to take over at a moment’s notice.
I linked to the ARGO AI story in Techrights IRC yesterday, highlighting Matthew J. Garrett, joking “You’re next, Bubbles.”.
(Which is what Peter Venkman told the judge in Ghostbusters II while the ghosts were flying away with his court reporter.)
He didn’t reply as far as I know. I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t already know.
The Federal Reserve may be fixing to lose all credibility.
I saw a report yesterday that says that many investors feel that the Fed will crater and stop aggressively hiking interest rates in December. The Fed hasn’t commented, but I guess we won’t have to wait long to see.
I don’t subscribe to the notion that jacking up interest rates through the roof and causing immediate and rampant destruction is the best or only way to get hyperinflation under control, but it is what’s available considering that Congress won’t quit throwing money around and bailing out Zombie Corporations like Japan did in the 90s before it gave up because the government deficits were just too large and the population wouldn’t stand for it anymore.
If true, this means that instead of just a Depression or just a hyperinflationary period, we’re going to get both as the Federal Reserve throws its hands into the air and gives up trying to deal with this using the tools it has available. █
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