Mark Zuckerberg directed the investment of something like $70-80 billion into his “VR metaverse,” which is now shutting down on 15 June.
I have been assured that capitalist ownership is warranted because capitalists take risks and because they make important decisions about capital allocation.
We are ruled by absolute bumblefucks who have no better idea than anyone else about how to “allocate capital,” who are convinced of their own genius and who will gleefully throw away $80 billion (of mostly other people’s money) in pursuit of ever so slightly higher marginal returns because they are obsessed with accumulating ever more power for themselves.
They’re so rich that they can make catastrophic mistakes like “misallocating $80 billion” and never worry about losing their status as ultra-rich capitalist owners.
@HeavenlyPossum Even if you assume competence, the incentives are off. The only purpose to which a business leader will allocate capital is that of making a return on the investment. Not social good. Often social bad.
Spend a billion dollars on curing diseases or building lasting public infrastructure? Wasted money, no profit.
This is the key bit. The theory is that people who are good at allocating resources will end up with more resources and so will allocate more resources more efficiently.
There are a couple of problems with this. The first is nicely summed up by a game where you all start with $100 and are allowed to bet up to 10% of your wealth on the outcome of coin flips. After the first round, some people will have $110, some will have $90. People who won in the first round but lost in the second will have $100, but people who lost in the first round and won in the second will have $99. People who win a few early rounds are able to accumulate a lot of the wealth in the game. They are not good at predicting the outcomes, it’s entirely random, but eventually this game decays to a distribution where a few people have most of the money and most other people have none.
The second, as you point out, is that extreme concentrations of wealth insulate you from failure. A trillion dollar company with multiple revenue streams can fund all sorts of things that waste billions of dollars, skew other markets, have huge externalities (environmental or social damage, for example) and have basically no consequences. Meta is a $1.5T company. Their stock price is around double what it was before the start of the pandemic. Wasting $70B didn’t make them lose money, it made them make money less slowly.
@MeerderWoerter @HeavenlyPossum
I like how this post implies that you've been walking this earth since at least the Middle Ages.
@HeavenlyPossum And this is why we should totally believe him when he tells us how awesome AI is going to turn out to be!
It will serve as a fantastic pub quiz question in a few years: “why did Facebook rebrand itself ‘Meta’”?
@HeavenlyPossum “After nearly 10 years, #JohnCarmack’s time helping to guide VR hardware efforts at Meta (and at Facebook/Oculus before that) have come to a close. The #IdSoftware co-founder and Doom co-creator officially left Meta on Friday night, according to an internal company memo obtained by Insider and confirmed by The New York Times. Carmack’s departure message serves as a scathing indictment of crippling inefficiency at Meta that he said he was “offended by” and that he compared to a GPU with a measly 5 percent utilization rate. “We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this,” he wrote. “I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”
Not listening to heeding expert technical advice is “Marky Marks” special geek power. 🤣
@jplebreton don’t disagree on that, a “lost decade”, thats a great way of thinking about it. The way I’m looking at it, so many attempts to capitalise on GPU’s; Graphics, crypto and now AI. VR was always a lost cause because the best in the business, #SteveMann ¥ identified #AR as the cherry for vision and while I think it’s useful, it’s not that useful day to day.
The world is screaming energy availability and pollution reduction and the best and brightest have switched to #AIAgents that have indeterminant outcomes and cant do mathematics. Make something that people want and will pay for.
Physics wins again
And there were all those businesses that shelled out to have a permanent presence in the Metaverse. They'd be ticked if they couldn't write it off.
I never so much as logged in. Never saw it.
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