nakedlunch

Sorry, I didn’t mean for it to come over as an attack - but I don’t think it’s a straw man.

What do you think doing that would say about Amazon’s value? Why does that matter in justifying its price today?

What I’m trying to point out (maybe I did a bad job!) is that it doesn’t make sense to try to run the numbers of how long it would take to return an investment in purchasing Amazon in profit, considering if returning investment capital in profits was Amazon’s goal they would behave in a profit maximising way rather than a growth maximising way. I just don’t think it’s the right question to ask (how long would it take to pay off buying Amazon from Amazon’s current profit margins) because the answer wouldn’t tell you anything interesting about how to value Amazon.

Isn’t that a bit of a silly question?

The share price should reflect future earnings. If you are a shareholder, you believe that amazon will continue to grow and that other people will continue to value its future earnings higher than the price you purchase at.

Amazon’s strategy is not (solely) to make a profit. It’s strategy is to invest in growth, sometimes in such a way that makes a loss or scant profit, to dominate markets in a way that gives them sustained competitive advantage.

If you bought Amazon and asked them to switch to simply profit making, then they could can a lot of the future growth stuff to get your trillions back. Comparing them to an apartment building which can only grow in line with a wider market (ignoring subdivision of apartments etc) is just a weird false comparison in my eyes.

Are you sure they should be aiming to be profitable through the biggest expansion in at-home delivery ever? Or should they not have invested more in growth through this period? Surely it’s only unit economics that matter, not whether they are profitable?

On point 4 - I do think it’s tempting to say “we used to do it this way at my old place, and it was much better”. I call it “at my old place” syndrome.

However, if you never take your learnings from place to place, that’s also pretty useless isn’t it?

I think it’s more about how you communicate those learnings. Perhaps start by not suggesting they are better, just that you’ve also seen it done a different way in the past (I.e. avoid “at my last place...”) and you’re wondering why we do it this way instead. People are going to be much more receptive to not opening with “I know better”, especially because when you do it this way you often find they’ve already tried it the way that your previous place did it and it didn’t work for them for very straightforward reasons.

I’m not sure you read the article, which was fantastic, because your comment reads as a reaction to the title and not the body of the work.

This is my first ever blog post, and my first ever submission to hacker news.

Any feedback on the post would be much appreciated!

Has anyone ever told you that you can disagree with another person without taking an indignant and rude tone?

Well... A. Perhaps this “Internet forum commentator” has more relevant experience than you understand, B. You don’t need to have years of scientific study to understand statistics and C. Plenty of bad science gets published every year in journals.

Is the freedom to accept a contract for poverty wages to avoid starvation a desirable feature in our society?

You know, when you call someone who disagrees with you not intelligent, you come off a bit of an asshole.

As other commenters have pointed out, this only prevents counterfeit shoes being sold as real.

If that’s the intention, it would be much simpler to just make a database and print a code on each shoe (probably already done to some extent). Therefore when a user wants to know if a shoe is real or counterfeit, they could use the code on a website to find out if it was the genuine article.

That seems like it would have far more uptake and use than a cryptographic model requiring wallets.

A gambler who got lucky. The article gives the distinct impression that the fact he invested at the bottom of the market rather than just before a bust cycle was not because of good judgement. There is little else to say about this.

I really don’t enjoy when this form of argument comes up, because it strikes me as both lazy and extremely unlikely that the speaker puts the same conditions on his own conduct.

I think you can both fly on planes and believe we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels dramatically. You can both believe that we should pay more tax to fund public services while not donating additional income to the government. You can work for Amazon while thinking they should pay their workers more. You can believe that the way the food industry treats animals is awful without being a vegan.

In my opinion, being a complete paragon of virtue is not a prerequisite of having an opinion on what would make the world a better place.

There's a few such services that exist right now - doesn't mean you can't be better than them but worth noting! Only one that springs to mind is https://feedly.com

I'm not sure HN is going to be a super effective research tool for you with this. Have you thought about making a few basic mockups and putting them in front of people?

Not sure anyone can give you a good answer with this level of detail buddy. $1 for an app? $1 a day? What kind of news? In what way will it be personalised?

I’d say if you mean a news aggregator, it sounds unlikely.