Member Since: 11/7/2011
Posts: 10,399
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Is Gaga's "ARTPOP" a warning to tech investors?
Quote:
When Lady Gaga calls a press conference in Brooklyn to introduce an environmentally-friendly, flying dress – and the press actually shows up – it seems pretty clear to me that we're in a bubble.
And when she uses the terms "visionary, artistic, entrepreneurial, poetic, social, techie" to describe her new mobile app, I don't see how there can be any doubt that we've reached the End Times.
Lady Gaga might not be the sort of financial metric used by serious economists like Mr. Summers, but she's not a bad foil for the modern economy – or at least the tech sector. After all, when Samsung debuted the Galaxy S4, it did so with a song and dance routine. Qualcomm's CES keynote was a tribute to the theater of the absurd, featuring Big Bird and Desmond Tutu. At this very moment, Google is busy turning barges into "unprecedented artistic structures." And surely I'm not the only one to have noticed a similarity between Lady Gaga's brand of serial scandal, and the TechCrunch Disrupt conferences now being held at regular intervals, and with no apparent sense of irony. Or the fact that her debut album, "The Fame," topped the charts as the market made its turn in early 2009. But I digress.
Losses are waved away by corporate management with the same Gaga-esque refrain we've been hearing for years: visionary, artistic, entrepreneurial, poetic, social, techie. And while these may be troubling signs, they're not proof of anything.
It was also, by strange coincidence, the first year of the boom in which borrowers were asked to pay something close to normal interest rates – and the question for 2014 is whether they'll keep paying it, and continue buying all of the promises. My purely speculative guess, based on a personal dislike for Lady Gaga's music, is that they won't
Economic formulae might tell us something about the economy, and the fortunes of a pop star may tell us something about social mood, but I'm not going to bet the farm on either one (although I will just point out that "Artpop" isn't selling all that well). Ultimately, we have to judge the economy in the same way we judge music: by listening to it. For what it's worth – and I don't expect it to be much – I hear something discordant.
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 mess the unnecessary jabs though
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2...album/3699717/
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this is just amess