Facebook is dying as the tech bubble bursts.

Facebook is collapsing right in front of us.

All you have to do is look at their stock price.

It’s “worth” less than 25% of what it was 13 months ago, even before you adjust for the fact that the money lost another 30% this year under Biden and (locally worse) Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Where you have to pay for three dozen eggs at 2020 prices to get only a dozen and you have to pay for two pounds of butter to get a pound, and you have to pay for 1.2 months worth of rent to get a month.

This is Illinois and this is America under the Democratic Party.

Phoronix is talking about Facebook’s code contributions to the BtrFS file system for Linux, which I admit I use personally.

Since it’s all under the GNU GPL, it will survive the collapse of the Second Tech Bubble, when Facebook is long gone. As did much Free and Open Source Software the last time, much of which is still developed and in use today.

But what will be gone when Facebook itself collapses?

Cat pictures?

Terror content that they don’t see anything wrong with (because there’s no human moderators and they try to cover it up with software that detects words)?

Anti-vaxxers? People denying that we had an election and they lost?

They don’t care what kind of an open sewer they’re running as long as people engage with advertising, but in Biden/Pritzker’s economy, ad revenue is worth very little right now and many of the ad firms themselves are shutting down and having 100% layoffs.

Meanwhile, the company is mostly being mocked for spending down all of their assets on something that looks like characters in a Nintendo 64 game where nobody has any legs, on a $600 VR headset.

Facebook truly is burning while Zuckerberg fiddles. This is priceless. I shall watch with great amusement and then laugh in “I still use IRC and lost pretty much nothing.”.

There’s nothing particularly unique about what’s happening to Facebook (“Fakebook”) in the economy of the Bay Area. Layoffs Tracker shows mostly what’s unfolding in failed blue cities and states.

Yesterday, a “self-driving” car company based in Pennsylvania called Argo AI went under, and 2,000 people lost their jobs, as their clients took possession of the company’s “intellectual property”.

Self-driving cars are a pipe dream. Tesla is now under CRIMINAL investigation by the feds for advertising that their cars are “self-driving”. (NewsWaffle proxy. Original.)

I mean, it’s technically true that “self-driving” cars can mostly manage to stay in a lane, but you can’t trust them not to run people over and say they were a shopping bag or slam into the back of a parked police car in Florida, so you still, legally, have to be paying attention to the road and ready to take over at a moment’s notice.

I linked to the ARGO AI story in Techrights IRC yesterday, highlighting Matthew J. Garrett, joking “You’re next, Bubbles.”.

(Which is what Peter Venkman told the judge in Ghostbusters II while the ghosts were flying away with his court reporter.)

He didn’t reply as far as I know. I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t already know.

The Federal Reserve may be fixing to lose all credibility.

I saw a report yesterday that says that many investors feel that the Fed will crater and stop aggressively hiking interest rates in December. The Fed hasn’t commented, but I guess we won’t have to wait long to see.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that jacking up interest rates through the roof and causing immediate and rampant destruction is the best or only way to get hyperinflation under control, but it is what’s available considering that Congress won’t quit throwing money around and bailing out Zombie Corporations like Japan did in the 90s before it gave up because the government deficits were just too large and the population wouldn’t stand for it anymore.

If true, this means that instead of just a Depression or just a hyperinflationary period, we’re going to get both as the Federal Reserve throws its hands into the air and gives up trying to deal with this using the tools it has available.

I’ve witnessed five US recessions and have studied more as a hobby. Here’s what I think about Bitcoin.

I’ve witnessed five US recessions and have studied them as a historical phenomenon as a hobby. Here’s what I think about Bitcoin.

If you look at the fake coins bloodbath and bankruptcy proceedings going on right now, that alone is another dotcom bubble, and Bitcoin and clones turned out to be Flooz 2.0.

Remember Flooz? If you’re much under 40, you probably don’t.

There was going to be an “Internet Currency” that you could exchange USD for because online merchants weren’t established to take credit cards and stuff yet.

I got some as part of a promotion and used them to buy some cigars from a cigar Web site through the mail when I was underage. I think the statute of limitations is up on that. It was over 23 years ago.

Anyway, Flooz got Whoopi Goldberg doing commercials for them, similarly to the way Matt Damon and others were doing Super Bowl ads for crypto exchanges that are now defunct, only months later.

Most of the Flooz (and similar company, Beenz) activity ended up being Russian oligarchs using it to launder money.

When the company shut its doors with no warning in the middle of the night (like crypto exchanges that now freeze transactions because there is no money and head to bankruptcy court), people flooded Web forums to complain that they had a bunch of them and when they called the 1-800 number it said the line was disconnected.

Bitcoin+Clones and the exchanges are just a fancy Flooz.

The problem is that cryptocurrencies got very big because people figured that it would always go up, it appealed to Libertarian cranks who thought they had something real like Gold or Silver (and they didn’t) just from some buzzwords about it not being “legal tender”, which turned out to be a problem when it lost 70% of its value and continues plummeting, and then the tax evaders started getting letters from the IRS saying “We know what you did last year and we want money.”.

Ironically, people who bought Bitcoins last year have about 29 cents on the dollar today, while people who just held onto the dollar still have 91 cents even if they didn’t invest it.

And a full inflation-adjusted dollar if they bought inflation-backed treasury bonds.

So while my sister-in-law is tearing out her hair, my Treasury Bonds have not lost a single penny.

She comes from the slums of Manila and fancies herself an investor who drives a BMW.

They’re probably going to want that back.

Anyway, “Flooz on a Blockchain” (cryptocurrency) didn’t actually work out all that well, like I kept trying to say it wouldn’t.

Now who will clean up all of these ridiculous Bitcoin ATMs?

They managed to litter them at Merchandise Mart in Chicago and at gas stations in the suburban ghettos, and they’re rather unsightly.

CNN stops bothering to hide that the economy has turned sour.

CNN was one of the last few holdouts insisting that we were in a “strong economy” with “robust growth” and “record job creation levels” and that high inflation would be “transitory” in America.

Sometime around yesterday, they changed their minds and finally started reporting what investment magazines and CEOs were saying for months, that a dire recession is coming. (It’s already here, though.)

I’ve said over the last few years, repeatedly, that we were in a “second tech bubble”, with the first big one of course being the Dotcom Bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s where investors were willing to throw at and lose money on anything vaguely tech related that sounded like it might have a business plan, no matter how insane.

But even I didn’t see what’s happening now coming. We’re in uncharted territory on gasoline prices (for the United States….Europe has always had very decadent and corrupt politicians who subscribed to this green new deal insanity, but it’s a pretty new concept here).

There’s a shortage of baby formula, and the president of the United States refuses to do what current law authorizes him to, in order to get it under control. Because he doesn’t want to go too hard on the oligopoly that produces it all.

There’s pretty much every major company laying off or going into a hiring freeze at about the same time.

Carvana is about ready to collapse and has lost their license to sell any cars at all in the entire state of Illinois.

And streaming companies like Netflix are seeing record cancellations and the end to subscriber growth, and admit it will accelerate.

Walmart has had its worst trading days since the 1980s this week, losing 19% of its share price in three days. Target and Amazon got hammered much worse.

The whole thing is an epic disaster. And where is the news? Trying to tell people that “this millennial in their 20s just bought a $700,000 house….so why don’t you have one?”. (CNBC bullshit)

I’m just so sick and tired and goddamned disgusted by it all. I’ve tuned out advertising completely. I don’t have any streaming disservices in my house. I watch movies and stuff on discs. Usually ones I borrowed at the library, which I have to pay taxes for whether I use it or not.

I’ve blocked advertisements from appearing in my Web browser since 1998, when I got on the Web and found out there were ads and that they were slowing my browsing down a lot (images on a 56k modem….and now videos on my cable that I didn’t consent to watching).

I couldn’t really care less about their damned “economy” aside from how it bleeds into our household and affects our lives.

So far, we’ve weathered this better than a lot of people I know, who foolishly take on lots of debt over things that aren’t even remotely important and then plead bankruptcy for the fourth time.

That’s where advertising leads people. They go “There’s a scratch on my car…Get rid of it!”, “I bought those jeans last year….I need new jeans!”, “I’m so sick of this TV. It only has the features from 2020, I need the 2022 model!”.

And so a lot of what people spend money on isn’t only unnecessary, it’s ridiculous, it’s corrosive to their actual wellbeing.

They can’t afford healthcare, they can’t afford rent, they can’t afford groceries or transportation, because they’re sitting around a mountain of crap that doesn’t do any useful work for them, that they bought because the advertisers told them they were entitled to it.

The Democrat Party and the Republican Party that let laissez-faire Crapitalism dictate trade policy, who bankrupted us as a nation, who convinced us all we could “just go shopping” to cure what ails you, have no answers for how to fix anything, because they’re the ones who don’t really want to fix it.

Even Trump said he opposed NAFTA, then he got in and made it even worse.

But tech is the most interesting point of the economic collapse in my opinion.

Where are all of the people who were saying Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon had these trillions of dollars in “value”? Fake value which is starting to be erased. They’re silent. They’re going away.

And it turns out that the biggest fools of them all were the ones telling people to invest their money in the companies like Tesla and Netflix, which deserve to fail.

They deserve to fail for many reasons, including defrauding their investors and their customers, but they also deserve to fail because their customers have no control over their products.

Even now, you buy TVs with a “Netflix” button that paid to be there. After the company goes bankrupt, it’ll just be something you accidentally hit that doesn’t do anything anymore.

Like how Webvan left all of those empty tubs and that turns out to be their assets after the bankruptcy.

Speaking of Webvan….Instacart, Doordash, Grubhub.

I believe that economists will eventually call this the “app” or “smartphone” bubble, because it seems like everything involving those is shit hitting the fan, but there are lots of other bubbles too, like “cryptocurrencies”.

I remember when there were going to be “internet currencies” called flooz and beenz, and they got Whoopi Goldberg as their spokesperson, and that’s starting to sound a lot like Matt Damon doing cryptocurrency ads at the superbowl this year before those cratered, right?

I suppose we’ll see how long the IRS goes on auditing those when they mostly turn up losses that lower people’s tax liabilities.

I’ve also heard “Everything Bubble”. Since it has infected banking and even low end retail that mostly deals in toothpaste and underwear, like Walmart, I think maybe this is also a fair assessment.

However bad you think this will get, it’s going to be worse.