Stress is relative to your own personal conditions. It’s not absolute. A tech executive might have a nice house and financial security, but if he’s working 80 hours/week under intense pressure to meet some deadline, that’s still stressful. Nobody wants to be perceived as a failure at work, even if their personal financial consequences for failure are minimal.

Your argument seems to imply it’s impossible to feel stress if you’re comfortable in life. Even the poorest Americans can count on access to food, clean running water, electricity, internet, etc. For most of humanity’s existence, and still today in some parts of the world, these would be considered enormous luxuries, so anyone with access to them would be seen as extremely comfortable in life. Clearly though, people can still be stressed out despite having access to these sorts of things that most of history would consider luxurious.

Stress is relative, not absolute.

In what context?

In the insurance world, you sometimes see the phrase “L+ALAE Ratio” to refer to the ratio of (losses + expenses) divided by premium. It’s a way to measure profitability for a book of insurance business: how many dollars of loss and expense do you have to pay per dollar of premium earned? Lower is better, and you don’t want that ratio too much higher than 100%, because that means premiums aren’t high enough to cover losses (though investment income can sustain small underwriting losses).

I could see “L+” used as shorthand for “L+ALAE” or “L+ALAE+ULAE,” though admittedly, I’ve never seen that specific shorthand used.

Doubt it. It’s just dumb low effort posting over here trying to force inside jokes on Lemmy. I blocked all of that sort of stuff back in the day on Reddit, and I blocked it here too.

I agree, though hopefully this will pass with time as people default to Lemmy rather than Reddit for their downtime. That said, when the Titan submersible craft story broke a week or two ago, there was decent discussion on here. For the most part, comment threads are a ghost town aside from threads bitching about Reddit, but there are occasional exceptions to the rule that should become more common as people get adjusted here.

The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.

Yep. The rising interest rates is an enormous part of it, and it’s not really getting discussed that much. Basically, the 2010s were a period of historically extreme low interest rates. When you can borrow for cheap as you could during the 2010s, you could easily fund growth via borrowed capital. Money was flowing everywhere. Tech companies in particular could get funding from places like Silicon Valley Bank, so profitability was a secondary concern, with growth as the primary concern. No need to be profitable if you can fund your day-to-day operations with cheaply borrowed money.

In the current environment, things are very different. Cost of capital is much higher now, so borrowing to fund the day-to-day isn’t as feasible anymore. Those rising interest rates ultimately led to Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse in March: They held a lot of long term US Treasuries on their balance sheet, so they were forced to show huge unrealized losses with rising interest rates because of mark-to-market accounting. That collapse cut off a huge source of funding for Reddit and other tech companies.

The result is predictable: Reddit needs to turn to profitability, and they have to do it fast. It absolutely sucks for long time users, but they no longer have access to the same funding source that kept the place afloat in the 2010s.

Reddit isn’t unique in this. Other tech companies show a similar pivot to profitability after funding growth with cheap money in the low interest rate environment of the 2010s. Uber is a good example: Borrow money for cheap to fund operations at a loss for a few years, and all of a sudden, you’ve gained huge market share because you’ve undercut the cost that taxis charge. After that money dries up though, you have to raise costs to pivot to profitability. Today, Ubers are often more expensive than the Yellow Cab you may hail from the street, but people are so used to using Uber that they don’t compare prices anymore.