pembrook

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by pembrook 2y ago
What both of you are describing is just what normally happens with MOST acquisitions (regardless of the nationality of the acquirer). Most acquisitions don’t turn into YouTube or WhatsApp/Instagram-level success for the acquirer. The a
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by pembrook 2y ago
Apparently any piece of informational older than a year has no value to you? Thankfully you aren't writing the laws in my country. Creating a law that makes internet creators want to delete all historical record for fear of potential p
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by pembrook 2y ago
Trust me, while the big social media sites love this, it wasn't their lobbying that made this happen. The UK government has a long history of meddling in media coverage to achieve certain aims. Up until Covid, legacy media still had co
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by pembrook 2y ago
You can just look at the numbers. Percentage of GDP that is driven by government spending: China: 33% USA: 34% Germany: 50% Economically, modern Europe is more communist and exerts more centralized control than China. Might explain why the
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by pembrook 2y ago
No, we do not agree. In the short term irrationality can and does prevail in both markets and democracy. In the long term, the best product and ideas always win. This is why both democracy and markets are durable. Paraphrased differently, t
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by pembrook 2y ago
If you cannot argue your points succinctly here without ad hominem attacks, I presume they aren't strong enough to stand on their own. A rebuttal of "markets don't work because monopolies might form!" doesn't make s
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by pembrook 2y ago
Except you do not provide it for free. You provide it under the implicit transaction of your relationship, where you are both giving up value in other to get value. Try betraying your partners trust and cheating on them - or refuse to take
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by pembrook 2y ago
This comment reads like a very rational, risk-averse person convincing themselves why they should never try doing anything new or interesting. Yes, markets are democracies which are messy and complicated and competitive and hard and not as
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by pembrook 2y ago
If people would actually be happier with your solution that's simply a marketing problem, which is entirely solvable. But I think more often people delude themselves into thinking their thing is better (since it's their baby) wh
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by pembrook 2y ago
You might be right. The US might always dominate software (which could turn out to have no moat) and China might always dominate manufacturing. But neither industrialized manufacturing or software even existed 200 years ago. I'm pretty
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by pembrook 2y ago
The vast vast vast majority of companies do not sell a product below-cost. And if the customers are not willing to pay more, it sounds like they're actually happy with the current offering and that's not an area that your fellow h
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by pembrook 2y ago
> The idea that the market can be described as regular people deciding things is, by the way, fairly funny. We don't get to choose what gets made, and have to select from a buffet of often pretty poor options served up to us by peo
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by pembrook 2y ago
The authors examples of “Digital Mittelstand” companies are not businesses at all but tiny “creator economy” side projects. These do not scale to 30% of GDP in the same way high value B2B industrial equipment does (in manufacturing you happ
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by pembrook 2y ago
If you can’t find something to accuse from the SEVENTEEN “areas of focus” they’ve already designated in the law then I would argue you lack the creativity and thirst for power needed to climb the ranks as a politician.
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by pembrook 2y ago
A perusal of HN is simply reading various folks complaints and pet peeves for the day. As social media platforms discovered, the highest engagement comes from anger and frustration (basically politics).
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by pembrook 2y ago
As someone living in Europe, I’ve come to realize these comments typically come from two types of people: 1) Americans who don’t actually live here but fetishize the pop culture idea of Europeanism 2) Europeans who are so insecure they feel
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by pembrook 2y ago
Nothing more reassuring than a vague “we’re unlikely to go after you [if you stay on our good side.]” It’s clear the UK wants big monopolistic tech platforms to fully dominate their local market so they only have a few throats to choke when
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by pembrook 2y ago
When stating "all profit is waste" you've officially changed the topic of discussion to communism. Basic logic would dictate a response addressing that head-on is not a red herring.
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by pembrook 2y ago
Wild red herring fallacy, I’ll bite. The private sector is indeed filled with lots of inefficiencies, but due to the profit motive and presence of competition, there’s massive incentives to correct those inefficiencies slowly over time. Y
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by pembrook 2y ago
Financial literacy is not some magical thing that lies outside the realm of topics like math and history. It is math and history. Building character might be needed to make good financial decisions, but the knowledge of the mechanics of h
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by pembrook 2y ago
I do not. The article claims that teaching financial literacy is a "fallacy" ie. doesn't work because kids have no way to contextualize something they don't have a need for. So we should give them the need for the knowle
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by pembrook 2y ago
Any argument against teaching financial literacy can also be applied to pretty much any topic taught in schools. You could also write the same clever-sounding contrarian think-piece about why teaching Home Economics doesn't make sense
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by pembrook 2y ago
Patents come from a quaint time when startup capital was non-existent. Today, they are simply a giant anchor on the speed of innovation. The software world has flourished with effectively very little patent protection and very lax IP enforc
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by pembrook 2y ago
That's not what I said. Musk is roughly as democratically elected as the average IRS bureaucrat (arguably more so, since the guy auditing you most certainly never appeared on the campaign trail), so I view it as a wash.
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by pembrook 2y ago
Bad news, there's a spreadsheet of every Americans SSN, Residential Address, and more widely available with a bit of googling. It's currently being passed around Lagos on zip drives as we speak, and has been for years.
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by pembrook 2y ago
Why would you want a law that says government workers have zero accountability over how they spend the money they extract by threat of violence from the citizenry? We should all have "root access" to everything but the most nation
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by pembrook 2y ago
Fairness and efficiency. If someone is making significantly more money than you, they are either: a) creating more productive value than you or doing something more in demand by society [strong signal you should join them!] or b) manipulati
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by pembrook 2y ago
Not just that, so are the tax returns of private businesses. You can look up any company and see exactly how it's doing. In Finland they publish everyones salaries over a certain threshold in the newspaper every year.
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by pembrook 2y ago
Federal government can audit and wiretap citizens, citizens should be able to audit and wiretap the Federal government.
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by pembrook 2y ago
You've clearly never been audited by the federal government. In the case of the IRS, generally, you must hand over the data they request or you go to jail. Whether or not it's behind a password protected internal system is irrelev

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