thow-01187
thow-01187 on Hacker News
Haven't the past past 10 years been a complete refutation of this belief? Money made by hype, fraud, market power abuse or regulatory arbitrage dwarfs profits made by providing value, no longer how long the time horizon. Especially since it's clear that the US establishment's policy is not to prosecute and punish white-collar crime
Yes, this is the crucial difference
Brick and mortar stores are dealers, Amazon is a broker. Dealers have inventories - they purchase items from the suppliers and resell them - if they misjudge demand, they're left off with useless goods. Brokers simply facilitate a transaction between two parties - there's no risk involved. The fact that brokers get to charge a higher mark-up than dealers is just bizarre
The notion of: "it's a little bit like X, a little bit like Y - but it's neither X nor Y, therefore we it's a wild-west anarchy without any rules or regulations" - this is such a glaring loophole in our legal system that it must be intentional. Derivatives bubble, ad-tech, gig-work, crypto-mania, AirBnB, and many other socially-parasitic enterprises exist solely because our legal code is missing "try-catch-finally" clauses
It would be interesting to see the revenue split between App Store and Play Store in the US. Since iOS skews towards more affluent users, and more affluent users are way more likely to spend, it wouldn't be surprising if App store gets 90%+ of the US market in terms of revenue - finally dispelling the "it's not a monopoly" argument
Planes are actually surprisingly fuel efficient. The short haul flights in Europe are often served by Airbus A320 or A321 Neo, with fuel consumption per seat at 2.19 L/100 km. A mid-sized petrol-powered car consumes three times as much. And that figure ignores that planes take a straight route - taking that into account, the emissions are close to a single-occupant electric car
No. Landlords do not "produce" rooms by taking raw materials and transforming them into goods. In the current market, the rent is determined by how much the marginal renter is able to pay. Increasing the cost to the landlord doesn't magically increase the renter's ability to pay
> The decision to make a standalone headset and build their own app platform was absolutely the right one
Not sure whether the appeal of Quest 2 is in the standalone-ness and the app platform - or whether it's about being around half the price of comparable headsets before it, perhaps even being sold at a loss
I suspect that worshiping "The Rule of Law" as an unadulterated good is responsible for a lot of the corporate overreach we observe in the past few decades. When we construct a social fiction that state is just one among many actors, and must be bound by rigid rules and justify its actions, that Bermuda is basically an equal partner to the US, it just naturally leads other entities to malignant behavior
Of course the corporations will reverse engineer the legal code to get away with as much as they can. Of course they will evade taxes. Of course there will be a slow creep, where previously borderline illegal behavior is now the best practice adopted by everyone, and therefore unenforceable
If there's a sovereign on top of the hierarchy that doesn't have to answer to anyone, the corporations are way more docile, as seen in China or FDR-era USA, and proactively align their goals with the goals of the society
Yet, Finland is ok with operating nuclear plants, and is building a new one (still). Sweden likewise. Belarus and Ukraine were the ground zero, and the most impacted regions, yet you don't see anywhere close to the militant anti-nuclear sentiment as in Germany
Controversial take, but even if we had a Fukushima-level disaster every 10 years, and just dump nuclear waste into the ocean (which sounds cavalier and hand-wavy, but we've been doing that for decades no discernible ill effect) - nuclear would still be a better option than coal for base load
They provide short-term, non-committal inventories and buffers to a supply chain that doesn't have them, since it runs on long-term contracts. In some ways, they're capitalizing on the failures of just-in-time inventory dogma
> SpaceX has proven how ripe for disruption NASA
The story there might be murky, too. NASA bankrolls a lot of SpaceX R&D. US military then approaches SpaceX for extremely generous launch contracts, despite the fact NASA already paid for the R&D. There are some allegations that this double-dipping is used by SpaceX to commit price dumping on commercial launches
> In the short term the market is a popularity contest; in the long term it is a weighing machine
Warren Buffett
Elon is undoubtedly skilled at driving up hype - the popularity contest part. As for long term - Tesla themselves claim they never plan to pay dividends.
There's another problem with Finland - it's just too geographically isolated. It's de-facto an island. To make matters worse, it's also a monotonous forested flatland. Not much of historical sites to speak of either.
Living in southern Norway or Sweden, it's still doable to go on a car trip, visiting Germany, Alsace, Netherlands or even Austria or Czech republic; not to mention their own fjords and mountain ranges. From Finland, one always has to fly to go just about anywhere interesting
Furthermore, financial penalties on late delivery are not uncommon in enterprise business-to-business settings. These penalties are sometimes quite steep
If the choice is between releasing kinda-working, but unpolished software, or throwing a developer's monthly labor cost out of the window every single day, these management anti-patterns suddenly make much more sense
Unfortunately, low fertility rate is not a one-time problem of boomer generation followed by a stable plateau. It leads to a perpetual spiral of gerontocracy, high dependency ratios, under-investments and general vitality being sapped out of the populace. It's no coincidence that Italy and Japan, once vigorous and creative, are not exactly bursting with enthusiasm in the past ~20-30 years
I'm continually amazed how this isn't #1 topic on governments' agenda across the developed world. We're looking at South Korea losing 95% of its generational cohort size in 100-year timeframe. 80% for Japan or Italy, 70% for Germany, etc. Climate change is on everyone's mind - but what's the point of solving climate change if there's barely anyone left to inherit the planet?
Black Death, Mongols, world wars, not even intentional genocides managed to inflict this level of population loss. And it's met with yawns and shrugs, as if it's unavoidable like gravity.
And no - people's desire to have children hasn't dropped all that much:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility...
https://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF_2_2-Ideal-actual-number-c...
Unfortunately, more often than not, the logic behind it is market segmentation, not technical or operational efficiency
Imho, what was happening in the Silicon Valley economy looks much more like displacement of value rather than creation of value (1).
Google/Facebook have displaced other ad formats, redirecting money to themselves. AWS have displaced IT technicians in other corporations, redirecting money to themselves. Apple is selling overpriced commodity hardware, redirecting money to themselves. Uber is displacing taxis, redirecting money to themselves.
In other words, it's barely above zero-sum game. And US productivity statistics are clear - the aforementioned corporations grew 500%-1000% in their profits and valuations since 2010. Meanwhile, the US productivity has grown by 4.7%. Had the SV tech been a clear net positive to the economy, the productivity growth would look different. When the tech/telecom was truly creating new value (1995-2005), the productivity growth was at 27% that decade.
(1) with notable exceptions: Microsoft really is creating value where one didn't exist before. So is Netflix, Amazon's venerable logistics and Tesla's drive to decrease battery costs
Yes, vacations are financed as a hidden tax on normal working days - the worker pays for it from his labor cost. What exactly is the problem with having 10% lower salary in exchange for 10% more time? How is it supposed to be a drag on business formation? btw, LLCs are a possibility everywhere
Every EU country I've been to has a concept of probation periods - during the first ~3 months, the employer can freely terminate the new employee, or at least choose not to extent his contract. Also, collective dismissals are about equally as difficult in most of the EU than in the US (1)
What is unarguably easier in the US is to capriciously fire an individual on the spot for trivial reasons. I wouldn't call that a feature, though
(1) - https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EPL_OV
Wages in tech are laughably bad anywhere in the world, when compared to US. Tech landscape in Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea or Taiwan looks much more like Europe than like US. US is the outlier here, not Europe
There's a case to be made that Europe is playing the smart game here.
At this point, US has cumulatively burned a few trillions in funding for their software corporations. Europe, meanwhile, gets the fruits of it, mostly for free (1). Case in point - I personally spent more money last month on a fish tank cleaner than to all Silicon Valley corporations combined, and even that's an aberration in my social circle - most of the others do not wire a single cent there.
Yes, the overall money flow in IT is from EU to US, but expressed as ROI, it's unlikely to be very impressive.
(1) - apart from Microsoft. Imho they're the true crown jewel of the US software sector. Most of the world's economy runs on Microsoft Office in one way or another
> French investors for example are really stingy and you won’t get somebody to just throw a few millions at you to see if you succeed
Isn't that...normal? Where did the attitude come from - that startups are somehow entitled to funding worth of several lifetime median incomes, for their half-baked business ideas that are unlikely to ever turn profit? That if the country doesn't shower the founders with angel investor money just for showing up, they are somehow unreasonably risk-averse and stingy.
As an example - Docker, arguably the most influential software of the past decade, was developed in France. HN has derided French investors for not investing in it, leading to the company relocation to US. Afaik, Docker is still burning money, with no end in sight, and will continue to do so indefinitely unless a buyout at ridiculous valuation happens. Looks like...the stingy French investors were right after all...
What about the following proposition - any publicly traded company must issue, every calendar year, new shares worth of 2% of the total shares outstanding, and transfer them to the tax office.
That's essentially a 2% wealth tax on the stock market, borne equally by all shareholders, regardless of their residence. Maybe I'm just naive, but I don't see any accounting magic to avoid such a tax.
But then again - there's one agenda that unites left and right across the developed world - no wealth taxes.
Except...the traditional automakers are not struggling to make profit. Not even close. VW Group made $10B last year, during a pandemic year. Toyota $19B. FCA, with their public image of "also ran", $7B. BMW made $4.5B just last quarter.
Even minor automakers like Suzuki or Kia still make multiples of Tesla's profit without breaking a sweat
Google does this even more egregiously with Android - my default browser is Firefox, but any links from Google News, Google Assistant and other Google software open in Chrome.
Every time App/Play store fees are discussed, it devolves into unproductive hair-splitting over the word monopoly. The proper term is captive market.
> Captive markets are markets where the potential consumers face a severely limited number of competitive suppliers; their only choices are to purchase what is available or to make no purchase at all
I wonder whether the near universal unpleasant experiences mentioned in this thread aren't caused by bad ports of MS Teams to Mac/Linux/Android. I use Teams solely on Windows, and the calls/video are flawless, recording just works, captions and audio transcripts are fairly accurate. The chat portion has minor warts, but it does get the job done. Markdown syntax works for most of the message formatting needs. Webhooks are easy to implement.
This is big in enterprise software.
Some corporate customers have bare-metal servers, some OpenStack, some run in AWS, some on VMWare, some on Azure, more exotic options are not rare either.
Kubernetes smooths out the differences, letting you develop an application against a standard, google-able API that is deployable anywhere.