Is it true that IT innovation this time around shows the pattern _opposite_ of all other types of research and development? Meaning that the downturn of the IT market is even worse than it seems, relatively speaking? Or is something off with this chart? Or is R&D in US defined counterintuitively?

So I'm sorry George, but no, propaganda didn't quite got me haha. I'm just reflecting on the easy-to-observe misalignment between financial market behavior and practical investments in all sorts of high-tech :)

On "impossible to move" - I mean, it is possible, but it is way harder than 10-20 years ago. The market is too high, the development is too low, for no good reason. I said nothing about investment of ppl :) I meant that R&D is stagnating for no good reason. And I would know haha, as I work in it

Sure, the metric is very high, and the metric is not exactly _bad_ per se, but still it feels like it is a wrong metric to optimize. We're optimizing a wrong target. And people are mad at that, even if they can't quite verbalize it.

I'm guessing people (at least some of them) are responding to the obvious disconnect between "housing prices have never been higher" and "it's impossible for a person to move or invest", as well as "corporate profits are roaring" and "people are laid off and long-term investments are not happening"

Thanks! It's super-interesting to see these "general principles" (when they make sense of course! And these do make sense :) It's interesting what principles are shared across domains and business cases; which ones are really more organizational than area-specific.

One of the red flags when looking at product pricing is if the unit they bill by doesn't make a lot of sense. For example, some off-the-shelf video products like Cloudflare Stream bill per minute of video delivered, not per byte. A minute of low quality video _should_ be much cheaper to deliver tho.

So what's the optimal soft spot? On a scale from "code it all yourself" to "prepackaged solution", how to find the optimal level? Or conversely, if you are writing a tool for others, how to pick the right level of abstraction to sell it?

So I see how the same vibe may arise elsewhere, under similar conditions :)

Yeah I think this vibe comes from a combo of IT boom, being so car-centric (with highway interchanges in the middle of an otherwise very walkable city - it feels... peculiar), and the influx of young ppl (partially because of the war, sadly) that shifted the age distribution. Everyone is young here!