Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

beautiful

There were several reasons for haste, including a suggestion by Artie Minson, the company’s then–chief financial officer, that it would be ideal to go public before the loquacious Neumann spent a summer saying things he shouldn’t to bankers and investors in the Hamptons, where the Neumanns have two homes.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/marketing-expert-scott-galloway-on-wework-and-adam-neumann.html

Fun read!

This really got out of hand, huh?

haha that guy is kind of a dick, but it's in a worthy cause

I kind of wish the ipo had been forced through so that JPM, GS and all the other underwriters could've eaten shit and had to deal with their client fallout.

It really does suck that Neumann, thus far, has all this money and is currently free to start another 'venture'.

I don’t want his family to have to go into hiding, as Galloway suggests, but he should certainly never show his face in public for a long time. It’s kind of infuriating this relatively obvious sham - lol math - doesn’t rise to the level of what happened in Theranos, because it kind of feels like it does.

It's a business that in theory COULD have a sound, profitable business model (albeit on a much smaller scale). At least I think so. Theranos made a product that just didn't work at all.

in theory COULD have a sound, profitable business model (albeit on a much smaller scale)

If WeWork had been pursued on the appropriately smaller scale and grown at an appropriately sensible pace, rather than being hothouse force-grown with scads of VC cash, then it would have been a wholly different beast, a legitimate business, rather than a fraudulent vehicle for extracting tons of money from unwary investors.

shoulda been called YouWorkWithoutBenefits

https://www.fastcompany.com/90285552/the-most-powerful-person-in-silicon-valley

Returning to this article nine months later reminds me what the real gambit was

WeWork’s potential lies in what might happen when you apply AI to the environment where most of us spend the majority of our waking hours. I head down one floor to meet Mark Tanner, a WeWork product manager, who shows me a proprietary software system that the company has built to manage the 335 locations it now operates around the world. He starts by pulling up an aerial view of the WeWork floor I had just visited. My movements, from the moment I stepped off the elevator, have been monitored and captured by a sophisticated system of sensors that live under tables, above couches, and so forth. It’s part of a pilot that WeWork is testing to explore how peopule move through their workday. The machines pick up all kinds of details, which WeWork then uses to adjust everything from design to hiring.

I ask what else we can spy on. He taps the screen and calls up a large map displaying each of the 83 cities in which WeWork operates. From here, we can drop down into any of them: Around the world in 80 nanoseconds.

“Basically, every object will have the potential to be a computer,” adds David Fano, WeWork’s chief growth officer, who is overseeing development of this new technology. “We are looking at, what does that world look like when the office is this highly connected, intelligent thing?”

This is why Son is investing billions in WeWork.

First paragraph quote should end in ellipsis (i should cop to snipping the bit where the We guy promises no identity data is captured - but of course that promise is absolute nonsense)

The recent bit where people were mockingly saying 'why were people treating them like a technology company?' - well, in the long run, the idea was that the real money was going to come from the data

The machines pick up all kinds of details, which WeWork then uses to adjust everything from design to hiring.

This quickly glosses over whether the practical benefits produced by all that gee-whiz technology were ever valuable enough to offset its cost. Although it obviously was impressive eye candy to show to investors and journalists.

worker 823-B seems to retire to the bathroom stall in a 10th percentile-trafficked hallway and makes motions their hand 99.99% match with "jerking off" 7.4 times per month while only once visiting the restroom on the way back to module 25

recommend employee termination and powerhose purchase order, automatic notification to finance team...ok

the fancy tools probably were mostly eye candy, with benefits that seemed to underline that promise that they weren't gleaning personal data but only overall trends

But the people who read Fast Company were sharp enough to realize that this is Google & Facebook's business model applied to the physical world in the form of identity data gleaned from identifiable bodies who both live and work near the same biosensors 24 hours a day, and were able to connect the dots

So the money was coming from people who absolutely recognized this as a tech company. Had they been given another 5-10 years to collect data, it is very likely the money would not have had to come from rent, but from the life data of their customers. They couldn't exactly brag about this in their IPO roll out, but for all the people dunking on them for 'not being good at math', the real question is why we allow Google & Facebook's business models to remain legal in the United States

Because advertising is the second best thing America is best at, after military technology

So, you're saying the idea was not that the data would in any way be used to improve "everything from design to hiring". That was just a smokescreen. The idea was that reams of data about their tenants would be collected and sold to outside companies.

I imagine all that data gathering would make anyone concerned about business confidentiality a little hesitant to work there.

https://i.imgur.com/CWLicAz.jpg

🤟

not a smokescreen, I imagine they trusted those machines to help with design & hiring -- but the real money is in gleaning personal data for AI to learn from. the trends lead to predictions, and accurate predictions can be sold. it doesn't have to be the kind of spying we've already grown acclimated to on gmail, though seeing as we've somehow learned to accept that -- you can see why investors were ready to gamble on what could happen if We became normal

about business confidentiality -- man alive's point is well taken, even given the fact that they're clearly after a different kind of data. I mean it all sounds insane & like I'm connecting one too many dots, but you really have to take Son at his word when he's discussing planet-sized ambitions like these. WeWork failed, but SenseTime is real

it doesn't have to be the kind of spying we've already grown acclimated to on gmail

I don't use gmail, what is this a reference to?

gmail searches your email for keywords in order to more effectively target advertising to you on other websites

I just wouldn't really trust a company like that to not also be harvesting info off wifi connections, maybe even zooming in on screens with AI-assistance. I don't think my local Stumptown provider is doing that.

Not yet, not for their own purposes

WeWork/SoftBank thread:

You haven’t even begun to see the anger that will be unleashed on Adam Neumann. He has 15,000 people right now who are stuck cleaning up. They feel like circus clowns shovelling the shit. He has taken $750M & left a toxic waste cleanup.

interview @nymag https://t.co/dEb19Qjdjl

— Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) October 1, 2019

Also the longer interview with Galloway linked in that tweet:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/marketing-expert-scott-galloway-on-wework-and-adam-neumann.html

i've heard it's a fun read about things out of hand

At least it’s a ~13 hour gap this time, not the ~7 hour loop that happened to xyzzzz on the UK politics thread today

Whoops, my bad

> The machines pick up all kinds of details

And yet they can't tell who is swiping all the candy bars...

It's probably worker 823-B, I don't trust him.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-01/toyota-typifies-ugly-month-with-16-slide-auto-sales-update

The severity of the slide stokes fears that a long-anticipated car sales collapse may be arriving. The slowdown puts auto dealers already struggling with shrinking profit margins in an even more precarious position.

Hope so.

By Lucy Bayly (NBC)

Wall Street took another slide on Wednesday, just two days into the new quarter, as disappointing employment data and a contraction in manufacturing activity fueled fears of a recession.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by around 525 points, or 1.97 percent, on Wednesday morning, wiping out all gains for the third quarter. The S&P 500 suffered a similar fate, falling 1.85 percent and erasing any yield for the last quarter. The tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 1.75 percent as Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft fell.

President Donald Trump blamed the Democrats for the market sell-off, tweeting that "impeachment nonsense" was driving down "the Stock Market, and your 401K’s."

congratulations to the FTSE100 btw

In other news, the market is apparently not too sanguine on $2000 exercise bikes that cost another $40/month to operate

What now?

oh peloton.

oh pelotonpaws

Good stuff in this (long) essay: http://bostonreview.net/forum/lenore-palladino-american-corporation-crisis%E2%80%94lets-rethink-it

My 1-year old nephew who lacks basic language and object permanence will get bored and stop playing after two or three rounds of peekaboo, you know. https://t.co/DeSphYS8iE

— Quantian (@quantian1) October 11, 2019

anecdotally, it seems like the market is more volatile these days - so many swings of 1% or more, in either direction. but maybe it's not?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/VIXCLS

is ^that^ a decent indicator?

That’s a measure of expected future volatility, but I think it tracks historical vol pretty well.

it seems like it should be easy to find historical volatility data, but for some reason i keep running across the VIX instead

but let's face it, i'm a rookie

Look for S&P 500 realized volatility index. Realized is the more common term.

thanks!

every part of this graf is amazinghttps://t.co/IYkNJTn8ho pic.twitter.com/hfsCCdGm14

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) October 22, 2019

mr neumann's work sure is worth a lot of money, he must have really good ideas