In market based economies there will always be a general movement of capital to the top, because simply having money allow you to earn more money. It's a positive feedback loop. That's why it is important for an external force, which pretty much has to be a government, to tax the wealth at the top and move it back to the bottom. Otherwise the system gradually turns into feudalism by its very nature. A government that stops taxing the richest companies and citizens is failing in its duty to protect the health of the market.
Thats not at all correct. In the mid to long term money will move to the person allocating it most efficiently. This of course assuming a non corrupt government. And thats where I see the actual positive feedback loop: People like you want the government to have more power, with more power there is more room for corruption/lobbyism, people demand even more government power
The same holds truth for powerful companies. Even more so: While a powerful (democratic) government can be controlled by voters, powerful monopolistic companies can't if the government is weak.
Now I get the issue with a over-regulating bureaucratic government, but the real world is more complex than 'powerful government is bad'.
> In the mid to long term money will move to the person allocating it most efficiently
> In the mid to long term money will move to the person allocating it most efficiently
Not without protections for antitrust and other uncompetitive practices. Picture this: Google becomes an even larger behemoth, with their cash they acquire Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Amazon and a few other larger companies (as it's happened in a much smaller scale with IBM and some other old tech companies growing larger and acquiring competitors). There is no pushback from government, they are allowed because they have the cash, they hoard companies and markets.
Now you are going to try to compete with this. How? You can be as efficient as possible but you are small, they have trillions, how do you compete? Isn't this a corrupt system by definition? It's ingrained in it, if you have more money you don't really have to be hyper competitive, you can just buy out your competition.
So there is a point where government intervention is necessary to keep a fair market, if not then you are bound to the monopolistic tendencies of accumulation of capital.
> Thats not at all correct. In the mid to long term money will move to the person allocating it most efficiently.
Under what model? Having more capital at your disposal enables you to stake more and riskier positions, which allows you to outcompete a smaller, but more efficient rival.
Your second claim has a simple counter-argument: the government has allocated wealth so well in the past 100 years that they are responsible for some major tech innovations (nasa, CERN, every startup that began in a public college) and subsidise private industries that would die without them (Starlink, The corn industry).
2. So going to the moon / CERN are particularly necessary? Besides that, a counter-argument to this doesn‘t work like: Lets pick some „good“ examples out of a big pool. This has to be viewed through the average and on average governments are beyond terrible at investments (some more than others)
Governments are great at investment. Its just they don't reap the rewards life a firm would. If every company had to 'license' the discoveries and tech funded by taxpayers there wouldn't be much of a private sector.
This doesn't seem to be true, biggest companies today weren't biggest companies 50 years ago. Even in IT, IBM is not giant that it was and was succeeded by newer companies.
I don't think the comment is referring to individual companies but the market as a whole. It's clear that wealth is and has always tended to accumulate to the richest when not checked.
> In fact, the top one percent alone holds more wealth than the middle class. They owned 29 percent—or over $25 trillion—of household wealth in 2016, while the middle class owned just $18 trillion.[iii]
> This has not always been the case. Before 2010, the middle class owned more wealth than the top one percent. Since 1995, the share of wealth held by the middle class has steadily declined, while the top one percent’s share has steadily increased.[iv]
Most capital is invested in businesses, it's not piles of money in banks, but it's embodied in factories, jobs, products, research efforts. The vast majority fo the wealth of billionaires is tied up in the businesses they control, and that's fine. That money is doing useful work. We don't want to take it away from people who have proven they are effective leaders and managers and hand it over to bureaucrats. Let the people who built the businesses and created the wealth manage it. Tax them yes, that's fine, but at a proportionate level.
The feedback loop in Capitalism is to direct capital towards people who discover more efficient way to provide goods and services, or provide better goods and services, to help them scale up, or give people with a proven track record more resources to devote to new enterprises. This is exactly what we want.
There are three main issues with this picture.
The first is rent seeking behaviour, where simply having capital enables growing more capital without productive activity. This is what we need to tax punitively. Capital that is not being used productively is dead weight on the economy.
Secondly, monopolistic behaviour is closely related to rent seeking, it's using market power to extract rents or exert unfair influence.
Finally inheritance is a problem because it's un-earned wealth. There's no reason to expect that those inheriting wealth are likely to manage it effectively. Inheritance taxes should be high, without being overly punitive after all one of the main incentives to work hard and accumulate wealth is to provide for the next generation. You want to allow successful business owners and investors to benefit their families without facilitating excess waste of resources.
>We don't want to take it away from people who have proven they are effective leaders and managers and hand it over to bureaucrats.
This sentence is so bizarre not even the opposite is correct. First off, 'effective leaders and managers' isn't an antonym to 'bureaucrat'. There are effective leaders and managers in bureaucracies. In fact that's kind of what bureaucracy means, effective and rational management of resources.
Furthermore, bureaucracies exist both in the private sector and public sector. Wealthy billionaires employ hundreds (if not more) of individuals doing nothing but managing their wealth in highly bureaucratic fashion. They don't run around and employ their billions in some sort of crazy act of pizza and dorm-room fuelled creative destruction, the deploy countless of institutions and non-profits and accountants and lawyers, the gates foundation looks more like the tax office or a defense department than a garage workshop.
>, or give people with a proven track record more resources to devote to new enterprises
No, the point of capitalism is to allocate capital to people who don't have any proven track record. Because that's the people who actually make new things. If you only want to distribute money to people with track records then a bureaucracy is the right address, because correctly licensing, testing, rewarding, and promoting people based on their track record is the very essence of the ideal Weberian bureaucracy. Keeping track of who does a good job is 90% of what bureaucracies are all about.
OK, that's fair to a point, I'm just saying taking away wealth from the people that built it in the first place and putting it under the control of people who have not demonstrated those skills (whatever skills they do have) isn't necessarily a good idea.
As long as the capital is being employed productively and managed by the most competent people to do so, we all benefit. I'm carefully trying to avoid a 'tax bad, government bad' position and the phrasing you pointed out quite reasonably might have given that impression.
> inheritance is a problem because it's un-earned wealth
> Inheritance taxes should be high, without being overly punitive
What's strange is that when you talk to people about inheritance tax they become instantly outraged at the idea of the government taking their money by force, yet they seem to have no problem with the government forcibly taking close to half of their salary.
It's a strange paradox and it seems that people just aren't used to the idea, despite it being much fairer. Tax the wealth of the dead rather than the earnings of the living.
If we could slash income tax in half but implement an inheritance tax of, for example, 50% above a certain threshold, it would be a win-win for everyone. The rich would still leave lots of money to their kids and the average person would get to keep more of their earned money. It's more meritocratic on every level.
Sadly, so many of our leaders now are very wealthy themselves, so this isn't a proposition they're likely to be enthusiastic about.
The problem with inheritance taxes is that corporations don't have to pass their assets onto their children in order to continue existing. They're a half measure.
That said this is an issue that for some reason has a lot of poor people who would never be affected taking up the torch in support of the very same billionaires that are currently screwing them over. It's really remarkable the power of propaganda.
Corporations don’t own themselves though, people do. Effective ownership and control are the main goals that benefit society, as long as the organisation is well run and generating useful goods and services, and employing people, we all benefit. Inheritance is an obstacle to that because it’s effectively random in terms of the competence of the inheritors, but there’s nothing random about the leadership of companies. By and large it’s based on merit. If it isn’t, then sure, corporate governance is a legitimate area for policy making.
I think you might be overestimating how much merit is a factor in the selection of board members. Corporate boards are incredibly incestuous. The most reliable way to get on a board is to be in an old money family and know other people on the board.
One could argue that the current system of selecting corporate executives produces no better result than the general election process used to select some government officials. Certainly there is no lack of poorly run companies in the modern world, especially when compared to highly competitive companies like Apple under Steve Jobs and Tesla/SpaceX under Elon Musk. The advantage to corporate boards is that candidates don't have to spend time and energy with public campaigning, but they gravitate towards conservative governance that is unable to adapt to changing times.
At any rate, the competence of the leadership at companies doesn't really matter. If they make money they can be taxed on that. How competent the leadership is may or may not impact how much money they make. Poorly managed companies may even make more money in the short term.
Well, badly run companies die and get eaten by their competitors. That’s fine. We do of course need to make sure markets are competitive and that incumbents aren’t unfairly privileged, so there is a role for regulation, but the basic competitive system is fine.
Inherited wealth is already taxed at source. Taxing it again is double taxation. What is being levied is basically a death tax. You are taxed because you died.
Your statement is a gross misunderstanding of tax codes. Inheritance should not only be protected from excessive taxation, it shouldn’t be taxed at all in the first place. It is literally taxing Death.
A death tax says that the govt would gain/profit from someone dying. Family is the only way to remain immortal and inheritance is transferring assets to extensions of one’s own DNA. Because DNA..it can be argued is ‘property’.
The state can levy a small fee to retire identity of the deceased for legal purposes. But other than that, transfer of wealth being taxed is theft.
When Salesforce goes out and gets a patent that says you can't have any client resembling Slack without paying them royalties , then you can consider that a monopoly.
And for fringe companies like BD, its honestly better that they get acquired by someone that can dump IRAD money into it cause the research that comes out of these is arguably more valuable than the products they produce.
Contrary to what you might have learned on hackernews, monopoly doesn't mean there is no alternative and having no alternatives is not the primary downside to monopolies.
> United States v. Grinnell Corp., 384 U.S. 563 (1966) Grinnell made plumbing supplies and fire sprinklers, and with affiliates had 87% of the central station protective service market. From this predominant share there was no doubt of monopoly power.
Alternative take: consumer behaviour that demands complex integrated products incentivizes the formation of large corporate bodies that can marshall the many skills and resources required to make them, with the economies of scale that make them viable.
Semi-facetious summary: there’s not a lot of demand for local, organic, artisan all-terrain robot packhorses.
Another take. I think that one of the forces that promote “monopolization” on the internet at least might be the issue of trust. It’s harder to trust “smaller” (or less known) businesses on the internet and vendors on platforms like Ebay, Etsy, Airbnb. Roughly speaking there’s quite a lot of scam and low quality products/services out there. Things work differently offline where physical location can in many situations create more sense of trustworthiness even for smaller businesses. Online – your brand is extremely important. And bigger companies tend to have better established brands.
Just a speculation (and not very related to BD in particular but to a situation where internet got overtaken by corporations instead of becoming that decentralized paradise we once hoped for).
But... I don't disagree with this. This is exactly what is happening, and it is yet still creating monopolies. Just because it is what people want does not mean it is a good thing.
It’s totally applicable. Crunchy Roll are a media aggregator - the more aggregated a service is, the better value. Consider consumer unwillingness to subscribe to 5-6 different streaming services, but toleration of having 2-3. In fact, consumers would prefer just to have one that does everything. In other words, a direct connection between consumer demand and monopoly creation.
Can you expand upon you thought? How do each of these acquisition make a case for the acquirer tending towards a monopoly?
It seems Boston Dyanmics is a solution looking for a problem. It can be a great company but it's going to take a long investment by Hyundai. It's been in the hands of some huge companies and none of them have been able to squeeze a profit out of it.
These are just 3 examples of thousands of acquisitions by big companies with dominance in their industry. The trend is very clear, a handful of companies buy out competition and own virtually every serious competitor in the market. There are ongoing lawsuits against tech companies for doing this, and unfortunately companies can lobby to keep the laws on their side. Also, businesses like BD are always going to tend to want to sell rather than compete, this is obvious.
I don't see how one could argue there is no natural tendency towards monopoly capital given these key facts.
This is a key point of Peter Thiel's in his talk at YC from some years ago. He expands on it to great effect in a few other videos too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtJ0C0UHFfE.
> Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly
We had this in post-War America. What broke it up? Activist investors. Corporate raiders. The stereotypical bad guys of 1990s media. (Also, antitrust action. The situation is a product of public and private sector failures combined.)
BD is hardly the only one in the game. Even though they did sink in a lot of R&D that was likely done by Google..because remember BD was alphabet owned before SoftBank acquired it.
Ghost Robotics...DARPA funded.. are actually a tad cheaper but will likely only for govt and military contracts first.
Low interest rates make M&A attractive. Its very similar to real estate investing and using existing property as collateral for new property purchases. There's a low barrier for the project to result in a decent IRR.
Plenty of us are seeing it happen. Now we just have to figure out how to take action to redesign the system to stop and undo it or use the tools already avaiable to undo the damage.
When interest rates are low it makes sense for companies to acquire companies. COVID also exposed some companies, so the acquiring company can get a bargain.
Monopoly is inherently the tendency of capitalism because price competition forces profit margins down, meaning you can only match your earlier gains by expanding your market. The easiest way to do that is to acquire competitors
I wonder if this is because of the SoftBank cash crunch. Or if it's just nobody has figured out how to make money with Boston Dynamics. Though if the 1 billion sale price is true, maybe flipping BD is the only way to make money with it.
> In early November, Bloomberg first reported that Hyundai was in talks to acquire Boston Dynamics from Tokyo-based SoftBank Group. The Japanese conglomerate is selling off non-core business assets after it was hit hard by a series of soured bets, including WeWork and Uber. In September 2020, Softbank sold Arm to NVIDIA for $40 billion.
I wonder how much this has changed with the continued increase in stock values and new companies going public. Uber, Doordash, etc. aren't the losers that they appeared to be even just a couple months ago.
sure. But for Softbank, this current bump (which is think is artificial and going to pop) could allow for them to liquidate some of their positions (likely without making too much of a price disturbance) to allow for diversification.
I'm not sure that is or was ever in the plans for SoftBank. "Pump and dump" gets thrown around a lot, but hasn't that been their model? Get in as early your massive dollars allow, promote the hell outta the company, feed the tech/SV/VC ecosystem, cash out, repeat.
Silliness. The market is effectively a free money machine for people who are capable of delaying gratification. The fact that most people are not capable of this is not the fault of the market.
And, for the record, the rich aren't getting better returns than the rest of us--the S&P beats the vast majority of Hedge Funds, year after year.
That's clearly an absurdity and not physically possible.
Whatbwe do know is that every time we have QE 90% of the money ends up in financial markets, not real economy. This is a well known problem, and Yanis Varufakis has talked about it at length
Nominal returns. Unfortunately, none of us are average. You can gain 100% many times, but lose it only once.
It's going to be fun when the "just buy an index and you'll be fine" strategy falters (in this case a cap-weighted, large US company index that buys shares at any price).
The S&P500 isn't diverse like they talk about in finance textbooks. There are quite a few years in that article you linked where hedge funds beat the index (2001-2005, 2007, 2009, 2010). It's almost as if who beats whom is random...
>Nominal returns. Unfortunately, none of us are average.
With index funds and ETFs everywhere, it is quite common to be average. It's also far easier to buy an all-market index fund/ETF than to pick stocks or active funds.
> You can gain 100% many times, but lose it only once.
True of all investments.
>It's going to be fun when the "just buy an index and you'll be fine" strategy falters (in this case a cap-weighted, large US company index that buys shares at any price). The S&P500 isn't diverse like they talk about in finance textbooks. There are quite a few years in that article you linked where hedge funds beat the index (2001-2005, 2007, 2009, 2010). It's almost as if who beats whom is random...
Not over the long run. From the same article, "After 10 years, 85 percent of large cap funds underperformed the S&P 500, and after 15 years, nearly 92 percent are trailing the index."
Anyone who can consistently beat the market with the their process doesn't stay in the public investment game for long - why would they? They turn into self-funding private investment firms.
It was like put money in x wait/monitor till it starts moving up or down lock in your maximum losses and your minimal profits with stop loss orders.
I was kinda dumb strucked how easy it was to grow your initial input after the huge market drop in march and just by reading some blogs.
Things will probably change after the corona pandemic.
Risk an opportunity costs is a major issue with that argument. In 1981 for example the 30 Year Treasury Rate was over 14% which significantly outperformed the stock market over that period. https://www.macrotrends.net/2521/30-year-treasury-bond-rate-...
Looks like they bought it for around $100m, and then pumped additional $37m into it, which would be 7x increase. Not terrible, but probably nothing to write home about, considering Softbanks "world-changing bets" scope.
This does sound like shedding off bets that didn't quite live up to the expectation, and making a small[0] profit off of it.
[0] Small in the eye of Softbank. If you have a $100B fund and got 0.7B profit, those 0.7% are going to move your needle very much.
Also..historically robotics companies get acquired by Asian companies because that’s where manufacture and production is happening. Also..in America, we are not as tech forward and don’t embrace robots on our intersections like they’d do in Asia..China, Singapore, Japan, Korea etc.
Can you imagine if SPOT mini went around asking people to mask up in American public parks? But Singapore deployed SPOT minis during covid and no one batted an eyelid.
When I approached my city’s PD and FD to acquire a couple of SPOT minis, I got a response that I wish I can share here..but sadly I can’t.. suffice to say that it was jaw dropping. With calls for defunding police departments, they are already on financial survival mode.. high tech will never reach American cities never mind be well adopted as in Asian cities.
KUKA for example became a Chinese company and was bought out for a pittance. At least Boston Dynamics had a good valuation. I guess SoftBank in America are better deal makers than German KUKA.
I have consistently been amazed by the demise and/or sell off of robotics companies for cheap. If the $1 billion number is true, I think that would be the highest number for an acquisition for a robotics company.
This should be very interesting, I'm not clear on the relationships after their split but Hyundai has a huge reach across every sort of heavy industry you can think of. I found another article that says it is the motor division that is acquiring Boston Dynamics. I'm surprised the US allowed this, Boston Dynamics seems like the sort of company they would keep close to home.
> I'm surprised the US allowed this, Boston Dynamics seems like the sort of company they would keep close to home.
South Korea is a treaty ally with the US. The US has thousands of soldiers at bases in S. Korea. S. Korea is not a country the US has to worry about afaik.
Not trying to be rude but that is a very naive view on geopolitics. Look no further than NSA and who they spy on to see who to worry about (IE. everyone worry about everyone, like NSA spying on EU etc.).
The robots are practically weapons. Imagine the 4-legged one chasing you down like a large cat could, then pouncing on you. Imagine the 2-legged one with armor, relentlessly stalking you like Terminator.
In my (somewhat limited) experience, I'd be surprised is Boston Dynamics robots are, wholesale, on the list of export control. ITAR classification isn't usually an arbitrary designation, there's typically some aspect in particular that falls under the designation. For example, non-binary source code in the robots could have the potential for export control, but almost certainly not the physical robot itself.
As an example of this, many autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are subject to export control laws. This isn't just because they can be used in an explicitly military manner (one of the most common uses is minesweeping), but because the Inertial Navigation System they use while submerged has enough sensitivity to be export controlled, since that tech can be adapted to be used in missiles. So it's not the robot that's export controlled, but the INS system inside the robot. If you took that out, most of them could be sold wherever. I believe the same thing goes for a lot of satellite technology that's export controlled.
The robots Boston Dynamics build seem to be solving a different problem, the (very hard) one of physical adaptive control in real-world environments, but imho what I've seen doesn't line up with what often seems to the reasoning for assigning an export control label, whether ITAR, EAR, or even CUI, to most of the technology.
"... the Inertial Navigation System they use while submerged has enough sensitivity to be export controlled."
To further your point, if the inertial navigation system has low limits for max acceleration and angular velocity (i.e. can't be put in a missile) then it can still be accurate enough for this task without ITAR restrictions.
I'm far more worried about kamikaze drones with machine guns than I am about robot dogs. You can crank out 100 cheap and deadly flying drones for the cost of the smallest robot dog. The dog might be tougher, but it's much slower and easier to stop.
I imagine in the not-so-near future there will be fleets of mini drones seeking out soft targets.
Machine guns are overly elaborate. A bunch of < $20 drones from Ali express with an explosive tied on would do it. You would not even need elaborate radio-jamming defeating control systems, they just need to fly straight until they hit something then a tilt sensor or timer detonates them. If it’s one thing we learned from myth busters, it’s how much damage the concussion wave from a surprisingly small blast can do to anyone nearby.
BD robots could be easily defeated by a 50-cal bullet or an EMP or a sandstorm or merely by preventing them from recharging their batteries. Reality is not like the movies.
Reality is that adding armor is trivial, but hitting critical components (small parts) is not. EMP protection is standard for military systems. The military already deals with the logistics problems related to batteries and fuel. The preferred energy choice might not be a battery.
Consistent usage of dumb tactics is unlikely. The robots aren't going to just run across a huge open field, straight toward the enemy, with plenty of warning to set up a defensive 50-cal gun. They could leap through a window or low-quality wall, in complete darkness, while the target is sleeping.
Adding armor that blocks small arms fire is straightforward, although even this might add too much weight to a BD robot.
Armor that blocks a .50 caliber rifle bullet is a completely different story; a Barrett 50 round will go through an engine block. If such a round hit the robot anywhere, it would almost certainly disable it.
Detecting an approaching robot would be trivial with radar, IR (these things have to make heat), tripwires, etc.
Not sure what you mean about "setting up" a 50 cal gun; a Barrett 50 is handheld. Setting it up takes about a second. Although in practice a perimeter would probably be established in advance with robotic guns using closed loop feedback.
My point is that it would be a significant engineering challenge and at least an order of magnitude cost increase to design a BD-style robot to deal with even the most prosaic threats of a hostile battlefield. And the power supply would probably need to be a gasoline engine rather than batteries just for reasons of weight and endurance.
EMP weapons are quite difficult to build unless you have $100 and a modicum of engineering skill. And no, I won't google it for you because I like not being on the no-fly list.
They tried to sell that to DoD already and obviously did not meet their needs in this way. If they had, they would not be looking for a sale, I’d imagine.
I'm not sure if this is what you're alluding to, but that's literally the plot to an episode of Black Mirror. The robots are even clearly inspired by Boston Dyanmics
National security, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (Cfius), has gone as far as requiring the repatriation of Grindr after it approved a deal for it to go to a Chinese company.
It's interesting to question the presumption that it is acceptable to sell a company in a way that gives foreign control. Not every country allows this. China is growing very well with it restricted.
I understand that the valuation of a company is also determined by its earning potential but did Boston Dynamics have that so much that it justified this crazy valuation.
From what I know it barely made any revenue while being in business for more than 25 years. It couldn't find a customer to produce any of its hyped robots at scale. It was clearly a loss-magnet entity for Softbank which is in a selling mode in the wake of Uber/Wework disaster.
In any other country valuation like this would have become the subject of enormous assessment because outside the US, $1 bn still means a lot of money. But I think USA is beyond but I really do not understand the system which facilitates such transaction without the corresponding exchange in value. How is the money being made?
As an immigrant engineer I feel this is actually good because it shows that the market in the US is bullish on new technologies. I believe this is what has led to most of the major inventions in the past 100 years to come from the US.
In my home country (India) it’d be impossible for a company to reach such valuations based only on research and prototypes, which in turn leads to low salaries for STEM people, culminating in brain drain.
A ~30 years bet on a company is difficult in any country or any sector for the matter of fact unless it has potential to change the landscape of future wars, thereby providing ROI in the form of strategic superiority or at least that's what U.S. DoD hoped for with Boston Dynamics and it didn't happen.
On the same context,
Imagine if Boston Dynamics was only involved with drones, it would have never changed hands.
And it’s fine. Boston Dynamics paved a way with research and prototypes and some company will come along and commoditize it.
My point was that the economic culture in the US supports and this kind of innovation. No other country - maybe barring China, can do that.
I’m not praising the US as a country either (infact I’m moving to Canada). The US has deep flaws but it’s one redeeming quality is industrial innovation.
>Boston Dynamics paved a way with research and prototypes and some company will come along and commoditize it.
BD had already started selling its robots(Spot, Pick) commercially and had even had projected a plan for profitability[1].
Current sale is not really an indicative of its inability to make money but rather desperate situation of Softbank VF after string of poor bets, this must have been hard as Masayoshi Son is a self-acknowledged robophile.
This immediately follows the Slack acquisition which was sold at at price that is almost 1/10th of Pakistan's GDP. Keep in mind that Pakistan has 220 million people.
One individual company with less than 2k employees is valued 1/10th of what 220 million people collectively produce in a year. How can one explain this asymmetry. No doubt it was the biggest tech acquisition in the history but tech executives in the US bolstered by Fed's dollar printing have been breaking paper records almost every year.
Maybe I do not understand the economics of this well so I would gladly accept any roast of my above observation.
In my noob understanding, Salesforce overpaid on the acquisition for a couple of reasons:
1) They are desperate to continue growing and need acquisitions to do so
2) They believe Slack is their best bet to boost their revenue in the coming years
In saying that, the asymmetry is the markets each of them serve though. Are majority of Pakistani's serving B2B customers with a SaaS? No, and so the profit/revenue generation is different.
I agree Slack is way over valued for something which could be switched without much effort. In fact my anecdotal knowledge from my network suggests that MS Teams is taking over.
However the analogy with Pakistan is incorrect. Pakistan has a lot of people who simply don’t have the skills to be productive. Same with India.
And in South Asia progress and reform doesn’t happen easily.
I think the boom bust cycle is good. It trims the extra fat and runs unsustainable businesses (like Boston Dynamics, Uber, WeWork, etc) and lazy unproductive individuals to the ground.
As a side effect home prices in the US remain relatively stable.
In India it’s impossible for a single income family to own a home and it’s a struggle with dual incomes.
Same with Canada where I’m planning to move (since I don’t have patience to wait 20 years to start my own company)
I have been secretly hoping Tesla to buy Boston Dynamics and revolutionize autonomous manufacturing. One day, a Starship fleet will send an army of robots to Mars and build out a city.
Hyundai Robotics is a much bigger chance for this, particularly considering they've rather concrete plans for it already trough their HGZN partnership [0].
Makes much more sense than with Tesla, all Tesla can offer on that front is battery tech, which is kinda useless for autonomous manufacturing as everything there can be easily powered trough a line.
Robots are the goal for Tesla - no labor laws needed for them (probably not for people that build them as well)!
All jokes aside, Hyundai can probably do much more with Boston Dynamics than Tesla. Tesla has already failed to automate, using the exact same method as Ford in the 80s. Doubt that throwing more advanced tech at it solves a fundamental logistics problem.
> [Ars quoting Musk in 2017] "We are pushing robots to the limit in terms of the speed that they can operate at, and asking our suppliers to make robots go way faster, and they are shocked because nobody has ever asked them that question," Musk said on a conference call last November.
I saw a video, years ago, when Tesla was installing/setting up/showing off the robots. The demonstrated method and tool to 'program' the robot arm was terrible, and the resulting arm motion was excessive.
My takeaway was Tesla needed experienced staff to optimize the arm path.
>[1980s GM quote] As Hamtramck's assembly line tried to gain speed, the computer-guided dolly wandered off course. The spray-painting robots began spraying each other instead of the cars.... When a massive computer-controlled 'robogate' welding machine smashed a car body, or a welding machine stopped dead, the entire Hamtramck line would stop. Workers could do nothing but stand around and wait while managers called in the robot contractor's technicians.
Normally we dread this coming from the supply side, “will we end all possible work through automation?”
But if you think it from the demand side, people will always need something like “work”: structured schedule, socialization, ways to differentiate yourself from others through “achievements” that not everyone can do, etc.
Even in an utopian society where all material needs are covered and wealth redistributed, people would create and consume art, “fight” for relevance, create petty politics... and gladly “pay” for part of that. So we will end up inventing new jobs in any case, so we can keep on using the same old concepts and social structure, just not for food acquisition.
If you think about it, this sophistication has been happening for some centuries already.
Surely the whole point of tech is to make life involve less work? The problem becomes an economic one, how to you distribute the wealth automation enables.
Solving the tech part of the issue while ignoring the societal aspect is somewhat condemning millions to misery though. Here in the US, it's expected you work, the economy and society are built around it, and millions of people would scream at you for trying to make a system that some people "don't have to" work in
If we implement UBI (my preference is by taxing automation), or some post-capitalism model where people can get paid by the emotional and cultural value they provide, then the moral case for autonomy is to free everyone from boredom and drudgery.
I could talk about this for days, but: the more we automate below us on Maslow’s pyramid, the higher we raise our baseline.
ive been hoping tesla buys BD as well. i think tesla is the only company that will have the necessary battery tech to untether BD's products from a hard line for power
What makes you think that Tesla would be able to do that, given their reputation of not being able to manufacture cars that don't fall apart immediately upon rolling off the factory line? They kinda have to be able to build cars in the first place in order to build them faster with more robots.
Edit: you've already been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit with this account. Can you please not? Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333233 are particularly not ok here.
I frankly can't see how this is inciting a flamewar. Tesla has a pretty good record of being terrible at manufacturing. I've seen innumerable comments on this site where people make similar "what makes you think that..." comments that are inciting argument. I don't see why mine is special.
Furthermore, in the linked comment, the person I was replying to did, in fact, completely miss the point of my comment and make an entirely non sequitur resposne. Will they be getting warned too?
Tesla is a divisive topic with passionate feelings on both sides, and a swipe like "they [can't] build cars in the first place" is tossing a Molotov cocktail into the thread. Would you mind taking the spirit of the site more to heart? We'd appreciate it greatly. Note this, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Re the other person: I'd don't know which specific comment you're referring to, but generally it's not against the site guidelines to miss someone's point, or to be wrong, or to make a non sequitur. Such rules would be impossible to impose and would wipe out half the discussion anyhow (I'm being generous with "half").
If they broke the guidelines then we probably should have moderated it too, but that runs up against a different issue—we can't see everything that gets posted here, or even come close. We often don't read the threads in linear (depth-first?) order either, so a comment that appears adjacent to a normal reader might escape our attention.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Any kind of company that can inspire these kind of comments is worth investing in I tally how many comments I run into randomly over the week and use that to determine how many more shares I should buy.
Anything disruptive attracts this kind of attention and even if you don't think they will succeed it's hard to argue they are not disruptive.
BD isn't really about precision robotics though, they are definitely more of environment estimation and motion planning company first, and legged robot company second.
My guess is they got acquired for some research they have done in dynamic trajectory planning, which can be useful in self driving cars.
Not bad for a company they reportedly bought for 100M and pumped about another 400M over these three years. But all these ownership changes really show how hard it is to find the product and market fit for complex robotics.
> In April 2019, Boston Dynamics acquired Kinema Systems, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup that uses vision sensors and deep learning to help robots manipulate boxes. Kinema’s Pick system was rebranded as the Boston Dynamics Pick System. It was the company’s first commercialized product.
Interesting, I thought Spot was the first commercial product BD sold. But the Pick System seems like it would be much more viable for commercial application and adaption.
Particularly when combined with Hyundai's experience and presence in manufacturing, construction, healthcare [0] and even logistics [1] automation.
Boston Dynamics is such a hyped company, yet it constantly gets shoveled from one mega corp to another...Does it mean none of those companies see a profitable future with it?
Word has it Marc Raibert is not the easiest person to work with as an acquiring company, in a sense that he will keep control of the company, and do whatever he wants with it.
Amazon AWS is the literal incarnation of "money printer go BRRRR" meme. The profit margins are insane on it. They have zero issues with money reserves to expand to new things.
amazon never had their money run out, they have been incredibly profitable for a long time, they just put it back into the company. Building up patents and technology is the not the same as not showing a profit on your balance sheet.
I dunno if he has any say anymore given that the company belongs to Softbank who will write the terms of the sale.
And generally, it got passed around because there is valuable research IP that belongs to the company, which given the right market can be valuable, so in the spirit of capitalizing on it if that market realizes, companies either jump on it, or preemptively buy it for a later sale (which is no doubt what Softbank did)
No, but will that stop him? Or will that allow acquiring companies to start asserting some control? Or will Boston Dynamics yet again use the US military as a counterbalancing force to do what they want?
The main point is that profitability is probably not the issue why BD is switching owners so often. Some of these owners did not need the cashflow from the sale in the first place.
i understand, and i agree that his inflexibility was a large contributor to why Google moved them to softbank.
since softbank though, marc has transitioned to a chairman role, and the company has put in a lot of work into commercialization. i suspect they are still mostly R&D focused, but they are focusing more on commercialization than they ever have before in their history.
Developing walking robots when the wheel has been invented is not big business. Walking is good only for special purposes. Walking is not energy efficient. Their military mule looked cool, you rarely saw it doing anything that small wheeled unit could not do with better range and less maintenance.
Their new pivot towards wheeled logistic robots is acknowledgement of this fact. They still try to push probably unnecessary "legs with wheels" with Handle.
There are two activities for companies like Boston Dynamics. They can either develop technology or develop a product. Those activities take very different skill sets, as Tesla can attest, and many startup hardware companies fail trying to evolve from one into the other.
My guess would be that Hyundai's product development organizations, in theory, can take Boston Dynamic's technology and integrate it into products that can be sold commercially. As an automobile and robotics[0] manufacturer, Hyundai actually has a better chance than Google or SoftBank since they know a fair amount about manufacturing machines.
I assumed the headline meant the conglomerate parent Hyundai Motor Group until you pointed this out. I figured it made more sense to be aligned with their other defense and heavy industry subsidiaries.
How does that apply to this case? Hyundai is a massive player with cutting edge technology in a wide variety of heavy industries. Acquiring a robotics company seems to make perfect sense to me.
Isn't Hyundai cutting edge on its own? I had the impression that Hyundai is quite innovative. This could be a good match where BD profits massively from Hyundai's resources.
This just demonstrates the "price gap" between virtual and "real world" companies. An app with a few thousand uses with worth more than one of the world's best engineering companies.
Computation existed for more than 40 years before apps started making a ton of money on it. If BD develops robotic platform-"workers" that can be trained in 5 seconds to do any manual labor, that's the new "app" that one would be making money off of in the future.
"On the joyous and satisfying occasion of this, our first successful journey to Mars, we think back not only on all those who died along the way, but also on the Slack clone that allowed us avert disaster on this mission..."
I do wonder why we want humans on Mars. Given the huge amount of fossil fuels that must be burned on this planet to get us there.
We may find Mars is dry and arid when we get there, and so is Earth.
I agree, and it's probably becoming a problem, but... I don't think this is a good example of that.
I mean, we're talking about the value of a business. Boston Dynamics is more of a research lab. They don't really have much in the way of revenue streams, customers, products, etc.
Cutting edge research is ultra-high risk-to-reward.
Some of the scientist and engineers working there might invent/discover what could be the most significant thing in human history for the next hundred years. Leading to a fabulous amount of wealth creation. But there's no guarantee the company financing all of this will be able to capitalize on that invention.
That's a lot of ifs. If people there invent something important; if the company sees the true value of the invention; if it is marketed in a way that makes money; if etc...
Boston Dynamics is a consulting company that uses some fun pet projects as PR. Consulting is a very tight margin business because it's used as some kind of arbitrage move between workforce and capabilities.
It doesn't matter if you are doing consulting with the most specialized meditation app UI researchers or the most specialized cyber-biology engineers with experience in exobiology and colonizing other celestial bodies. It's still consulting.
I was going to cite concrete numbers for BD’s previous acquisitions — since I was certain I’d heard those figures being higher — but Wikipedia just gives the Google and SoftBank purchases as being undisclosed sums:
But it doesn't matter. A car costs a lot, yes, but the margin is not that big. You can't build a car and send the same unit to every buyer. While I can code once and sell the software to a million clients.
Tesla is the most valuable car company in the world and I think it has a lot to do with the software, not only the hardware.
People spend a small amount of money on the hardware of a car, then spend a lot of money on the luxurious comfort and prestige upgrades.
Boston Dynamics makes utility robots that are cool from an engineering standpoint but not super useful (or even welcome) in someone's home. Hyundai makes a lot of sense, since these expensive-but-handy robots will fit in well with their other industrial robots and military equipment.
Well, there seems to be a clear downward trend in car purchasing, if you look at demographics (e.g. the move from suburbs back to cities)
Renting a service + car together via rideshare does have some fundamental economic efficiencies (depending on where you live, and other aspects the situation)
Its about the margin though isn't it? They cost a lot to buy but they also cost a lot to make. How much value can Apple and Microsoft extract from you over the lifetime of a single car.
> How much value can Apple and Microsoft extract from you over the lifetime of a single car.
Probably less than Toyota has extracted from me in my lifetime already.
Cars are lower margin, but they are expensive in absolute dollars, and their purchase almost always involves leverage. A $35,000 car will typically earn the manufacture $3-7k in direct profits, the financing arm gets ~$1800, the dealership gets ~$600 (plus profits from extended warranties, service, etc). There's still a ton of money to be made in automobile manufacturing.
And that's for an average car (actually, below average, the median new car price is nearly $40k). Vehicles like Porsches or an F-150s have insanely high margins. Porsche has the highest margins in the industry (50% for the 911) by a comfortable amount and Ford reports the percentage of F-150s sold for over $50k in their annual reports, and have for years, because it's the most critical aspect of their bottom line.
Tech companies benefit from having really dispersed revenue streams: they make a few dollars off of billions of people while car companies make thousands of dollars off of a few million people.
Cars are a consumable product. They only last about 10 years. Before you get bored of it and buy a new one. Or before it breaks down so often, that you must buy a new car.
Software, like Microsoft Office, is also consumable, in the sense that your computer burns out, or Microsoft makes its operating system end-of-life after 5 years. This forces you to buy a new license.
So if Toyota makes $3,000 in profit per car. And you replace your car in 10 years, then this is $300/year. Or about $25/month in profits to Toyota.
If it’s $7,000, then the monthly profits goes up to $58/month for Toyota.
So it’s the equivalent to a Netflix or Cable TV subscription for Toyota. But with the entrenched benefit that being a car manufacturer is big business, and there aren’t that many players in it.
What Toyota did was to make perfect, their vehicles, that they have such a loyal following. That their customers go back to them for every new car, decade after decade.
And plus, they make more money from their luxury brand, Lexus, and from their trucks.
Could someone explain why this acquisition makes sense? The core competencies between the two companies seem to have little overlap from my outsider perspective. Is this diversification or does Hyundai make more than automobiles?
Hyundai is a South Korean chaebol (sort of like a conglomerate). While it was ostensibly restructured into "independent" groups a while back, let's just say that, in practice, they're not really independent in the western sense.
In addition to building cars and trucks, Hyundai does the following:
* building construction (everything from homes to office and factories)
Much more. "It is the second largest South Korean chaebol or conglomerate, after Samsung Group, related to other Hyundai-name industries following a specialized development split and restructuring which resulted in Hyundai Motor group, Hyundai Heavy Industries Group, Hyundai Development Company Group, Hyundai Department Store Group, and Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance."[0]
Hyundai is more like a GE than a GM. Nobody would really wonder why a conglomerate like GE bought yet another company. People just don't realize that Hyundai is a conglomerate because they sell cars too.
Even if Hyundai weren't a diverse conglomerate as several other commenters have pointed out, car manufacturing and robotics have plenty of overlap.
Robots are used to make cars. Robots and cars both require precision engineering at a macro scale. Both have lots of electronics and control systems, even leaving out self-driving or autonomous capabilities.
For 5% of Hyundai's market cap, I think you can make a case for BD being valuable to Hyundai just as a car manufacturer, or having synergies with its core business.
> It is not yet clear how Boston Dynamics will fit into Hyundai, which becomes the third owner of Boston Dynamics in seven years. It was acquired by Google in 2013 and sold to Softbank Group in 2017
In order for Google to have sold it, there would have to be a buyer who then becomes the new owner. The new owner then owns the company and can, among other things, sell the company.
I thought they were related to U.S army funded projects which were highly confidential to foreigners..
I think they split the company into sensitive department and public department and hyundai is buying the public one.
... that hasn't found a scalable business model in 28 years of operation. Hence the low valuation despite great tech.
I seriously admire their work and it's great that they've been able to fund it in various ways when almost all the robot businesses come and go quickly. They've been able to grind away at very hard problems. But so far no scalable product.
I hope they (and the mobile robot business in general) finds some more killer apps after weapons, vacuums, warehousing and (almost) cars. They seem to come along pretty slowly.
Boston Robotics should have stated that his goal was making an autonomous robot that delivers food to your dinner table, and takes professional pictures of the food for Instagram.
Seriously, I can't understand why a company developing advanced products that will have civil and military uses was valued so low. Is it struggling with money? Did their progress stall?
Yes! I thought most of their funding came from DARPA. Now, a company funded with taxpayer money is becoming part of a foreign megacorp. Of course, this is nothing new under the sun, but is it fair to the US taxpayer?
Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.