ericmay
> This final reply, leave your prediction history can judge.
with your prediction being:
> ANT/OAI balance sheet will be obviously non-sustainable in 1-2 years. They will slow down frontier spending to balance book. They will fail and either political capture to be too big to fail, or be bought out by other US tech majors.
My prediction is that both OpenAI and Anthropic will IPO, slow down some spending on infrastructure, but will otherwise be continuing on their current growth trajectories while other major US tech firms slow down their own spending. I'm not sure about their valuations but I'm not sure that really matters. Neither will be bankrupt or purchased in 1-2 years.
I also predict that China will continue to lock down its own AI companies and further halt export of models, while both American and Chinese startups continue to carve out niches for special-purpose models which continue to be behind the bleeding edge. Enterprises will increasingly spend on compute and tokens, sometimes will use low-quality models for random things, but more companies will be embracing and using AI. I also predict that China will increase spend on state of the art because the leading general purpose models will be much more useful than we think they will, and they are primarily limited by interface and workflows today. In other words, we haven't seen anything yet.
Though I'd like to add a caveat which I'm sure you'd agree is fair and I would grant you the same, these predictions would be predicated on nothing crazy happening (like a war over Taiwan).
Good chat, enjoyed it even if we disagree!
No they don't.
> PRC budget fast follow currently is catching up.
If it is then your argument falls apart because by catching up on funding in any way disproves your theory about pricing and investment. China and Chinese companies can't invest because to do so is self-defeating, someone else already has a cheaper model and therefore any additional marginal investment will result in a large financial loss. You can't have it both ways. The same economic rules apply for both countries even if the CCP wants to pretend that they don't.
> and geopolitics will make sure US cannot run PRC AI out of business in PRC and vice versa
At least for my part I've never espoused that this will happen. Both countries will pursue and invest in state of the art AI and the crappy models mostly don't matter.
> This really not complicated
It actually is pretty complicated - and the points you are putting forth don't match your conclusions as I highlighted in my previous post.
> IMO this actually best case for US medium term favour,
Well it's not, it's actually just the base worst case. The best case will be something like an insurmountable lead in AI. If investors lose money, who cares, they still bought a lot of physical products and built infrastructure. For the US it's totally fine - boom/bust cycles are normal and fine.
> if I had to guess assuming incumbent FAANG doesn't just snatch up ANT/OAI if they explode
Provide some predictions then. You're just throwing things at the wall. OpenAI is going to "explode" and then Google is going to buy them or something? Based on what? Show the pricing and the economics.
The only examples we see, open source software, for example, shows that the major market players still make a boatload of money. Anyone off the street can download OpenOffice and it's the "worse quality cheaper product", but Microsoft makes hundreds of millions of dollars (estimate) on Office and that's what everyone uses.
What compelling evidence do you have that things will be different now?
Please refrain from writing things like this or just don't respond.
> I find it curious that, I, a European, consuming European media, living in a European country and consuming its domestic media, which you very likely don’t, am being lectured, by an American, on how we feel.
You're just one random person though. I'm in Europe often and talk to Europeans all the time. How you as a random person on the Internet feels isn't reflective of how everyone feels. There's nothing "curious" here, nor am I "lecturing" you aside from your mistaken belief that your own social circle is how everyone feels.
> The quiet part isn’t said out loud by anyone but the president who threatens to abandon Nato commitments,
Can you quote a specific article, source, or comment where the President has threatened to abandon NATO commitments?
> US deployments here are minuscule, approximately 2 months worth of Russian casualties.
The US deployments in Europe are actually quite significant. Your framing of them in terms of Russian casualties when Russia just pushes people to front lines is obviously flawed. The deployments over time have lowered because the Soviet Union and Marxist ideology that took root there was defeated by the West, but in today's world the value America can bring to a fight in Europe is logistics and air power. 600+ million Europeans need to do the infantry work and go clear Russians out door-to-door, not Americans.
> The value was always the deterrence. And the value for the US was a gateway to the middle east and further abroad along with highly favorable deals for its military industry.
Those are nice to haves but not required, and the value for Europe is US protection. The framing that typically occurs is how there are all these benefits for America and all the bases are good for us, which is wrong since Europe gains even more in benefits.
Maybe we don't need to have troops deployed all around the world anyway? Let's withdraw from South Korea and Japan. Maybe Germany can stop China from taking over Taiwan. Perhaps France and the UK can partner with Saudi Arabia to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons? Or maybe the US can withdraw from Europe and Europeans can spend another trillion Euros on their military? Sounds good to me if that's what you are advocating for.
> The US has already been nearly useless these past 2 years.
incorrect
> We fund the entire war and you sell the arms.
So? It's not turning out well for Europe right now. Look at the riots and protests. How is Europe going to sit here and pay $70+bn to Ukraine when that's more than Russia's entire military budget?
> I don’t think there is any point continuing a discussion from there.
I do as well, no need to reply from here.
Win on what terms, or in what sense? We've seen this play out via Android versus iOS for example. The cheapest models are more prevalent, but Apple makes all the money. I'd be perfectly happy being the Apple in this case.
It's like you can go and buy a cheap Android phone. It technically does all the same things as the latest iPhone, but it does them worse. So Apple ends up making all the money and delivering the product that people go on to use to do all sorts of other economically advantageous things that make them even more money. Where does that leave the Android phone/model? In the dust, for the most part.
I think the fundamental disagreement is you believe that cheaper models can just break the state of the art. This seems false because if it were true then the SOTA can also stop developing and spending on SOTA and just use a cheaper model to build their own better models and leverage their existing compute and energy infrastructure (or even build it out for better and more capabilities later). Anything that is released the SOTA has access to, but it also has access to things that others don't. It's ahead by definition and it's not possible to come out ahead of it because the SOTA will just absorb whatever open-weight/open-source/whatever is released and add to its own lead.
> SOTA AI only labs has much less moat than Microsoft or other incumbent tech with decades of overlapping capture mechanisms.
And those companies are worth a lot of money, continue to execute at high levels, are systematically important, and are by any definition wildly successful. That's my point. You have to apply the open source style argument fairly and equally. If you're going to suggest the cheaper models (which follow this open source software argument) are going to come into being and do all this stuff you also have to acknowledge that they made no money in comparison to the Microsofts of the world and Microsoft won because it made all the money. Whatever open-weight stuff that gets released everybody gets to use it and so tech companies get to use it too and accelerate their advantages. This is what we've seen play out, why would AI be any different when you're using the same economic paradigm as your argument?
> Literally the primary reason PRC AI was forced to go free was because DeepSeek is billionaire side project who priced his hobby as free which set economics for all other players.
American billionaires can also "just set up a side project" and reset whatever economics exist. The crux of your argument is someone can do this and then SOTA isn't economically viable, but you can't escape that this has to be true for everyone, not just the US. If it's true for everyone you also then have to admit the SOTA can't progress because there's no viable economic model - anytime you make an advance in the SOTA someone "just sets up a side project" and/or steals your model or w/e.
The US SOTA losing just means the SOTA has to be equal for everyone or the US is ahead - you can't have it both ways. Progress is practically impossible because you can't make money and you can't obtain a lead so nobody will do any work since their work will just be immediately utilized by someone else.
If what you are proposing here is true, then China is permanently behind. There isn't an economic model to obtain a "lead", yet the American companies get to just take all the work that Chinese companies do (until they go bankrupt not making money) and add it to their lead.
> The productive answer is THEY ARE ALSO BEING eaten alive.
Well you can just run them out of business then. If they spend any money you just spend more until they can't make money and close up shop. Or is someone going to subsidize them indefinitely?
The economics of these arguments that the US SOTA companies are just going to go bankrupt because of cheaper models is something I just don't find compelling. I've been trying. I debate these things so I can learn, but I'm just not seeing a coherent argument on the topic.
I don't think all of these tech companies and investors are stupid. Greedy to a large extent and some will lose their hats? Absolutely. Stupid? I don't think so. Worst case is all the infra is still useful.
What you are arguing is that all progress on models (outside of government labs or internal corporate workings) will effectively stop because there won't be funding for it. That seems unlikely to me. You just need to play it out...
US companies/investors go and invest a trillion dollars or something on models. Someone "does stuff" and reverse engineers their model. They go out of business (you said so [1]).
So now what happens?
Well, the US/DARPA/universities/whatever (all countries with interest) will keep working on this stuff and there will be some funding for it but that's about it. Military applications, physics, things like that.
Chinese companies will also fail and it will not be possible to create new SOTA ones because they'll obviously just be reverse engineered too and given away for free or at super low pricing - whatever happens in America must happen in China too.
So who will build new models? There's nobody around to pay for it besides governments or maybe corporate labs. But corporations and governments will protect the models (obviously, as OpenAI and Anthropic do today to varying extents) and keep the weights and stuff closed source. They'll have some productive use for them even if it's not in the download Claude Code and have at it style of B2C/B2B we have today.
Or
Maybe the trillions of dollars of investment going into these companies actually makes sense and the threat of open-weight models isn't what you and others seem to be suggesting it is. Whatever fate we seem to want to assign to America also happens to China here. To the extent they are behind, they're still running the same exact race. If open-weight models undercut companies they'll also undercut Chinese companies.
Just as Open Office exists today, so does Microsoft Office. Microsoft just makes all the money. I'm not sure why some seem to think that they can use the open source comparison here but not also use the open source economics that we've seen play out.
I think as a productive exercise someone should run this argument and explain why Chinese companies won't also be eaten alive by this alleged race to the bottom and have all of their stuff reverse engineered and given away. How can they invest in new AI companies with SOTA aspirations? Whatever argument you want to make for the US applies to China as well, and we can just give away freedom models to all the countries just like supposedly they will.
[1] "The important distinction is SOTA US labs - ANT and OAI - who can not economically survive reverse engineering / fast following PRC models at PRC pricing."
The problem here is that let's say it's true that the Chinese are cutting off US companies at the knees. Well the US can just do the same thing back to the Chinese. We might have some money lost and stuff but the data centers will continue to be useful, as will all the infrastructure and energy grid buildout so it's not a total loss (I couldn't care less if accredited investors like myself lose money - you know the risk). Then we just steal Chinese models, do the open-weights thing, and all that stuff. So where does that leave us? Nobody makes any money? (Also where is Europe in all this?)
> I also dont think these need to be better than SOTA, just reach a "good enough" bar.
I agree with you in some respects but I'd like to digress here a bit. Good enough for a general purpose model isn't good enough. You want the best or at least what performs to your expectations. I don't even care about old models nor how much they cost (in my personal life and of which I will be a paying customer as will tens of millions of other people) I just always use the latest and best one unless something else triggers me to use a different one. It reminds me a bit about software updates. Folks around here are like, I'm not upgrading to macOS 17.2 and I'm staying on 17.3! Regular people? Not only can they not tell the difference they don't care - just give me the latest and best thing. period.
On the other hand you can have models that are OK at general purpose tasks but are perhaps specialized for certain applications (software or hardware). Those could wind up being on a spectrum from cheaper (and integrated with lower-quality products kind of like an Android Tv model) to very expensive and high-performant.
I don't see a world in which people are by and large sifting through well today I want to use Kimi 1.1 and well later today I'm going to switch over to Claude Lite 18.7 and dang it's not giving me what I want so I'll switch to whatever model. That's not how people operate - they don't want the cognitive overhead of trying to mess around with something that's good enough. They may have to suffer that based on their economic means, but it isn't going to be an expressed preference outside of very niche categories (like home-brew hackers playing with their toys).
Similarly this is just my opinion as well. I enjoy a good discussion here and I hope you are as well. Positive intents, even if my words my be curt, at times.
Ok - we just disagree there. It seems incredibly obvious to me.
> As for viewing things with an economic lens. I profess to having only a moderate grasp of economics, I do better with history and geopolitics- and I think this is another blind spot.
I do better with history and geopolitics as well, my point was just that no matter how "open" the so-called open models are, money is what matters and you have to be able to sell the model or associated infrastructure around it (in software terms but perhaps also hardware in the future) to keep your company going and to make money. There is no way around this.
> Americans largely view the world as “business as usual “, but you profoundly underestimate the animosity, concern, suspicion and outright fear other countries have now.
Sure, but on the other hand this exact comment has been parroted all over the Internet (which has little in common with what most people actually think) on select forums of slightly more intelligent than average people to the point where the extent to which Americans view business as usual is being underestimated we can also say that random people on the Internet trying to tell Americans they are so big mad at us is itself an overestimate of how people feel.
I'd also like to point out - which countries, exactly? And just how profoundly are they big mad at the US? If they are profoundly angry, concerned, suspicious, and fearful, and perhaps they are European, maybe we should immediately withdraw from NATO, withdraw military forces from Europe except where it benefits us directly, and we can remove sanctions on Russia because well Ukraine is in Europe and we want cheaper oil and gas here at home. After all, you can't simultaneously claim that there is all this distrust and then trust us to have armed soldiers in your countries.
There's a strong contradiction between rhetoric and action and it plays out very obviously at times like this. You see the same thing with big, grandiose statements from European leaders who want to talk tough and appear like they're "standing up" to Donald Trump, but behind closed doors it's always a different story.
> There is simply no way our entire infrastructure will be hooked up to an American “super intelligence” firm where the president calls every other Tuesday to extort a country. And failing to appreciate that leads to vastly more rosy ideas of the growth potential of OpenAI, Anthropic and others.
Yes but then you also can't be hooked up to, idk, Chinese "super intelligence" firms because they also can do that to you and have demonstrated that they will punish European countries for saying the wrong thing about their dear leader or whatever. You're also assuming that the United States will allow other countries to hook their infrastructure up to our AI infrastructure. It seems likely, but in terms of the latest, state of the art models and capabilities I'm not so sure that non-Americans will even be permitted to use those, at all.
If the promise of AI as being generally stated is true, it actually makes sense for Americans to have sole access to American AI technology so we can build and expand our businesses and maintain competitive advantages. China is also restricting models with fresh news as recently as last month on that front. Perhaps a likely scenario is that China and the United States simply come out on top and the rest of the world is left to suffer what it musts.
Another area that seems strange to me is the insistence (and honestly I think it's just a belief in how someone wants the world to be more than it likely will be) that American tech companies, run by some of the smartest people on the planet and investors, American ones who have been doing this for a long time and have access to incredibly deep capital and resources to evaluate companies are all somehow wrong about spending a trillion dollars or more (whatever the number is it's very large) on AI buildout. It just doesn't seem likely besides a typical boom/bust which is a healthy aspect of our economy. Somehow, they are all wrong and hey some Chinese companies released some open-weight models so I guess all of these people in America are totally wrong and everything will be free and open and run by China and somehow they won't build companies to make money they'll just work for free and release open-weight models and by the way Europe will never use American ones!
I'm just calling this to be all bullshit. Nobody is providing hard numbers and nobody seems to have an explanation as to why American companies can't if they want to just reverse engineer Chinese models if they were better. Let's say investors go out and lose their t-shirts on Anthropic and Open AI? Yea that sucks, so what? We'll just build more and better models. If China "gets ahead" we'll just do the same strategy to them that they seem to be doing to us.
Here's another question - why isn't Europe even in the topic of conversation about AI? Where are the companies? If the Chinese models are just cheap/easy to use or whatever why aren't we seeing a number of new AI startups? If you are going to accuse Americans of being unable to build and release open-weight models, what does that say about European companies?
This isn't a pro-American point of view, though I am pro-America (regardless of who is president). I just find the arguments put forth in this topic to be either of poor quality, or too strongly ideologically tainted.
It's the same reason that open source software has been a commercial failure except for a few evangelists or whoever becomes a cool "thought leader" by releasing a new library and then gets invited to conferences to speak. Software was commoditized in many ways, yet all the big software vendors made more money than GOD because they took whatever commodity parts came to exist and monetized them.
I think the models can be improved with either recursive improvement (it would be faster with better hardware but if you can do it at all you just need time) and algorithmic developments. I don't know what those would be, but usually we see improvements to both over time. The algorithms will tend to be trade secrets as well.
If a Chinese company released an open weight model that somehow was so superior to Anthropic and OpenAI then they can just take the model and deploy it, reverse engineer it, use it to improve their models, and/or do any number of things they currently do today which are of increasing value.
Most people don’t want to or have any interest in running or managing models locally.its not just about cost. The market for running models is infinitesimal in comparison to the market for managed products. That’s why everyone uses Office and not Open Office. Nobody is going to run some Chinese open weight model no matter how good it is on their critical banking infrastructure or something.
There will be space for lots of different solutions and many products and types of models including Chinese open-weight models and American ones too once we get around to making money on them.
The game isn’t just “cheapest open-weight model at all costs” which is what you are asserting here.
I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that part of the reason American startups haven't released or haven't released as many successful "open weight" models or related companies is because we have a lot of really high-end, top-tier tech firms which are hiring most of the talent and paying them a lot. It's not just Anthropic and Open AI. It's basically every tech company, plus finance companies, airlines, &c. who are researching and figuring out how to make their own companies better.
If you find that to be something wishful or you have trouble understanding, I think instead of combatting my comment you should ask yourself why you think that American tech companies aren't hovering up exceptional talent and that has had an impact on startups or other tech companies launching similar open-weight models.
You also need to understand the economics better and talk through those. Investors in the US don't generally have state backing so they may be more diligent in what they invest in.
> Rome is not what it once was, and China has plenty of universities, bright people and capital of its own.
Sometimes I think people are internalizing the troubles in Europe (I know you mean Rome as in the US being the new Romans or something) and externalizing those issues at American problems because of Donald Trump, but I would caution against this. China has plenty of universities, bright people, and capital of its own. Yes. It also has disadvantages. The US also has advantages and disadvantages.
> I don’t see how anyone, looking at the past 30 years, can be so sure that the US will out-do China. But good on you for being an optimist I guess.
We've proven we can build competitive and capable companies. I'm not being an optimist, instead I'm just calling it like it is. Our ability to continue doing what we already have demonstrated we can do isn't taken away by China (or other countries) also doing those things. There hasn't been any material change in the ability of the US to build world-class companies in recent history.
This may be true now but probably won't be true in the future. My guess is that part of the reason for this is that the major American technology companies are acquiring talent to build out models and related capabilities. China doesn't (or at least didn't) have that same dynamic.
Well if the work you were doing is necessary for your company and will enable you to sell your product to other companies it’s not really a loss. If anything it was an opportunity to get real feedback and see where your shortcomings are.
What did you do wrong while closing the enterprise SaaS client?
Probably that you didn’t close the deal in June (or prior to doing any work at all). Alternatively, nothing at all. Maybe you have a great product but your pricing is bad. Maybe you thought these demos were going well but they weren’t. Any number of things. If you were spending 5-6 months working on a product for this client without a contract - don’t do that.
The wrong answer is “CPO’s friend”. That’s your ego speaking.
Maintain close contact, and keep them informed of new product features and ask if you can schedule a demo from time to time for feedback and to see if they like any of the features. Keep a good relationship. Even if it’s with the most junior person on the team. Today’s CPO might not be the future CPO.
Plenty of great places all over the country.
Being liberal isn’t the same thing as being a Marxist.
Love it or leave it isn’t a valid argument.
It's an OK sci-fi show but the US isn't in decline. In fact, the opposite is occurring, minus those espousing Marxist ideology dragging us down a bit.
Either way artificially cheaper cars from China doesn’t solve our problems in the long term. Obviously once your country loses its ability to build cars they just raise the prices and you’re back to where you started except now you have lost union jobs and manufacturing ability and know how.
That’s why across the world we should ban blanket advertisements like these. They’re a dumb eyesore.
Porn just exposes what is obviously annoying. But advertisements themselves are a sort of mind-virus you can’t opt out of. I can choose to not buy cable TV. I can’t (reasonably) choose to not walk outside in the public space.
The trade-offs are worth it and humankind continues to accept those trade-offs. Yea 60+ people died in a train crash. So what? Tens of millions ride high-speed trains on a weekly/monthly basis without any issues. So why would we overreact to anomalies when by and large the technologies we’ve invented are pretty awesome?
I’m no opponent to the “slow life” and I have a lot of critical comments regarding modernity (cars, social media, modernist art) and overpopulation but we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water here.
I think it's fine that cars are expensive and getting more expensive. More people should be walking or using alternative means anyway because we spend way too much money and are dealing with a number of negative externalities from our car-only infrastructure. Having competition in terms of method of transportation itself can solve many of our problems, no artificially cheap Chinese cars required.
I drive an EV and generally prefer that to ICE vehicles but we have to acknowledge that there are still emissions that go in to EV manufacturing and mining rare earths, which China created a strong monopoly on the processing of so we'll have to do more ICE to compensate, sucks. There seems to be a desire to push cheaper EVs on to the American market, but it's even cheaper to build sidewalks and live closer to your place of employment or where you do the majority of your daily activities. It's better for the environment too.
So if we can't build EVs in a way that is advantageous to us and on our terms, we should avoid it and just walk and build transit and keep the ICE going.
Believe it or not, Microsoft is more dependent on those government contracts than the other way around.
One of my hopes with AI tools is that we'll eliminate a lot of what people do on the Internet today (social media). I'm guessing a lot will stay around primarily as zombie companies or bot land where fools are participating in ever greater foolishness, but if AI can destroy the Internet as its used today boy that would do wonders for us all. I'm hoping websites will fail to do things like prove human (HN for example) and we'll have a cultural shift where everyone thinks everyone else is a bot so they just come to believe all of this conversation is super pointless and we instead get back to more in-person or more intentional use instead of mindless scrolling.
The key piece I think is missing here is reciprocity.
We can’t have “China subsidies its industries until they are super competitive and then they get to sell in our market but we don’t get to sell in theirs”. Europe does a little of the same with regulatory lawfare.
The problem with lowering the level of protectionism is that it doesn’t really serve anyone’s best interest besides Chinese automakers. American companies lose out, American workers lose out, and we wind up in a worse position than before.
There are a few other things to note here. First is time - so even if the subsidies which still exist and are rather significant (Imagine at like Google's scale if they're making $100bn/year and the government was paying them or subsidizing $10bn of that - that's a lot of $$$) matter less so now, they still were used to spring up the industry and many of these automakers which has downstream effects on viability of the company and in what has been widely reported as over-building of industrial capacity. Coupled with a declining Chinese market, no access to the American market, and soon to be little to no access to the European market China could build cars for $5 but if there are no buyers and they're not making a profit it doesn't matter. Plus China of course artificially devalues its currency to boost exports.
My point here isn't that China is bad or that Chinese automakers aren't or can't be great, but that there's a good reason we have protected our domestic markets and even if Chinese companies were eventually just the best, fastest, cheapest, most advanced in the world we would just protect our markets until we catch up because having a domestic industry and those jobs and the capability to produce wheeled vehicles is more important than having the cheapest possible EVs. Ergo that's why we have tariffs. Disagreeing with that direction is a failure of understanding. The policy is a must-have.
Other countries may not care or their people may not understand why we do what we do, but those countries aren't relevant players on the global stage and their industrial capacity if it ever existed doesn't matter. American industrial capacity, Chinese industrial capacity, and probably German, Japanese, Korea, and maybe a few other select countries are the only ones that matter in this regard.
The Atlantic ran a story a week or so ago which over-indexes a bit but I think is directionally accurate and is relevant here[1].
"According to the London-based research firm Capital Economics, the share of Chinese industrial firms that are losing money has doubled since 2018 to 30 percent this year."
“But as the economy has slumped in recent years, the strain on Chinese companies has increased and their finances have deteriorated. Total net profit at 5,400 Chinese companies listed on local stock exchanges fell for the third consecutive year in 2025, according to data from Nikkei Asia, a Japanese business news outlet. Excess factory capacity and weak domestic demand have created a brutal competition for shoppers, and the resulting price wars have narrowed profit margins.”
"Facing an unstable job market and slumping property prices, Chinese consumers are reluctant to shop—car sales, for instance, in China have plunged by more than 20 percent so far this year."
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/10/chinese-co...
It's more important that we protect domestic industry and good union jobs than it is for us to import EVs at lower prices.
Here's a great article I shared elsewhere: https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/china-cars-domestic-sale-...
"The number of Chinese EV brands selling at least one product rose to a record 143 at the end of 2025, according to a tally by management consultant AlixPartners.”
"Now, in a country with a shrinking population, reliable big-city mass transit and a growing robotaxi industry, sales of passenger cars to regular Chinese families are unlikely to ever again record a sustained surge, analysts said. But cities and their private-sector partners are reluctant to admit that their lofty ambitions won’t be fulfilled, which would result in factory closures and lost jobs.”
"In recent months, Germany’s once-towering trade surplus with China in automotive products has turned into a deficit. Germany—the country widely credited with inventing the automobile—is embracing Chinese brands, while German automakers are struggling in China.”
"In the U.K., BYD is selling its flagship Seal hybrid sedan for the equivalent of around $44,000, more than $10,000 less than a similarly equipped Volkswagen Passat. These vehicles are sold at Chinese price points we cannot match with European cost structures,” said Volkswagen Chief Executive Oliver Blume in an August memo to staff."
"About the only major market where Chinese automakers aren’t causing upheaval is the U.S., where tariffs and restrictions on Chinese vehicle technology have all but locked out the country’s automakers. General Motors and Ford are among the few automakers still pumping out relatively healthy profits.”Yes I read the post (please refer to HN guidelines on asking if people read something) and didn't find anything worthwhile there which is why I mentioned what I did.
Posting here for others asking about lying/juicing since I'm rate limited.
~~~~~
Lying on financial statements is in fact illegal. Juicing implies that some number is being misrepresented as higher than it otherwise would be which is a form of lying and thus would be illegal.
Obviously there are some gray areas - "we changed how we measure this" or something along those lines can be considered "juicing" or just a matter of changing a calculation to make more sense, but the broad accusation is extraordinary and requires much more evidence than some random person on Twitter saying some things. As an investor in Google (individually and through ETFs) it has no bearing on any investment thesis I have because I don't care what random nobodies on the Internet say and neither should you.
You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.
But I'd say that it's probably not a big deal anyway because how often are you going to run into such a scenario, and even if you do how would Google/whoever capture a lot of informal names for things? A little bit of confusion is fine too anyway.
Well yea that's what will happen most likely. Obviously not all will come back and in what form it does will probably be different. But we don't have to focus only on Apple assembling computers since that's not the only company or industry at hand.
> The problem is that the average American earner cannot afford to pay what it would cost to produce consumer goods end-to-end in the US in a manner that would allow people engaged in low-skill labor to earn an American "living wage".
Well I think we can, we'd just have to buy fewer things but probably higher quality/more handmade/local, and then we'd have more people making more money. Personally I'm in favor of it just because I think it's a better way of life for many people (owning your own business, doing work yourself, &c.) But to your broad point, I don't disagree with you. I'm just saying this idea of a "living wage" is a farce unless Americans are willing to do what I believe you and I are both generally suggesting here. :)