“The risk for the technology industry is that we are now the incumbents: we have a stake in keeping things exactly as they are, and we build products for ourselves — we’re our own best customers. That, though, cedes the future to the powerless — those with nothing to lose under the current system wil…”— Ben Thompson, stratechery.com
“iPhone maker Foxconn has replaced more than half its workforce with robots since the iPhone 6 was launched.”— Tom Whitwell, Ben Lovejoy, medium.com
“The second [coming disruption] is telerobotics. There are a couple of well-known ones. One is the surgeon operating at a 100-kilometer distance from the patient. But you can imagine that hotel rooms in London could be cleaned by people driving robots sitting in Kenya or Buenos Aires or wherever, for…”— Eshe Nelson, Richard Baldwin, qz.com
“We shouldn’t try and protect jobs; we should protect workers. It’s really a fool’s errand to struggle with because after a year or two those jobs will still go. Either they will be replaced by robots or they’ll move to Mexico or China.”— Eshe Nelson, Richard Baldwin, qz.com
“Consider that in 2015, more than 100% of the S&P 500’s gain came from Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google”— Morgan Housel, collaborativefund.com
“The math of stock market returns blows people’s minds. According to research from J.P. Morgan Asset Management, the median stock in the Russell 3000 Index underperformed the overall index by almost 100 percentage points from 1980 to 2014. Fully two-thirds of stocks in the index underperformed the ma…”— Morgan Housel, collaborativefund.com
“NYSE measured the distance to the furthest cabinet, which is where people put their servers. It was 185 yards. So they gave every [high-frequency trader] a cable of 185 yards. Then, traders who were previously closer to the [exchange server] asked to move to the farthest end of the building. Why? Be…”— Morgan Housel, collaborativefund.com
“In 1990 there were 610 hedge funds managing $39 billion of assets, according to Hedge Fund Research. Today there are nearly 10,000 hedge funds controlling more than $3 trillion of assets. There are another 9,000 mutual funds in the United States, bringing the number of actively managed fund companie…”— Morgan Housel, collaborativefund.com
“The amount of time the average stock is held for has fallen off a cliff, from more than seven years to less than one.”— Morgan Housel, collaborativefund.com
“The number of publicly traded U.S. companies peaked in 1996 at 7,322. Today there are just over 3,700, according to data from Wilshire Associates. The U.S. population has risen nearly 50% since 1975, and real GDP has tripled. But the number of public companies has declined 21%.”— Morgan Housel, collaborativefund.com
“It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 yea…”— Paul Mason, theguardian.com
“Think of the difference between, say, Horatio in Hamlet and a character such as Daniel Doyce in Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Both carry around with them a characteristic obsession of their age – Horatio is obsessed with humanist philosophy; Doyce is obsessed with patenting his invention. There can be no…”— Paul Mason, theguardian.com
“More than 200 years ago, the radical journalist John Thelwall warned the men who built the English factories that they had created a new and dangerous form of democracy: ‘Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate di…”— Paul Mason, John Thelwall, theguardian.com
“With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost. But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the m…”— Paul Mason, theguardian.com
“In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a ‘general intellect’ – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagine…”— Paul Mason, Karl Marx , theguardian.com