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Basically everything Dan posts online is deeply insightful, fearlessly honest, thoroughly footnoted, and dryly humorous. I think even he is a little averse to

Basically everything Dan posts online is deeply insightful, fearlessly honest, thoroughly footnoted, and dryly humorous. I think even he is a little averse to straight up saying it out loud (we’ve discussed it many times): software and product outcomes have gone to shit because we don’t enforce anti-trust law already on the books, let alone update it in light of 50 Moore doublings. You want a smart phone? Here are two vendors with the same App Store vig at payday loan shark rates. You want to rent cloud compute? Here are several vendors where the 4th place vendor charges the same as the first place vendor. You build disruptive encrypted messaging app? You better live on a boat and watch your six like Jason Bourne Mr. Marlinspike. Is it even a little surprising that everything from Google search to Netflix is a shittier version of itself ten years ago? There’s no incentive to make it compelling!

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
>I think even he is a little averse to straight up saying it out loud (we’ve discussed it many times): software and product outcomes have gone to shit because we don’t enforce anti-trust law already on the books, let alone update it in light of 50 Moore doublings. None of the examples of crappy software from the OP are Magnificent 7 companies, are they? Those companies seem to be capable of hiring the best talent. A critical input into the build vs buy decision is whether your company is actually capable of building. Suppose Dan was advising the company that made the crappy Postgres/Snowflake sync software on whether to build vs buy a supporting component. Given that their main product is already crap, can they really be expected to build a better supporting component in-house? Seems like they might as well buy, and focus their energy on fixing the main product. Dan advocates vertical integration here, and elsewhere says engineers get better compensation from FAANG than startups. This suggests that big companies made up of lots of talented engineers have natural efficiencies, relative to the alternatives. A natural interpretation of "antitrust" is: break companies up into their smaller business units. That basically replaces an in-house "build" relationship with an inter-business "buy" relationship. So it seems antithetical to the OP. Dan, if you're reading this, I encourage you to write a reply here on HN tearing me apart, like you did to all the other HN commenters.
- benreesman 2y ago
  Your build/buy analysis is pretty astute if you accept the axioms: when reasonable people disagree firmly it’s almost always their starting assumptions. I’ll challenge the notion that enriching mediocre people at the expense of society is either reasonable or useful. Enlightenment ideals around the sanctity of personal property fall apart when you extrapolate that to millions of people in passive index funds who don’t vote on governance. Neither the United States Constitution nor the Universal Declaration of Human Rights nor the Geneva Conventions have any protections for rent seeking assholes as a bloc. Don’t shoot the messenger: in my reading of history either one group backs down or the other slaughters them. I’m lobbying for the peaceful resolution.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
    Your analysis seems really handwavey. Of course, rent seeking is not considered particularly valuable. But some amount is inevitable. You haven't been very specific about the rule change that you think would reduce rent seeking, or why you believe it would be helpful.
    - benreesman 2y ago
      I see very little downside in an extreme form of campaign finance reform where basically any interaction between industry and legislature is deemed briber and treason and is a capital crime. I’ll also advocate for a punitive wealth tax: not to raise revenue (who cares) but to cripple billionaires who aspire to nation state power. 50 million seems like plenty to live in arbitrary luxury but not enough to buy policy. Seize everything above that.
      - benreesman 2y ago
        Today this is a comment. It will become a proposal. Then it will become an ultimatum. What happens after that is unclear. War possibly.
      - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
aketchum 2y ago
this is a tangent for sure but I doubt you can find payday loans that lend for 30% APR (Apple Store takes 30%). People really have no idea what realistic rates are for people with bad credit. If you have a sub 580 credit score the average APR for unsecured loans is 100%.
- benreesman 2y ago
  I was being generous to the App Store vendors. The better analogy is Tony Soprano with a migraine.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    But Tony Soprano sucks the blood out of pre-existing economic activity while Apple created a brand-new playing field for billions of $ of new activity, complete with the hardware platform and app hosting.
    - benreesman 2y ago
      On economic activity? Apple has generated a lot in the last few decades. On human welfare? Every other day a new study comes out on the destructive force that heavily marketed smart phones represent: Phillip Morris and Enron put together couldn’t collapse the birth rate in a nation. This debate is about economic activity as a good a priori. A lot of people assume that. Some are ill-informed: they haven’t read the designer of GDP talk about the perils of GDP as a metric. A small few know how mathematically comical the fucking Laffer Curve is and who thought it up and where and prey on the good intentions of the former group. They’re going to catch a guillotine no matter how much caution I or anyone else advocates for.
      - FredPret 2y ago
        "Catch a guillotine"? (!!) Collapsing the birthrate? Human welfare? We're talking about the App Store my friend. You need to take it easy on the ideology.
underdeserver 2y ago
Anti-trust laws, and their enforcement, are only feasible in the very-large-monopoly space. Even in smaller monopolies, where not a lot of a money is moving around, you'll get a crappy product. Do you see Linda Khan going after Workday?
- benreesman 2y ago
  The “Magnificent Seven” represent like 25-30% of the S&P 500 by cap. We’re not in the “very large” regime?
briandear 2y ago
Payday loan shark rates? > payday loan shark rates Do you know what the retail markup on things you buy in your local shop? If a product costs $1 from the producer, the distributer sells it to the retail shop at $2. And the retailer sells it at $4.
- benreesman 2y ago
  Indeed. There is a nascent alliance forming between socialists like myself and libertarians like many I respect: a “market” that has profit margins to increase prices but little or no competition to put downward pressure is a despotism. It’s a vampiric wealth transfer on the scale of great power GDP and many of us have fucking had it. If you can hear this, you are the resistance.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  The retailer has to pay a lot in shipping and stocking that a digital storefront doesn't. More importantly, the retailer doesn't prevent me from buying it directly for $1 or $2.
andrewflnr 2y ago
> Here are several vendors where the 4th place vendor charges the same as the first place vendor. That, uh, is kind of what you expect in a competitive commodity market, isn't it? I don't think that's the example you want. (No disagreement about app stores).
- benreesman 2y ago
  You raise a good point but I think it’s actually a great argument for the corruption. Modern cloud compute is priced at such absurd margins that AWS subsidizes the price dumping of the whole Amazon retail business: there’s a reason Jassey is second only to Bezos in clout. When vendors 1-5 are all running 20, 30, sometimes 50 percent margins while their share varies from like 40% to like 5%? That’s called price fixing.
  - andrewflnr 2y ago
    The high profit margins, if those figures are correct, are a much more compelling argument than merely having similar prices. Those can be deceptive too, but I haven't looked into it...
    - benreesman 2y ago
      They’re both worthy of scrutiny. The combination is pretty damning.
immibis 2y ago
Luckily both the US and EU are working on breaking Google's app store monopoly. Though the US might stop that if Google manages to convince the new top guy that it's anti-woke.
csomar 2y ago
One example is Google maps. There are two ecosystems: Google and Apple. Apple is kinda meh but lacks user information (ie: menu photos for a restaurant). Google maps has become simply horrendous but here is the catch: There is no third viable alternative. There used to be Foursquare for finding stuff nearby but that's gone. It's a very legitimate market. Businesses want to be found. Users want to find information and legitimate ratings. Money can be made as Google is monetizing Maps. Sometimes I wonder if the free market has stopped working.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  How, specifically, has Google Maps become horrendous? >Sometimes I wonder if the free market has stopped working. The "free market" means people have the freedom to compete. It doesn't mean they are guaranteed do so. You might as well blame society for getting lazy and complacent.
  - wolvesechoes 2y ago
    "The "free market" means people have the freedom to compete." The "free market" means nothing as nothing like that existed at any point of human history.
    - benreesman 2y ago
      Like anything, the term “free market” fluctuates in semantics like hemlines. But “the effective freedom to compete” is a reasonable TLDR on versions of it that lead to peace and prosperity. The “money for nothing” kind of capitalism? That kind gets regimes and their apologists killed in my reading of history. I’ll admonish you to endorse a better plan.
  - benreesman 2y ago
    It’s got the same disease as the rest of Google? What gained monumental trust by being a useful and accessible library of high-quality information is now a place to shove higher oCPM because fuck everyone? I really admire Google over time, it’s a special place that still has engineers you can’t find many places. But once they let climber TPMs write their own performance review by just ransacking the dwell? An even worse crop (Altman, Amodei) was inevitable.

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

>I think even he is a little averse to straight up saying it out loud (we’ve discussed it many times): software and product outcomes have gone to shit because we don’t enforce anti-trust law already on the books, let alone update it in light of 50 Moore doublings. None of the examples of crappy software from the OP are Magnificent 7 companies, are they? Those companies seem to be capable of hiring the best talent. A critical input into the build vs buy decision is whether your company is actually capable of building. Suppose Dan was advising the company that made the crappy Postgres/Snowflake sync software on whether to build vs buy a supporting component. Given that their main product is already crap, can they really be expected to build a better supporting component in-house? Seems like they might as well buy, and focus their energy on fixing the main product. Dan advocates vertical integration here, and elsewhere says engineers get better compensation from FAANG than startups. This suggests that big companies made up of lots of talented engineers have natural efficiencies, relative to the alternatives. A natural interpretation of "antitrust" is: break companies up into their smaller business units. That basically replaces an in-house "build" relationship with an inter-business "buy" relationship. So it seems antithetical to the OP. Dan, if you're reading this, I encourage you to write a reply here on HN tearing me apart, like you did to all the other HN commenters.

benreesman 2y ago
Your build/buy analysis is pretty astute if you accept the axioms: when reasonable people disagree firmly it’s almost always their starting assumptions. I’ll challenge the notion that enriching mediocre people at the expense of society is either reasonable or useful. Enlightenment ideals around the sanctity of personal property fall apart when you extrapolate that to millions of people in passive index funds who don’t vote on governance. Neither the United States Constitution nor the Universal Declaration of Human Rights nor the Geneva Conventions have any protections for rent seeking assholes as a bloc. Don’t shoot the messenger: in my reading of history either one group backs down or the other slaughters them. I’m lobbying for the peaceful resolution.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  Your analysis seems really handwavey. Of course, rent seeking is not considered particularly valuable. But some amount is inevitable. You haven't been very specific about the rule change that you think would reduce rent seeking, or why you believe it would be helpful.
  - benreesman 2y ago
    I see very little downside in an extreme form of campaign finance reform where basically any interaction between industry and legislature is deemed briber and treason and is a capital crime. I’ll also advocate for a punitive wealth tax: not to raise revenue (who cares) but to cripple billionaires who aspire to nation state power. 50 million seems like plenty to live in arbitrary luxury but not enough to buy policy. Seize everything above that.
    - benreesman 2y ago
      Today this is a comment. It will become a proposal. Then it will become an ultimatum. What happens after that is unclear. War possibly.
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

aketchum 2y ago

this is a tangent for sure but I doubt you can find payday loans that lend for 30% APR (Apple Store takes 30%). People really have no idea what realistic rates are for people with bad credit. If you have a sub 580 credit score the average APR for unsecured loans is 100%.

benreesman 2y ago
I was being generous to the App Store vendors. The better analogy is Tony Soprano with a migraine.
- FredPret 2y ago
  But Tony Soprano sucks the blood out of pre-existing economic activity while Apple created a brand-new playing field for billions of $ of new activity, complete with the hardware platform and app hosting.
  - benreesman 2y ago
    On economic activity? Apple has generated a lot in the last few decades. On human welfare? Every other day a new study comes out on the destructive force that heavily marketed smart phones represent: Phillip Morris and Enron put together couldn’t collapse the birth rate in a nation. This debate is about economic activity as a good a priori. A lot of people assume that. Some are ill-informed: they haven’t read the designer of GDP talk about the perils of GDP as a metric. A small few know how mathematically comical the fucking Laffer Curve is and who thought it up and where and prey on the good intentions of the former group. They’re going to catch a guillotine no matter how much caution I or anyone else advocates for.
    - FredPret 2y ago
      "Catch a guillotine"? (!!) Collapsing the birthrate? Human welfare? We're talking about the App Store my friend. You need to take it easy on the ideology.

underdeserver 2y ago

Anti-trust laws, and their enforcement, are only feasible in the very-large-monopoly space. Even in smaller monopolies, where not a lot of a money is moving around, you'll get a crappy product. Do you see Linda Khan going after Workday?

benreesman 2y ago
The “Magnificent Seven” represent like 25-30% of the S&P 500 by cap. We’re not in the “very large” regime?

briandear 2y ago

Payday loan shark rates? > payday loan shark rates Do you know what the retail markup on things you buy in your local shop? If a product costs $1 from the producer, the distributer sells it to the retail shop at $2. And the retailer sells it at $4.

benreesman 2y ago
Indeed. There is a nascent alliance forming between socialists like myself and libertarians like many I respect: a “market” that has profit margins to increase prices but little or no competition to put downward pressure is a despotism. It’s a vampiric wealth transfer on the scale of great power GDP and many of us have fucking had it. If you can hear this, you are the resistance.
Dylan16807 2y ago
The retailer has to pay a lot in shipping and stocking that a digital storefront doesn't. More importantly, the retailer doesn't prevent me from buying it directly for $1 or $2.

andrewflnr 2y ago

> Here are several vendors where the 4th place vendor charges the same as the first place vendor. That, uh, is kind of what you expect in a competitive commodity market, isn't it? I don't think that's the example you want. (No disagreement about app stores).

benreesman 2y ago
You raise a good point but I think it’s actually a great argument for the corruption. Modern cloud compute is priced at such absurd margins that AWS subsidizes the price dumping of the whole Amazon retail business: there’s a reason Jassey is second only to Bezos in clout. When vendors 1-5 are all running 20, 30, sometimes 50 percent margins while their share varies from like 40% to like 5%? That’s called price fixing.
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  The high profit margins, if those figures are correct, are a much more compelling argument than merely having similar prices. Those can be deceptive too, but I haven't looked into it...
  - benreesman 2y ago
    They’re both worthy of scrutiny. The combination is pretty damning.

immibis 2y ago

Luckily both the US and EU are working on breaking Google's app store monopoly. Though the US might stop that if Google manages to convince the new top guy that it's anti-woke.

csomar 2y ago

One example is Google maps. There are two ecosystems: Google and Apple. Apple is kinda meh but lacks user information (ie: menu photos for a restaurant). Google maps has become simply horrendous but here is the catch: There is no third viable alternative. There used to be Foursquare for finding stuff nearby but that's gone. It's a very legitimate market. Businesses want to be found. Users want to find information and legitimate ratings. Money can be made as Google is monetizing Maps. Sometimes I wonder if the free market has stopped working.

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
How, specifically, has Google Maps become horrendous? >Sometimes I wonder if the free market has stopped working. The "free market" means people have the freedom to compete. It doesn't mean they are guaranteed do so. You might as well blame society for getting lazy and complacent.
- wolvesechoes 2y ago
  "The "free market" means people have the freedom to compete." The "free market" means nothing as nothing like that existed at any point of human history.
  - benreesman 2y ago
    Like anything, the term “free market” fluctuates in semantics like hemlines. But “the effective freedom to compete” is a reasonable TLDR on versions of it that lead to peace and prosperity. The “money for nothing” kind of capitalism? That kind gets regimes and their apologists killed in my reading of history. I’ll admonish you to endorse a better plan.
- benreesman 2y ago
  It’s got the same disease as the rest of Google? What gained monumental trust by being a useful and accessible library of high-quality information is now a place to shove higher oCPM because fuck everyone? I really admire Google over time, it’s a special place that still has engineers you can’t find many places. But once they let climber TPMs write their own performance review by just ransacking the dwell? An even worse crop (Altman, Amodei) was inevitable.