I'm curious to see how good Lyft Maps is, too. Uber Maps is, frankly, a disaster in my area, frequently suggesting illegal and/or impossible turns. I try to submit map feedback every trip (very hard as a rider, as most forms of available feedback seem to be to punish the driver rather than the platform), and it's still never been fixed. Most drivers seem to use Google Maps or Waze instead and if I see a driver using Uber Maps, I need to watch the trip and suggest several corrections. Ironically, I'm only a few miles from the office where most Uber Maps staff used to work.
Source - I led this team
Long story short: this is actually not the best way to accumulate investment returns. The numbers in the post are not just realistic. Small $ private equity investments (that’s what this is) often lose money when costs are properly accounted for, especially if you include the value of time. And if you pay someone to manage the asset (rental property manager for example) it eats your return.
My dad once came into possession of a coin operated laundromat. It was exciting for a while. I’d go with him down to the laundromat and we’d pick up the quarters and do inventory. We bought a coin counter on eBay to make it go faster. Eventually we did the math and realized the business barely broke even, and was occupying 20% of his professional attention. He shut it down after 3 months and sold off the equipment.
Anyway you can make these kinds of businesses work but it’s a grind, not a free lunch. You’re better off with ETFs or a good dividend stock.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S156919932...
No one really has a good story for why (and it may not hold) but it seems to be consistent with the idea that the most important variable is truly just age.
If tech salaries were risk premia, you would expect the expected value (weighted average over all foreseeable futures) of compensation packages at startups to be higher than those at established tech giants. This might be true, but it doesn't seem obvious: there are often comments on HN doubting the claims of high packages at tech giants, suggesting the commenters aren't getting paid more at their more risky (p(fired | laid off | shutdown)) jobs.
Software engineering salaries are high because there's competition for the 'best' software engineers. In a competitive hiring market, the absolute upper cap on compensation is the marginal contribution of an additional engineer, less some percentage to account for uncertainties. That marginal contribution is high at the largest tech companies, so salaries are high. Other companies can either pay high, too or, if they can't use a software engineer as efficiently (e.g. because they don't get as much leverage from software, or if their engineering is poorly managed), they won't be willing to pay the market rate.
This is so spot-on it literally pains me
This is a measure of where inflation "goes", not what fuels inflation. The narrative that profits are "fueling" inflation is completely made up and the people pushing it are lying to everyone for political reasons.
Inflation is caused - in most countries - by excessively loose monetary policy (sometimes fiscal policy, sometimes both). If government policy creates inflation (average prices go up) that money can flow to a domestic labor or domestic investors or leave the country. This depends on supply-side factors that are basically orthogonal to the inflation question. It is true that in the most recent round of inflation it primarily led to increased corporate profits.
There is a theory from the 80s called the wage-price spiral [Blanchard] that talks about how inflation (which is initially caused by fiscal or monetary policy) can become self-sustaining if wages and prices are set in a staggered back-and-forth kind of way, as workers react to higher prices by demanding raises, and firms react to higher labor costs by raising prices. However, there is no serious theory that such a process would happen with profits. That makes no sense at all! The exact opposite would be true, if anything. High profits in some time period would likely regress to the mean as price competition sets in. In fact, this is exactly what is happening right now, as corporate profits after spiking over the past 12 months are shrinking.
The "profit-price spiral" narrative is being pushed by the same disingenous idiots pushing the "greedflation" narrative - it is not a serious attempt to explain inflation, it is an attempt to use reasonable-sounding economics words to blame inflation on companies instead of the actual culprit: governments that overstimulated their economies to such a degree that they caused both inflation and profits to spike.