Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/20 - Worse Shape: Tech Stocks or Crypto?

Episode Date: November 20, 2018

Storm clouds everywhere! Tech stocks in bear market territory, crypto in full-on meltdown territory… but video games might help solve science’s gender problem and this one spacebar trick might make your iPhone insanely more useful. Oh, and the weekend Longreads suggestions. Links: It's Official: Once Mighty FAANG Stocks Have All Entered a Bear Market (Fortune) Silicon Valley wages have dropped for all except highest-paying jobs: report (The Mercury News) Bitcoin drops 12% to below $5,000 (CNBC) Tumblr was removed from Apple’s App Store over child pornography issues (The Verge) Video games could be a short-term answer to science’s gender problem (The Conversation) “The space bar trick” is the most amazing feature in iOS 12, and the internet just realized it (Fast Company) The Betterment Weekend Longreads: How The Wall Street Journal is preparing its journalists to detect deepfakes (NiemanLab) Self-driving trucks in US offer window into where machines may replace humans (Christian Science Monitor) When Elon Musk Tunnels Under Your Home (The Atlantic) The Case Against Quantum Computing (IEEE Spectrum) HOW GOOGLE AND AMAZON GOT AWAY WITH NOT BEING REGULATED (Wired) How to Use an iPod Touch as a Secure Device Instead of a Phone (Motherboard) Scientists say goodbye to physical definition of the kilogram (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the tech meme ride home for Tuesday, November 20th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, storm clouds are everywhere. Tech stocks are in bare market territory. Crypto is in full-on meltdown territory. But video games might help solve science's gender problem. And this one spacebar trick might make your iPhone insanely more useful. Oh, and the weekend long read suggestions, of course. Here's what you miss. today in the world of tech. Yesterday we spoke about the storm clouds seemingly gathering around Apple's iPhone unit sales

numbers, but it's worth noting that when it comes to the stock market, there are storm clouds seemingly everywhere in tech generally. Now, before we get into this, I do want to note that I am not a stock market guy. I'm not prognosticating anything. This podcast is not investment advice, but this is the industry we discuss every day and one feature of the current bull market has been how much it has been led, even some say dominated by tech. So it's worth noting that at the time of this recording, all of the Fang stocks, which

represent Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Netflix, all of them have declined 20% or more in value in recent months from their recent highs, pushing all of them into bare market territory and wiping out a collective $1 trillion in market value. Quoting Fortune Magazine, Alphabet's stock close Monday at $1,020 a share, marking a 20% decline from its record high of $1,273 a share in late July. Apple's stock is down 20.3% from its October 3 high, while Amazon has lost 26.3% of its value since early September. Netflix has slid 36.1% since reaching a peak in late June, while Facebook's stock has dropped 38.8% since late July.

Not long ago, the stocks of the five tech giants seem to be a safe bet, with stocks volatile at times, but always recovering from sell-offs to March to new highs. The tide began to change this summer with a growing sense that the nine-year-old bull market was losing steam, leaving the Mighty Fang at precarious. valuations right as growth in their earnings was poised to slow down." Now, I do know enough to know that there's an old saw on Wall Street that the leaders in any bull market are often the first to get a haircut when a new bear market starts to get going. Again, I'm not predicting anything. That's above my pay grade. And here's a counter argument from Alan Cole at Wharton, quote, a few bad months for Fang, but I'd never bet against any of them for the long haul. or Microsoft. They're the bottlenecks of internet commerce. To bet against them is like looking at a map of the classical world and betting against Constantinople, end quote. By which I assume he means that

whoever controls Constantinople is in a good position because they control the Dardanelles. Because, of course, Constantinople was sacked a ton of times throughout history, and the Byzantine Empire, of course, did fall. That's why it's called Istanbul Today. Make your own. They might be giant. joke here. Let me flag one other interesting detail for you. Apparently wages in Silicon Valley are dropping. According to the Mercury News, nine out of every 10 jobs in Silicon Valley now pays less adjusted for inflation than they did in 1997. Now, this is because the lower percentile wage groups have been the hardest hit. For example, the 40th, 50th, and 60th percentiles have seen wages drop between 12.1% and 14.2% over the last 20 years. But interestingly,

even the highest paid 10% only saw a 0.7% increase in wages adjusted for inflation over the last 20 years. And the lowest paid 10% only saw a 0.7% decrease. So what these numbers suggest is that it's middle wage jobs in Silicon Valley that are getting squeezed. But we know that Silicon Valley has been booming, right? So where is that money going? I bet you can guess. Quote, since 2001, the amount of money generated per Silicon Valley resident, the areas per person GDP, has grown 74 percent the study found. That's more than five times faster than the equivalent national growth. But a smaller share of that wealth is going to workers, according to the study, which was released last month. In 2001, about 64 percent of the money generated in Silicon Valley

went to workers. By 2016, that was down to 60%. The drop translated to $9.6 billion, about $8,480 in potential pay and benefits per worker, that instead went to investors and owners, according to the study. Sorry to do two stories in a row where the essential premise is the sky falling, but, you know, these might be need-to-know trends. So let's know about them. On Monday, Bitcoin dropped below $5,000, representing losses of more than 22% in the past seven days and more than 65% in Bitcoin's market value this year. At the time of this recording, Bitcoin was down a further 16% to around $4,400 per coin. Everyone is making note of this because there has been a lot of chatter that perhaps one of the reasons Bitcoin soared so much,

Much last year in late November and December was because a bunch of crypto enthusiasts went home for Thanksgiving, told their friends and family about the big run-up in crypto. A bunch of first-time investors jumped in and the price of Bitcoin topped $10,000 a coin at the end of November before flirting with $20,000 a coin right before Christmas. Well, Bitcoin is now off more than 30% versus last Thanksgiving. By the way, this recent dip is pretty much across the board. in crypto with most currencies down around 20% in the past week, wiping out roughly $40 billion in the entire cryptocurrency market valuation, which stood at around $172 billion yesterday. Longtime crypto bull and high-profile pundit Andreas Antonopoulos tweeted, quote, whatever your reason for being in crypto, now is the time for compassion, patience, respect.

Lots of people have lost lots of money recently, and it's not helpful to make empty promises, share S-word memes, or criticize others' choices, end quote. But what did I say yesterday about the crypto space and it's bickering, it's endless bickering, no less than Noreal Rubini tweeted in direct response. You, Antinopoulos, now spew this BS after you peddled for years crypto crap to clueless hodlers. and now you pretend you care about their losses. Spare them your crocodile tears. You are a hypocrite at best, or most likely a whale dumping your S onto foolish bagholders, end quote.

Quick update to yesterday's mystery in a statement, Tumblr has said that an audit found that child porn images were slipping through its usual detection tools, and that's what led to its removal from the iOS App Store. In its statement, Tumblr said that all images on the platform are, quote, scanned against an industry database of child sexual abuse material, end quote, but that the database in question was missing some content which allowed some things to slip through.

Though these offending images were immediately removed, this was the cause of the takedown. Quoting The Verge, Apple's iOS guidelines clearly state that all apps must have a content filter to screen out such material, and it seems Tumblr's existence. system wasn't up to the standard. Although the company has said getting its app reinstated is its top priority, it was unable to give any clear time frame for its return. Let's palette cleanse after those stories. Could video games be a short-term answer to science's gender problem? In a piece in the conversation, Annessa Hossein says tentatively, yes.

In her recent research, Hussain found that girls, who were heavy video game players were over three times more likely to pursue STEM degrees in college than non-video game players. Quoting Hossein, this was the case even after accounting for their socioeconomic background,

their ethnicity, past performance, and how good at their chosen subject they felt they were. Video game playing boys, meanwhile, were only 1.5 times as likely to take up a STEM degree. This suggests that identifying and encouraging young women gamers

could help get more of them studying these subjects at university. This would be a practical way to start addressing the gender imbalance and shortage of qualified people in sectors that rely on STEM experience. Having said that, in the long term, we should be

looking for ways to encourage more girls to study these subjects regardless of their other interests, end quote. The whole internet seemingly discovered this yesterday, myself included. So if you miss the the memo, listen up. There is a so-called spacebar trick new in iOS 12. The feature is actually called trackpad mode. Have you ever tried to correct something and some text you've been typing

on an iPhone, but getting that little microscope window or bubble to get the cursor wherever you wanted proved to be so devilishly difficult because your fat fingers kept getting in the way? Well, guess what? Click and hold on the space bar, and now you can. can drag the cursor in any direction you want, sort of like you were using a mouse or the arrow keys on a keyboard. Go ahead, try it yourself. It really is kind of mind-blowing. And actually, you could already do this by hard pressing on any phone that supported 3D touch, but now with the space bar trick, it's available to everyone, even those on 10Rs, which mysteriously lost 3D touch. So file this segment under News. You can use.

Time for the weekend longreeds suggestions brought to you by Betterment, the financial advisor for the rest of us. Through a combination of goal-based tools, affordable management fees, and a hands-off approach to investing, Betterment wants to help you maximize returns and minimize risk. Check them out at betterment.com slash ride. These are, of course, supersized Longreeds to tide you through the holidays coming up. What's that, Uncle Bob? Why am I over here in the corner on my phone? No, I'm not texting or playing a game.

I'm diving into a long read that Brian suggested. First up, we have Neiman Lab, who is looking at how the Wall Street Journal is preparing its journalist to detect deepfakes. If you're not familiar, deepfakes are the latest video technology that can superimpose faces over real video and make someone look like they're saying or doing something that they didn't do.

It's mostly been used in porn. up to this point, illegally, I might add, to superimpose celebrity faces onto the bodies of adult actors. But, well, you can obviously see the dire implications for this technology for a new generation of fake news, right? Quote, the production of most deepfakes is based on a machine learning technique called generative adversarial networks, or G-A-Ns. This approach can be used by forgers to swap the faces of two people, for example, those of a politician, and an actor. The algorithm looks for instances where both individuals showcase similar expressions and facial positioning. In the background, artificial intelligence algorithms are looking for the best match to juxtapose both faces. Because research about GANs and other approaches to machine learning is publicly available, the ability to generate deepfakes is spreading. Open source software already enables anyone with some technical knowledge and a powerful enough graphics card to create a deepfake, end quote. Next up, the Christian Science Monitor has a deep dive into the profession that is most likely to be decimated by automation the soonest. And that profession is long-haul truck drivers.

Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and author of a book on automation, says AI could replace millions of semi-skilled humans in industries from fast food to retail. No job is immune, not even in white collarfield, such as accounting, insurance, and pharmacology. people talk about this as if it's speculative and in the future, and we're in the midst of it, says Mr. Yang. That warning may be premature or prescient. What can the trucking industry tell us, end quote. Next, from the Atlantic, what happens when Elon Musk decides to tunnel under your home? This is a deep dive into Boring Company, of course, and its first test tunnel, which is currently being dug under a working class neighborhood in Los Angeles. quote, the company sent letters to some neighbors about the project and held public hearings to discuss it with residents in July 2018.

But when those public meetings occurred, the tunnel was nearly complete. This is an oversight that would have been unimaginable in a higher income neighborhood. Indeed, when Musk tried to build another underground tunnel in a wealthier neighborhood in West L.A., residents quickly sued, end quote. Among the many tech buzzwords we follow on this show is quantum computing. In I-Tri-E spectrum, Mikai Dachanov makes the case against quantum computing. He asks and answers, quote, When will useful quantum computers be constructed? The most optimistic experts estimate it will take five to ten years.

More cautious ones predict 20 to 30 years. Similar predictions have been voiced, by the way, for the last 20 years. I belong to a tiny minority that answers not in the foreseeable future. having spent decades conducting research in quantum and condensed matter physics, I've developed my very pessimistic view. It's based on an understanding of the gargantuan technical challenges that would have to be overcome to ever make quantum computing work, end quote. This is a dense and math-heavy piece, and I'm certainly not qualified to judge the merits of his argument, but consider this me sharing one side of a current tech debate. Some of you know that I absolutely bow down to Tim Wu, the author of the books The Master Switch and the Attention Merchants. Tim has a new book out called The Curse of Bigness, Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.

I'm actually planning on reading it this week, and to give you a taste, Wired has an excerpt for you, titled How Google and Amazon Got Away with Not Being Regulated. The holidays are of course also a good time to tinker with devices, so here's a project that you can maybe try to see this week if you can actually get away with. In Motherboard, Joseph Cox says that if you're worried about everything from sim jacking to SS7 to your phone company selling your data, maybe you could try setting up an iPod Touch as your secure device instead of an iPhone. Cox has step-by-step instructions on how he did this himself and explains how the move did and did not work for him.

Finally, did you know that we said goodbye to the kilogram last week? For 129 years, the kilogram has been defined as the weight of the international prototype kilogram, or IPK, a lump of platinum iridium that's stored in a vault in Paris. slight changes to the IPK's weight caused by contamination. Some speculate have been a blemish on the metric system's reputation and a threat to scientific experiments that depend on precise measurement, end quote. Until last week, when a vote was held to establish a new kilogram definition based on Planck's constant, hit up the link in the show notes for a history of measurements generally

and the arcane arena of international standards. That's been the weekend long reads brought to you by Betterment. Investing involves risk, of course, but TechMemeer at home listeners can get personalized financial advice from real live licensed financial experts to gain actionable answers and guidance about what to do with your money. And you can get up to a year managed free

by going to betterment.com slash ride. That's betterment.com. slash ride. Betterment. Outsmart average. So yesterday I did that story that mentioned, well, A-L-E-X-A. And as has happened in the past, people complained at me on Twitter that by saying that name out loud, their devices were triggered by, well, the activation word. Same thing happens, I guess, if I say, you know, okay, blank. So I was wondering, should we just come up with a euphemistic replacement for she who should not be named on a podcast, I guess?

If you have any ideas for how we can solve this problem, go to the podcast Reddit, which is R-slash-R-Sash-Ride home and find the thread where I'm soliciting replacement names. Like, I don't know, Buford. But give me some suggestions and we'll put them up to a vote. It might be super confusing for new listeners, but then I guess it would also be a fun in-joke for long-timers. Anyway, remember no show again until Monday the 26th. I'm headed to Northern Michigan to be with my wife's family. Wish me luck marshalling a two-year-old and a four-year-old through LaGuardia.

Every time we take those two bonzos on a plane, I keep repeating to myself like a mantra, this is the worst it will ever be ever again. next time they'll be older. This is the worst. It'll be ever again. Next time they'll be older. Anyway, safe travels to you and yours as well. Talk to you next week.