HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:
Conor Sen writes that we’ve seen over the past 12-18 months that
the post-recession world we’ve built doesn’t scale beyond its current size [tumblr.com] because it’s not as cheap to scale atoms as it is to scale bits. Consider the following: The San Francisco Bay Area is the economic center of the early 21st century but it’s finding that
scaling housing and infrastructure for workers is a lot harder than scaling servers and storage [economist.com] so jobs and people have to move to cheaper metros. Tesla wants to disrupt the auto industry but it’s never produced more than 50,000 cars in a year, and
suddenly has to meet demand for as many as 500,000 cars a year [hbr.org]. That won’t be cheap or easy, and it’s unclear how much shareholders and lenders will be willing to finance that growth. As they grow, Uber and Facebook are running into problems of scale. For Uber, it’s finding drivers and fighting regulation. For Facebook, it’s eating too much of the revenue pie for content, and maybe as it grows it’s going to come under greater and greater scrutiny given its media clout. "Both will argue they’re not utilities, but the vision and scale they aspire to would make them exactly that." Finally the conservative movement is finding that the
demographic groups that believe in conservatism no longer scale to form a viable national party [cnn.com]. Trump will soon find the same to be true for his white working class coalition. The Republican Party needs a new ideology or constituency that can scale to compete with Democrats. "It’s time to let Steve Jobs and Ronald Reagan rest in peace," concludes Sen, "and find new leaders who can build the world of the 2020′s."
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