A series of a critical views on capitalism as this individual has followed more bull markets than bear markets, and would rather watch a stock ticker on cable news mixed with the juicy details of advancing vs declining stocks and knowing how many stocks hit annual highs and lows, where “going on your phone” requires reverting back to 1997 and going onto BigCharts to retrieve simple market information that no cable TV network cares to show screen anymore…
She’s into superstitions
Black cats and voodoo dolls
I feel a premonition
That girl’s gonna make me fallShe’s into new sensations
New kicks in the candlelight
She’s got a new addiction
For every day and nightShe’ll make you take your clothes off and go dancing in the rain
She’ll make you live her crazy life, but she’ll take away your pain
Like a bullet to your brain, come on!Ricky Martin, Partial lyrics of “Living A Vida Loca”
By the time said song was a hit, the dot-coms were on the up and up, “NASDAQ 10,000 by the end of 2000″…said the pundits! As a result of a backwards market beginning in the mid 1990s with the initial dot-com bubble, it began an avalanche of expectations a “company” is supposed to be after the 20th Century. Double-digit growth, ensure you got seed funding from the proper VC firms at the right time and like a good comedian, you time your offering at best market value like a good laugh. Years later, Silicon Valley was still Living the Crazy Life; it has lead into a really strange phenomena in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the last couple of years, the housing “demand” is so high, that one suburban house, a ranch, 1,000 sq ft; less than an acre property to be sold for literally a cool million. A house that burned down could be sold for that same amount of cash. Who in the hell could think a small plot of land could be priced so out of whack even for the largest metros in the country? Is there that many Steve Jobs out there with Reality Distortion Fields?
Heads of big VC firms are living a crazy and rich life too; with really out of whack economic views. And any startup that would compete against Facebook alike are probably falling through the cracks. Our employment numbers, to me needs to be seen in a skeptical lens. Are there people who have given up work? If so they are not counted. Has anyone that’s a normal minded person ever got through the first interview process at Google? Has anyone called out the discriminatory process at big tech companies they like to call “hiring seminars”? Has the industry listened to Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs and only would hire “the great” people, which are one and a million, or even more? Has the industry written off people because they are not “good enough”? Why does an industry have to be so reliant on coding? Why are people not redefining a corporate monopoly that is far from what AT&T was 35 years ago – and why are people comparing the software and services of the IT sector to what was a “regulated monopoly” of the phone company?
Oh right, I shouldn’t be asking questions, I am supposed to jam like it’s 1999 and just sing some Ricky Martin to waive-off the concerns of this out of control marketplace.
This is where I feel “group-think”, the speaking the verses out of the political bible of libertarians, social liberal/limited government, as well as the extreme capitalists who perhaps pray to the Gordon Gecko character 30+ years later, as well as the highly technical people have taken over an economy based on philosophy and not on real-world, and concrete business practices or norms that was “it was always done that way” for generations, centuries and millennia before. I mean c’mon Alexander Graham Bell didn’t go to a VC firm to consider marketing his invention. Nor did Grey, Kellogg or Western Electric who then marketed his own invention.
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