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0 pointshackernews_73643mo ago0 comments

There are many legitimate concerns about the financial implications of these huge investments in AI. In fact the podcast that he references is great at providing _informed_ and _nuanced_ observations about all of this - Paul Kedrosky is great.

BUT (my point)

Is that the article is terrible at reflecting all of that and makes wrong and misleading comments about it.

The idea that companies depreciating assets is them "pretending they haven't spent the money" or that "management gets to pick your depreciation period" is simply wrong.

Do you think any of those two statements are accurate?

P.S. Maybe you make a good point, I said that I suspected based on those statements that he had little financial knowledge. tbh I didn't know the author, hence the "suspect". But now that you say that it might be that he is so biased in this particular topic that he can't make a fair representation of his point. Irrespective of that, I will say it again: statements like the ones I've commented are absurd.

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evanelias3mo ago

Those statements are quite clearly simplifications, provided for readers who lack accounting experience (e.g. the majority of readers, since it is an engineering-focused blog). That's entirely reasonable in context. I don't know why you're laser-focusing on these two phrases as some kind of smoking gun that discredits the entire piece.

On the "management gets to pick your depreciation period" one in particular, despite being a massive over-simplification, there is substantial underlying truth to the statement. The author's comment about "I can remember one of the big cloud vendors announcing they were going to change their fleet depreciation from three to four years and that having an impact on their share price" is specifically referring to Alphabet's 2021 Q3 earnings statement. See the HN discussion I linked in reply to the sibling comment.

hackernews_7364OP3mo ago

I don't think they are simplifications, I think they are misleading.

Notice that I never disagreed with his underlying take. Everyone should have concerns about investments in the magnitude of 1 or 2 pp of GDP that serve novel and unproven business models. He even cites a few people that I love to read - Matt Levine. I just think that the way he is representing things is grossly misleading.

If I had little financial knowledge my take away from reading his article would be (and _this_ is a simplification for comedic purposes): all of these big tech companies are all "cooking the books", and they all know that these investments are all bad and they just don't care (for some reason)... and they just hide all of these costs because they don't have money... And this is not a fair representation.

I think we are too forgiving of these type of "simplifications", if you think they are reasonable, ok. I just shared my take, probably I should have stuck with just the observations on the content and left out the subtle ad hominem, so that's a fair point.

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