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jboydyhacker

Great article on a timely topic. The only point I think Nilay didn’t fully address is the specific impact on Amazon Marketplace. Amazon often takes half or more of the revenue from those sales, which helps sustain its “one-stop shop” dominance.

With agents, however, that marketplace advantage disappears—the agent effectively creates a dynamic marketplace on demand. It’s also worth noting the ongoing U.S. DOJ antitrust case against Amazon Marketplace, which could tie directly into this discussion.

once they all turn 30- he's a dead man.
Re:A Chronicle reporter went undercover in high school on Friday March 29, 2024 @09:12PM (#39870869)
Great stuff. Yeah it's as I suspected CA collects more from property tax per capita than TX, NY more than both. CA and NY both have very high income taxes that augment schools so it's not likely lack of money that is causing poor outcomes.
Re:A Chronicle reporter went undercover in high school on Friday March 29, 2024 @02:53PM (#39867628)
Has anyone done a comparison of how much California collects per capita in tax revenue from property tax versus other states like New York and Texas? For example, in NY they used assessed value which is an often a small fraction of actual value- sometimes around 10%. In Texas, assessed value is often frozen/ lagged from market values as real estate transactions are not reported to the tax bureau.
If you increase regulation so the time and cost to build a nuclear plant is impossible...then yeah everything else is way cheaper. Not exactly brkeaking news.
MSFT doesn't have a fiduciary duty or a duty of care like a director does. They are shareholders.
If Sprint had gone bankrupt you would have had the same effect- the assets including licenses sold to Tmobile. That said, I don't think Sprint would have gone bankrupt but it def was underinvesting.
Going from 4 large competitors to 3 has obviously hurt completion and led to higher prices. Americans tend to pay a lot more for their cell service- especially single lines than other countries.

There are mitigating factors such as T-mobile becoming a much more potent competitor with the mid-band spectrum they got from Spectrum.

The FCC hoped that Dish would step in to emerge as that 4th have not materialized. We need Dish or someone else to emerge as a major competitor.

That said, I don't think reversing the merger is a viable option at this point. We really need a 4th national competitor to merge. Dish has potential but so far it's not made a dent.

Re:Web Scraping for Me, but Not for Thee on Friday August 25, 2023 @10:50PM (#37269524)
Fair use is how cos like Google got started in the first place. AI is similarly dependent on sucking up vast quantities of information, with a light touch of course, and use that to create the NEXT Google.

For that matter, who will build the next LLM if anyone like Elon Musk can slap terms of use change on an account because he wants to stop fair use. This is anti innovation and means challenging all these monopolies- Google in search and twitter in Social media will be all the harder.

This needs to get to SCOTUS fast for clarification as it's evil, wrong and will kill innovation.

Re:Plans Develop for High-Speed Rail in the PNW on Saturday July 29, 2023 @12:13AM (#36916831)
I wish we had trains just like Japan and Europe have, but we don't have geography or population density like Japan or Europe has.

We have surmountable problems in regulation that drive up our costs to 6x per mile what it costs other countries but the problem is the revenue per ticket mile. Hard to match the city and population density.

Re:Is technical analysis just stock market astrology? on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @01:59PM (#36866605)
The article there looks at ONE use of technical analysis which is a moving average crossover. The nicest houses I know are owned by traders who know how to use technical analysis. it is very interesting that such an uniformed opinion is the top rated comment on YC tho.
Why not a similarly brave stance in China? In China Apple claims it "obeys all local laws" except in the UK it wants to be courageous? I guess it's a brave state unless the $$$ are good.
Re:Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees on Monday March 20, 2023 @10:51PM (#35241984)
Are they keeping their headquarters in downtown SF? It has not been used for a while and fairly nice
Solid response.
Re:U.S. Accuses Google of Abusing Monopoly in Ad Technology on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @03:22PM (#34509707)
Google owns 90%+ of search, Android, and the Ad side. The three together allow it to crush competitors from both ends all while taking a 35% cut. The most lucrative part of the ad business is paid downloads. how many of those searches start in Google with e.g. "Download Spotify". Google makes money selling that to Spotify and they can do it at a much higher rate because no other ad seller has access to search inventory for "download Spotify" or similar searches.
Re:The euro has tumbled near parity to the US dollar on Monday July 11, 2022 @05:08PM (#32061883)
Imports into Russia have dropped by over half. meaning they can't use their currency to buy anything. And they import pretty much everything except food and natural resources. Any currency which could not longer be traded internationally would rise as well but it's of little good if you can't trade it for anything.

so before you dismiss all that "propaganda" make sure you don't spread it yourself.

Merkel wanted a pipeline that just happened to terminate in her district you forget to mention. She may have a physics degree but she is a politician and I have a feeling she used her political education more than her physics on this one.
Re:HIV mRNA Vaccines-Progress and Future Paths on Monday May 24, 2021 @10:37PM (#27272064)
First of all, the most dangerous word in the world is "safe"- there is no such thing. It's an illusion. You are not safe, you will get sick and die one day. We all will.

Also, people have been having "unsafe" sex for over 40,000 years. There's been gay unsafe sex and straight unsafe sex going on all that time.

I'm not sure how we all made it.

Don't you need to get access to the lab first tho?
Re:Don't Talk to Corp Dev (2015) on Friday May 14, 2021 @03:24PM (#27158647)
No the advice is still spot on- acquihires are considered the firesafe scenario he is referring to.
Re:Wrecking sandwich traders for fun and profit on Friday March 19, 2021 @12:03PM (#26514935)
The term for this is public markets is "front running".
We've built a QR Code and Barcode Scanner that is fully privacy compliant. It focuses on product search and providing local and online prices but the QR code Scanning is incredibly fast here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.biggu.shop...

If you guys have any features you'd like to see in a stand alone QR code Reader, let us know.

Aside from the problem that Wealth Taxes have been tried multiple times in many countries and failed, or the fact that enforcement would be more expensive than the revenue collected-

I think most people object to the idea of taxiing people who pass through for 60 days then keep taxing them for a decade of their life to support a state doubling spending with no real improvement in infrastructure, health, education or our citizens well being.

The highest taxes in the country to support what? San Francisco for exampple, has doubled it’s budget in 10 years with the population growing only 12%. The California legislature keeps passing highly creative yet extreme anti wealth measures while massively increasing spending.

Can anyone say life in San Francisco has improved in the last decade? By any objective measure it's far worse. Not just for tech but for small business in particular- the regulation, taxes and cost of doing business in the state are oppressive.

Yet we want to enact more policies to drive out the tax base? Brilliant. The top 1% of taxpayers supports half the budget of the state. Instead of speeding this exodus up, why not enact real reform. The state needs a revolution- a massive reset in spending from ground zero- not a bunch of new taxes that force even more companies out.

If you read that article it talks about how some of that money is spent on prevention so it's a bit unfair to just use existing homeless as the denominator- it's still an obscene amount of money per person. So saying it's "totally incorrect" is a bit of a stretch.

San Francisco absolutely has a Homeless industrial complex that isn't trying to solve the problem but just keep their cash flowing.

Re:The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system on Sunday December 13, 2020 @01:03PM (#25408551)
Economists writing about the end of the dollar as a reserve currency is not a new thing. With the Fed printing money tho at record rates this would be the time for a shift to happen.

The problem is there is no alternative. The Euro has it's own structural issues and as we saw in March when folks got scared they sold alternatives like Bitcoin down hard. In short, there is no alternative without international cooperation to make a change which doesn't appear likely any time soonish.

Re:Elon Musk moves to Texas on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @02:31PM (#25363301)
This looks like you are making stuff up.

I don't think it's a small motivation of Musk to escape the tax rate when he starts to sell his shares. Just because he vested them while in CA - if he's a resident of Texas when he sells I don't think he owes CA a dime.

Re:Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal on Monday July 06, 2020 @12:27AM (#23744686)
You can't take two one legged men and tape em together and win a race.

UberEats and Postmates have the worst execution in the space compared to Caviar (owned by DoorDash), DoorDash and Grubhub.

Dara is a banker, he doesn't know anything about operations. This will end bad.

This bargain exists already- it's called a hedge fund.

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