Dana Blankenhorn

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Where Computing Happens

I met my first computer in 1976, in the basement of Herman Brown Hall, on the campus of Rice University in Houston.

The computing happened in a big room, separated from me by a window. I passed a stack of punch cards, tied with a rubber band, through the window. They came back along with my output. Which usually said the program had died on Line 3.

By the time I got out of journalism school, two years later, computing was moving to desktops. A neighbor bought a $20,000 Cromemco machine that could run 3 terminals. She hired friends to work at the terminals, transcribing court records. I think they got 50 cents a page. Computing had come home.

The Limits of Senior Power

If I were around 100 years ago, I would be dead. Instead, I’m rich. (Pictured are my grandparents, May and Edmund O'Donnell, in 1918.)

It’s a demographic and economic transformation that is destroying hope for change in America and (perhaps) making us the last generation.

Until recently, people lived their first 20 years dependent on parents, the next 20 as parents, the next (if they were lucky) 20 as grandparents and anything past that dependent on the children. Most of the world still lives this way.

But starting with Social Security in 1934, and continuing through general prosperity to today, America has turned this on its head. Seniors aren’t just living to an average age of 83, we’re doing it with money. I’m just a 68-year old journalist but, thanks in large part to a wife who works in tech, I’m a millionaire. We own our house. We have enough invested to guarantee a fine retirement, God willing. There may even be something left when we’re gone.

This has changed political incentives. There’s no better example than Florida where The Villages, a huge retirement town of 150,000 (almost all of whom vote), has turned the state’s politics on its head. Add them to those already living up-and-down the state’s east, west and south coasts, and you get a huge state entirely devoted to short term thinking. Education, the environment? Fuck ‘em. We’ll be gone.

Jassy’s Gotta Go

I’ve seen enough. Amazon.Com CEO Andy Jassy’s gotta go.

Jassy became CEO 18 months ago, after spending most of two decades at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit.

Jassy was fine at AWS. He’s out of his depth now.

The problem is he has no vision. He’s a numbers guy. He runs the company for Wall Street, which is precisely the wrong way to run it. It needs to be run for the customer.

The problem with Amazon’s store is familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of business history. The store, which is by far the biggest part of the business, is fighting with itself. It’s a battle between Amazon’s own procurement and its third party sellers. Jassy blindly follows the sellers because they’re bringing in most of the sales.

But they’re taking the store down. The user experience sucks. The third parties are gaming Amazon’s algorithm, against one another, against the customer, against the store itself.

Why Adani Fell

The U.S. stock market is off to the races again, encouraged by hints that interest rates may peak soon, and that the economy continues to grow.

But under the radar, there’s a crash. It’s in Adani Group, which you can trade over the counter under the symbol ANNRY. 

A week ago, Adani was worth over $200 billion. Today it’s fighting to hold $100 billion. CEO Gautam Adani has seen his own fortune fall to $75 billion.

This tells you something. Adani is closely held.

The stocks crashed after a report from short seller Hindenburg Group charged that they were being held up by a network of offshore companies and a very thin float. What made Hindenburg suspicious was that the value of the companies rose over 800% in just a few years, on assets like coal mines, container ports, and airports. It didn’t make sense.

But there’s another lesson here, America’s dominance of the global marketplace. About 40% of the world’s stock market value is now held in the two U.S. markets – the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. About 60% of the world’s liquidity, the capital companies require to do business, is in the U.S. That’s why the threat to cut off Chinese stocks from U.S. exchanges was so powerful. It’s why the Hindenburg report blew such a big hole in Adani’s market battleship.

Tech and its Workers

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my journalism career lay in assuming tech companies would have the back of their workers, because they depend on human talent rather than muscle. (The picture is from a book on computer coding.)

The tech oligarchs who made their piles in the last decade have become just like other oligarchs. No worse, but certainly no better.

The latest round of layoffs is especially egregious. It’s not how many were let go. They were mostly the pandemic overhang, an adjustment as life returns to “normal.” It’s how they were done, and who was targeted. Firing via e-mail? No warning for families or teams? It sends the message that people don’t matter.

To the oligarchs they don’t. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel – they’re one-way guys. They care about themselves, no one else. They don’t really care about technology, or what it can do. All they care about is how much money it is making for them right now.

There was, once, a difference between Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The wealth creation of the last decade eliminated the difference. Wall Street doesn’t care about the long-term, about the need to keep investing in the new across the chasm of a recession, or the talent that is tech’s raw material. It cares about this quarter, about today’s trade.

What’s funny is that the horrors now being visited on the Valley are 10 times worse on Wall Street. Layer after layer of management has been eliminated, as the industry has gone online. More and more of its wealth is in fewer and fewer hands, and those hands care nothing about the people who made the wealth. Just as they don’t care about the technologists of the Valley.