I realize the political nature of this topic, so please hear this question as sincere and not baiting / trolling: How is it a bail out if the government shut everything down to protect us from a pandemic? We’re intentionally pausing the economy, which will undoubtedly lead to a recession. Many of these companies were doing well financially prior to this disaster.
And I’m not defending AirBnB. I’m asking this about all companies. Isn’t this exactly the time our tax-funded government should step in and prop up successful companies, small, medium, and large.
What public service is Airbnb providing that they should be artificially sustained in the absence of a viable market instead of giving direct public financial support to their employees?
Yes I know what they do. That wasn’t the question.
I have used them, like many.
But that doesn’t mean they should be sustained in the absence of a viable market. The employees should all be supported, like anyone who is living through this. No question.
But the company? Why do we, as a society as a whole, need to sustain the company in the absence of a market? Someone else would create the same business again when there’s a market for it. If there is again.
This is a natural disaster, businesses shuttered before the government did anything because many people wisely started to quarantine themselves. So to be fair to the government, a lot of shutting down was happening anyway.
Being a natural disaster, I think the fairest characterization of the money is a relief effort, just as if a hurricane had struck.
A bailout is a fair term if the market screws up, as in the 2007 financial crisis due to subprime mortgages. Though the causes were complex, people were selling dodgy financial products that obscured value and risk.
In this case, many companies are adapting to a big shock quite well because of automation and delivery, but there are a ton of businesses that closed because they have a face to face business model.
I cant speak about AirBnB, but the reason bailouts are unpopular with some companies...say...airline companies is because they purposely implemented stock buy-backs and wasted most their reserve cash chasing EPS. Now they come for money. How is that fair to other companies which remained cautious and maintained cash reserves?
Are you saying every airline should have held cash reserves (really more likely to be bonds or other investments) sufficient to sustain them through a total wipeout of their entire customer base for months on end? A scenario that has never happened before in the history of commercial aviation?
Resources tied up in cash buffers are resources not deployed elsewhere, after all.
The argument seems to be that because the government adopted business operating, they should get a hand.
I'm not sure I buy that. When you're a business owner, you take risks. Also ones that you weren't explicit about.
Suppose the government creates a rule that adds paperwork, so that all businesses now need to pay more to fill in docs. That could easily be the thing that kills certain businesses. Should they get bailed out? This actually happened in my business.
I'm not sure I'd go that far. I think if there is a major, near-unforseeable danger that where public policy requires shutting down business, then I think Bylund has a fair point that it shouldn't be treated as "sucks to be you" entrepreneurial error.
But I also think there's a lot more gray area. What if you were exploiting the fact that something was illegal but not enforced? That doesn't seem to merit a bailout.
What if you were running on extremely tight margins so that a week of lost revenue for any reason, even a justified one like a pandemic, would shut you down? Again, doesn't seem to merit a bailout.
No, if companies aren't allowed to fail then the economy is broken. Every time a company is bailed out it just incentives less accountability in the future.
Besides, no one is going to bail out the small, or even medium sized companies despite what politicians say.
> How is it a bail out if the government shut everything down to protect us from a pandemic? We’re intentionally pausing the economy, which will undoubtedly lead to a recession. Many of these companies were doing well financially prior to this disaster.
I don't think it's a question of moral deserts; as you say, none of the businesses suffering right now are doing so because they did something irresponsible which blew up.
But the concern is that we likely can't bail out literally every business in the economy that's in trouble, in which case the choices we make should be driven by global societal utility. Eg, if the airline industry was destroyed, the economy would be far worse off post-crisis, so it's reasonable to keep airlines afloat to some degree.
Value stocks might not be what you think.
They are stocks that are under-valued by the market relative to its "real" value... But that doesn't necessarily imply that those companies are inherently valuable.
In my experience, the best approach is to treat the notebook as the frontend. So widgets, graphs, annotations are generally ok. Anything compute intensive should be relegated to the backend.
Maybe bitcoin and crypto are not valuable... but the mathematical ideas of blockchain are, after the bubble dies they'll just become boring pieces of crucial infrastructure that sit in the background but they'll be there, it's the only way to ensure data auditing and integrity, and sooner or later people will be ok with paying 10x or 100x storage and compute costs for auditable integrity.
It's just that the real deal insight behind blockchain is not sexy and not something that's easy to make money from...
This is related to how I take issue with many of the "progressive" things people are talking about with identity.
If you want people to be liberated from discrimination and oppression the best thing to do is change the general mindset to unity "we're both human" instead of reinforcing differences and creating new categories for people and then trying to enforce rights that only people in a certain classification can have.
The best summary of this I saw was the sign for a coffee shop bathroom. It had a list of genders: men, women, and a few others I don't quite remember. The problem I have with this is the bathroom was one room with a toilet and sink. There was obviously no need to be "inclusive", just put a sign up that says "restroom" and that's it. Nobody needs to be included or excluded, progress is made by making the shallow distinctions which get discriminated against – making those irrelevant to day to day life.
Because progressive is exactly the self centred mindset as the middle classes that fought for communist ideals for the working class they'd barely rubbed shoulders with.
It's less about the people you are supposedly trying to help and more about the power you're trying to wrestle away from some elite.
Nazi's did along racial divides, communists along class divides. Both failed and so time to try some other divide. This one is even more insidious because it's not even clear sometimes where the divide is.
In Savings and Loan crises of 80s, wall streets banks lost all the money they made during the previous 25 years. In the current crises, I dont know the exact number but it is worse than that.
So if you believe that wall street banks actually make any money, you might want to reconsider your view points.
So what happens when each node in the decision tree has probability attached to it. Worse still, what happens when you do not know the true probabilities of these nodes. Now imagine you have to deal problems all day with uncertain characteristics, i.e., decision trees have nodes with unknown probabilities. You will be stuck, unable to make decision.
This also reminds of the study in which a person's emotional part of the brain was removed (forgot name of the part, its the one that uses hueristics). So, he would have to make every decision completely rationally. That caused him to take a very long time to make even the simplest decisions, like which pencil to choose amongst a set pencils to write with.
This research seems to be suggesting that auditory-sequential (AS) learners are more intelligent, i.e., have higher IQ, than visual spatial (VS) learners.
If IQ is the measure of intelligence, then certainly, AS would be regarded as more intelligent. That is why AS learners do better at every single test that is timed or requires quickness of thought, be it SAT/GRE, mensa or job interviews at microsoft/google or a wall street bank or hedge fund.
Actually, the author is clearly stating the causal relationship. He is pointing out that free market fundamentalism is the cause of the crises and Business schools are the cheerleaders for free market fundamentalism.
Now, I personally do not agree with that argument, but your criticism of author's argument is unfounded.
Perhaps some B-schools are the cheerleaders, but I never saw it where I was. Economics departments are where that particular meme came from, and they don't actually teach economics in B-school except tangentially.
My experience is the same. I think people are confusing the macro (economics) with the micro (running an actual company). Business schools focus on the micro and in doing so very rarely address economic systems as a whole.
To but it a different way economics is about how the rules of an economic system are created. Business school is about teaching the student to work within the rules already created in the existing system.
