Thanks, this is great.
I’ve found that very few people are asking this question. And when I ask people what they think is happening to these costs over time, their opinions vary wildly.
I'm similarly baffled. How is it that this industry generates so much discussion, but nobody is asking this fundamental question, with an ecosystem of comments, discussions, critiques, and corrections on those analyses?
I'm not super interested in people's credentials (good or bad). I need for the actual substance of the words on the page to be well supported and well reasoned.
Zitron does the work of actually gathering the public statements (across SEC filings, public disclosures, public or leaked documents) and crafting a narrative around those statements. He links to original source documents a lot. Other people should be doing the same, but for whatever reason not a lot of other people are.
He needs an editor. His articles could be better organized, more tightly argued, and more focused in scope.
I have some skepticism about many of the extrapolations that he makes from the facts, but on my read, his factual claims are mostly well supported. When he calls other people liars by showing those contradictions out in the open, I think those arguments stand for themselves regardless of what his background, credentials, or even motivations are. So I draw a line between his factual claims about the past and present and his predictions about the future.
And that's the reason for this thread. He makes factual claims about the exponential rise in costs for these companies, and infers/extrapolates into the future with it, but I want to check whether those extrapolations actually fit the data we already can see. That's what I'm trying to learn by asking here.
Of course, if you have specific examples of him making false statements about the past or present (no need to attribute intentionality to the speaker), I'd love to see those, too.