Their income and operating margin has almost halved, compared to 2021. Their free cash flow is 1/50th of the previous few quarters. Those are truly horrible results.
FB was a money printing machine, but they trashed it.
Everyone wants to dance on Meta's grave, but it's way too soon. Yes, the Apple change gave them a top line haircut, but if the RL spend is excluded, they are making a ton of money. I'd also argue that the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok.
The two will be forever conflated (and there's an excellent argument that Putin made his move on new territory while the rest of the world had weakened itself with years of self-imposed Covid restrictions). However, literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice, to me is obviously the biggest cause of what we see now (and what is to come).
Exactly how does the war in Ukraine economically affect, for example, the US?
> the rest of the world had weakened itself with years of self-imposed Covid restrictions
This is a pretty bold political statement: it’s saying that people weren’t worried about getting sick and that the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy. Things like the business owners complaining that retail sales were down even after they got exactly what they asked for suggests that’s not the case.
> literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice
Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
>the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy.
They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks. No, in a purely pragmatic sense, they don't contribute much to the economy, especially as any wealth they do have gets immediately re-distributed on death anyway.
If we were talking about some terrible disease (like Smallpox, for example), where the young and old alike died in huge numbers, then the argument would be different.
>Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
Are you kidding me? Maritime shipping and aviation are two obvious examples.
First, while the death rates were highest among the oldest people there are still a ton of people who were not close to death anyway. It’s also not true that losing older people is necessarily neutral - economies do better when money circulates, not when it’s tied up in a lump sum going into someone’s retirement account.
Note also that I mentioned people who were impacted but not killed. Again, there are millions of people in prime economic years who became substantially less productive - and someone in their 20s or 30s might be missing key career steps which will lock in much of that permanently. Similarly, there are millions of people who stopped working or started working less to care for the previous groups. All of those have a significant economic impact.
Finally, maritime shipping wasn’t shut down, certainly not for “years”. It was significantly disrupted by the disease but that wasn’t a policy choice.
Air travel (notably not cargo) was restricted for months, not years at the global scale, but it also bounced back quickly thanks to heavy government support in most countries. I don’t think it would be enough to explain the economy on its own as a lot of business went virtual and people found domestic outlets for the money they’d have spent on international travel.
Finally, I’m not saying that there was absolutely no impact from policy but rather that some people have had a tendency to blame policy more than the actual disease, or ignore the benefits from those choices. We saw this a lot with groups like restaurant owners where lifting safety measures didn’t improve business as much as they’d hoped because many of their customers didn’t want to engage in high-risk activities, or especially when their outspoken political positions drove people to competitors. In many ways this is natural: people want to believe things could have been better by choice because then they can imagine it being better if they were in charge.
> They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks.
You're saying here that most of the people who died were old, which is true. But you're also saying that this means that not many young people died from covid, which is untrue. It's untrue because a small proportion of a very large number is still a lot of people. Covid killed very many economically active people.
The US has given over $8B in aid. Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter. Gasoline prices hurt this summer, both directly and in transport costs.
Only a fraction of that $8B in aid was direct cash payments to Ukraine. Much of it went to US defense contractors and was recycled into the domestic economy. Higher fossil fuel prices hurt US consumers, but most of that value is flowing to US energy companies and ultimately to US investors. The vast majority of fossil fuels burned here are also extracted and refined here; we only import a little.
Reading the notes at the bottom, it seems like the number might be somewhat realistic, but should really be called the cost of shipping fuel and securing it to Afghanistan, some of which was probably used for aircon.
Yes, I agree, I don't think that $8B is a lot of money for the US, especially in the military context. I was just surprised at the number and shared some back story.
Agreed. It was blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease, and that at best the restrictions could just kick the can down the road a while. It was also covered up by printing cash at enormous scale.
Now when the economy starts bleeding, supply chains struggle and inflation moons, people try and pin it on Putin and deny they ever supported it.
It’s cognitive dissonance at best? incredible dishonesty at worst.
They should blame Xi. All these economic decisions wouldn't have happened had there been no COVID. The Chinese government deliberately released this lab-made bioweapon/virus, to see how it would negatively impact most of the world. From economies struggling, to people getting polarized and more divided, and supply chains getting affected, their move has been a massive intelligence success for them.
If anything, the western world needs to take a lot of strict action against the Chinese and also the tons of CCP sympathizers in their countries.
It'll be like the wars in Iraq and Libya. Vitally important at the time, but you can't find anyone now who will say they supported them.
Then again, how can you blame people? Most people do what they are told, and the person who glared at you last year for breaking some Covid rule or the other could equally likely have a conversation with you today about some horrible outcome they've had thanks to Covid restrictions, and never link the two.
It wasn't blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease, especially because it wasn't.
There is room to disagree on how much and for how long we should have distanced, and which government interventions were more useful, but I (and most people?)
think doing nothing would have been much worse.
> It was blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease,
That's not how I remember it - governments locked down to prevent health systems collapse while a vaccine was created, tested and scaled for mass production. After successful vaccine deployment restrictions were lifted.
"health system collapse" was the inevitable outcome of any other approach to dealing with Covid.
"health system collapse" is worse than all of the other present and future side-effects, including the effects of denying healthcare to huge numbers of people over the past 2.5 years.
"health system collapse" didn't happen anyway. At least where I am (UK), it's increasingly clear that our response to Covid has blown open all of the existing cracks, and it's hard to say that we "saved" the NHS.
3 weeks for me to get a remote GP appointment right now. This will be killing more people than Covid ever did, so we are in the red before we even get onto anything else.
Why were "they" wrong? Is it because the issues of each successive development in mass media made those of the previous iteration look quaint? It's easy to look back on (for example) TV as a harmless diversion, but it was a radical development in the dissemination of visual information.
Also this is a funny argument. If these things are truly making people dumber but the change is happening on a generational level, then a dumber generation would not realize that it is dumber than the previous one.
It's also further muddied by other changes - like changes in education in the past 50 years - which makes the phenomenon harder to isolate and to judge.
WW3 started years ago, and we have only just started to realise. The objective of this war is to turn the citizens of your enemies' countries into useless, self-absorbed, self-hating nobodies.
For those of you who have read The Hobbit, I see the "Culture War" as something more akin to the scene in that book where the trolls were turned to stone. That is - while we may think we are involved in some great "culture war", fighting the (online) forces of anti-democracy, bigotry, racism, etc etc - actually all that is intended is that we are arguing amongst ourselves.
I have come to a similar conclusion. The intelligence services seem to be completely oblivious to any of it and are still staring at the horizon for some enemy plane to enter their territorial space when at home their daughters and at college their sons get run over by algorithmically enhanced fine-tuned propaganda: to either weaken their bodies, drug up their minds or cannibalize their culture. That’s taking the second front of the late Cold War to an entirely new level of warfare.
For all their other sins, at least China seems aware of the dangers of unfettered access to all that "tech" has to offer. I've long been of the opinion that it's insane for a country to allow any agent (in the broadest sense of the word) anywhere in the world, direct and unlimited access to their citizens' life, thoughts, and desires through the internet.
I guess as it transformed from epidemic to pandemic to endemic, it became increasingly predictable. The duration and peaks of the last waves could even be predicted by months indeed, as measures and behaviors remained practically unchanged. Not one of these predictions encompassed six months, though.
I stand corrected if that was the case. I followed WHO and Mexican predictions, and more speculative ones if the authors were honest about the speculation.
Why not? It's the most efficient way I could think of, to display the sheer quantity, timeline, and content of the "Covid predictions" that we were shown in the UK. They are easily clickable, to show the original context (typically a news story or press release). You'll also note that practically all of them extend for at least 6 months.
Also, you "asked for some". There they are - there's a lot of them.
Reminding ourselves that you asked to be "pointed to some (graphs predicting more than 6 months)":
It is not clear when the image in first result was published, but given that it includes error bars for dates from March 2020 onwards, I would assume this is the result of modelling performed earlier than March 2020. It covers until October 2020.
How've I not noticed this? I've instead seen a whole lot of graphs with no prediction whatsoever and lots and lots of people in positions of authority who seem totally unable to extrapolate from those in their heads, resulting in idiotic back-and-forth on various restrictions for the first 18 or so months of the pandemic.
Shit like schools releasing plans ahead of the school year that they then immediately ignore because otherwise they'd have to close in the first two weeks of school, when it was fucking obvious the numbers would be like that around that time, just from looking at the graph and knowing more-or-less how disease spreads. Or "Ok stop masking and open up restaurants wait oh shit it's going up again I thought the tiny dip we saw would continue forever, for no good reason". Just baffling levels of data-illiteracy.
But not a lot of long-term prediction graphs. Who was publishing those?
[EDIT] Wait, I did see total-deaths-at-time-X predictions with/without measures, and with/without vaccination at high rates. That's true.
[EDIT EDIT] Is there a tone issue or is my having seen vanishingly few graphs for all of COVID that tried to predict trends more than a week or two out an outlier experience, and those were in fact extremely common in, perhaps, media I didn't look at? Truly, the main problem I saw locally was an astonishing near-complete failure to consider trends and likely projections, over and over again and often by the same people, who seemed weirdly incapable of learning a very clear lesson, rather than too many projections looking too far out.
I didn't take in much news, and now avoid it more than ever, but what little I did was wall-to-wall with projections complete with big scary peaks and steep rises in numbers. I dread to think of the state of mind of someone who watched more like the average number of TV hours (for me it is zero), and took in all of this with an uncritical mind.
My guess is a tone issue. It’s hard to even tell that you’re saying you haven’t seen long term graphs - the first sentence comes across as sarcastic when followed by long sentences complaining about other problems.
> I've instead seen a whole lot of graphs with no prediction whatsoever
made it pretty clear, but maybe not. And the rest was expressing that the actual on-the-ground problem I saw, and the single biggest problem with my state & local-level response to the whole thing, was a complete lack of attention to future trends, not too much. But perhaps that doesn't come across very well. Mea Culpa.
If you are a software engineer (or even, a "coder", which I think is an incredibly apt analogy for OP to mention), does your work calendar currently say "code this week for 65 hours or else" ?
Of course not, I would accept a different job. The game is doing these or else's within the week and not compensating for them.
A company that pays 70 hour a week worker is paying for at least 85 hours of time or can be sued and the worker must not have any more appropriate offers that the employer tricked them out of taking.
The problem of the salary job overtime scam is one of an employer misrepresenting a job to be equivalent to other jobs to ultimately get more value for less money, it has nothing to do with different parts of the job market having lower bargaining power. If the software industry fails, the scam is entirely unnecessary.
I think this is a limitation of faceless communication, and boils down to the respect that users of a platform have for the other users and the platform itself. Ie - there isn't enough. And that's ok, because we should spend more time talking in real life.
India has its own payment processing stack, UPI so I expect Visa going down shouldn’t lead to a major disruption. It’s yet to be tested however so we won’t know until Visa actually goes down.
WhatsApp going down on the other hand will be a big pain as lots of businesses and people rely on it. Though I expect them to figure out alternatives within a few weeks.
I go to the bank and get cash. Businesses accept that cash for goods and services. I observe no difference in my social media habits because I do not use Meta products.
And me. So your "exception" hypothesis is getting weaker :)
You've really got me thinking.
Is there a word for that thing when "everyone knows" what they think
"everyone is doing", but once they start to dig deeper it turns out
nobody really is? Everyone is pretending to, because they think that's
what everybody should say and do?
Mass delusion? Group fallacy? Fashion? Groupthink? None quite capture
it.
I think what's happening here is selection bias. The people who proudly have no Meta accounts are replying to each other saying "me too". The hundreds of others who were reading did not reply.
I'm alluding to something a bit more interesting, I hope.
We don't have a way to test those hundreds of voices comprising the
supposed silent majority. I'm saying that when/(BIG if) one does - via
some hitherto undevised ingenious experiment which always yields truth
- we find that no... in fact everyone is at best ambivalent, but
mostly going along with what they think the majority view is.
I'm sure there's a name/concept for this in group dynamics.
Consensus mythology? (I'm just making that up)
A hallmark is that interrogating the group yields one answer, but each
individual considered privately will give you a very different
answer.
But it's not "group-think" I'm talking about, because that implies a
more overt pressure. Rather it emerges in the absence of coordination
amongst an implied majority when there exists a loud propaganda
message designating some other group a minority.
I think this effect has important implications in the kind of 50:50 +
swing elections we've seen over the past few years. For example, in
Brexit, a mass of lethargic voters assumed "everyone will vote
against" and didn't verify the reality by asking lots of diverse
friends. It's not that people are trapped in actual bubbles so much as
bubbles of their own mind based on assumptions about those around
them.
Sorry, that's probably a long and clumsy way of saying something
obvious.
I see what you're getting at. I do know that many people, when asked about Whatsapp (especially parents complaining about the "obligatory" school Whatsapp groups), wish they didn't have to use it. I'm not sure how serious that sentiment is, or if they really would wish that if they understood the consequences, but as an experiment I have been attempting various community organisation projects that explicitly do not use Whatsapp. They've been quite successful, so far! We have just started co-ordinating a monthly kid's play session in our street, and I have a regular biking group.
Think about the situation for a second. You'll be switching to other methods, and so will everyone else, all at once. Do Amex and Mastercard even have the capacity to take up the slack with no notice? Do you really think that every critical component of a cost-optimised system will have been over-provisioned to be able to take on hundreds of millions of additional customers in a single day? And if one fails, the demand switches to the remainder and crashes them too. It's a classic cascade failure.
I suspect it would take up the slack - depending on how the failure happened and when it happened.
I don't believe payment processors have the same number of payments every second, so Amex and MC have to be sized for the largest spike (+ some) that they can endure, and so unless Visa fell right when they were already maxed out, they'd likely continue.
And Visa has fallen before; if it was anything like a long-term failure, you know all the other processors would be spinning up as much extra capacity as they could. And many stores still have the paper machines for credit slips.
FB was a money printing machine, but they trashed it.